Living 2005

This year my mantra has largely been
“Live life and use technology as if it is the year 2005”.

By and large I’m getting there – My car has a lot of technology built in. I’ve got wireless internet at home. I can surf from anywhere in my house. I’ve streamlined my ability to migrate across various computers (I’ve used at least 4 different computers as a primary machine in the past half year) by using online services such as Google Reader, Google Mail and other tools. I’ve also got my iPod, kitted out with an iTrip for broadcast and an iTalk for recording.

Sure there are probably still a lot of places I can improve, but at least I’m trying.

And then I look around at the world that surrounds me, and I’ve managed to identify a whole slew of problems where society is not living like it’s 2005:

• The easy ones : poverty, unemployment, war etc…
• Dial-up modems – these should have been banned years ago (Thanks for nothing Telkom). In general bandwidth in South Africa is non-existent.
• No user-centric design and ergonomics in the average work environment.
• No successful online music store in South Africa
• Non-existent South African web services and location-based services – my kingdom for an API to maps of South Africa.
• People still queue at banks/department stores to do simple financial transactions
• Too many cars with only one person in them on the roads (Lack of public transport)
• Phone (mobile and landline) costs are way too high, where is Push-To-Talk?
• Micropayments are still not really a reality.
• Telecommuting is largely frowned upon. (because large companies lack the expertise and foresight to set it up)
• Oh, there’s a lot more – I’ll post ’em as I come across them.

Add comments if you think of more ways in which we are not living up to our era…