I am always amazed by the power of the internet.

Yesterday my wife and I bought a new BBQ. We decided to sell our old one on craigslist. The old one has a few small issues, but all in all it’s okay. I would have tried selling it for $50. My wife, well, she wanted a quick sale and put it up for $20. Oh well.

So after an hour or so we got an email from someone who was interested. The next day, this morning, she called back and said she was trying to find someone with a truck to come and pick it up for them.

She called me back saying that she had a friend who would be passing through town with a truck and could pick it up. The buyer would meet the friend at our house, pay us, pick up the BBQ, and be on their way.

What makes this all interesting is that the buyer and her husband had never met the person picking up the BBQ. Turns out the buyer posted to Facebook that she was looking for someone with a truck to help them out. One of her “friends” volunteered her husband to come by. Before today, none of them had ever met, nor even knew they existed, and here was the guy with the truck picking up the purchase for them.

Within 24 hours we had listed and sold our BBQ on craigslist, and the buyer had met and managed a favor out of a guy with a truck. A couple things not really possible before the days of the internet – at least not at this speed.

As humans we can travel into outer space, cure disease, build machines to perform our mundane tasks, alter DNA, and harness the power of the Atom. So why are we doomed?

This species we are part of can do things that no other Earth bound creature can even come close to – and while our huge advances in technology and civilization put us far in the lead of the next closest creature on this planet, we also do one thing (and very well I might add) that no other creature does – and that’s destroy the very thing that gives us life.

Afterthought: After writing this I realized that we are not the only creature that is killing its environment. If we look into the world of microscopic life, among others, cancer works to ultimately kill its victim, killing itself in the process. I guess we are just the cancer of the earth.

For creatures with such incredible intellect and power, why is it that we poison the earth? If we continue to put out such massive amounts of pollution as a species we are doomed – and we’ll take much of the other life on this planet with us, hell, we are already responsible for driving numerous creatures to extinction, with others on the way. (The Dodo being the most common – others including the Bali Tiger, Golden Toad, Passenger Pigeon, the Quagga to name a few. And no I didn’t know this before writing, and I assume that the article, 10 recently extinct animals at Listverse is accurate)

I believe in most of the global warming debates, but certainly hope that they are far fetched. I believe that I will live to a ripe old age without having the effects of our poisoning the earth take me down, but I am convinced that mankind will be responsible for wiping out life as we know it. It may take 100 years, it may take 1000 years, but it will happen. But why? It’s 100% preventable.

What is stopping us from reducing our carbon output? Money. Not the direct cost of solving the problem, but the indirect cost. Big business, primarily the oil companies, have too much to lose, they don’t want to see us switch to electric vehicles. (Just imagine, if we pushed on developing the electric carriage back in the early 1800’s, and didn’t make the switch to oil dependant vehicles in the 1920’s, how advanced that technology would be today – we would almost have no need for oil)

Our greed is helping drive us to extinction, but it is not alone. Today most of us have come dependant on power hungry technology to help us get through our day, slowly poisoning the earth as we go. With all honesty, people are not going to change. While I acknowledge how bad it is for the environment, I will step into my gas burning car and pump some pollution into the air later today. I’ll do it again tomorrow too, and the next day. So will millions… hundreds of millions… perhaps billions of other people.

We are so wrapped up in the modern convenience of technology that most of us refuse to change our ways to help the greater good. I use compact florescent light bulbs, recycle my cardboard, bottles, etc, and even have a rain barrel to help water my garden, but I am not sure its enough – perhaps if everyone did these simple little things it may be, but I don’t know.

We have a hell of a good reason to clean up this planet, and we have the technology to do so – so why the hell do we keep poisoning ourselves? It must be true, we’re doomed.

A Finnish software developer has had a USB flash drive implanted into his prosthetic finger. After losing part of his finger in a motorcycle accident last year, Jerry Jalava’s doctor suggested he have a USB drive built into his replacement digit.

When he needs to use it he simply pops off his finger and sticks it into the computer. I think this is a great idea, and am thinking about getting a couple drives surgically implanted into my nipples. (I was going to say somewhere else, but that’s too crude even for me to write publically – although I guess I just kinda did.)

Okay, here is a list of some of my predictions for 91 years from now. Keep in mind I have no education relating to any of this stuff, I am just making it up off the seat of my pants.

Electricity
Forget Solar, Wind Power, and all those. We are going to be powered by the reaction caused by collision of atoms in the air and cosmic rays from space. All our appliances etc, will not need to be plugged in, they will just feed off the energy present around them. We wont be “off the grid” because there simply will be no grid. The grid will be a thing of the past.

Computers
Computers as we know them will cease to exist. Everything will be controlled with a simple and microscopic implant that will allow the unused portion of our brains to be our permanent computers. Our brains will do everything that modern computers today do – that and a 1000x more.

Exercise
Life will get a little boring, as everyone with the money to buy there computer implant, will have a health program installed. When you think that you are putting on a little too much weight, you will just run your “body-defrag” and the computer in your brain will remove the excess weight, tone your muscles, and keep you trim and healthy. There will be no more obesity.

This program is a welcome change too, considering the lack of exercise we will face with the advancements in transportation.

Transportation
Star Trekkies rejoice. Teleportation will be here, and there will be no more need for mass transit, cars, planes, or any of that junk. Heck, even now, we have built the technology to teleport information between two separate atoms. Just imagine where this will take us in 100 years from now. The impossible just may not be impossible.

Food
You’re going to miss that steak dinner. Global warming will cause mass chaos in the food chain and we will survive off of proteins grown in the lab, fake meat laced with all kinds of chemicals mimicking vitamins and other essential nutrients.

Sun Burns
You know those bad sunburns you get in the summer these days? They will be a thing of the past. We humans will evolve to make us immune to sunburns by causing our body’s to emit their own version of sun block.

That’s it for my predictions today. I will write a part 2 later when I am feeling creative again. I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on these crazy ideas, and would also love to hear your far-out predictions. Leave them in a comment to this post, or contact me!

Ahh, I remember back in the day – our old 486 4-100. It was lightning fast, faster than all my friends, and faster then all the computers in the school – that thing rocked. It had a HUGE hard drive in it too, a mind-blowing 512 megs, and those 8 megs of ram, almost unheard of!

Its hard to believe that we have exceeded those amazing storage and technological capabilities! Today, 1TB hard drives are not uncommon, and even JumpDrives far exceed the capacity of hard drives from just a couple years back. I saw a secure 16 GB JumpDrive at Lexars website that had a capacity meter built in – pretty cool really. 16GB on a jump drive is really quite amazing considering that just a few short years ago, standard hard drives didn’t even reach this figure.

With USB 3.0 in the works, it wont be long before every computer has it, and that will open up a lot of opportunities for speed. I can see a future where all your software, operating system, everything, is stored on a jump drive. Take the jump drive to the office, or over to a friends house, plug it into their machine, and run all your software, games, operating system etc, all off of the JumpDrive. Today, USB 2.0 would likely be a bit too slow for this idea to work, but when usb 3.0 takes off (expected next year) its speeds of up to 10x that of 2.0 may make this kind of usage possible.

(Note, if 16 GB is not big enough for you, CDW has a 64 GB jump drive available, but at over $5000, you might want to wait a bit)

What is this world coming to? I have to say that I simply do not understand.

A keyboard featuring the Klingon alphabet has gone on sale for £43.99 for all those die-hard star trek fans out there. The fake language was originally created back in 1984 for the Star Trek series and since then thousands of learnt to write and speak the strange non-existent language.

I have never been a Star Trek fan, so I just don’t get it, but if you are one, you may be interested in ordering this bizarre product. It has been made available here. It is available only with a PS2 connection – strange, USB has been around forever

When you are eating dinner and the phone rings, do you answer it? I know some people that don’t, but I for some reason, do – and in most cases will talk with the person, at least briefly, interrupting my dinner. The telephone interrupts my favorite TV programs, family time, work hours, and sleep. – it’s really a nuisance.

Sure I could unplug it, or turn off the ringer – but then how would people call me? I am learning to hate this device, but the reliance on it, and all technology has me hooked. I can’t even leave home without my cell phone – what if something happens, I have to have my phone with me. I hardly ever use our cell, but yet it follows me everywhere. What’s going on with this world? It’s almost like the telephone is a virus we can’t escape. When it rings I think, “Ah crap, who is it now.”

I am constantly checking my email, and spend probably half my life sitting in front of a computer or television. Sure I work on the computer, so that’s an easy 8 hours a day – but why must I watch TV, or use my laptop during my free time. I am sure that all this technology is causing mass tumors to grow in my brain.

My favorite part of vacations is that we often go to places without telephones. We’ll hit up Pacific Village in Tofino once a year – beach front cabins without TV’s, radios, or telephones. I leave my cell turned off, and watch in the car. Complete isolation from technology. Those vacations are the best times of my life. No email, no phone calls, no commercials telling me I need to call Sam. (That lawyer guy in Michigan – you know the jingle: “You can talk to Sam. 1-800-call Sam”. Grrr. Go away Sam Bernstein.).

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time to a land before all this dependence on technology – but then how would I watch Judge Judy?

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Remember all the hype about 9 years ago when our clocks rolled from 1999 over to 2000, and how the worlds information systems were supposed to come to a crashing halt, and the planet as we know it would essentially self destruct? Do you remember what happened? No? Probably because nothing happened.

Sure big corporations had to spend a lot of money on programming to fix the issue, but in those few short years leading up to the new millennium, the issue was fixed, and the average person would have had no idea that there was an issue in the first place.

Well, we are at that point again, or will be, in just a few short decades. Based on current programming practices at precisely 3:14:07 on Jan 19, 2038, all of our computer systems will crash and man kind will be sent in to a world where no computer will operate correctly.

Some people are a little bit worried about this problem, but as for me, I am convinced that in the next 29 years, programmers will have this dilemma solved.

Some Details
While I have some programming experience, I am far from a programmer. The majority of readers of this blog are also not likely to be programmers, so I will try and explain this as simply as possible – in point form.

• Time on your computer is stored as the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 at midnight
• This data is stored in a “signed integer” data type typically labeled as “time_t”
• The modern 32 bit computer (most likely what you are using right now) stores “signed integer” data types in 32 bits.
• The MAXIMUM value a 32 bit “signed integer” can hold is 2,147,483,647
• This represents a time of Jan 19, 2038 at 3:14:07 AM
• Exactly 1 second after this time, the signed integer will crash, having nowhere to go, it will turn negative. (for a number of technical reasons)
• By default it will revert to the value of “time_t” to -2,147,483,648, which represents Dec 13, 1901 at 8:45:52 PM.

Having computers suddenly jump about 120 years into the past would have catastrophic results on the majority of systems out there. To fix the problem on any 32 bit system represents a huge dilemma and programmers just don’t know how to fix this.

Why Worry
One fix to the problem is with the use of a 64 bit system. While they are not common place at the moment, 64 bit systems are out there.

My assumption is that we will see 64 bit systems as main stream well within our 29 year time span to get this problem fixed. I will be VERY surprised if there are even any 32 bit systems still operational in business in 30 years from now.

The old Commodore PET, the Tandy, and the Apple II were 8 bit systems. When was the last time you saw one of these? Last time I saw a Commodore I was in Elementary School. They were popular back in the 80′s.

If we can go from 8 bits to 32 bits in 20 years, I am sure that we can go from 32 bits to 64 bits in that same time frame or less). I suspect that we will be in a 64 bit world far sooner than that.

Want More Technical Info
I learnt of this issue at WebProNews, and they cited an article here: http://home.netcom.com/~rogermw/Y2038.html. This page is currently over quota on their hosting account, so feel free to check it out in Googles Cache here.

I absolutely hate to admit that I kinda like Windows Vista. It did take some getting used to as much has changed, but the more I use it, the more I actually like it.

I have heard of many people having tons of problems with it, but for me there were only 3 problems I had to deal with, and now all 3 are corrected:

1. Office 2003: I installed it, but every time I opened word or excel it prompted me to accept the TOC. I eventually found a work around through registry edits to make this problem go away. (And yes, it was a 100% legal and legit copy of Office).

2. É and é: When going for the question mark (?) or forward slash (/) often the computer would switch to the red character on the keyboard instead; the (é) or (É). I fixed this by changing the language settings from Canadian English to American English. The problem has not returned

3. Weird Mouse Thing: The cursor would randomly jump from one field to another while typing causing total chaos when filling out online forms. I for the life of me cant remember what I did to fix this, but I found instructions online, followed them, and it fixed it.

Other than these 3 things, Windows Vista has been good to me. Regardless, I still find the following comic strip (from XKCD funny )

Every now and then I check out Wired.com, and my latest find was this new concept VW Microbus. At an incredibly steep price of $130,000 I doubt many will be sold, but I cant deny how much I love the look of it. Very cool and modern, yet retro at the same time.

When it comes to these retro re-do’s, I like some, hate others. For instance the PT Cruiser and Chevy HHR I find insanely ugly, yet I like the new Beetle and Camero.