When I started this blog back in 2007 it was,  I thought,  just a good way to promote my book.  Over the years  it became a way for me to deal with the rush of technological change altering not just how we read but how we gather our information.  More recently, while it’s popularity has increased dramatically,  tales of my Adventures have become less and less frequent at a time when I should be providing more information.   At the same time I have seen a significant increase in demand for my book and, almost daily, I get asked about the status of my next book, when is Considering SomeplacElse the movie coming out, when will you start/finish the Laughing Bear Million Laughs project, what about the eSynched movement you were going to start, will the Rocky the Polar Bear stories ever be produced, and what about all those new software applications like the Remedy Data Wrangler and SCRUM?

When asked what super power they would wish for 60% of the US population asked for “Time Travel”.  They did not specify whether they would use this power for traveling backwards or forwards in time, but I suspect going back to right wrongs or take advantage of opportunities lost would be the primary motivation. “If they only knew then what they know now”.  While I would certainly take advantage of such a super power if it were granted, it is not at the top of my list.

The savvy Captain Jack thought about wishing for eternal youth, then chose the unknown mystery of a pirates life for him.   But neither eternal nor pirates life are for me.  

My favorite Twilight Zone episode contains a stop watch that stops everything around me.  This would give me more time and, I think, preferable to traveling backwards.  This is most tempting, but still not good enoough.

In, what is probably my 2nd favorite movie of all time, Forbidden Planet, there are machines avaialble to create whatever you can imagine.  This, is getting very close to something I would wish for, BUT I would fear the consequences of unleashing monsters from my ID.

No, my super power wish harkens back to the early days of computing, when I was told that, one day soon, a machine WILL respond at the speed of my thoughts.  And while there are computers that process data signficantly faster than my aging brain, there is still no personal computing tool that doesn’t make me wait.  AND when my brain has to wait more than 3 or 4 nanoseconds, it starts thinking about other things.  Now, I’m not saying I would have a billion thoughts while waiting 3 seconds for my iCon device to process a command, but it is very easy for me to “forget” what I was trying to do during those 3 billion nano seconds, because something else has now captured my attention. 

The QWERTY keyboard was invented to slow down the typist, because the typewriter mechanism couldn’t keep up with a humans ability to move their fingers across the original, much more efficient, keyboard design. (Yes the most commonly used letters were NOT where they are now, they were positioned to maximize our ability to strike them in quick succession).  We didn’t even redesign the tiny touch pad keyboards on our phones. Come on guys, really? A full size key QWERTY Keyboard on a 2 inch screen. I guess we still needed to make the human slow down, because the tool can’t keep up with us.  Voice Recognition you say?  Try saying “Voice Recognition” into your microphone and see what gets typed the first two times you say it.  

No, I don’t need a time machine, I just need a machine that can create as fast as I do, because  “If it only knew now, what I knew then, I’d be done.”

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