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Where I Sit
``` I got 75 responses, totaling 143K bytes, to my request for descriptions of the physical surroundings in which RRE readers use their computers. They're just terrific, but they seem a bit much to send to the whole list. The complete set of responses can be retrieved by sending a message that looks like this:
To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send sit
You can also retrieve it in three parts by sending three separate messages to the server; the files are called "sit1", "sit2", and "sit3".
I've enclosed a representative sample of the responses. Please note that each of these messages is Copyright 1996 by its author. The whole set of messages can be forwarded to anyone, in its entirety only, and only in electronic format, for any noncommercial purpose. Any other use requires written consent from the author of each message.
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Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 05:30:43 +0800 From: davidc@cs.uwa.edu.au (David Cake)
If you walked through the door marked 'System Manager', you would be facing me, standing straight in front of my desk. But its not just my office. There is another desk straight behind mine (he could see what I typed, if his vision was sharp enough), and my supervisors office to one side (but he has to walk through ours). Luckily there is almost no tension between us. I have worked in four different long term jobs now, and I have never had an office to myself. The room is new, and the furniture is new but cheap. Its all standard university issue. All three of us have desks covered in computers, at least three on each desk. We all hate the person we are talking to walking behind to our side of the desk, unless we ask them to. This is probably because then they can see our screens, see what we are doing. I don't like this office. There is almost no natural light, but bright fluoros. No air flows (just air conditioning). There is lots of ambient noise, from at least a dozen different devices with internal fans, some old and loud. And my shoulders and neck have started to ache since I started here - I think its because there are two keyboards on a desk built for one, so both are in uncomfortable positions. I want a window.
David
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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 12:32:00 +0100
From: Keith Hudson
I work in a vaulted cave about 20 ft long by 8 ft wide cut into a cliff behind my house. It used to be an ice-room when the house was built in 1815 which was the date of the battle of Waterloo but also the year in which Tambora erupted. About four times more powerful than Krakatoa, seven cubic kilometres of mountain-side went into the air and circulated for years. 1815 was called the Year Without a Summer -- with an average of two hours of sunshine a day. Millions of people died that year because of failed crops. Also, the semi-darkness meant that my house was built with scarcely a right-angle in the place. The ice that used to fill this cave came from a fresh-water lake near Boston, Mass., and was very clear and very expensive, but this ceased suddenly in 1856 when an ice-factory was built in Walcot Street, about half-a mile from here down a steep hill. Horse-and-carts carrying the ice used to hook themselves onto a continuous iron chain in the centre of the road, helped by the empty horse-and-carts hooked onto the chain going downwards. Despite its origin, this ice room has an equable temperature all through the year and I sit here in shirt sleeves whatever the season and take no notice either of the weather or of the radioactive radon gas which seeps out of the rock in these parts. As I don't intend to father any more children, this doesn't worry me. Nor does hacking away at this keyboard bother me either -- but more like 15 hours on a good day, rather than the 13 mentioned by Phil. I arrive here at about 6.30am armed with a large pot of tea and a fresh pipeful of tobacco to start the day, read my mailbox, sit around, cogitate, and then usually write an e-mail or two. Send them off and then take my dog Gemma for her walk and read my morning papers. Back at about 10am, I eat my morning porridge and then get down to some heavy scanning of articles, extracts of books, etc, for a Vannevar Bush-type database in which I am involved and which one day, hopefully, will appear on the WWW. In the afternoon I look at my mailbox again, maybe write a few replies, cogitate again and so on. Sometimes I have to work if my business (elsewhere on the premises) is overstretched, so I step out of my ice-room and into my studio which is a glass-topped conservatory connecting the house to the cave. The curious thing is that when I look at the white surface of the drawing board after spending a few hours in front of the monitor there is an oval surround of crazy dancing lines in my field of vision but if I look through the middle of it when working it doesn't bother me and after half-an-hour or so it disappears. Whether this is due to the X-rays from the monitor or the alpha particles from the rock around me, I've no idea. In the evening I usually spend more time here at the keyboard, sometimes till 10pm. I hardly watch TV now and I rarely use the Web, except about once a week to read journal articles. My better-half is very understanding. If I were younger, or had a family, I couldn't possibly get away with it with this perfect mode of life. On a summer's day, my house front door is always open and, sitting here at the back of the cave, I can see straight through the studio, the hallway and into the front garden where I can see tortoiseshell butterflies on the buddleas. What more could anyone wish for? Perhaps a saner and more sustainable world for my grandchildren. But I doubt that that will happen, unfortunately. We are truly in a mess and I can only hope that the many who are writing on the Net will find some answers before the politicians and our existing political systems make the world a far greater tragedy than it already is.
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Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail:ac972@dial.pipex.com
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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 05:21:47 -0500 From: iq@usinternet.com (John Farrell)
I lease office space in a beautiful old building in downtown Minneapolis. I can see Nicollet Mall from my second-story office window. Pictures of my family are scattered throughout my office. My little girl's artwork covers part of two walls. My computer sits on the skinny part of the "L" on my desk. There are two large "flip-chart" papers covered with the outline of a course (in black, blue, green and red marker) I and a colleague are teaching later this week. My desk is covered with papers and my "project box" is stuffed full of work to be done for various clients. I have four unopened "TRY AMERICA ONLINE FREE!" diskette packages sitting on my little computer speakers. I think I'll throw them away. There, that feels better.
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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 96 10:21:44 EDT
From: "David M. Chess"
I sit in an office, with my back to the door (the screen is reflective enough that I can tell if someone moves around behind me, but I can't see who it is without turning around). My wrists are on a rather dirty but familiar red OS/2 wrist-rest, my fingers on a PS/2 keyboard (also starting to get dirty, now that I actually look at it). Beyond the tube are two big slanted-inward-at-the-top windows, overlooking a parking lot, a Topps Appliance City, wooded hills across the highway beyond that. Coming back inside, most of the horizontal surfaces in the office are covered with piles of paper, drifts of books, clumps of diskettes, Rubik's Cube(tm)s. Whiteboard on one wall, shelves opposite it, little two-drawer file cabinets holding up the above horizontal surfaces. Three other computer displays, all off at the moment, sitting under the shelves. My chair, my laptop, my sandals. The rug's getting dirty, because there's usually too much mess in here for the cleaning people to bother trying to get their vacuum-cleaner in. I should really do something about that...
DC
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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 96 11:06:39 EDT From: spot@hopeless.mess.cs.cmu.edu
small office shared with two others, but nobody else is there, five computers, hazy morning light through the window, cluttered desks and bookshelves, telephone, closed door to shared lab with video tower, seven machines, and five more adjoining offices. silent but for the fans, disks, and my typing.
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Date: 12 Aug 96 9:09:29 From: Dean Cochrane/IS/HeadOffice/Weldwood
I'm one of those lucky cubicle-dwellers, one of the tortured many whose workplace environment would make a battery hen feel right at home. The walls of this cell are a kind of faded, speckled green washed with yellow, like urine-stained jade, and the countertop (I wouldn't presume to call it a 'desk') is a bland and inoffensive shade of tan. You can hardly see the keyboard against it. The machine that I am typing this on is a sort of Frankenstein's monster: no two parts are from the same machine. Here in tech support, we get what's left over. The box sits beside me, without its cover (which sits on top of the tacky roll-front thing hung on the wall of the cubicle, along with some software boxes and possibly defective printer cables) with cables hanging out o f it: I leave it open because I'm always testing cards, or attaching a HDD to try and recover data for some idiotic user who has somehow never heard the word "backup" in spite of the edicts and papal bulls that are regularly circulated from On High. The inside of the cubicle is papered with phone numbers, Dilbert cartoons, Microsoft religious tracts, tech notes, and those velcro circles that 10base2 tees come packed in. I use old Microsoft TechNet and Lotus CD/Prompt CD-ROMs for coasters. There are stacks of diskettes teetering dangerously on my right. I really have to sort them out one day, but for now I just shuffle through the entire stack until I find one. There's a plastic Godzilla on top of the monitor, and a cheap plastic Daffy Duck mug stuffed with screwdrivers and jumpers lurks amongst scratch pads, pencils, and stacks of printouts.
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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 14:22:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: Sarah W Salter
Although a portable, my computer and I are almost always at my desk in my bedroom - a cool, darkish basement room, near the main line of the Toronto subway. I can never tell if it is thundering outside, or just another train going by - the gentle rumble happens every few minutes day and most of the night.
My cat is sleeping on the desktop, by the computer on top of papers that need urgently to be attended to - printouts and source notes for articles rushing toward deadline, urgent mail, phone messages & my to-do lists. It is great having them under the cat -- I hate to disturb her.
Just about every thing in sight is "industrial quality" - grey utilitarian table-desk, carpet, plastic milk-crate toolboxes (3), plastic laundry basket and a couple of garbage bags of clothes. My eye delights in my graceful small wooden desklamp, a nude drawing (of me) on the wall, and stacks and stacks of books - for work, general information and belles-lettres.
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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 96 11:17:00 PDT
From: Shelly Julien
The phones always ring -- after all, I'm in PR. Just try composing an intelligent and grammatically correct email missive when you're interrupted three times by reporters who've waited until their deadline is 30 minutes away to do their interviews...but I've jumped ahead of myself. Actually, my workspace is rather nice -- my calendar from the British Virgin Islands is at my right, so I can look at sailboats and blue water whenever I need to. And of course my adorable son's face is all over -- in a baseball uniform, in a tux, as a baby. That keeps me grounded and helps me remember what's important. On top of my computer is a prayer candle, "Our Lady @ www.com" which says, in part, "...I turn to you to help me navigate the tangled mess that is my computer. Banish systems crashes and power surges from my consciousness, and protect me from carpal tunnel syndrome..." (Since I spend most of my day at the keyboard, mostly with email, that last protection is the important one.) There are lots of toys around here, most from various trade shows, including my dear Mrs. Potato Head. In fact there is a lot of flotsam and jetsam from various software companies, all of whom want to turn me into their walking billboard, residue from 16 years in the industry that I can't quite let go. And piles of books and papers, four sections of the WSJ spread out on my conference table right now, so many things to read and so little time! I have windows that look to the south, so I can watch for the storms that come in and make sailing rough (as if I ever have the time to slip out anymore!). The huge whiteboard on the far wall has small saxophone drawn on it, courtesy of my son's last trip to the office with mom. I'm enough of a nerd to have my WWW5 poster up on the wall -- and the fact that it's kind of hidden behind the door means either that I'm a little ambivalent or, more likely, that it was the last open space on the walls. The computer itself? Well, it's just a computer. Lots of memory, a laptop/docking station setup, Windows 95 and Internet access from my desktop. I put it on a narrow table so I couldn't indulge my natural tendency to stack up papers all around it. An island of organization in a room of lively chaos.
Regards, Shelly Julien shellyj@wagged.com
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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 12:00:17 -0700 (PDT)
From: Sara Miles
I work in a big, sunlit room the color of roses. On the walls are pressed flowers my great-great-grandfather, a Transcendentalist, picked a hundred years ago and labelled in his spidery hand: "Convovolus Sepium, Hedge Bindweed, June 19, '86." On my desk are piles of paper from current projects: Queer as Fuck, the anthology I'm editing on gay and lesbian sexual cultures for NYU Press; a piece I'm writing for HotWired on interactive gaming; an essay on electronic cash, and a manuscript about the prophetic tradition in law. There's an old White House press pass on a metal chain that my daughter's been playing with, a story I clipped from the business section of the New York Times, a gorgeous photo of my girlfriend laughing, six pens, two pencils, a pair of scissors, and a PowerBook165 with the slowest modem in the world. My windows look out on the Cesar Chavez Elementary School, a bright blue building covered in murals; there's a sign in Spanish taped to the front door directing ! ! parents to the Wednesday night computer class. I can see the drug dealer from down the block walking his Rottweiler, Mrs. Mayzyk sweeping her stairs, and the guys on the corner fixing their car. It's not that I don't care about the future, but the tangle of many pasts and the gravity and beauty of the undeniable present tend to focus my attention at this desk.
Sara Miles 824 Shotwell San Francisco CA 94110 smiles@igc.apc.org
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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 21:06:51 -0400 (EDT)
From: Will Sitch
It's dark outside, and I just had to reset the lights - they turn themselves off after hours. Noone else is here in a building usually bustling with energy, and I listen to my headphones as they lay on the desk in front of me. BushX is playing.
I'm sitting in the middle of a square room, facing east. To my right is the door to the lab, and on my left, two windows overlooking the grounds around our buildings. I sit at an open cubicle, one desk holding five machines, mine the middle one. Each machine is partitioned from the others with a half cubicle wall. The monitor is large, and the text crisp.
A meagre Sparc2, but with a recently-acquired external CD-ROM drive. My desk is a mess, papers everywhere. I've been rewriting some code obviously written by a high school dropout, occasionally I stop and wonder how I would torture the original author of the meanderings I find before me.
My brain tumor is acting up, trying to kill me before I reach the tender age of 20. His name is Hermit, although he thinks I should call him Hermie.. he is, after all, killing me.
The cubicle walls are a grayish beige, almost a non-colour. Flourescent lights pour down on me from above, and on the worn carpet rest my sneakers. A screensaver on the machine to my left has caught my eye again, it appears to be a collection of diamonds placed in position based on their previous position, according to some mathematical equation relating the existance of a diamond to the number of surrounding diamonds.
The Galium Arsenide (GaAs) Lab, in the Advanced Techology Labs, at Northern Telecom, is where I reside. My beeper stands beside a glass of water on the table holding the machine, ever vigilant. I had a date with a good female friend tonight, we were to get together and quaff a few brews, but I cancelled.
I could not. I had to finish the work I had laid before me. Bullshit. The draw of the machine is powerful, I cannot remember the last time I moved from this seat. The music I'm listening to is very zen, Everything Zen is the first track.
I am happy here. A long day has passed and noone else remains, they have all returned to their homes and families. A home and a family waits for me, but they will wait a while yet. My bike is probably one of the only ones left on the racks, funny that I seem to never see the slew of other bikes that must appear after I arrive, and leave before I. The other bikes must exist, for the racks are extensive.
I awaight a friend. She is dining on salmon and wine, with good friends who are close and comforting to her. She too, however, is drawn. She will arrive in a few hours, walk in, sit down, and login.
We will exchange simple conversation, and proceed to play an old game, the one of discovery.
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William J.D. Sitch -- wsitch@engsoc.carleton.ca; wsitch@nortel.ca Data Analysis, Northern Telecom, Advanced Technology Labs Technical Director for the Carleton Student Engineering Society Member of the EngSoc Board of Governors; ISIS Consultant 2nd Year Electrical Engineering Student @ Carleton University
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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 22:16:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: Michael Weholt
My computer is tucked-crammed-slipped into a monstrosity, a rolling thing I built for it out of two-by-fours and plywood and wood screws and a few stove bolts. The wood is stained cherry everywhere except where my two cats have discovered that vertical two-by-fours of cheap pine make terrific scratching posts. They have carved deeply into one of the verticals, around a place where a knot has hardened the soft wood. I suppose the cats could eventually carve deeply enough into the wood to collapse the vertical, but that won't be for a while yet. The cart is just under six feet high (with its big rubber wheels on), two feet deep, three and a half feet wide. It's built to fit through every door in my apartment (well, except the bathroom door) so I can roll my computer around the joint and work wherever I want to work. There are shelves and nooks and hidey-holes and secret trapdoors up and down and all around the cart where I can shove books and small boxes of things, wherever I want them to be, so they can travel with me and my machine whenever I move the cart. I write ideas on bits of yellow paper and use thumbtacks to stick the bits of paper onto the wood, wherever convenient or most likely to recatch my attention. My favorite part is the "undershelf" bar-light glued to the plywood just above the space for my keyboard. Clicking it on, illuminating my keyboard, seems to tell my imagination it's time to go to work. Clicking it off means it's time to chill. The wood and books and all of it makes the thing very heavy, like a tank. It creaks and sways dangerously when I roll it around. Working in front of it is like sitting crosslegged and daydreaming at the end of an old, familiar pier.
-- Michael R Weholt
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Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 02:11:06 -0400 From: jdewey@crocker.com (Jeannie Dewey)
The horses jar me back with their fierce naying. Must be a porcupine in the meadow again. When I turn to look out at them I notice the peepers have gotten melancholy and dim; the night is ringing with near silence. Maya, the middle child and the passionate Scorpio, is talking in her sleep again. In a minute I will likely find her wandering, in a state of semiconsciousness, and need to usher her back to bed. That kid never rests. I think that, like me, she is nocturnal, but she won't discover her natural rhythm until she's an adult and no one can tell her when to go to bed. Like me, she may spend years not sleeping at all, not knowing what to do with herself in those hours of solitude. I'll offer her then what I have found, the comfort and the companionship of words. I'll teach her the timelessness of writing - reading, developing her ideas, thoughts, inspirations. I'll give her what I know - the communion with the night, glowing eyes, a language in silence. We'll Email.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~*~ Jeannie Dewey, MSW jdewey@crocker.com I am not standing Here before the Light to cast shadows ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*~
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Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 16:27:14 EST
From: "Anne Beaumont"
I now have the nicest office I have ever had. The walls are a lovely buttery cream, and non-ergonomically, (really too much glare) my computer faces a wall in which is a 1.75x3metre north-facing window. Here in Australia that means that the sun comes in and on sunny days the office is wonderfully bright, and even on dull days like today I can tell what the weather is like.
We are on the second floor of a building facing onto a major street in our CBD, opposite RMIT, so that the view includes 2 trees (deciduous, so currently bare) a pseudo-sort-of-gothic building and passing cars and trams.
On the wall beside my desk is a notice-board on which is pinned my Wilderness Calendar. This month it shows a view of Mount Feathertop in the Bogong High Plains which are is the northeast of our state. Because it is winter, this view shows the mountains snow-capped. Last month's view was of the Polbue Swamp in fog - very evocative. http://www.vicnet.net.au/~twsmel/ - no photographs unfortunately. You may wonder why I mention my calendar. Apart from the wonderful photographs, it is important because I use it as a source of passwords. There is ususally some aboriginal name or species name which, with judicious use of alternative characters, would be very difficult to crack using a standard dictionary or gazateer. And being next to my computer, when I forget the password(s) it is easy to check. Beside my computer is a ceramic coaster which I bought in Sausalito in 1984 - the year I bought my first computer, a Kaypro luggable - which I brought back to Australia. But that is a different story.
Anne Beaumont, Application Support, Information Technology, State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston Street, Victoria, Australia. 3000 tel:+61(03)966 999 38,fax:+61(03)966 99 958,(anneb@slv.vic.gov.au)
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Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 02:38:56 -0700
From: "Robert B. Gelman"
Imagine this: On a redwood forested mountaintop, 2500 feet above San Francisco bay, is an old barn, converted into a home. In one corner of that home is a single-man, sitting at a high-end multimedia Macintosh. The computer sits amidst phone, fax, printer, answering machine, card files, disk files and shelves full of supplies and paper files.
Now pull back and you see that the desk is really a makeshift table construction that is in the kitchen! The sink is four feet away, the refridgerator just a reach over the shoulder. Under this "kitchen" desk, apparently supporting it, are two wiremesh chest-of-drawers...more appropriate in a bedroom closet than a kitchen.
It's the wee hours of the morning, and I'm checking my mail for the last time before I saunter off to bed, when I notice the yard lights automatically come on. This is a sure-fire indication that I'm being visited by local deer, out for an early breakfast of my lawn!
RB Gelman ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 23:00:05 -0300 From: desmith@cycor.ca (Dorothy E. Smith)
Where I sit: A basement -- I sit under a five by three window, a dead lily, survivor of my 70th birthday bouquets tottering in a green glass bottle, 70th birthday cards stacked in the embrasure. There too a picture of grandson Sam, very small then, alone in the middle of a field, a little bundle. My basement is just one continuous room, but spacious with dedicated spots. My work spot -- this is it -- is marked off by a circle of papers and books on the floor and by the iranian carpet they rest on. Beyond the circle easy chairs, a tv, my stereo -- currently out of order and I'm looking for the warranty, and at the end of this leg of the basement, a duvet-smothered bed, also cascading with books (paper is really a very very slowly moving liquid). Photographs tacked up on the walls (I like to take photos but am not very good); they are fragments of hikes one to my left of deep snow on a trail through a ravine in Toronto on the other side of Canada. My desk is piled with paper, books, diskettes; Lots of unanswered letters, at the top of the pile a guilt-generating one from a friend -- "now it is only ten years or so since your last letter" (she's being sarcastic). I'm outside schedules now for about half the year, but still I never seem to it all done, though there'd always be more of what all would be. I don't hack; don't do much internet, mainly because my software is a bit balky and switches me off every time I try to get through to 'deathnet';. Here I just work with a compaq laptop hitched to color monitor, though in my other work place I have more. I am resolved to upgrade but am too busy to make the arrangements as well as being currently a bit broke. And then, I'm of the bookish generation: along the wall to my left are bookshelves, a geological series of almost a lifetime (not quite over though): lots and lots of poetry -- some canon stuff, and a long shelf of women's movement poetry, fat-paperbacked encyclopedias (linguistics, modern social thought, cultural theory, etc.), fat and thin software instructional books, books on language, postmodernism, the sociology of large-scale organization (my field); under my work table boxes of files, disorderly. I see as I look around that it's a room full of relics as well as/including the books and papers: my month in Japan celebrated in a wallhanging -- blue icons flying on pale cream -- a Japanese friend gave me; on the wall too, a pale cream photo of a single cormorant sitting far out in the mist on a rock in the sea in the Burrard Inlet here in Vancouver -- I took that the day after Christmas walking with Dave, Ann and Sam along the seawall and then I messed up the shutter of my camera putting a new film in with gloved and clumsy hands; the green glass bottle a faint reminder of a long-ago marriage; twenty-or-more year old rose petals in a glass jar (my mother dried them for me on her last visit here). My dining table to my right, round and oak, and at the moment set with a Tarot spread -- I'm trying to learn to read this stuff, so far without much success; I may not have the right kind of mind. Kids' toys stacked in the other window embrasure ready for Sam's visits. Round the corner a kitchen invisible from here. It's night and a plane flying over and the refrigerator and my computer humming mark the silence all around them; nothing on the street now and no wind in the big chestnut trees along the street. I love how this place smells though I only notice it when I come back in and feel at home. And at this moment, I'm really going to sleep but not quite making it into bed.
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Professor Dorothy E. Smith Dept. of Sociology in Education OISE 252 Bloor St. W. Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6
Internet: dsmith@oise.on.ca
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Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 13:24:05 -0600 From: s-star1@uiuc.edu (Susan Leigh Star)
Today I'm sitting in my dining room with my elbows propped up on my wheelchair so I can reach the keyboard of my power mac. The dining room table has a crossbar that interferes with the foot of the wheelchair (which is supposed to be elevated), so I have to keep wiggling around to find a comfortable angle. I broke my ankle while hiking two weeks ago, on vacation in New Mexico, and I've had a series of computer-related adventures ever since. I used a powerbook from a rented accomodation in NM, while waiting for a new cast, to let my class know they'd be working on their own once I got back to Illinois, and to arrange for a handicapped sticker for my car on return. I have a good modem and PPP connection here, and just purchased a new portable phone so I can call out from anywhere. But this morning the system backfired -- incoming calls ring over from the main line when I'm logged on, and the phone to the second line was in another room where the door is too small to admit the wheelchair. So I don't know who was trying to telephone. The floor here is wooden, in this old 1920s vintage Midwestern house, and the wheelchair rolls across it without friction. I almost knocked over the terminal just now, in fact, as I haven't yet gotten the coordination to stop smoothly. The room is hung with green plants, and at this time of the year, my backyard and sidewalks are dense living green, abuzz with insect life. We have air conditioning so I feel lucky to be able to observe it without fully experiencing it. My working space is still chaotic -- mostly I lack "bins" where I can put things to be filed, to be photocopied, and to be read. The injury limits my scope of reach when sitting to about 2 feet around me, and so the sorting takes place little by little, one paper at a time. I'm currently waiting for a friend to bring big envelopes to put things in, and to bring the paper mail. Ironically, I just got an ergonomic desk at work, where I won't be able to go for several weeks. Wheelchairs and dining room tables are not too comfortable for long sessions; powerbooks on pillows even less so.
--Leigh Star
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Susan Leigh Star Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois 123 LIS Building 501 East Daniel St. Champaign, IL 61820 Phone: (217) 244-3280 FAX: (217) 244-3302 email: s-star1@uiuc.edu
"Formalisation is not itself a formal activity." -- Joseph Goguen, "Requirements Engineering as the Reconciliation of Social and Technical Issues" (1993)
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