Around the world

I’m in the middle of some kind of tour. As I’m writing this, I’m on a plane to Osaka, Japan. Siberia is on my right.
Recently I visited Switzerland, played at the Montreux Jazz Festival on the World Wide night with DJ Ghe. People in the business say this is one of the most professionally arranged festivals in the world. At least I haven’t experienced anything better. We had a beautiful view from our hotel balcony. Our set was filmed, streamed and shown live on big screens all over the festival. We got served Champagne right after. I hanged out backstage with Jamiroquai and Roy Ayers. Stunning women everywhere. Even the girls who interviewed me were pretty damn good looking.

It all made you feel like a star for a day.

Forss in underwear, Alex from Jazzanova in
Montreux.

Then I paid a visit to friends in Zürich who run west95, a newly opened atelier/showroom.

“I have to work on my attention span…”

They made a cozy party there, where I had the opportunity to play. The beat from Journeyman just kicked in when the PA broke down. I managed to snap a photo of the surprised crowd, while a replacement amplifier was arranged for.

It’s the first and hopefully not the last time I take down a sound system.

In the meantime, I don’t get things done — and it’s frustrating. Neither the new site nor the philosophy essays are done. Can’t focus, especially not when there’s wifi around — which there will soon be on planes too.

Instead I consume articles and papers, read blogs, check out sites and applications. It seems I’m not alone with this problem.

Surprised crowd at west95 after sound system
failure.

It is clear I have to work on my attention span, but it’s also clear that computers need to get better at aiding the user to stay focused. I want to be able to tell my computer on a global level that I’m working on this project, that needs to be done at this date, involving these people etc. The computer could help me stay on focus by simply filtering out mails, IMs and documents based on these criterias.

Unfortunately, this involves changing quite radically a lot of the current application frameworks and interface paradigms.

I will write more about these issues in future articles, but for now I’d better just learn meditation instead.

 July 31st, 2003