Rainbows, Squirrels, and Ten Minutes of Work

(Buffalo) I went out to Niagara Falls this morning - just a 30 minute trip up the highway from Buffalo itself, right up to the Canadian border. In theory I could have just continued on from there to Toronto, my next stop on this trip, which wouldn't have been too much further to go, but strangely enough I'm booked on a flight this afternoon which takes me there via Toronto (adding a good three or four hours of transit time to my day). Not entirely sure my travel agent checked the map when we made the booking...

Niagara was beautiful, if windy and quite chilly - but the intermittent sun brought out multiple rainbows over the falls and really blew up the mist from the water cascades. I can't imagine what the falls would have been like before the power generation scheme reduced the flow over the actual falls themselves. It's clearly going towards autumn here - I saw plenty of squirrels (including one of the rarer black ones) burying their nuts and other goodies in the ground for the cold season.

Back in the hotel, Trebor Scholz and I recorded a brief ten-minute summary of the produser concept, which is the basis for my residency here at the Institute for Distributed Creativity, for the iDC video blog. It felt strange to rant at the camera for ten minutes trying to outline the produser concept and its implications, and I hope what I said makes sense - please check it out for yourselves (I'll try and post it here soon)! Trebor reminds me that I should also write a summary text for the iDC site, and I'll get on this as soon as I have some spare time - looking forward to it, in fact, as I haven't yet written anything about the produser per se other than in the context of other research (such as the Gatewatching book).