weekend ending. reflecting in the office. swimming two days. more swimming pool commentary. wide 50-meter pool that is hardly ever open, and when it is, it is full of the breast-strokers. no pull-buoys to be had, at least the Russian attendant gives a good looking around, but the useful objects are locked away for the special-interest groups. so, some 50- and 100-meter sprints, just up to a kilometer is all I can force myself to do. no measure of relaxing and meditating. but at least some upper-body work-out.
conversations with Frieder are long and intense. and traverse new territories in mind. would it be possible to finish my doctorate here? hmmmm. it would seem to be an ideal place, though after the Media Lab experience in Helsinki, I am skeptical. there is the common phrase “ahead of his time” that does seem to apply to the general trend of my situations. where I attempt to do something that is against the flow of the situation. the digital media thing at the Icelandic Academy: where I had to struggle, on a salary scale that rivaled Eastern Europe, to get people to believe that the Internet was something to pay attention to, getting the school up on the web — the first Icelandic school to have a regular website. but then retreating (as I was leaving Iceland anyway), tired of trying to pull others into that vision. then the school eventually privatizes, salaries quadruple, the technical infrastructure blossoms, and a former student of mine is hired to do network-based teaching… or, applying for digital media jobs in the US, using a portfolio on a floppy disk back in 1995 or so. argh!