This morning, as I sat by the open window at my laptop, engrossed in a departmental email, one of my senses - sight, smell, hearing? - pricked, and I looked to the immediate right of my lap to see a large and twittery squirrel, on the sill of our screenless window. I jumped and yelled HEY, causing the contents of my coffee cup to go shooting up and over everything in sight - powerbook, papers, window. During the requisite freakout-session of careful cleaning of my laptop to keep coffee from getting inside the thing, I noticed a nut the squirrel had left behind, on the sill - he was looking for a place to stow it, I suppose.

Of course last weekend's challenging and enlightening New Forms Festival in Vancouver came to mind, where the 2005 theme was "Ecosystems." Biological metaphors are nothing new to this community or to some of the more theoretically(academically?)-minded in new media. But Niranjan Rajah and the other conference organizers put together a collection of presenters and panels that gave the subject a deep, difficult examination, unlike any I have experienced...