The Information Field


Wherein something begins to dawn on our narrator.

The big moment this morning was when the AirPort in the Little Theatre went live, able to communicate with the wider internet. The three of us with Macs (David Barda and Tom Kennedy with their G4s, me with my cute little G3) immediately popped them open and began to check our email, surf the web, etc. For the rest of the day, as the presenters talked, and websites scrolled by, I popped open the iBook, went to the site on view, bookmarked it in Safari, then closed the iBook again, until the next time. I must have 20 or 30 new bookmarks, plus a whole host of business cards of folks who will (I hope) be coming into AFTRS to lecture in the "Producing for Interactive" course next month. Over all, a very successful day.

Now, there's just few things going on - an Announcement about South Australia and ABC having funding for mobile gaming - but network went away promptly at 5 PM. Which really truly sucks because I was just getting used to bathing in all the WiFi here and having the constant high-speed connectivity. I got MySQL working on this puppy, tested the PHP/Apache interfaces - also working - downloaded 2 episodes of "Red vs. Blue" from my server in Sydney, and whipped together some web pages to show them off. I didn't need them, after all, but it was nice to know they were there in case I did.

I've fallen in love with Rendevous, which is zero-configuration IP networking; the best of AppleTalk lives again! And that means that my web sever on the iBook is available to everyone else in the room, on the AirPort, just by typing "luna.local" into the URL field of their browser. Very, very, *very* nifty.

I am continually frustrated by having these tantalizing glimpses of the information field - which I soak up greedily when I have it - and which disappears again, just as I've begun to regard it as perfectly normal. I incorporate it so quickly into my operational ontology that it seems as though I'm already *there*. Only the rest of the world hasn't quite caught up.

I want a Google implant, so I can know everything. Potentially, at least. And we're going to need a lot more *unmetered* broadband, and pervasive WiFi before I get my wish.

Posted: Mon - March 8, 2004 at 05:46 PM        

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