the workshop begins this afternoon with sub-normal facilities. always Germany seems to have this strange public schizophrenia of thinking things are better here than elsewhere, when it really is not. CEbit2000 notwithstanding, the overall technological situation here is dismal compared to Scandinavia. and although my workshop specifically does not depend on the ‘goodness’ of a local technical infrastructure, it is helpful to at least have that as an option — to check something out on the net. the main irritant is this feeling on the face of things in Germany that things are really happening, when they’re not. a leap ahead of the situation in 1996, to be sure, after the partial destruction of the Deutsche Telecom monopoly, but still quite problematic.