User Submitted Blog Post: Future Compliant March 6, 2007

It's going to be the future soon. Are you ready for it? I'm not, not really, but I'm trying to upgrade my life in every way possible so I can ride that wave when it comes crashing down upon me. Oops, too late. I missed it while I was typing this post on my new Asus EeePC in my favorite coffee shop while I munched on whole wheat blueberry scone and tried to see if I could connect to the free municipal wi-fi here in downtown Sarasota. Turns out I could, so I e-mailed a German hacker friend of mine who's in Seattle right now just to say hi. And lo and behold, the future was upon me. I was using a $350 ultra-portable laptop running linux to access a free wi-fi internet connection while drinking coffee from Indonesia and eating a heart healthy whole wheat treat. Not too long ago that would've been impossible. Not too too long ago when I was a college freshman my laptop weighed over twenty pounds, displayed only four shades of blue and connected to the internet via a 2800 baud modem. So the future hit me while was still trying to get ready for it, but that's ok, there's plenty more future coming right at me. Next time I'm going to be ready for it.

I'm a dabbler and an enthusiast. I'm a fanboy and a booster. If I can make any kind of claim to any kind of expertise, it's that I've bee a professional writer of one flavor or another for going on 13 years now. I can't write code, I can't even use Ruby on Rails. I've got no l33t hacking skilz. I do however know what code looks like, and I know what the largely incomprehensible to the uninitiated phrase “ l33t hacking skilz” means. I pay attention to what hackers and inventors and technology companies are doing, and I get excited when they do something cool and angry when they do something stupid. I go to hacker cons for fun. I listen to tech podcasts while I'm at the gym. I'm doing my best to tap into the zeitgeist of that ever approaching wave of the future, and I 'm relying on my one marketable skill (aside from my ability to lift heavy objects) to take all that exciting, frustrating, confusing, inspiring data in and churn out some thoughtful and amusing prose so that others might learn from my obsessions.

So here's the first thing I've learned about the future, and you should all take this to heart. In the future, keyboards are a lot smaller. So are the screens. Here's a pic of the four devices I use to access the internet in one way or another (not counting my X-box 360 or my Wii).

The little laptop is this EeePC I'm using right now, and let me tell you something, it's taking some time to get used to the tiny keyboard. I'm a big guy and while my fingers may be deft and nimble, they're not by any means small. So early on I made a lot of mistakes. I just made another one as I typed that sentence. But I'm getting better with it, and it's a hell of a lot easier than the tiny keys on that blackberry in the picture there. I'm not quite ready to do a whole day's work of novel writing on it yet (novel writing happens on the bigger laptop there), but I won't be surprised when I do.

The tiny keyboards are the price you pay for the rest of the thing be so wonderfully small and light and easy to lug around. This EeePC is smaller and lighter than many hardback books. I slipped it into my laptop bag this morning and it felt like the thing was empty. There mere fact of its portability makes using it just more exciting. Take it anywhere. Once I figure out how to use my blackberry as a modem for the thing, my options become even greater. And as the portability becomes more commonplace and other technologies catch up, even these tiny keyboards will be a thing of the past – an inconvenient evolutionary dead end that will become extinct, replaced by folding keyboards that really work or eventually the ability to type with our minds alone. Think that last bit sounds like science fiction? Ha! There's already a company getting ready to sell headsets that let you control video games with just your mind. The borders between home and work, online and off are cracking and groaning under the pressure from the future. WiMax is coming. Dark fiber is lighting up. Computing's moving into the clouds. Some people hate it, some love it. No one can avoid it. The future's here all right, and I can't wait for more of it to come crashing down upon me. That assumes of course that I won't drown in it, which is a dangerous possibility. But that's a topic for another day.