I let my fingers do the walkin' on the telephone man

Ipods.

"They what? They had to stick things in their ears to hear the music? Things with wires on them?"
"Yes. And to like rollpak a folder to a threader, they had to like use their finger on this huge white plastic thingie."
"Did not."
"Sha."
"So not Sha."
"Yah. No autfeed from a sattel or nothing."
"No sattel feeds!? Don't bush me, sha?"
"That's the way it was. Spider up 'ipod', K?"
"Twill."
===

And there they were on my satfone lens, little jpegs from the distance 2005 of the old time, slim little waifgirls with white cords attached to their heads and a look on their faces that made me think for a moment that the wires went all the way through their slim little brains. The ipod. I must look on the site to see if there's a link if maybe they did.


Joe(directly connected)Nation

Oh yes! IPods, fersure.

I think weekly garbage collections will have given way to a maximum of monthly and probably less often than that.

I think people will be astonished that we ever spent hours cooking things in an oven.

I think people will think CSI is just terribly quaint.

I think people who picks up a Patrica Cromwell novel cataglouging terrible crimes and luxury products as sinister and hilarious.

Cell phones will contribute to the death of the Locked Room Murder Mystery.

I'm gonna start saying "don't bush me."

As in, "don't tell me one thing, then do the opposite"? I like it.

A friend here in town makes a good business
tuning up computers and getting rid of viruses.

He says that setting up a network for someone with WiFi
is one of the best ways to meet lonely housewives.

They have so many questions ....

Watercookers will go the way of teakettles I presume. Those huge monitors most of us still have despite the temptation of (all too expensive but seductively slender) flat screens ... And the computers themselves, big rectangular blocks instead of discman sized cordless carry-alongs!

Internet cafes! I'm sitting in one now and noone in the West will believe they ever existed in a few decades. Cellphones and ringtones (they really spent hours installing some primitive five-second sound to define their personal identity?).

Faxes, definitely, will be gone. And now already, who remembers the sounds you hear when your computer makes the dial-up connection? The brrrtrtrtrtzz - wasnt that the loneliest sound? (I once saw an installation in a video art museum with a wall-filled image of a nuclear explosion, and the like, with just this sound of the dial-up connection eerily wheezing and rattling on ...)

Hmmm ... and hey, cameras will be considered quaint in the time when one just needs to blink to take a pic when connected ... or perhaps I'm just dreaming now.

I bet Craven could come up with good stuff on this one ...

Heck, if enjoying looking at men and asking the ones I hire a lot of questions are indicitive of lonliness you may count me among the lonliest of women.

Noddy, I do believe you're right. I also blame cel phones on the death of dinner table conversation.

"Don't bush me", I love that!

I don't even know what a watercooker is, nimh! Maybe it goes by another name here.

I agree with monitors. I read an article about the "wired kitchen" a while back where your countertops would weigh the ingredients and recipes would be projected onto a wall. Why couldn't everything just be projected on the wall? You could adjust the size you wanted it to be, set it up anywhere, and so on.

I can't even begin to imagine what computers will be like. Maybe intergrated into your wardrobe - belt buckles or bracelets or something.

The future of photography is something I really ought to think about....

I can't remember the last time I sent or received a fax!

Most of the stuff we have in our houses will be "quaint" 30 years from now. They'll be laughing at our 50" plasma TVs while they watch Video on Demand on their 360 degree holographic projectors. We watch TV and movies. They'll be participating in them.

Now instead of a shoe box full of photos you never look at you can have a hard drive the size of a shoe box full of photos you never look at.

Projectors are all the rage for 20 somethings. No need to have a TV filling up space. Just a projector for a convenient wall. Larger image and smaller footprint.

All phones that actually connect into a cable into a wall. I guess, for that matter, anything with wires at all will probably be gone. Answering machines.

I want my MTV.

No, not yours. Mine. All mine. All of it, nobody's but mine.

Go get your own, damn loader, if your units can even afford broadfeed.

You know, like ... eeh, perhaps I just dont know the english word? You wanna make tea, and instead of boiling water in the old-fashioned kettle you put water in that electric thingie thats just plugged in and heats it up 5 times faster?

I was realising a while ago that lot of kids now probly wouldnt recognize the sound of the kettle whistling? Kinda like the way the sound of a typewriter wont be recognized, or the kedeng-kedeng of trains before new balancing-on-the-tracks techniques or whatever's made it different (in Holland its now replaced by this weird vague wheezing buzz, but thats just a bug of our trains I think). Or the whirr of the round phone dial every time you turned it for one number (see, my english just totally gives out on me describing things like this)

That's an interesting idea, fishin'. Do you really think that will happen in only 30 years? I'm still waiting for my flying car, after all!

Small footprints and no wires are most definately the future!

I read an article about "upcycling" the other day. The man interviewed is working on a new type of printing. Paper will be made of a lightweight plastic, the ink will be lifted off in hot water and reclaimed and a new book can be printed using the same ink and the same "paper".

Newspapers, magazines, books, phamplets, anything printed could use this technology and there would be no waste and no degradation of materials as there is in current recycling.

I read another article, I don't remember where, about how in Japan? China? one of the two, that people sort their recycling into 30something different categories. Everything reclaimable is reclaimed.

These are the things that make me think we'll be doing away with garbage haulers.

I usually put a cup of water in the microwave for two minutes when I get a hankering for tea!

You're right about sounds, nimh. There are a lot of sounds that have become obsolete.

Years ago I bought a Tom Petty CD and right in the middle of the CD he says something like "this is where you would flip the album over". Some future-kid will discover that CD someday and wonder what in the world that nut-job was talking about.

LOL, I remember the Young Ones/Cliff Richard single where midway through the 12" you have Neil going in his slowmind drippy hippie voice, "so this is the twelve inch version, which is exactly like the 7 inch version except its got five inches of nothing in the middle ..." 12"s were still pretty new then I think.

Small 3-D Holographic screens have already been developed for high-end Graphics workstations so I think it's just a matter of time before it ends up in the home.

Imagine your favorite movie where, instead of watching a conversation taking place at a kitchen table, you were at the table yourself and able to interact with the computer generated "actors".

It'll be longer before you can get your own personal "holodeck" ala StarTrek but on a smaller scale - yeah, I expect it'll be possible in 30 years. I wish they'd hurry. There are some things I want to get done with Sandra Bullock.

Sandra Bullock, huh?

Now that you mention it, I remember seeing the debut of a 3D scanner about 15 years ago!

Even more years ago than that my dad had a friend who was a molecular engineer who's area of interest was holography and he was working on some kind of thing that my brain couldn't quite wrap itself around. (To be honest, my brain has a hard enough time with "molecular engineer".) (They eventually ended up in jail together in Mexico. Ha ha. Good times.)

So, okay, I'll give you interactive entertainment.

But I still want my flying car, damn it.

January 3, 2129
Dear Gramma,

The trip back was not as much fun as the trip to your houseship. For one thing the artigrav worked the whole way so neither I nor Butch got to float from our seats. I know it's dangerous but it felt so cool! Anyway, thanks for the retro-movie collection. I showed the disc leads to my teacher and he said that they looked like real historical classics. I watched part of the one called "You've got mail." and I understand that they were still using keyboard-driven linear speech, but what I don't understand was --what were they trying to sell in the stores? They looked like some kind of boxes with what Uncle Frank used to call hard copy or print copy, I mean, who would buy them?

Oh, I was supposed to tell you that while we were on your ship, Aunt Rita got all of her organs replaced. Well, all of them except her brain, so she is still Aunt Rita. They had to wait until the pancreas had fully formed before implanting it, but the heart and lungs and liver had all been made years ago after she supplied the cell cultures in the day she graduated from high school. Do you remember that? Anyway, she's fine and playing a game with Butch right now in our holospace. Something about hitting a white thingie with a batstick and making it go into a hole. Then you do it over so it must be like some kind of time/shift hole, like at Dad's workspaceplace. It's a new game, I think.

That's all
Rudy

PS I didn't tell Mom about us singing the songs about the oholy night. They are much stricter here about insults to Islam than they are up there in the spacevillage, but I thought they were ripping. Angels are just like the commuters here but fluffier when they fly.