By Grace Chng

Title: In Bytes We Travel

Author: Lin Hsin Hsin

Publisher: World Scientific

Price: S$16.00

Available at all leading bookstores

this is the net

you can't escape

this is a scape

that keeps information

to date

This short excerpt from a poem called Netscape sums it all for Ms Lin Hsin Hsin and her latest poetry book, In Bytes We Travel.

It is a book, of course, about the Internet. It is a record of her "travels" and more importantly, it is about her experiences on the Internet, both as an artist and as an information technologist.

And as she admits in her Prolog (sic), it is written by a techie for techies. But this should not prevent the non-technical expert from reading this 200-page book.

For she has provided, in a manageable "byte", a kaleidoscope of all that is current and controversial about the Internet.

I thoroughly enjoyed her wide coverage of topics from Apple Computer's current misery and Netscape's ascendancy to the World Wide Web, passwords and security, e-mail, theft on the Net (she was a victim as some of her art was stolen from her cyber-museum) and naturally, art on the Net.

Her knowledge of IT cum her acute sense of observation laced with plenty of humour - World Wide Wept or World Wide Whack - has allowed her to paint a unique perspective of cyberspace. Take for example Together we travel and checkmate?

this is a place

where digi-fingerprints

& crawlers mate

make a date

digi-fingerprints and

crawlers become travelmates

The book is divided into five main sections:

• Net Life where she puts on paper her thoughts on geeks and nerds, e-mail, netizens, electronic commerce and Net crimes;
• Net.Net which dwells on more technical issues like security firewalls, protocols and JavaScript;
• Net Art on the aesthetics, form and animation on the Interent;
• the World Wide Web which focuses on the "libraries without walls" - as one of her poem is aptly titled; and
• NetFuture which explores tomorrow's development including a cyber-Olympics and cyber-medics.

Ms Lin's craft here is to use technical words, but weave them into lines of imagery, as in "Caffeine":

nerds and caffeine

are born as twins

with codes in between

How true!

As Mr John Gage, chief scientist of Sun Microsystems and who wrote the foreward to this book, said: "Her basis of her evocative work is the technical vocabulary engineers design not to be evocative. She takes the language of dry precision as an instrument of suggestion."

So this book is a refreshing read from the voluminous material already written about the Internet.

To sum it all, Ms Lin scores again with her latest compilation of techno poems. Her intimate knowledge of the computer industry has enabled her to give a humourous and jovial twist to issues surrounding the IT world.

A must read for techno freaks and all who have an interest in the Internet.