Yesterday my boss and I escaped from the work lab an hour early so he could attend (online) one of the classes he teaches. Since I'm not in the class, and have kind of a cold, I went back to the hotel for some relaxation.

I've had and enjoyed "Virthulegu forsetar'" by Jóhann Jóhannsson for a year or so now, and while I was kicking around on iTunes Saturday afternoon, I found out that he released a new album last year, called "IBM 1401, A User's Manual". Since I knew I had a long plane flight ahead of me (and a new iPod to use on it), I decided to buy the album on Sunday, along with a book to read.

Sunday afternoon I tried the Border's on Dale Mabry, and they were sadly lacking the album, so I went and fulfilled my other errand (cough drops), and returned home to pick up the roommate who needed groceries. Before groceries, we tried the Barnes & Noble basically a block away from the Border's, and they also didn't stock the album. However, I did pick up the book "Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg. After dinner, I found the album on a DRM-free online music store linked to from the album's home page. Nice.

So, stuck in a hotel room in suburban New Jersey with the common cold and the sun tracing its final radians through the sky behind me, I picked up where I left off on the book (page 128) listening to the album for the first time (was in a Beastie Boys mood on the airplane).

The book is a fascinating -- it alternates between an exploration of the concepts that make the art of programming difficult to control, and a tale of a personal information manager project going through a difficult start due to overplanning and desire to do the most futureproofly perfect thing at the expense of doing anything.

Simultaneously, the album is beautiful and haunting, owing greatly to Jóhannsson's inspiration from tapes of a computer's "wake" long ago. As it reached its end, I paused reading to look up and adjust my lighting, as the sun had set to the point where the shadow along the wall was perfectly parallel with a misaligned identification sticker on the face of my work laptop alone and untouched on the desk on the far side of the room.