It's November!

I can't believe it's November already! Time just flies these days and sometimes it makes me just a little queasy. Pretty soon it will be 2011 and another year will be gone. I remember being a kid and thinking that 2000 was soooooooooooo far away. 2000 was supposed to be in the way future with spaceships being a common form of travel. We were supposed to be living on the moon and other planets. Life was supposed to be way different than life as we knew it in the fifties and early sixties.

I suppose life is really quite different in a lot of ways. We aren't traveling by space-ship, but we are doing a lot of traveling by computer. You can see almost anything in the world on the computer and find almost any little piece of information about almost any subject. It's amazing really. News is available 24/7.

When I was young the only news on video was what we got at the movie theater. There were newsreels before the movies and they covered the most exciting or interesting stories of the week or month. Television changed all that and the major networks each had a news team and nightly newscasts to keep us informed of things happening around the world and at home. You could find out important news on the same day or nearly the same day. That's changed again with the invention and improvement of the home computer and the speeds at which we can access the internet now. Broadband means most computers are on all or most of the time and news travels pretty fast these days. Something can happen here in Tacoma and if it's important enough it can be around the world before the reporters for the newspapers even get back to their desks.

Computers weren't common in the home even when my kids were little and certainly not when I was young. We didn't even have television until I was about 9 or 10. In those days television was pretty much controlled by the adults in the household. Most households only had one television in those days. Children never had television in their rooms. These days you can even get television on your computer, completely eliminating the need for a separate television set. I imagine in the next few years that will result in a nice hybrid between televisions and computers and eventually eliminate the need for having both. I know they are talking about it already. It will be interesting to see the changes in the computing and information highways in the next few years. It's hard to imagine what things will be like when my grandchildren get to be the age I am now. I notice they aren't making any movies about it yet. Maybe mid-century they will come out with a "3001-Space Odyssey". Maybe we will really be traveling in space by then. Or maybe we will still just be traveling over the wires, completely eliminating the need for face to face contact and everyday conversation. Maybe the "talkies" will go back to being silent. Who knows?