...continued.

At the service discovery layer: define a Universal Ubiquitous Service Self-Identification profile, or UUSII. (Pronunced, naturally, "you see.")

Oh, good god, how sweet it is to wake up this morning and see what the day has brought us, after six long years of waste and misrule. To invoke Winston Churchill, the felicitous result last night may not be the beginning of the end, but it sure looks like the end of the beginning.

I can't imagine that any one thing is going to get very much better any time soon. The Republicans still control the Senate, they still own the judiciary, and they've maintained an astonishing ability to frame the national political debate, even into their weakest hours. The war is, sadly, a given, for the foreseeable future. We failed to get rid of that thrice-becursèd blot on human decency called Joe Lieberman, and he'll wrap himself in a smugness still more lethal for appearing to have his constituents' approval. But maybe we'll see the tide begin to change, with the worst of the judicial candidates sent down to defeat, and the White House curtailed in its ability to make mischief. And would I be too naive to expect one or two investigations with teeth, that some of these felons should end their days in orange?

So give each other a hug. This is a great day, for no better reason than that nobody will ever have to utter the words "Senator Santorum" again.

I'm off to Oslo tonight, for Atelier Nord and a few surprise appearances. This sure is a wonderful going-away present. Thanks, America.

I am very, very happy to be able to relate this following piece of news to you: starting the week of 16 January 2007, Kevin Slavin and I will be teaching a class called Urban Computing at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

We see the class as an experiment, and you should too. What we're doing, really, is groping after a sense that we've both had - Kevin in his work with area/code, me during the research I did for Everyware - that some of the most interesting ideas current in interaction design were being worked out at the scale of the city. And if we increasingly understand the urban architectonic as a platform for computation in itself, wouldn't it be natural to explore these ideas at ITP, hopefully extending, informing and enriching its traditional focus on physical computing?

We're going to try developing a vocabulary (and maybe even a grammar) of interaction patterns appropriate to this scale of events, and then see how our students permutate them in their projects. All I can say now is that we'll all learn something about these places called cities we live in, and with any luck, we'll have a hell of a lot of fun while doing so. Needless to say, I can't even begin to express my gratitude to Red Burns, Clay Shirky, and everyone else at ITP who did so much to make this happen. I can only hope that Kevin and I manage to reward your faith in us.

So we'll see you in class, starting the second week in January, right? ; . )

(If you should happen to be American, BTW, please please please remember to get out and vote today!)

So here I am in grey Toronto, having done nothing more place-specific than repair to a sandwich shop with free wireless around the corner from my hotel. It's a flat and close-in kind of afternoon, I'm not feeling all that social, and there are worse things aplenty than getting some reading and writing done over a few bottles of Stella Artois.

I brought two books along with me: Peter Macey's The Lives of Michel Foucault and Canetti's Crowds and Power. (I've been on something of a Foucault kick lately, and the Canetti is something Mr. Slavin and I have both been working our way through in preparation for our course next spring. It makes me want to weep it's so beautiful. You should go buy it right now, and thank me later.)

Foucault is notorious for having constructed his experiments with LSD, SM and anonymous bathhouse sex as the conscious pursuit of "limit-experiences," by which he meant (if I understand him correctly) the sacrifice of an ordinarily well-defended sense of self on the altar of extreme sensation. And it's in this context that Carey relates the story of Foucault's near-death one evening in the rue de Vaugirard, at the hands of an speeding driver.

Foucault was struck forcefully as he stepped into the street, thrown up onto the hood of the onrushing car with enough violence that his head shattered the windshield. Despite the extensive damage he suffered, his recovery would eventually be all but complete; while he apparently continued to suffer headaches and muscular pain for the remaining years of his life, he evidently regarded the crash as a net positive. According to his biographer, he thought of the intense physical violence he experienced in the moment of impact as a kind of ecstasy, a mode of pleasure, a limit-experience hard to equal.

On reading this, I'll admit that I was preparing myself to object pretty strenuously, if only silently and to myself. It sounded just a little too much like caricature, like the would-be provocation of a peculiarly Continental type of eminence so lost in cynicism that all perspective is lost - Stockhausen's celebration of the aesthetics of the collapsing World Trade Center towers comes to mind. But then I remembered two incidents from my own life, and I realized that it was something else entirely.

On two occasions in my thirty-eight years on the planet, I have been entirely, viscerally convinced that my death was both imminent and inescapable. (The first was at the age of sixteen, when I lost control of the Mustang I was driving and did a 720 straight into a ditch; the second is related here.)

And what I can tell you is that, on both occasions, I felt an intense and unmediated sense of peace and rightness, something oceanic and pure and heartbreakingly simple. Here, at what I had every reason to believe was the very limit of a life I generally consciously experienced as a disappointment, I had somehow broken free into something so far beyond beauty that language doesn't have the tools to convey it. (I'd love to hear, in comments, whether you've had any similar experiences, and if so what their emotional tenor was.)

And you know what? I can totally buy the idea that this is what Foucault felt at the moment he was swept off his feet by the force of impact. And I'm sympathetic, surely, to the attempt - once you've known that breakthrough into satori - to recapture or rediscover it by whatever means come to hand, and whether those means involve jumping out of planes or running ultramarathons or hanging in slings in fistfuck clubs ripped to the gills on your own endorphins is irrelevant. What I don't buy is the coupling - and here I can't tell whether it's Macey's or Foucault's own - of the sought-for ego-dissolution to the sensation of bodily violence. The latter, I'd argue, is immaterial, a distraction, the worst sort of red herring. What's crucial is letting go of control.

But now we're back in the realm of words, and the poorer for it. What I really wanted to tell you was this: reading about Foucault's rather Ballardian limit-experience was enough to trigger my own recollection, bodily and present, and for a few gorgeous moments every little thing was all right. That's not so bad for a biography...and certainly nothing to be ashamed of for an afternoon in October's gutter.

Wheels up early early tomorrow for DesignThinkers 2006 in Toronto, where I'll be giving an Everyware talk and doing a discussion thang with Dan Saffer.

To be honest, I'm just a little worried about turnout - I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but I'm really puzzled as to why my kind hosts edited the description of the talk the way they did (i.e., in such a way as to remove any reference to its actual topic, ubiquitous computing). I don't know about you, but from where I sit a generic discussion of the "implications of new technology for society, for business, [and] for the way we design" just doesn't sound that compelling. Still...we soldier on, whether there are four or fourteen hundred in the audience.

I'm not sure I'll have time for my planned pilgrimage to Jane Jacobs' house, or any of the other local immersion exercises I had in mind, but we'll see. Usual rules apply: come say hi, if you can forgive me in advance for my jetlaggedness and such.

All hope is local.

Last night I had an appointment to meet some old friends at Freemans for drinks and - as is both my habit in general, and an occupational hazard when getting around town on a conveyance that moves faster than just about anything else in the mired cityscape - I showed up quite a bit early.

Having locked up my bike, I found myself with a good fifteen minutes on my hands, an absurdly generous stretch of time in which to stroll up and down the not-particularly-extensive length of Freeman's Alley. I didn't have a book, I didn't happen to have my Moleskine on me, I had nothing close at hand with which to divert my attention, and so I wound up subjecting the space of the alley to the kind of close and sustained inspection I so rarely get to lavish on anything.

I saw windows bricked up, apparently against the encroachment of a neighbor building that was no longer in evidence. I saw fronds of razorwire tangled in rusted lengths of now-obsolescent barb, the both moored to a stanchion that had somehow worked or been torn free from anything more solid than the wire itself and which remained hanging stupidly in the void. Above all I saw a thousand ad hoc interventions, each the trace of some occasion on which an electrician or a plumber or a contractor made an off-plan, field-expedient modification in the name of getting things done - the outstanding example of which was a congeries of coiled, small-gauge utility lines staplegunned to the alley's westerly wall, their distal ends disappearing through holes into the buildings beyond. Some of these were still tagged legibly (feed 193 chrystie roof), but most had long gone mute as to their function or purpose.

I took all of this in, over the course of a quarter-hour. And then I knew, immediately and in my bones, that any project devoted to the Borgesian attempt to map the built environment at even reasonably high resolution is forever doomed to failure, no matter how many self-reporting locational gizmos we tack onto the world. Time and layered improvisation had rendered this one alley-end baroque almost beyond description, calling into question the practicality of any attempt to represent it schematically. And from there, inevitably, the regress beckoned, as it always does for me, and I suddenly understood the world as nothing more than an enormous aggregation of moments like these.

Infrastructure foliates, ramifies. That's what it is, what it does. It has a thousand parents, all of whom work on their own, in effective silence, and none of whose efforts or intentions are fully knowable to anyone else. Infrastructure, as I once insisted to a friend, is a bitch. All the cables, conduits, trunks and buses our planetary girdle of awareness is built from - they may not literally have the power of self-reproduction, but they may as well have, given how far beyond any one agency's knowledge or control they are and continue to grow. You turn around for a moment and it's all changed. How could we possibly hope to map it all?

I can't help but think that this is one of those apparent insights which occasionally strike me with the force of epiphany, and yet are completely banal to others. I don't know why a few minutes at the back of one particular New York alley should impress this feeling on me - maybe it's the effect of recent attention to questions of situatedness and underspecification - but I do know that moving forward, I'll be a lot less likely to take seriously any schema of the world which relies on the accurate description or representation of live infrastructure for its force.

I am very happy and proud to be able to announce two keynotes I'll be giving in rapid succession next May. First I'll be opening Pervasive 2007, the Fifth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, in Toronto on 14 May, and then hopping on a plane to Paris to kick off XTech the very next day.

I hope to see you at one or the other of these events. Come up and say hi - I'll be the guy who looks travel-wrecked.

UPDATE: And while we're on the topic of appearances in Europe in the first part of 2007, check out the new LIFT site!

I spent much of my weekend at the Architecture and Situated Technologies symposium here in town, and more anent that later.

For the moment, though, I want to tell you about the most important thing that came out of the symposium for me personally, which was the chance to catch up with Anne Galloway. For one reason and another, we haven't spoken with in almost a year, and something unexpected and rather upsetting came out of our reconnection: I learned that she had no idea I kick off each and every talk and appearance I make with an open acknowledgment of how much my work owes to the conversations we've had over the years.

So let me say it again now, so you can see it, Anne: I owe the very fact of my original interest in ubiquitous computing entirely to you. If you hadn't recommended that I attend Ubicomp '02 in Goteborg, it's very likely indeed that Everyware would not exist, and so very much of what makes the book what it is owes its shape and texture to our discussions and occasional arguments.

It's not just that I'm grateful; I receive a great deal of pleasure, too, by being able to so publicly express my gratitude. I've always been very clear about this, and anyone encountering the book (or attending one of my talks) should be, too.

So, at last, at long last, it's really over.

Having spent a previous lifetime as a rock critic, I've spent more than my fair share of time at CBGB - not a little of it, actually, in panel vans parked illegally out in front, huddled with musicians sweating through that downtime between load-in and the top of the set list. (Admittedly not the same thing as having been there with Lenin on the sealed train to Petrograd, but not so bad for a twenty-year-old, either.)

To be sure, I missed the phase of its existence when it really mattered - the post-Fun City era when Saturday Night Live introduced itself as coming to you "from New York, the most dangerous city in America," and the President famously invited the whole scabrous, rat-infested burg to drop dead. I never saw the Ramones, the Heartbreakers, Talking Heads or Blondie there - except, maybe, as individuals half legend and half never-was, skulking around the joint like they both owned the place and had the decency to feel guilty about it.

But nobody could say I haven't had my share of moments. I've dived heedlessly into the arms of a crowd that buoyed me practically back to the bar, screamed myself hoarse, taken more than one Doc Marten to the jaw, made my way by drunken and fumbling touch down to its notoriously lightless and reeking urinals, and once or twice finished up the night by clambering up onto the canted stage with everyone else left in the house to send that one last whoah-oh-oh chorus crashing through the ceiling-mounted speakers.

All memories now, of course, and bound to remain such. Because finally, after throes endlessly and needlessly prolonged, it's all over. To be resurrected - maybe, and if so perfectly - as an Attraction on the Vegas Strip.

It's just as well, to tell the truth. As any New Yorker will tell you, it's been a decade and a half at least since CB's had any organic connection to a vital and growing subculture of any kind. And its closing merely underlines what we all already know to be true: that the economic and demographic conditions now extant make it very hard to imagine any global-scale wave of cultural innovation ever again coming into being on and spreading outward from this island Manhattan. This is a twentieth-century city, and will be, as far as I can tell, for the foreseeable future.

CBGB? A nice long ride - maybe a bit too long, in point of fact, but so good while it lasted. Thanks, Hilly, and thanks to everyone who made it what it was. Even you, Legs.

I don't think we're done discussing this, and Haloscan seems to be choking on comment length or something, so I think I'm gonna start a new thread just so none of what gets said gets lost...

Before I forget: Nurri and I saw old faves Massive Attack the other night in New York, and they generally kicked ass. If you get a chance to take them in on this tour, I'd really recommend doing so.

One of the things I particularly appreciated - aside from the stage set, which was really cheesy and also really, really cool - was that they had absolutely no compunction about playing the songs the hardcore fans wanted to hear, going all the way back to Blue Lines. (Might have something to do with touring behind a Greatest Hits collection. But still.)

Go, be thou rocked, enjoy.

Some of my more regular readers, and certainly anyone who knows me personally, will be aware that for the last few years, I've been more or less backing away from public identification with the information architecture community. I no longer identify myself professionally as an IA, that is to say, and I'm no longer so terribly interested in attending or presenting at IA-centric events.

Given how very much this community has given to me, though, I feel like I owe folks an explanation for my increasing alienation...even if nobody's asked for one. If I'm able to express myself correctly, it should shed some light on why I have been so reluctant to endorse, let alone embrace, the various events and causes to which more a few of you have invited me to lend support over the last few years.

Please bear in mind, as you read the following, that in this case all the usual disclaimers are utterly sincere. I really do respect the hell out of the parties involved, and equally, I mean this criticism - however blunt - to be both constructive and useful.

A lot of this distance is a healthy, and probably inevitable, structural consequence of the field's reaching maturity. The stirring challenges of those first couple of years are now largely resolved, and to the extent that those challenges were constructed as dialectics, most of them broke against the "big IA" viewpoint I was personally most invested in. Practitioners in the field, by and large, now spend their time and energy not in abstract definitional debates but in the nitty-gritty, day-to-day details of managing information flow in the large-scale enterprise. Given that this was never anything I found particularly captivating, it's understandable why I'd look elsewhere for inspiration.

But some of it is due to what I cannot help but see as a revenge effect. The early champions of IA - and here I'm explicitly thinking of Christina Wodtke, Lou Rosenfeld, Jesse James Garrett, and the Peters Morville and Merholz - were successful beyond any reasonable expectation in creating a welcoming, nurturing community. We all owe them a debt of gratitude for that; so, in my opinion, do the literally tens of millions of people who have used sites designed or improved by IAs who came up under their tutelage. Their contribution cannot be overstated and will not be forgotten.

But the less salutary flipside of nurturance is an environment in which pointed criticism is rarely heard or countenanced. It's not that there weren't expressions of divergent viewpoint at the various IA events and gatherings I've been to over the years; of course there were. It's that the field has seemed (to me, at least) more interested in being supportive and in welcoming all contributions - even long past the historical moment when this made sense - than in imposing a more rigorous quality control.

More concretely: I want you to go and at least have a glance at this article, recently published as the lead article on Boxes and Arrows, which remains the IA community's premier source for professional development materials. Put with maximum bluntness - and with all due respect to its author, who was doubtlessly writing in good faith - the problem with the article is that it presents as an "interesting new idea" a concept that has been extensively investigated, considered and published on elsewhere.

There is prior art here, in other words - and not a little, either. Author, editorial staff, and (perhaps most worrisomely) the commenters on the article seem entirely unaware of two decades of published work on the problem in the HCI field. From the perspective of a serious practitioner, both article and communal response are nothing but noise; the comments worry me most because, in a sense, they represent the collective intelligence of the IA field, and because nobody seems willing or able to point out the piece's essential vacuity.

(Ironically, this is in part nothing but a knowledge management issue - ironic because the fields are so closely interrelated that for years Yahoo actually listed IA as a subcategory of KM.)

Nor is the piece, or B&A itself, the only example of this. For a community that claims as its domain the structuration of information in the service of a human user, IA as a body seems startlingly uninterested in the much deeper and more interesting challenges that emerge around mobile and ubiquitous encounters with information. After years in which many of us tried to argue that IA potentially constituted a powerful, general skillset applicable to situations far beyond the Web, it seems as if that "beyond" extends only as far as corporate intranets and the like. And this strikes me as a failure, locally and globally.

Now, before you leap to remind me: I know that both B&A and the various IA summits and retreats are almost entirely volunteer efforts. I know that it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep up with developments in one's own field, let alone the other streams flowing alongside. And nobody is more dismayed than I by the sour bleatings self-appointed experts emit when they feel that the benisons of their knowledge have been insufficiently appreciated. So I'm sure not trying to score points here, and to the extent that people are personally hurt or offended by my comments, I apologize.

But that leaves the question of why so very many articles and presentations in the field seem predicated on the assumption that IA is something coextensive with Web technologies, most especially as used in the enterprise. I, at least, cannot take seriously, and do not want to take part in, a community where one not-terribly-interesting flavor of current practice trumps intellectual curiosity and the will to learn and grow.

Another way of looking at all of this is to say that the community has voted with its feet, that the people who are and who do IA at this point in time have made it clear where their interests lie. I once argued that IA is "whatever we say it is," and so it is - simply with a different "we" in the driver's seat. But given my feeling that the mobile and ubiquitous context offers individual information architects the prospect of a vastly expanded, more influential and, frankly, more important field of inquiry and practice, if IA is as a whole not interested in what's going on here, then I am afraid that I am not interested in it. I hope those of you in IA from whom I have learned so much will understand and forgive my feelings.

Got one for you:

I'll be through London very briefly next week on my way from New York to the Ci'Num conference in Bordeaux. Unfortunately, my flight from JFK comes into Heathrow...but my connection to Bordeaux leaves out of Gatwick.

Would it be possible for those of you among my London-area readership to recommend a reputable car service capable of getting me from one airport to the other in a reasonable amount of time? I'd really appreciate it. (You can feel free to either email me or simply leave your recommendations in comments.) Thanks!

Strolling through the West Village the other night, Nurri and I saw a shimmeringly gorgeous Stone Island parka displayed in a shop window - apparently a short-run cross-promotional item developed to support the launch of some new flavor of Nokia's pretentious 8801, and rather subtly branded thusly.

Much like a veil I picked up at moss a few years ago, in the first (and, alas, last) flush of my dot-com wealth, the parka's shell was woven of a stainless steel of surpassing softness, so silky to the touch that cognitive dissonance is the only possible outcome of having encountered it. You're tempted to deny the evidence of the senses; nothing this voluptuously smooth could possibly be metal. Like I say: gorgeous.

But I couldn't help but wondering this one little thing. I understand that the type of stainless steel used in this sort of application isn't all that conductive as metals go, but...um...wouldn't a steel parka still make a pretty efficient Faraday cage? As in, a shiny new 8801 thrust down into its downy pockets won't be able to receive any calls?

I'm sure my more technically-informed readers will enlighten me if I've made any unjustifiable assumptions. Meantime, I will continue to stifle my chuckles.

Our local drugstore recently installed the RFID-mediated Blink/PayPass "contactless" payment terminals I discussed in Everyware, and I have to say I was astonished by how hard they were to use in completing even the simplest transaction. (I say "recently," but it turns out they've been there a few months; this is merely the first time I noticed them. That's a usability issue in and of itself, innit?)

In fact, buying our toothpaste and Tiger Balm with PayPass took a full minute, maybe even a minute and a half longer than it would have with a thoroughly conventional card swipe. Here's why:

- As I imply, and to quote Mr. Morville, you can't use something you can't find. Perched up on top of the register, the terminal is out of a medium-height customer's natural line of sight. What's worse, it's almost lost amid competing claims on your visual awareness, what with the fractal cloud of promotional kipple that invariably seems to bedizen drugstore registers.

Similarly to the test deployment of RFID readers on the subway's 6 line, the placement seems almost intentionally chosen to defeat any possible notion of contactless payment becoming a natural gesture - to prevent information processing from dissolving into behavior. If this is a guerrilla intervention on the part of some RFID-skeptic wrecker deep in the PayPass apparat, then bravo!; otherwise, ouch.

- I had to repeatedly and awkwardly hold my card flat against the vertically-oriented reader to get it to register. A row of four LEDs across the top of the reader flashed in sequence, but I wasn't sure what they were indicating - contact established? time remaining until read? It sure as hell wasn't the "tap and go" transaction bruited about in PayPass promotional material.

- Even after the card registered, on its third attempt, I still had to provide a digitized signature and click an OK button. It turns out that signature authentication is required for purchases over $25 - whether this is mandated by the drugstore chain or the PayPass terms of service I haven't yet ascertained, but the requirement effectively nullifies any conceivable advantage the customer might have enjoyed in using PayPass.

In short, then, there's no reason to use this system except the novelty factor, and to say that "wore off quickly" would be to imply that there was ever any pleasure to be had in the process to begin with. While being narrowly, functionally usable, as an experience this particular deployment of "contactless" payment failed in every possible way.

I don't like to leave things on a note of complaint, though. So what quick-hit improvements might we suggest that would decisively alter the tenor of using PayPass?

- First and most obvious is terminal placement. If the card has to be laid flat on the reader to work, the reader itself should be positioned on the counter in a way that would make this a less awkward gesture. Putting it there would have the happy concomitant effect of reintroducing it to the natural line of sight - in fact, I'd argue that flat surfaces are where we expect payment to happen anyway, for long-standing cultural reasons ("cash on the barrelhead" and so on), and that a system designed to supplant cash should harness that expectation.

- The fact that this isn't at all a "tap and go" gesture should be addressed, preferably, by recalibrating system standards to make it one. In the event that this is no longer possible given the current hardware deployment, at the very least more realistic expectations should be set in copywriting and other promotional messaging.

- Eliminate the signature requirement for purchases over $25, or at least shift the threshold to a more-realistic $100. To me, at least, this is a situation where my fourth ethical principle for ubiquitous systems ("be conservative of time") clearly wins out over my first ("default to harmlessness, including financial harmlessness"). At minimum, do a better job of notifying customers that such a requirement exists.

It's not that I want to help MasterCard siphon away more of your hard-earned. It's simply that PayPass, as it is deployed now, is broken. It's embarrassing, or - more precisely, and not to sound like a hectoring know-it-all - it should be. Bottom line: if we're going to live with these systems at all, they should be done right. It's not that difficult.

So Bruce Sterling has a new short-short story in the current New Scientist Tech. See if you can guess which turns of phrase and elements of the scenario are, uh, mine.

I am, of course, tickled ultrapink. If yer gonna be stolen from, why not the best?

I haven't had time to write about it until this very moment, but a few weeks back Tom Elia and I were lucky enough to playtest area/code's new GPS-based "Big Game" Crossroads.

Played on a six-by-four-block grid of the West Village, Crossroads is a deceptively simple capture-the-flag-style game in which players Sun and Moon - each equipped with a GPS-enabled mobile phone - compete to claim as many intersections as each can in a thirty-minute period. And this you do by the mere act of standing in the crossroads, while a 30-second countdown on your screen elapses.

Working against you, of course, is your opponent, who can pick up unclaimed intersections the very same way you can or, still more profitably, flip ones that you've previously logged. And hovering behind both players, and working toward his own unknowable ends, is the voodoo loa Baron Samedi, Lord of the Crossroads - oh, come on, you know you're so thinking of Geoffrey Holder right now - who flips claimed intersections to the opponent's account merely by passing over them, and can even freeze you in place for a fatal thirty seconds should he cross paths with you.

You're provided with a number of offerings with which you can occasionally and strategically distract the Baron, but, as befits a god of death, he's a pretty willful fella. You can play your heart out, only to find him snatching victory from your very jaws as the gameclock runs out, and handing it to your opponent (with some implcations for the feeling of satisfaction in playing, as I'll note). The uncanny thing is that, while the Baron is fully virtual - he exists only as an icon on your screen - you feel him out there, working the grid. It's downright creepy. (Let's just say your arrector pili muscles get a workout, too.)

Strategy-wise, Crossroads has its go- or Othello-like aspects, but they're embedded in a context where running flat-out is mandatory, bringing new resonance to the shopworn phrase "thinking on your feet." With both the opponent and the Baron working against you, it's simultaneously a cognitive challenge and an endocrine kick only a little less fibrillating than the "front/back/go" circuits my drill sergeants used to pull on me.

I don't think the bugs have entirely been worked out yet - when I played, I occasionally had to stand a good ten meters outside anything that could even charitably have been considered the intersection to get satellite lock, and I can tell you that thirty seconds feels like an eternity when you're splat in the middle of Hudson Street with traffic coming on - but fixing either is just a matter of tweaking a few settings in a parameter file. I'm imagining it can also feel a touch arbitrary to have decisively outplayed an opponent, building a victory over the course of thirty heart-pounding minutes, only to have Samedi queer the deal in the final seconds. But maybe that's part of the point.

The larger issues, for me, have to do with the experience of place while playing, or more properly, the lack of same. There are both deep and pragmatic reasons why area/code chose this particular chunk of the West Village as their arena, but the trouble is that very little of the actual, specific place is engaged in play. You're way too busy hustling through - or dodging the Baron - to feel its particularities, and that's a shame. And, while it's not area/code's fault, there is something especially queasy about running past homeless people huddled in corrugated-cardboard boxes, or drunks passed out on the sidewalk, when your motivation for occupying the same chunk of space/time is that you're playing a game.

Bottom line, though, is that Crossroads is a hell of a lot of fun. The all-critical game dimensions of time and space feel just right, the relation of the players is appropriately competitive but never hostile, the iconography is spot on - and best of all, given where Crossroads is played, it's a trivial thing to huff or limp into the White Horse for your after-action review. Despite the fact that the game is limited to one clunky model of phone (Boost Mobile, ick) because US mobile carriers, in their infinite wisdom, choose to deny their customers a spread of GPS-equipped models, it'll be super-interesting to see how area/code develops Crossroads, and what mutant offspring it will give rise to.

Into the post-Conflux afterglow now, happy simply to be at home with the chance to consolidate for a bit. I always get a little nervous when I ship a new talk, and "Killing the Fathers" contained just enough in the way of new material to trigger those nerves. I'm not sure how I feel regarding the presentation itself, but I was well-satisfied with the conversation it led to, in a lovely, intimate, Sinatra-with-loosened-tie moment I'll be remembering for quite awhile.

My thanks to the ever-energetic Christina Ray - whose enthusiasm is an engine and a thing to behold - moderators Beth Coleman and Kevin Slavin, Glowlab's gracious facilitators Sarah and Jessica, and everyone who stayed for the talk.

Good news, everyone! I am terribly proud to announce that Everyware will be published in French in 2007 through the good offices of FYP Éditions. Given how generous the Francophone world has been to my work, it's only right and proper that this should be the first foreign edition (and it is for similar reasons that I am glad a Korean edition is apparently in the works as well). Daniel Kaplan, you know how grateful I am for your kind intervention on the book's behalf.

Me, I'm gonna cultivate kind of a lo-fi vibe for the time being. I feel like I've been on the road - or simply on - since about November of 1066, and maybe it's time for a little break before the long autumn train of Ci'Num and DesignThinkers and Atelier Nord kicks off in just a few weeks.

Finally: heartiest congratulations to my lifelong friend Jamie Mowder on the awe-inspiring occasion of his fortieth. Jamie is recognizably and delightfully the same person he was at twenty-one, in his grandfather's greatcoat, in CBGB's Record Gulag and Fabulous Proto-blog Emporium on Ninth Street - only better, faster, stronger. What can I say, but that I look forward to many, many more years of Guinness, art brut and spiel?