A Sustainable Train of Thought

Somewhere between Milan and Newark, Continental managed to lose my bag. The one containing all my clothes and all of my christmas presents. Yeah, good times.

Just called the baggage resolution hotline (or something to that effect) and it turns out my bag never left Milan. So at some point tomorrow I can expect a van to turn up with my bag. I suppose it would have been cheaper for Continental to have done it right the first time, but at least they’re fixing the problem.

I might add that this isn’t the first time this bag has gotten lost around Christmas time. This also happened a couple of years ago. I think it’s time to retire this cursed luggage in some appropriate fashion. Like fire.

And on a completely different note, it’s started snowing in New Jersey.

It’s been a long day, and I need about 30 hours of sleep to feel normal again…

During the last project of the semester, Alex and I needed rubbing alcohol (alcool) to clean some of the plastic parts used to house our project. I ran off to the market and discovered alcool is artificially colored this florescent, cotton-candy pink, and that it’s concentrated at about 90 percent. Let me just say that we had to bring the stuff into the paint room (which is ventilated) because the smell was so strong. Yet it was a familiar smell…

A couple of months ago, Victor’s grandmother visited him after a trip to Romania. She brought with her a plastic bottle of Romanian moonshine. Everything about the bottle promised blind drunkeness. The bottle looked drunk: its base was somehow distorted so it never stood upright but leaned one way or another. I couldn’t read the words on the bottle, but I have the suspicion it was, shall we say, repurposed. And the plastic conveniently meant the bottle wouldn’t break if you dropped it in your drunken stupor. I didn’t try any of the stuff, but I did catch a whiff of it. Disturbingly, its potent fumes had more than a passing resemblance to those of the rubbing alcohol…

If you’ve looked at the photos in “Dave and Syd’s European Adventure” from earlier this year, you’ve seen my grey jacket. I wore that thing all over Europe, and when I got back to the US I put it in the closet and never used it—California really doesn’t get that cold.

On that same trip I brought along a mini-tripod that I used constantly. When I got back to the US, I forgot all about it. It was really only when I was packing to move that I remembered I had it…somewhere. Alas, it never showed up, and I went to Italy tripod-less.

It was pretty cold on a certain Friday earlier in the semester, so I wore my grey jacket to Aperitivo. You know how you always find all these interesting things in your jacket pockets when haven’t worn it for a while? Well, I had a London Underground map poking out of my right pocket, so I started digging through everything. I found several TravelCards; a couple of train tickets; the button for the left pocket of my jacket, which had fallen off sometime during January’s trip; some lint; and…my mini-tripod.

The flight over the Alps was remarkable in that there was absolutely no turbulence. Compare that to the RyanAir flight I took in January—I was amazed when realized we had already passed Geneva today with nary a bump. The reclined seat in front of me means I’m wedged into this seat pretty tightly as I try to fit both myself and my laptop within the space afforded me by some arcane airline calculation of what is habitable “space” on a nine hour flight. If it sounds uncomfortable, it is. But that’s nothing new.

I’m heading back to the US with mixed feelings. I’ve tried to keep politics and suchlike out of this blog, because it’s supposed to be a record of my experience in Ivrea. But coming home is part of that experience, and so are the attached emotions. I’m not even sure of the words to describe my feelings at the moment, other than to say I expect to feel nervous in my own country.

Or can I even call it a country any more? Sometimes “banana republic” seems more appropriate, what with disputed election results, crushing deficits, weakening currency, and a free press that parrots the latest line fed to them from Washington. I mean, is the recent “discovery” that troops are under-equipped in Iraq really that much of a revelation to the US population? Where have they been getting their news? I’ve known about these problems for a couple of years now—this is not new information, especially if you cared to look for it.

I could go on at length about all of this, believe me, but I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble. It’s just talk, after all, and I’ve become a believer in getting things done. Let’s leave it at that.

We’re almost at the end of a four-week Physical Computing project. Thursday is presentation day, and boy I can’t wait for this to be over. We’ve been working non-stop for the last two weeks (10 hours on Sunday…woohoo!) and I’m beyond tired at this point. I’ve found that if I get somewhere near a normal amount of sleep, I wake up the next day feeling absolutely horrible: headaches, blurry vision, the works. So I think I really need a couple of days to recover from this project. In the meantime, I’m trying to hang in there until the presentations.

The good news is that tonight we got the projects fully assembled, AND THEY WORK! So hopefully all we have to do tomorrow is tie up some loose ends and prepare the presentation and perhaps (and this is a big deal) even get some sleep the night before the presentation (gasp!)

We’re working on some very conceptual projects this time. This was a conscious decision on our part; other groups are taking a more pragmatic approach. Both are equally valid, although I think it’s a little more interesting to pursue something conceptual at this point because we’ll probably be making pragmatic things after graduating…

Anyways, I realize I’ve been talking about all these projects without really describing them. I’ll admit that I’m a little paranoid at this point about how much I divulge online because there is a very real possibility of concepts and ideas getting “appropriated”—although nothing’s certain, it appears this might have already happened with one student’s project. I refer you to this article:

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/003934.php

Basically, one of the students from an earlier class at IDII developed a project where mobile phones are implanted with seeds, so that when the phones are discarded the seeds can grow into plants. Surprisingly, another group at another university very recently announced a very similar project. It’s a bit early to jump to conclusions, but Belmer (the student who developed the project at IDII) is disturbed by the whole thing, and understandably so.

At some point documentation of our projects will be placed on the web, and at that point I think there will be some evidence of their having been developed at IDII and whatnot. Intellectual property rights are definitely a big issue here (and one that has yet to be satisfactorily addressed), and I think I’m within my rights to veer towards caution. Of course I’m happy to talk about my work on a personal basis. If you’re interested, just ask me about them. However, one caveat is that sometimes it’s hard to talk about projects when they’re in the development phase because they can change so drastically.

I don’t anticipate updating this blog again before I get home to NYC on Sunday, but I’ll certainly have enough time on the plane ride to come up with some more stuff. I’d like to write some more, and I think the whole thing will help the reflective process. After working on a project for 4 weeks, it helps to regain some perspective.

Now, it’s time to sleep…