Pranayama touchpad   It all began when I bought a Mac Powerbook 190 last year. The Powerbook was equipped with a touchpad, which I thought was kind of neat. A touchpad a great aesthetic solution; a small square under your keyboard, and you don't have to fiddle round with mouse cables anymore. However, when I tried to use it, I noticed that it was very difficult. The cursor wouldn't move, or it would move and then go back to where it were when I lifted up my finger. Obviously, it was broken. I went back to the store to complain. There, I was met by disdainful glances and muffled whispers before somebody spoke up: "There's nothing wrong with your touchpad, you just have to practice for a while." Oh. I marched right back home, ashamed of my lack of dexterity & co-ordination. During the following days, since my attempts at direct attack had failed, I tried to outwit my touchpad. "Know thy enemy". I realized that the pad is sensitive to moist and static electricity. Applying this information, I used pieces of cloth as a buffer between my finger and the pad. It worked perfectly. After having fiddled round for a while with the cloth, I began to get the hang of how to move the cursor to where I wanted, and soon I was even able to discard the cloth. I felt complete again. But - and this is the catch - though I can readily control my touchpad most of the time nowadays, I still fail when I'm hurried or nervous. The reason? Sweating from the palms, of course, and God knows what kind of differences in skin electronic potential. And when you're in a hurry, you want things to go fast, right? So you work yourself up even more, and draw your finger along the pad in desperate sweaty trajectories, hoping for the cursor to get going. Resulting, of course, in even more pathological cursory behavior. No, this is not the way to do it, pal. The touchpad is a sophisticated (well, devious, at least) biofeedback device; it must be handled with proper care and respect. In the midst of one of these bouts, I suddenly found myself FORCED TO RELAX even though I was seriously stressed out. Just because it seemed to be the fastest way to solve the problem, of course. The nervous system will occasionally do something useful - if it is also a shortcut. I calmed down - started to breathe slowly and deeply - and blanked out inside. When I found out I still had some problems with the pad, I just relaxed even more. Voila. The pad responded 100%. By being sensitive to my level of excitement, it had actually made me go into a state of controlled breathing. Now this kind of thing opens up a whole new field of enquiry. I've heard of machines that have useful bugs - but devices that make you meditate AS A SIDE EFFECT? I sense a potential for a whole range of this kind of ZenWare (name deliberately chosen to sound cheesy, of course, and because PranayamaWare is a bit long). Might Powerbase Alpha suggest, for example; - a disk drive which is programmed to emit rhythmic, meditative sounds calculated to send you into a trance while you wait for your disk to load; - a desktop add-on that replaces all the texts in the alert boxes with koans and paradoxes that twist your brain inside out; Inventions like these would either subvert corporate structure from within, or give you peace of mind as a quick & dirty bonus, depending on how you look at it. It's anyone's guess whether they would be manufactured by private persons seeking to sanify the working place or as another zippie toy.   by Mikael Huss copyright (c) 1997