I've just switched my laptop-desktop-background to a larger version of these ostriches... Probably not the most beautiful shot of our travel, but I like how the color palette matches the one of our company-skin :-)

In any case it allows me to step onto the mental background of my thinking and the fresh ideas some the holiday reading has been bringing me. Compared to online-snippets it was quite refreshing to be holding a vaste amount of paper and ink again.

I started off reading The end of the Affair by Graham Greene and enjoyed it very much. (Oddly enough, while we mostly share our taste for fiction and novells, my wife couldn't even finish this one. She disliked the 'Maurice' charachter too much and could not relate to his line of thinking and behaviour in any way) I kinda started with a quite sceptical looking out for what she disliked soo much, but was soon captured by the intense philisophical questions that were raised. Looking out for the fundamentals of the feeling we call love. Is it (only to be) measured by Jealousy? Does it need to be reciprocal and expressed? (re-)Assuring? Or is it on the same basis as religion and thus more a solid conviction that grows into a Believe? I didn't feel like the book was giving answers, but I mostly enjoyed playing around with the questions :-)

And then I let Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig ride through... One of those books I 've listed down as must read a long time ago without any special reason: Maybe just the catchy title? I don't remember anyone raving about it. Equally I have no idea why I didn't buy and read it earlier then. In any case (and I'm getting pretentious maybe) I've mostly found a well argumented base, a deeper insight and some nomenclature for what I mostly recognized as my own thoughts over the value-hunt in life.

Fun to see that the book I preserved for my return to home: Understanding Computers and Cognition by Winograd and Flores just starts off with a *moderate* valuation of the rationalistic tradition (yeah, the Church of Reason). Have to do some more reading still to know if it actually comes to its own promise of providing a new fundation for computer design...