Garbage

Moving to a new place made me realize how incredibly dependant our lives are on all kinds of non-essentials. One kind of soap for the dishwasher, another for hand-washing, another for laundry, another for manual dish-washing, another for hair-washing (called shampoo), another for car-washing; printer-paper, toilet paper, resume-letter paper, paper-towels, lens-cleaning paper, bureaucracy-related paper; usb cables, dvi cables, rgb cables, coaxial cables, ethernet cables, power cables, speaker cables, s-video cables, hdmi cables, rca cables... at times I felt like I was wading through a garbage dump, only I depended on the garbage for my daily existence. Such is the way of the industrial age -without the mass consumption of all these "goods" our civilization as we know it could not sustain itself -and so, I fill box after box with add-ons to accessories to things needed to make other things work, which together with yet other things, while connected to even more things, enable me to perform one simple action -such as making a blog entry.

Keyboarditis

I just coined this term to describe the condition where you suffer a temporary disorientation caused by typing on the wrong keyboard and not seeing anything happen on the screen -seen most often in those having at least two keyboards and screens on their desks.

Mount Rainier

Some pictures from last weekend's hike to Mt Rainier.
Though the mountain is majestic and the views breathtaking, the trail istsefl -if one can call it that- is less than satisfactory. Most of it consists of climbing over crumbling stones, gravel, sand and the occasional snowfield. With virtually no vegeatation to protect the rock, extreme temperatures, ice, and water, make the effects of erosion plain to the observer. The spectacular views, however, make it all worthwhile.