Last night, or on the very cusp of this morning, I was racing. I was one of maybe eight or a dozen competitors scrambling around a circular track inscribed within a square sort of arena or field of play. I think it was outdoors. The object wasn't just to get to some finish line first, some elaborate rules for style points or some such were in play. It was about finding a good line within the pack of racers that maximized one's own free space while cutting off or limiting the options of other racers -- but without outright knocking them down or around. It was a genteel sort of competition.

Rather than a single finish line, the objectives were a couple of goal areas that everyone was trying to get to or through or around, but you needed some space from the other racers to get there, and it mattered what sort of line your path traced approaching and leaving these zones. It was about finesse at speed. Speed being a realtive concept in this race, as the rules required a quick shuffling movement of the feet, sort of like racewalking, but with a much shorter gait. The result was a sort of frantic shuffling with a lot of hip action to block the paths of other racers. Kinda weird, and not a little silly. But highly aesthetic!

Then the night before last, I dreamed my perfect information appliance. It resembled Amazon's Kindle, but much less rectangular. It had a white frame that kind of resembled an artist's palette, about that size but even more elaborately shaped -- almost a French curve. Inside the frame, the LCD screen was a little less curvey, but definitely not square-cornered. You used it with a stylus, and a lot of poking & tapping was involved.

The interface was mostly text, but with lots of links, and most of them seemed to open maps overlaid with geo-linked information. (I was shopping for a hotel room that day, and that experience definitely bled over into the dream.) But a lot of the dream was about drilling down through a link to a map to targets on the map that were loaded with information. The routine involved a lot of zooming in, then scoping back out to open the info stored in the nodes on the maps.

For what it's worth.