The Future is Now!

It's pretty much a given that technology has come a long way in the past 20 years or so and our level of technological sophistication is likely to continue to grow exponentially. Unless the current mix of religious extremism combined with an abundance of nuclear weapons doesn't blast us back to the stone age at some point. But that is filling for a different pie, as it were. What I'm talking about right now is a true Cyberpunk / The Matrix / Shadowrun / Johnny Mnemonic moment. A minor happening that the truly jaded technophiles among you will answer with a yawn and the computer illiterate with a shrug of incomprehension. Despite that, it was something that made me realize just how integrated tech has become in our lives compared to when I was a teenager. Trust me, folks, I was reading about stuff like this in science fiction novels back then and thinking how awesome it would be to be able to do stuff like that. Now it's freakin' *real*!

Ok, here's the story. I wandered into the lead programmer's office this morning to ask him his opinion on a programming issue. I found him on his hands and knees with his head stuck under his desk. "Dare I ask?" I asked once he had gotten back into his chair. He proceeded to explain that his school had given him a free 512 meg flash drive to keep his homework on (flash drives are solid state data storage devices about the size of a keychain, for those unfamiliar with them) and he was having trouble getting his work computer to read the silly thing. I offered the opinion that his USB port might be screwed up, so we took my 2 gig flash drive and tested the theory. Nope, mine worked. We decided to test his drive on my computer, so I took both back to my desk and plugged his in. Lo and behold, the data files popped right up, so it must have been a matter of his drive and computer having a spat. I have two frontal USB ports on my PC, so I took my flash drive, plugged it in next to his, and copied all his files (there weren't that many) to mine. I took them both back and he copied his stuff off my drive to his computer. Presto! Problem solved.

While this doesn't seem like a big deal, think about the fact that I only sat at my computer for about a minute, that both flash drives put together are about the size of a Hot Wheels car and that they have become so cheap that his school was giving them away just to make students' lives easier. Not to mention the sheer cool factor of being able whip this black, shiny, thumb-sized gadget out of your pocket, snap the USB connector out like you were R2-D2 about to hack into the Death Star computer, and saving the day with James Bond-like
panache. Q would of been so proud! (Q the old Bond gadgeteer, not Q the near-omnipotent Star Trek entity. The latter would probably just giggle and turn me into a Klingon ghargh worm for wasting his time.)

One can only marvel at the ingenuity of a bunch of furless talking monkeys. What wonders will our clever primate brains come up with next?