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the good life in a digital age

sources of energy

More FringeHog-ery, this time on personal energy:

“Human beings can survive for more than a month without food and for five days without water, but the average man, it is said, can’t live more than six hours without plugging in. Now fast forward to the future, say ten years from now. Imagine a world in which energy is abundant, portable and ultimately, personal. In this future electricity is disconnected from the power grid: no more sockets, no more wires.”

Now this might get me interested. I often fear I’m a bit of a luddite. I’m not interested in fancy interfaces or lots of functionality on my phone. Mostly I just want my phone to stop running out of battery.

The thing I would really like for my laptop is instant boot-up. I don’t understand why we all seems to think it is fine for the computer to putter away to itself for a few minutes before it lets you use it.

(I find the welcome message on work computers a bit menacing. “Good morning, Karen. It is 10.15am”. Why does it tell me the time? Just letting me know that it knows what time I got in?)

Now there’s some nice consequences of time to kill chatting with Chris, Vicky, Noush & Olivia (whose company I’m going to miss terribly if I get hauled down the other end of the office) but it just doesn’t seem very efficient.

I guess what I want from my gadgets is summed up by a colleague’s frequent appeal to our management to “perfect the basics before you start tacking bits on”. But there’s plenty of voices out there in “more! add more!” camp so I’ll be spending my mornings chatting for sometime to come.

Written by Karen

February 17th, 2008 at 9:36 am

Posted in future