Tuesday 18 August 2009

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I was saying to H the other day that perhaps I should revisit the whole idea of the travelogue--that I ought to write about what happens on a daily basis, where we go, what we do. I do not think, however, that I am ready to committ to the non-sequitir fully yet. I might reveal unintentionally dark connections: let's see, we visited the monument and camp at Buchenwald and then a co-worker surprised us with a giant (a truly industrial-sized bushell) sack of plumbs from someone's orchard. Rather, I was making an observation that some else has surely made before about designers' tendancy to royally bundle things up. It's never just a mobil telephone--but a whole suite of communication and recording devices. It's rather nice to be able to hold that much computing power in one's hand--I just dislike the move to bump everything to the top of the food-chain, to evolve everything into a personal-computer because of everything it makes redundant and what you have left over that does double-duties. I have a TomTom and a handy and a portable DVD player with a broken screen in my car that all play music files, since my radio has been busted since 2002. A lot of things tend to move in this way--beefed up to the point of super-saturation, financial markets, coffee shops, environdiscount stores. The community I work in seems a little bit like that as well--existing mostly as a make-work program. The people working to serve this small base probably out-number the population of military personnel , and their jobs are only perpetuated by staffing the services they give each other, until there are enough retirees and civilians living in this ghetto that the military side is an after-thought.