West Portal Reflections #1, July 24, 1997
West Portal Director of the MSU Communication Technology Laboratory
West Portal Reflections document my experiences as I try to open a portal to Northern California for Michigan State University. They are targetted to my teams in the Comm Tech Lab and Virtual University, to my close colleagues and bosses throughout Michigan State University, and to close friends and family. These pages serve as ethnographic documentation of my participant-observation research on TeleRelating ("using technology to sustain and enhance close personal relationships"). The contents mix professional and personal life because I am reaching out 2500 miles to people I care about and work with. I hope my reflections help you to keep me in your hearts and make San Francisco a place that is yours. Thanks for journeying with me as I think, learn and experiment.
The CTL West Portal begins by going through a wormhole after entering the cavernous, empty, garage/basement in the West Portal district of San Francisco.
Veering to your right, you appear at my office. Nothing but the computer I flew with, my Newton, Casio camera, hard drive, Jaz drive and monitor on the bare hardwood floor in an otherwise empty room. "Roughing it" but also "paradise."
If you go too fast you'll keep going through the wormhole and emerge into the back yard of volcanic rock diagonal designs (no grass to mow!). The fog creeping in nearly obscures the neighbor's house already, demarking the edge of the world.
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Three hours after we landed on Tuesday, I was at Cellular One purchasing a cell phone. The application asked for place of residence, how long you have lived at your current address, and previous address if shorted than 2 years. I was the shortest application on record at current address: 3 hours. Connectivity is a priority! Shopped for and ordered a custom flat black couch for my office. Filled out forms for a library card for the SF public library. Beginnings.
On Wednesday I speaker-phoned in to the regular Wednesday VU meeting. Perhaps because I was so recently with everyone, it felt a great deal like being there, although I was conscious of being located in the middle of the table instead of around the table in a chair. I felt a little like a phone. Pretty cool. I found I could still make light remarks and stay in touch (or so I thought, let me know if you disagree) but I cannot tell whether this was because of recent of physical contact, or because the medium can be effective. It is really nice to be able to do other things during a meeting without appearing rude. Took notes on the Newton and used Norton Utilities to fix the boot block on my internal hard drive during the meeting. Although the 5 times I rebooted may have been a little obvious. ?
I phoned in to report for duty for Vice Provost staff meeting Thursday, but was told I was not needed and they would call me if they needed me. Waiting by a phone ready to join a meeting for 2 hours is actually harder to stay awake at than a meeting...
Before I could set up my computer, I had to scrub the bathrooms and my office. Pacific Bell arrived to install the jacks in my office, so then I could mess with getting online. This took considerable time, and I ended up turning to Sheldon for help when I had dialup working but still couldn't get to email. It turned out to be changing the TCP control panel which i had been neglecting over to the Printer Port. I can't tell whether to feel humiliated that he knew more than I did about Macs, or pleased to have another super competent person working for me. Perhaps both.
Things were pretty flaky (no, not just me!) and seemed to hang up on me for a while soon after I connected. This may still be happening. For now, my 56K modem seems to be working well. Have clocked racing speeds all the way up to 54000 if only for a moment.
Washers and dryers are being waited for and arriving, shower repair people, inspectors, and an empty house with furniture on the way needing moving in care. Am not getting wonderful amounts of work done yet (this is my second full day). However, this is to be expected and I promise it will get better. It will take some getting used to to be less distractable. Log in to get onto email, answer the door or get up to kill a fly, and get back and it has logged me off. A little like running chest deep in the ocean. Need a combination of things being more settled, and getting used to a different kind of concentration.
I am also here to learn more about having a life. Below is a shot of the ocean 2.7 miles from the house. This nearly deserted beach stretches on as far as I can see. The water is cold. Only people called surfers seem to swim.
These are classic San Francisco style houses in a long row along the ocean, separated from the sea by sand beach, running and biking path, and small highway. They are multicolored boxy beautiful things very close to each other.
The ocean is just one of many nearby exciting distractions. The muni streetcar portal is a few short blocks from the house, and is great for getting downtown or to SFS, to shops and restaurants and movies.
The sign below protects the muni driver. I have ordered a copy for myself.
I mentioned that we found a database with 3,473 restaurants in San Francisco and are diligently setting off to explore them all.
Enough city information is online already about San Francisco that web searches for furniture yielded 148 stores including maps for how to get there. Tons of theater. Tons of movies. An amazing playground with stimulation and so many great sights and smells and events it is hard to believe this is real. The hand I get to hold and share exploring with (seen below pointing to an SF online database) is also delightful.
Below is a shot of a cheese enchilada mole, so far my most favorite meal here, although the Polish food tonight, Thai food last night, and even the bagel lunch today were awesome. The house is a short walk down the hill to a juice bar where I started the day with a Carrot Blaster (carrot juice, banana, yogurt). I know I don't deserve to live this way, but just want to see if I can...
Tomorrow morning I log on for a period, and then go purchase a bike for SF. Hope we can get IChat pagers working better than yesterday. I started a chat with Brian, the modem hung up on me, Bob disappeared from my friends list, and it did not work again. Tonight it seemed like Sanna had gotten added, and Kyle and Brian are still there.
I wonder how it feels to know that your boss is off in SF having a wonderful time. Pretty weird, I bet. It feels weird to me, too. There are uncomfortable elements to moving in also, and things will normalize as furniture arrives and we continue to get unpacked and organized. If it were not for the hassles of moving in, I would be certain I was on a short vacation. I cannot believe I live here.
Anyway, since I am trying to open a portal for all of us to SF, I am being pretty personal as my telerelating begins. Soon these postings will turn more toward work related themes, as I get settled.
Love to you all. Write soon.
Carrie
