What beholds our future?

By Dan Barber

Every week I read a lot of news from many sources, and from the news that I read this week I would like to make a prediction.

I predict that a new technology will be invented within the next year and shortly thereafter will be made available to the public, and because of the clever marketing of the company who owns the new gadget, people will camp out on hard sidewalks for a week or more just so they can be the first person in line to buy this new miraculous ‘doodad.’

What kind of prediction is this you might ask? Not much of one, because we see this scenario in the news quite often.  What isn’t in the news is that the ‘doodad’ has become obsolete almost immediately because the same engineers in the same company who created ‘doodad’ has now come out with a new and improved ‘widget,’ which the company’s marketing folks will convince hoards of people to pitch their tents on Main Street so they may have the honor of being the first person on their block to replace the old ‘doodad’ with the new ‘widget’… am I boring you with this story? I’m certainly bored.

Some technology is really great.

When I was returning home from Vietnam, I needed to call home from the Philippines’ to let my wife, Diane, know that I was on my way home and would be there in a couple of days. The call only took a couple of minutes, but cost me nearly a quarter of my weekly “tax free” income of a Navy second class petty officer in 1972. We didn’t have the convenience of free calling cards or cell phones with unlimited minutes. 

A massive improvement in communications was just appearing on the horizon.  Pay TV (cable) was a major source of debate between politicians, and the broadcast executives representing the 3 national networks, and the Federal Communications Commission.  Public meetings were even held so the average person could let their feelings on the subject be known. See how that has worked out. 

We can now sign up for “cable/satellite” TV, the Internet and our home and cell telephone service all with one company!  Because of the new technology of cell phones you can even save a bit of money by not having a landline phone at home.  The monopolistic telephone companies can no longer charge us whatever they can get.

Now my wife can talk to her sisters and cross-country friends on her phone for hours, or until the battery dies, for just one low monthly fee of just a quarter of a week’s pay. I also have hundreds of channels to surf through on my big flat-screen high-definition TV while at the same time surfing the World Wide Web on my cell phone, or any number of new thing-a-bobs I might be willing to camp out to buy at any number of big box discount department stores. But because of where I choose to live, I would have to drive for nearly an hour to get to one of those big box stores… a fact I am rather proud of.

To the horror of those network television executives back in the late sixties, because of all this new technology I can record what ever I want to watch, even out in the middle of the Mojave Desert without a 100’ tall TV antenna, whenever I want to watch it… and I can even fast forward through commercials.

Sometime in the future those unsightly telephone, television and electrical transmission lines that scar our landscape will be a relic of the past when every newly constructed building, development or home will be required to be self-sufficient with its own power source from a combination of solar, thermal and wind power. Perhaps some other new source of power will be discovered and put into use. Also, the kids can also create their own TV programming, filmed of course in front of a large mirror with their latest edition of a smarter cell phone with a video camera application and broadcast those programs world wide, via the latest social media program.

This can only be possible if the “public utility” companies, energy companies and governments can figure out a way to get out of the way of each other and let it happen.

What are you going to do when everything is gone?

By Dan Barber

My horoscope read today that I needed to write… Well here is another entry to my blog spot on my philosophy, right or wrong, it’s my thoughts on the mystery of life.

I just read an article about how the web split in 2011.  First we had the World Wide Web (WWW or web)… but now we have applications (apps) and the “old fashioned web.” In an earlier post I babbled on about my phobia about computers and the new definitions of every day words that used to mean something else, but now have a different meaning altogether… like backup, server, crash, hacking, cracking etc. Language has been evolving ever since our first caveman lexicographer starting calling a rock something else besides “rock” when they discovered that they could use the rock for cracking nuts, it then became a “nut cracker.” Then an industrious clan educator painted a picture on the cave wall to educate others in the clan how to use a rock. Our very first dictionary was actually a “Pictionary” and some Anthropologists and some Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) researchers have spent their entire careers trying to figure out what our ancestors were trying to say with these Pictionary’s. 

Now we need a dictionary to tell us what acronyms mean… the Navy has had one of these dictionaries for years… I keep it nearby on my bookshelf at work. I work at the Naval Hospital Twentynine Palms (NHTP) on the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC)… in military speak it would be pronounced as Nav-Hosp 29 Palms at the Mac-Cack-See… in texting it would probably look like (NHTP@MCAGCC).

Now everywhere I look people are holding their various communications devices and typing away with their thumbs in an acronym language that is totally foreign to me. My teenaged granddaughters are constantly pecking away at their cell phones instead of talking on them. I think the funniest thing that I ever heard involving acronyms was in the Neil Simon play “The Odd Couple” when Oscar said (paraphrased) “It took me a half hour to figure out that FU on the note that you left on the fridge that said, ‘need milk FU,’ meant Felix Unger.”

When I signed away two years of my life on a contract to get a cellular (cell) phone, I told the young sales girl that I only wanted a device that I could make and receive phone calls… I didn’t need a camera, the cell phone screen was too small for me to watch TV, I didn’t need to send or receive e-mails, and I didn’t need to know where on the earth that I was positioned at any given time… although at my age my family might find that particular “app” handy when I get lost while taking a walk in my neighborhood.

Our Southern California electrical power supply utility company just announced the other day that they were going to have to cut off power to different areas of our community for several hours so they could make repairs to the electrical grid. In our local community underground chat room, people were in an uproar over what were they going to do without power… no cell phones, no television, no lights, no computers! “How are we going to be able to charge our cell phones, read our book apps on a dead reader?” Perhaps we should not be so ready to do away with print newspapers or books… all you need to read one of these at night is a candle. A fire in the outdoor fire pit would be nice while star-gazing at our pollution free desert sky is a possibility, face-to-face conversation with family or friends is could be a positive experience… no batteries or charger required.

Maybe the Inca’s and Hopi Indians, and even the “web-bot” app have it right about life as we know is about to end in 2012… What are you going to do when everything you do in your everyday life is gone?