The stream

I don't know for sure when it was that I last heard anyone call the Internet "the information superhighway". I suspect though that it was Harry Smith on the CBS morning news about fifteen years ago. Or mebbe it was the first time I heard it called that. I honestly don't remember, but I do know that when he said it, I thought that it was made up language designed to explain something that needed no explanation for people actually making the trip.

Last night, in my sleep, I found myself dreaming about a different way of interacting with technology--the stream. In an intense, and very long, dream, I was moving thought my normal life but I was connected to information in a different way. At first it seemed sort of like I had one of those big screens that sorted through information in different ways--you know, like they used on CNN during the election--but the screen was desktop size and I sat in front of it. I spent a considerable amount of dream time making appointments to see people and doing workly things using the screen which seemed to be able to intuitively call forth all sorts of different features automatically when I had some task to input.

It felt like something new, but also something that was not much more than a calendar on steroids: time based, and interconnected with things like an address book, to do list, and email, but not much more. As I was realizing that, my mind wandered to another way of doing it, which at first seemed to have to do with getting more connectivity through a bigger pipe. I dreamt about going through a door and finding someone standing in a hallway that somehow circled the bits of my life. He was holding a big plug. It looked a little like the 220 thing-a-ma-bob that is on an electric stove.

As I considered plugging into this bigger thing, I suddenly realized that it was a false choice. That the real choice was whether I was going to choose to let the stream whirl around me, only faster and with more connections and continue to access it by sitting in front of a screen, or whether I was going to let go and become part of the stream with different bits of me swirling around connecting with different things in a way that was not time based--at least not in that march of time sort of way.

The choice was about accepting a different reality in which interactions happened that were relationship mediated. Different things could happen simultaneously and I could be fully present in all of them. There was no moving from Point A to Point B. Linear connections became inconsequential. It was a rejection of multi-tasking, which currently involves moving from one thing to another, and then coming back to the original task or two or three. In this new way of being I still had tasks but I did them simultaneously with whomever was involved. At the same time I was involved with a different group of people doing something else. When something I was doing with one group impacted the other group we all knew it and went from there.

I wasn't using the stream-as-tool, I was part of the stream itself.

In the dream, becoming part of the stream was an existential choice. I knew that if I joined the stream, it was the last decision I would make in the old time based way of looking at such things. Everything would change. I remember wondering about whether anyone I knew would be in the stream with me and wondering what it would feel like to be interacting with people who were still connecting in the old way.

I walked into the stream.

Its not all about the smoking babeee

I didn't sleep very well last night. I had run around a bit during the day, with a short shopping trip and some wandering around the grocery store. It felt so good to be able to breathe well enough to do this, for the first time in about six months, that I kinda sorta forgot that this kind of thing is not exactly easy on my ankle, and I paid the price in big time pain during the night.

I fell in late December, shortly before Christmas. My activity level dropped way down, and when I developed pneumonia and lingering respiratory problems, I thought that it was caused by this change in my lifestyle. In any case, I have been pretty much a slug since December and I never was able to tease out what was going on. It didn't help that I gained a whole lot of weight as all of this was happening--partly do to lack of activity, perhaps, but also because of the steroids I was taking, and mebbe some depression.

As the date for the surgery on my ankle drew closer, I became very scared that the problems I was having breathing could prove deadly. I have never been a fan of general anesthesia. In any case, I decided, in what I now see as a flash of brilliance, to stop smoking before the surgery. I did not really expect it to make a dramatic difference, but it did. I have not had to take any breathing meds since the day I quit--a week ago. In Quitnet terms that would be: 7 days, 8 hours, 42 minutes and 36 seconds smoke free, 294 cigarettes not smoked, 2 days 5 hours, lifetime saved, and $56.00 not gone up in smoke.

The dollar amount is not all that impressive, but that's only because I was buying gray market smokes. I guess I could add in a line about no longer breaking the law.

I know that I still need to have the surgery, but I have decided to pay attention to that little voice in the back of my head that is telling me to regain my health before putting my body through this. My job for the next six months or so is going to be to keep my quit and to lose the el-bees I have put on.

Poor Ron, he not only has to put up with my non-smoking bitchiness, he has to continue to do the shopping and related shtuff for awhile longer. Apparently being able to breathe and being able to run around are really two different things.

Of green peas and Os

Every time we go to our local farmer's market, Ron picks up a big bag of pea pods and our menu is rearranged to be pea-friendly. As we eat the peas, I inevitably say something like, "Sure makes you appreciate the Jolly Green Giant and Sprout. These peas don't taste very good." Still the ritual repeats itself--one part hope, one part nostalgia.

As pathetic as that might be, our lives are still better than the poor woman missing her crossword puzzles quoted in the NY Times this AM.

“You get the pleasure of solving each clue, so there’s that ‘aha’ moment over and over — it’s like having multiple orgasms,” she said."

Hummm, I may not accurately remember the fresh peas of days gone by, but I have not yet confused the joy of a great crossword puzzle with great sex.

I seem to have stopped smoking

And it seems to be related to wanting to breathe. I'm going to reserve judgment on it all for the next six weeks before reaching any tentative conclusions. I'm too old to jump and my brain is full of noodles.

A sip of the kool-aid

I spent several hours yesterday installing something called SIP on my mobile phone. It wasn't horribly complicated, but it somehow took me awhile to get all the settings right. Now that I have it, I can make long distance calls on the cheap from my cell phone--for less than a penny a minute in Canada and about the same to the US. Now that it is set up, Ron can use it from his phone too.

Chances are I'll seldom use it, after all, I have VOIP at home that includes every place I would ever need or want to call included in my monthly rate. As soon as Skype gets its act together and comes up with a decent app for Android phones, I'll probably use that instead. I use it now to make long distance calls from work.

I did this particular techie dance because it somehow felt necessary to have very cheap long distance on this phone that I seldom use, but carry with me everywhere. I did it because I was damned if I was going to toss more gold into the deep pockets of Rogers Communications by adding on a long distance plan. I did it because this particular thing felt somehow subversive.

I am deeply ashamed that I have been sucked into this must-have-more vortex. I am also deeply ashamed because I used to be subversive in ways that really mattered.

Wrangling wireheads

A good friend stopped by after dinner last night. He had ridden his bike for about 30 minutes to get to our house, and he carried with him a backpack containing his on-its-last-legs laptop. This time he didn't come for beer and casual conversation; he wanted his favourite wireheads to look at his machine and make some recommendations for a replacement.

B is a great guy. He visits our house often, sometimes several times a week. He is also one of Ron's clients and was a co-worker back in the day. Ron sees him as a serious business dude. I see him as a creative type who brings a whole lot of right brain thinking into his business life.

Therein lies the rub.

Ron's recommendation was that B purchase a high end Dell or HP laptop. My recommendation was that B get a smallish ruggedized laptop (note the first paragraph wherein B rides his bike onto our patio with his laptop in a backpack) and buy a second machine for home--a high powered Mac that can run both operating systems.

My thinking was that B throws his laptop in his truck, carries it with him when he is out in the oilpatch, and takes it with him when he stops by for a cold one at places that need bouncers. He also has this other, softer, side. I've seen it in creative multimedia presentations and reports he has written for work. He's also done some great design work.

In any case, I recommended a Mac. And my husband heard me. As you can see, I survived to tell the tale.

B actually liked my idea. He went so far as to say that he thinks Macs are sexy. At that point, I thought Ron was going to take the beer out of his hand and toss his best friend to the curb. Instead he glared at me, as if to accuse me of having bewitched the man.

I have not owned an Apple product since buying an Apple IIe back in the 80s. I don't see one in my future, either. Chances are if I ever got bitten by the creative bug, I'd buy PC software and be done with it. Ron, on the other hand, not only has never used an Apple product, he hates the company with a cold white hatred he usually reserves for talk of the Liberal Party, Quebec, or the 1981 National Energy Program.

I love the man, but he does have a knuckle dragging Neanderthal side.

Because we don't actually fight in our house--at least not in public--Ron spent the next 10 or 15 minutes glaring at me and muttering. B finished his beer and ran out. No one spent the night on the couch, and there were no visits to lawyers today. In fact, the only follow up at all was when Ron told me that after nine years of marriage, I am still a complete mystery.

That's a good thing, right?

Etiquette and the moveable desk

I'm off work for the next six weeks. I am making an effort not to think about work related things anymore than absolutely necessary. I am though wondering who will sit at my desk when I am gone, and what they will do to my computer.

This is the first place I have ever worked where everyone has an administrator account and people move around the office like they are playing musical chairs. I'm lucky enough to have an out of the way office in the basement. It's quiet and highly valued in the summer because our offices have no air conditioning. Now, the people I've scared the bejesus out of will stay away from my office. OTOH, my boss is likely to assign the office to some unsuspecting summer student who believes that it is perfectly fine to install music players and games onto my pristine machine.

I've done what I can to prevent that. I have hidden my speakers (note, they are mine, not my employer's) and left behind the trackball that apparently no one else can learn to use. I have an office chair that is stuck at a height that makes working at my desk a painful nightmare for anyone over 5 feet tall. I am the only person in the office who has two monitors, and the commonly used applications open in a way that appears to be helter skelter, but makes perfect sense to me. The average person sitting at my desk will wonder how anyone actually puts a piece of paper on the desk to write, as my smallish desktop is filled to overflowing with equipment and strangely named hanging files. The truth is, I don't put paper on my desktop. On the rare occasion I have to use a pen and paper, I move elsewhere. I am digital, not analog.

When I go back to work in mid-August, I will probably be the interloper in someone else's office as I am likely to still be on crutches, and our stairs are scary things even without a mobility impairment. The plan is to move all of my equipment from the basement into my temporary digs.

It's taken two years of hard effort, but I seem to have succeeded in training the powers that be that you don't screw with The Princess.