Personal computers and data transport systems are changing the way we live our lives.
I’ve noticed that I’m increasingly using my PC in place of other tools that I would have used five, ten or more years ago.
For example, I use an electronic diary, whereas a few years ago I used a filofax, and before that, just an ordinary desk diary. And 15 different notebooks and lists scattered throughout my home and office. Now everything gets entered into my diary – meetings, appointments, visits from friends, also reminders (transfer money to my current account, go to school to collect kids, go to the gym etc) that go ‘ding’ at appointed times and grab my attention.
Currently I’m working from home so everything I need is in my house. I have a lovely, light laptop which I can carry around in one hand. I have a simple wireless network, which means that the desktop has a grunty hard drive which the two laptops can access. So I can sit down at any of the PCs and access my data, meaning it’s useful to have it all there.
Take cooking, for instance. The desktop is in the kitchen and if I need an idea of how to, for example, extract vanilla from a vanilla bean or make pizza dough, I just Google it and watch the video on YouTube. Or for ideas on what to do with a tomato, some yoghurt and a bit of leftover roast lamb, I’ll Google ‘recipes’ and include those ingredients. And I have a whole heap of recipe documents on my shared drive. I do still have cookbooks and have favourite recipes written down, but I find myself more and more often turning to the PC.
And isn’t YouTube just the thing? Everything is there. I wanted to show the kids some classic ads from when I was their age – the KFC ad with Hugo and the girl in the back of the car, the ‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke’ ad, and the Goodnight Kiwi. It’s all there. I missed the last episode of Stylistas the other week, so what did I do? I watched it over five videos on YouTube.
I sometimes wish I could catch the news on TV during the day, but I want to be in the kitchen washing dishes or something useful. I’m looking forward to when IPTV becomes more prevalent, so I can watch local channels from wherever I am in the house. I do have a lovely big TV, but I’m pretty busy and I seldom take the time to sit down and watch it. And anyway, I’d have to fight the kids off watching Wipeout (urgh!).
However, I am finding with so much going on (I’ve just seriously got into one of the apps on Facebook, and so has my son), we are racking up the gigabytes of broadband traffic. If I ever get that video editing business going, I’m going to have to seriously look at some bigger pipes, probably SDSL because leased line is still not affordable, as we’re forever exceeding our monthly ASDL allocation, and upload speeds, if I’m posting to my blogs or uploading graphics content, are not great.
So, it’s a changing world we live in, but a fun one.