Saturday,
January 26, 2002

It still freaks me out a bit

I don't know if I ever explained how I create entries for this journal. I use Dreamweaver as my HTML editor (kick-ass tool -- I love it, despite the fact that its maker didn't hire me), and a template for the pages, mainly to make sure that none of the regular links at the bottom get messed up. Template or no, I usually make a new entry the lazy way by opening the most recent one, saving it as new (so that I don't automatically hit control-S and overwrite the old entry -- Zoroaster knows I've done that enough times), and writing the actual body of the entry.

Before I start writing, though, I change the date that's included in the Title bar. This morning, it struck me that I'm writing an entry for January 26, 2002.

2002. Jeez, that was The Future(TM) when I was a kid. We'd have personal space ships and cities on the moon and all kinds of wild stuff in 2002, I thought. I would turn 36 in 2002 -- I'd be old. And now it's actually 2002, and I don't feel old at all.

Actually, my knees feel old (note to self -- pick up some more chondrotin this week). But you know what I mean.

It's just kinda weird, being in 2002. But weird in a cool sort of way -- I mean, we don't have the flying cars or Moonbase Alpha, but we do have a slew of cool technological shit -- Velcro, xerox machines, SETI, cell phones, Gameboys, artificial hearts, cochlear implants, the Internet and Web, Dolly the sheep, Palm Pilots, gene therapy, the list goes on and on. The most amazing thing, however, is that we don't think of all these things as futuristic shit. It's stuff we use every day. It's ordinary.

Think about it. Things that would have sounded like direct lifts from science fiction when anyone my age was a kid -- palmtop computers? MP3 players? Multi-organ transplants? Clones? -- is considered ordinary. I think that's that's the only bad thing about The Future(TM) -- once you get there, it isn't The Future(TM) anymore.