Fax

My employer has just announced that they have “The Desktop Fax Service,” which is a “cost effective, comprehensive network fax solution for creating, sending, receiving, and managing faxes directly from a user’s desktop computer. Desktop faxing involves features and intuitive design to make faxing as easy as printing to a network printer.” The only problem is, the very same computer technology that made this possible is also what made faxes pretty much obsolete. I haven’t sent a fax in ages. Instead, I put PDFs up on the web server, or just e-mail text.

bad architecture

On Saturday I decided to catch the bus back home from downtown at the downtown transit center, near the art museum. This is a windowless and nearly doorless concrete structure. I walked around it to try to determine if I was supposed to go inside, or if it was a building devoted entirely to bus maintenance or whatever and I was supposed to wait outside by the bus stop sign. I concluded that it did not look open to the public, so I waited by the sign. When the bus came, the driver explained that I had to go inside to board the bus. Entering the one, recessed, door, with the sign indicating that it was the entrance to some sort of conference room, I found a very nice building, by public transit standards. A waiting area with seats, restrooms, and, upstairs, a series of displays on the history of public transit in Milwaukee. Three or four doors lead to the side of the inside driveway where the buses stop. You have to go out to see which bus stops where---no signs inside. It’s just bizarre. The building is really nice, yet totally anonymous. If you know it’s there, know it’s a public building, and know which of the spots your bus stops at, it’s great, otherwise, you’d never even know it was there. The architect could have designed a welcoming building, with a grand, or at least discernible, entrance, but apparently went with the “what if rebel forces shell the building? Better build it out of concrete, with no windows” style.