how are you?
i've been writing a lot about net use and situationalism with this finnish
professor who's been contributing for the presentation. there's also a lot
of politics and business (takeovers etc) going on.
this should explain itself
"must go now, bye"
---day
i woke up, seemed like a nice day. was in my room at the an.org/hospitium where most of my material beings gather to rest the nights during the week.
i felt good, had slept well. all my notes from the last night were there on the floor where i usually work. i had been reading don's book and my own prints in alex's room on the fourth floor and we had discussed them some once again. he was reading a book about managing risks, he studies economics and is from mexico. he and the other mexican called paris had gone to bed earlier, i had continued correcting the mistakes in my paper a while and come to sleep then up on the fifth in my own room.
after getting out of bed i collected the notes and loaded my bag with all the stuff i would need during the day: the prints, don's book, college readers and the rest of the papers that were in the folders i usually carry with me. then i remembered that there would be a meeting with the hypermedia group today so i should read the papers we were supposed to. i checked the time from my digital pocket voice memo (i use it as a [avaimenpera]) and it seemed to be something around eleven.
there was no hurry so i browsed through the first four papers in peace, there was not much new in them as we had discussed them already. it was interesting to notice, tough, that the first one ("how we may think") was from the year 1945 and brilliant! the next three were typical 80's hypertext stuff (dexter) and then the amsterdam hypermedia model which i left open when i had to go to the toilet.
in the corridor i met tara and tanya from canada, they went to have breakfast in the kitchen. tanya was telling a story about what had happened in their class that morning. the professor had gone mad when she had said shortly something to linda, the swedish girl on our floor, and asked them to share the discussion with the class. you know, the nasty way teachers always do when they want to embarrass the students. tanya had, however, been talking about the thing they were learning in the class. the course is about international trade and there had been something about malesia and tanya had just mentioned linda how the malay discriminate the chinese population there so that many move to canada to go to school. i guess tanya, as a canadian who's also been living in japan for a year or so to work as an english teacher, knows what she's talking about. the professor didn't care too much but just kept on teasing her with questions trying to, according to her and other students, make her feel bad. he surely succeeded in that as she was still in quite a shock and wondering about what to do.
the occasion had reminded her of something that a teacher had done to hear back on the 5th grade in her school in canada. they had been sitting on a couch reading and just relaxing and a friend of hers had accidentally leaned againts some book shelf so that it had fallen and hitten someone. nothing really happened, no one got hurt or anything. the kids were already just laughing about it when some teacher came, grabbed tanya with him/her and took her to the class saying: "tanya just tried to hurt jason by pushing the bookshelf on him" . the other kids, who knew what had happened, were saying that tanya did nothing but the teacher was just telling them that they shouldn't defend her as she was guilty.
tanya had to leave the school to go home (it was some kind of special day when they weared something called "brownies"). her mom was working, she's a teacher, and her dad was in business too. but when her father later got to know about he went to school and really put the teacher against pressure - almost the same way than the teacher had done to tanya before. then the teacher had apoligized publicly in front of the class saying that she had done wrong and she should never treat children that way.
today she was wondering if she should go to the professor here at the university and tell him that she thought that what he had done was wrong. she wasn't sure yet as she was still in a shock. the other students told that they had been quite suprised that well and none of them could say anything back to the professor during the class. the whole thing came really as a suprise as the spanish and mexican people often speak constantly with each other during the class, even in a language that no one understands and about totally different things, and the professor has never said anything. now that tanya had shortly said something to the girl next to her about something closely related to the topic, which the professor of course didn't know, he had gone mad according to what the people told me today.
tanya had e-mailed her teacher mother back in canada already and was wondering about what she would say. she was quite confident about going to the professor perhaps the next day and complaining about his behaviour but she'd had to gather some strength first.
this, of course, reminded me of everything we had been discussing with people on the net about kids and what i had been writing about "learning by living" and "teaching the teachers" myself and what don had written in his book. we were discussing in the kitchen for about an hour and i told the others some of those points of view when we were all remembering how the school was like when we were kids. it all has changed and will change so much and i think it could be even more dramatic in universities in the following years.
it was getting a bit late already so i had to go to work at teh university before the meeting and the evening. i still hadn't read the amsterdam hypermedia model either. there were lots of notes and corrections in the papers already which i'd have to go through too.
the weather and everything was really nice as i bicycled the short way to the university, it takes me only about ten minutes. some of the trees already have flowers in them and walking on a path trough the small park from the gate to the backdoor of the computer science faculty building i could even smell some of the now growing flowers! then climbing the stairs to the fourth floor and walking back-and-forth the corridor trying to get a terminal. i was lucky today: i happened to be there just when someone was leaving so i got me an ultra sparc which is often quite hard this time of day when everyone working on their practical works.
first i checked the mail.
there were ten new @an, most replies from editors to what i had send them late last night to finland trying to sell some of these writings for some magazines to get some money as i'm broke. a finnish friend of mine who's working on some net critical paper in berlin had also answered. then there were the STEIM-people i hope to meet today. i sent quick reactions to most important ones and left the others there to be worked on.
@netppl on my public account there were all the regular daily newsletters i receive, about seven of them plus some spamms. there was also a project status report from the management on the company forum with some quite good news about new projects starting and about how the current are going. i guess the hunger in my stomach was still aiming my thoughts at work and money as i replied also that report quickly and asked if we had any nice work for me or even for some new people to do.
@cs.vu.nl there was some new information about the hotel-project we are working on. I had just updated my own project page last night and the other people told now that they had also been working on their parts. They were somewhere on the third floor and there would be a meeting the next day.
after all the three e-mails i actively use i checked the irc's. i have three of them too - one for efnet/finland, one for undernet here in netherlands and then the linuxnet where i use the netppl's server in finland with a client here in netherlands. the other irc's, like the mailboxes and clients too, i like to run as close to the servers and the people i'm in contact with as possible. the company also uses internal channels that are only visible for our own server so that's another good reason to have my main irc client there.
there had been quite a lot talk since i'd left, about 500 lines on three of the six pretty active channels i'm constantly on. there was some feedback from the e-mails i sent yesterday about isp-business and internet politics in finland and a lot of general talk about people's doings, problems, joys etc. i love that moment of the day when you can go through friends' feelings and then react and perhaps start conversating if the other's are there still..
during the next couple of hours we talked some about installing media servers, the changes that are occurring now on the net business in finland, internationalization and some other things. at the same time i was also writing e-mails, mainly replying the questions my earlier writing and the published things on the an-site had rised in people.
there seems to be two short reactions sent at 14:30, that must be when i arrived, and then a long well written message sent at 15:15 for many important business and net people in finland. after that i wrote nine messages from @an to discuss the inet98-paper with some people before 17:15.
there's also one letter for my mother just to tell how wonderful she is and how fun it has been to talk to people about the finnish nature: full winters, spings, summers and autumns she loves so much. i put a copy of that message for my brother too so he can open it for her from home as she's probably too busy to read it at work. i haven't heard of my father or other brothers living with him yet but we've been writing a lot this week already.
oh, by the way, all those times are finnish time as those servers are in finland. so when finishing the mails and discussions at 17:15 EET it was 16:15 CET and i noticed that i'd forgot the hypermedia-meeting! it had started half an hour ago already so i tried to run downstairs to the first floor but there was no one there anymore. i was looking forward to hear critics of my hypersound/music paper i had started to write last week and was hoping to discuss later tonight at the free media cafe but now i missed the meeting. i guess i should put some kind of reminders on the net. well, i had done a lot of productive work during the meeting so it didn't matter that much. i could always here the critics later, perhaps i'll mail the assistant.
running downstairs did have one good effect: it got me started in a new way. i continued to the mainbuilding, bought some fruits there with the money i found in my pocket, continued running around the university area with the food in my hands thinking about this new idea:
"all is full of all" is something i had written last night .. or was it when i woke up this morning, probably somewhere in between. it's something i've been thinking quite a lot. bjork has a nice song called "all is full of love" which is really typical of her .. she uses words like "all" and "everything" and "always" really a lot which i hardle ever do. i know wittgenstein quite well since i used to love reading his philosophy as kid. i didn't understand much but it was good poetry. i also saw the movie, that's one of the special nights in my life.
well anyway, wittgenstein's tractatus logico philosophicus starts with the words (i only know it in german and finnish): "all that is, is the way it is". bjork, of course, doesn't fit really well that picture as she always claims that everything is allways something very specific (like love) and that we must always do this and that just some way (fuck logic! trust your senses! etc.). there's nothing bad in that style that bjork does, it's just emphasizing the aspects she finds important and putting them up there for people to pick if they feel they're important too .. she doesn't force anyone to listen to anything.
so i tried to combine wittgenstein and bjork and rewrote the song. it used to go: "all is full of love / you'll have to trust it / ..." but my reply would be something like: "all is full of all / and love's an important aspect" which, of course, would make lousy music and spoil the whole thing but satisfies me anyway :)
if you know the song (i'll put a link to the lyrics .. altough all the layers it has works much better when you hear the music) that game might have a meaning for you.
for me it turned out to be a new idea how to form this presentation. actually it all started already in the morning after talking about the networked growing up with the people in the kitchen .. now i remember that i was singing the "all is full of all" song when i bicycled here and thinking about how funny it was to find the same discussion i had had with the people cross the atlantic and what i had read in the book just in our own kitchen. of course it's just that i pay attention to those things that i'm wondering myself and find them anywhere .. like bjork has specialized in finding love or something at least sometimes .. enough to make a song of it anyway.
by the way, we are real time now. that bjork thing was the last that happened on the net (on irc with a friend) and now i'm just writing - not remembering anymore like the beginning of the text - what happens. people go on with the discussions and i put this text on-line and perhaps someone already took a look. quite a funny feeling :)
*** irc.netppl.fi Thursday February 26 1998 -- 19: 24 +02:00
and my desktop shows it to be half past six here in amsterdam so I guess I should be heading the STEIM to the Free Media Cafe. wonder if i'll discuss this text there already?
the idea is that as I've noticed that at least Laura and probably also other wise people reading these things we produce can tell quite a lot about our lives from what we show it might be valuable to show one day intensively.
afterall, "all is full of all", any day is every day at least when you have a routine like I do from monday to friday. of course each day is different and the life is always changing faster than i notice but still i think that this fresh snapshot - even the first happenings described here are only ten hours old - might tell something about how all this life is built. perhaps everything? even so that the whole presentation should be nothing else than one day?
this might be a good example .. depending on what happens from now on, of course. most of the people i'm going to meet i don't know or have met only once but i know that some of them have been studying the an-site quite a lot and are looking forward to discussing those topics (net.dance, hypermusic etc).
naturally i also have all those irc-logs and mails mentioned here, unfortunately in finnish only, but i'd be happy to answer any questions related to them or an-ything else.
must go now, bye.