Going Inkless

a short trip...      In the course of planning and designing a website, I've started to wonder how the internet became a place.  It's a fairly new concept as a whole, and somewhere along the way as it has grown, we gradually decided to think of it as a place.  We chose terminology appropriate to that idea.  There are sites you find at an address.  You can go into a chat room or go to a page.  You can view a gallery or library.  You start out  and return to a home.  Every mailbox has a place it's @.  Yet all this real estate is in your head.  It's imaginary.  Of course, the information that makes up this imaginary landscape is kept somewhere.  Even the airy "cloud" you picture is a heavy, earthbound mass of silicon and wiring somewhere in the physical world, or rather several masses.  But that information is what constitutes the internet, not the machines it's stored on.  The internet is really an idea.  It's a thought or the collected thoughts of i

     Mom's favourite colour is green.  It has been for as long as I can remember.  There was never a question about which colour to pick when choosing or making a gift for her or which sheet of construction paper to transform into her birthday card.  It was very helpful for us kids when we wanted to make something special even more so.  Grandma was more of a mystery.  When asked to declare it, she'd say her favourite was "sky blue-pink with purple polka dots."  Although that sounds a lot like lavender to someone learning to mix colours, I'm sure it was just her way of saying any colour we chose would be just right.  I still have no idea if she really preferred one colour over another or if, like me, she tended to love what suited the moment.  Then again, her car, the one she had for the 17 years I knew her, was a deep forest green.      Mom's love of green was sometimes puzzling to me as a child.  It seemed like such a plain colour, lacking the warmth or exc