Beam Me Up, Scotty!

When I was a kid, I used to watch Star Trek and think, how cool would it be to have a computer that fit in your hand, or one that could talk to you, or even to communicate with people far away by just pressing a pin on your shirt.

Fast forward to now and I have a computer, a laptop, an iPod, a cell phone and now a Kindle – which can’t simply be called an ebook reader because it does so much more.

The trouble with all these cools toys is that I’ve grown dependent on them, so when my PC died last week I was in a real mess trying to figure out how to get anything done. I found out post haste that all of my email contacts, passwords, and complex url’s are vitally important to my work day and being without them is killer. I did manage to pull over my old emails but it took hours and hours since Windows 7 doesn’t use Outlook. I also finally managed to shove my old Firefox profile into this new box. It did NOT, however, bring over my passwords – big sigh.

What I’ve learned from this is. . well. . nothing. Because even though I’m thinking of it now, six months from now, I still won’t be using paper copies of emails, address books or password logs, it’s just too much, too many changes, to make it worthwhile. Before you scream at me, I do back up my docs and photos on to discs but you’re still only as good as your last backup and face it, who backs up everyday?

Anyway, I now have a zippy new Windows 7 computer, and according to the man at Best Buy (after he stopped laughing) my new computer is about 400 times faster than my old one. So yeah, updating is good. I still have to crack the old box this weekend to pull more docs and wipe the drive before I dump it. Not looking forward to that.

Now let’s talk Kindle . Yes, I know everyone is talking iPad, but I wanted a Kindle before I knew about iPads and I won one in a contest. So cool. At first it was just an ebook reader. Then I found out I could use it to check my email which was a lot more helpful when I had the old computer that took an hour to boot, but still.

My Kindle now holds a mix of my favorite authors in eformat (reading Erica Spindler’s Blood Vines right now), fan fiction I’ve uploaded myself (Dark Angel rocks) and pdf’s for business, mostly about social marketing.

This week, I’m diving into the RSS downloads. I decided to pay .99 a month for Mashable because I love the content and never feel like I can just sit and read it on the computer. Now it will download into my Kindle automatically and I can read it at my leisure. I balked at paying at first, then thought about the magazines I subscribe to that go in the trash before I’ve read three pages. Yeah, at .99 cents a month, Mashable is worth it.

So here I am, living the Star Trek dream with instant information on my PC, virtual books on my Kindle and the ability to phone home by just pushing a button and saying, “home.”

Now, if someone can just invent an app that adds more hours to the day so I can enjoy all this new, accessible information, that would be worth at least .99 a month.

That’s my Castle quote of the week, uttered when he saw an FBI agent use her iPhone to scan a fingerprint then run it through the database, “There’s an app for that?”

The world will never be the same.