Serial Experiments

Nothing fortuitous happens in a child's world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else.... For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.
-- John Berger

Friday, November 19, 1999
One year ago: Lindy Basic
Two years ago: Spinning

I don't know if I've made as much dance progress this past year as I did in the year between my 1997 and 1998 entries. This is probably natural -- the changes from being an absolute beginner to being a good intermediate dancer are vast, but the changes you make after that are deeper and more subtle (or that's what I'm telling myself, anyway!)

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When I arrived at work this morning, our net connection was still down! We were vastly frustrated! Thank heaven we'll be in our own space next month, directly connected to the net and not depending on several layers of ISPs that we are not customers of. Right now our tiny intranet connects to the network belonging to the company that runs these offices, and that's the net that was down.

Chip did braindumps, first for me, then for new coworker M---, about features that will be needed in our future projects. We'll have a lot to do! He was nervous because he was leaving midday to go out of town. What if he couldn't get the site updated before he left? We'd been unable to update our database, update our charts, or post any new content last night -- Chip had added an apologetic note to our home page from his home.

Hurrah! We were back on the air around eleven AM. I immediately started the build process for last night's data. We actually have a lot of automation working for us, a whole suite of scripts and macros, but there are several steps that need minding, that need to be watched over. I felt triumphant when I got the current data and new articles up there.

The rest of the afternoon was calmer -- I got caught up on email and web stuff, and asked a columnist to resend his material. He'd sent it directly to Chip, and I think it had gone off with Chip's laptop. I thought I could escape without doing the work, but our columnist came through around five, so I did the reformatting and editing necessary while running the site update for the second time today, this time with today's data.

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As I was driving north to Bellingham, I listened to an edition of This American Life that was on the theme of "other people's mail." (Some postcards featured on the show, a repeat from 1997.)

The letters found by Richard "Negativland" Lyons inside junked cars were all such sad stories! Not surprising, I suppose, since all of them were in cars that had been in such bad accidents that the cars were totaled. A literal "train wreck" journal effect.

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Jack's daughter A--- was surprised when I arrived. "Is this why you didn't want to take me someplace?" she asked. But I don't think it was just my imminent arrival that made Jack reluctant to take her out on some random expedition.

After she stomped off to bed, Jack and I watched an anime video he bought down in Portland: Serial Experiments Lain. This tape had the four first episodes of a stylish, eerie story, about a young girl experiencing blurred boundaries between the net ("the wired", here) and reality. This was good, great graphically, but the little girl is so sad and passive! I'm sure Jack will be on the lookout for the next videos in the series. (More about lain here.)