Circuitry
May 7th, 2006I’m a newcomer to computers.
Only since I bought a computerized cutting machine a couple years ago have I had much appreciation for computers. I’d used the internet and email a little, but until my machine took the picture on the screen and cut it out of steel, they didn’t seem very relevant to me. Now I’m light years ahead of where I was, and if not totally computer literate, I at least have the tools to sound it out.
I’m glad I’m behind the curve. It’s probably how the iceman felt when he was thawed out, but with less damage to the connective tissues. Computers! Wow! A tower full of experienced little digital employees at my fingertips, ready to do my bidding.
Then I became more aware of the parallels between electonics and cities; electricity and people.
Bad city planning is like a bunch of crap rattling around, shorting stuff out, and making it impossible to have a functioning economy of messages. Our digital pals get all stagnant under the overpass, brooding with static electricity, ’til zap! Someone gets mugged.
My friend told me they call circuit board design “architecture.”
It’s interesting the way streets, originally layed out purposefully like wires, get sliced and spliced up over time. Press Street got chopped diagonally through the middle of an intersection, with a scarred barrier to ricochet cars around the corner instead of careening into the train yard that wiped away the old neighborhood who knows when.
No information finds its way down to the warf by Press Street anymore. Ursulines Street dead ends up against concrete, under the interstate.
Poverty is like a lack of sufficient voltage in the medium of exchange. Stuff happens in fits and starts if at all.
There are these neighborhoods with their lovely old houses stagnating, like broken radios full of perfect transistors. Someone could come in with a bulldozer or soldering iron and clear out some obstructed paths and carve out some new ones. But usually old radios just get kicked along the gutter untill they decintigrate in the weeds.
Who’s going to risk getting electrocuted by drug addicts when you can just go to Best Buy for a fresh, new Jim Walters home?
-Adam
