Twenty Nineteen
I keep thinking about how much the world has changed just in the 21st century. On the surface it kind of all looks the same. We had digital music in 2005, just like we do now. We had cell phones, we had iPods and laptops and wi-fi and all the same basic technology.
But it's a little stunning how much better it all is now. Some examples:
- In 2005 I started reading Questionable Content. When he would mention a band in the strip (which happened a lot in the earlier days) I would have to make a note of it to myself, then try and get the library to get a copy so I could go listen to it, or I'd have to buy a copy. Now I just open Spotify and listen to it.
- In 2005 I wanted to set up a little personal server at home so help me learn how to do web programming without paying for real hosting. But I either had to run the server on my wife's computer (my laptop spent too much time going back and forth to school with me to be a good server) or I had to basically build a new computer. Now I can just buy a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero and I have all the power I need to run websites, even containerized websites in Docker.
And a lot of other little things. Things like “synchronizing files”. We've gone from using flash drives full of data to Dropbox to having cloud sync for everything, running in the background, barely noticeable.
Oh, and also this year we finally had a private moonshot happen. It doesn't feel like things are changing but boy are they.