Keeping up with the applicasians

I have always been ahead of the tech curve.

I had a Sony Walkman in 1979 – That orange button on the top activated a microphone so people could talk to you while listening to music. It also had two headphone jacks!

I bought it for a trip to California to meet a girl I had met over the phone while working at a record store. I went to Venice beach, arguably one of the trendier places in the world, and people there were amazed at the walkman technology.

I acquired an IBM PC in 1984, no hard drive and a 16 color graphics card, whew! I got an internet account in 1994 and dialed in with a 3600 baud modem (which referred to a symbol rate of 3,600 symbols per second)

I bought a DVD writer in 1999 for $5,000 and the DVD authoring software to create them – I was one of the first in Chicago to have the capability.

I got a cell phone in 1994 – (the one on the left) A Motorola brick phone.

Technology used to be impressive and hip, now it is so prevalent and democratized, that any moron can record HD video, edit it, add special effects and upload it to YouTube. This is of course great and awful.

In other words, it is becoming harder and harder to be on the cutting edge of technology. I make my living on having an edge, using graphic technology in ways that most people have not figured out yet, but that edge seems to have almost disappeared. I am not a designer or a programmer, so I can’t rely on that to get business. Well, it is time to reevaluate the tech environment and figure out what to do next.

Now, most of the tools for creating media are available online, so it comes down to “Keeping up with the applicasians” (referring to the realty show about the rich girl that made a sex tape and hired a publicist to exploit this) I had started blogging with blogger, now I can see that WordPress is superior.

It is not a matter of hardware anymore – it is software – applications are the wave of the future.