Week 16: My Reaction to "Shift Happens" Video

Near the end of the video, a statement caught my eye. It said that it is nearly impossible to make predictions about technology more than 15 years in advance. I immediately thought of an article I read a few weeks ago. The article was about how Steve Jobs had predicted WiFi and the iPad. At the bottom of the article, it had a link to a long speech he made in 1983. I actually listened to the entire speech and was enthralled. Here is the article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/03/steve-jobs-1983-speech_n_1935815.html

What I think is amazing about this article and the attached soundbyte is that people are calling him this amazing “fortune teller” who could predict the future when, in actuality, he was just outlining a roadmap for what he was going to do. He made the iPad happen. He didn’t foresee it - he thought of it, then proceeded to spend the next 30 years doing it.

That’s what’s so phenomenal about the age we live in. You can “dream” and, in your lifetime, make that dream come true. Because things are moving so fast, and people are living longer, you can see the fruits of your labor actually materialize. Steve Jobs was able to enjoy the iPad before he died and he was able to see his dreams come true.

I went to an engineering college in the early 1990s and have many friends who are software engineers. I remember my C++ grad assistant, Das (yes, that is his name, though maybe I’m the only one who gets the joke now) telling me that, in India, many of his friends had their own cell phones. This was in 1994. He said someday, we would all get a phone number when we got our first cell phones and we would have that phone number for the rest of our lives. That was silly to think of because, as a college student, you moved at least once a year and were constantly changing your darn phone number. I told Das that that would be pretty cool. I now have a phone number, that I got back in 1999 in San Francisco, and I do believe I will have this 415 phone number until the day I die.

I think it’s wonderful what we’re accomplishing in the world today, in biotechnology, astrophysics, chemistry, and computers, and I have no doubt that further generations will solve the seemingly baffling or irreversible problems ours and previous generations have caused. I believe the problems will be solved because human beings are a truly remarkable species. I grew up seeing streets and beaches littered with trash and recyclables and, just 30 years later, I see an exponential change in people’s awareness about our Earth and what we’ve done to it and what we need to do to fix it. Even my parents, born in the 1940s, recycle and seem very conscious of their effect on the environment.

Yes, I believe we will persevere, and we humans will be around a long time because, like Steve Jobs, you don’t have to sit back and make predictions, you can actually make things, great things, big things, happen and live to see the difference firsthand.

Week 15: Urban/Suburban/Rural Life

This week, we are supposed to reflect on the changes we have seen in urban, suburban, or rural life in recent years. I have had the privilege of living in all types of environments, so I will comment on them all.

When I was ten years old, my father retired from the military and we moved to rural New Hampshire where my dad became the general manager for a second-home resort community.  We lived in the middle of the woods, no neighbors, no mailman, no garbage man, no house numbers, no cable. We heated our house using a woodstove. Many of the kids on my bus lived in tar-paper shacks with no running water. Some had to take showers in the nurse’s office at school. There were very few jobs to be found. Many were seasonal, so my friends’ dads would cut and sell wood in the summer and plow driveways in the winter. My high school was 40 minutes away on the highway and all some of my friends were long-distance on the telephone. We eventually did get a number on our house (we picked “10”) so that we could get 911 service. And I hear they opened a new store in the town I grew up in. But I think it’s generally the same. They closed the beloved ski area we used to go to with school on Fridays. I think the weather has warmed up enough that some of the little ski areas just don’t get enough snow to stay in business. I couldn’t wait to flee that rural area and many of my friends did the same – we left for the big city, never to return. I do have some friends who stayed though, and, with the Internet I don’t think they feel nearly as isolated as we did as when we were young.

In 1999, my husband and I headed West and lived in the city of San Francisco, where we lived for five years. There, we found an apartment in the Marina district, with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge from our third-floor window. The Marina was close to the water, surrounded by Russian Hill, Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Presidio. It was an all-white neighborhood with lots of little restaurants and shops. This was in 1999, so the gentrification of San Francisco was in full-swing. We had friends who were ready to gut or renovate $800,000 fixer-uppers in “up-and-coming” neighborhoods, just so they could own a piece of the city. We couldn’t fathom paying that much money for an old dilapidated flat in a bad neighborhood, so we headed East. We do have friends who stuck it out, saved their money, mortgaged themselves to the hilt, and settled down and started a family in San Francisco. It has gotten out of hand as far as price, but some of the neighborhoods that we would never have considered living in 10 years ago (like Potrero Hill) are now nice enough that we might consider it if we moved back.

In Charlotte, NC, we were able to witness full-fledged suburbia, and I fell in love. It was a place I’d always dreamed of living when I was a kid. We lived in a 90-home planned community, where everyone had the same exact 1980s brick colonial, with huge lots and tons of families, events, and gatherings to keep you busy. Now, in Charlotte, as opposed to San Francisco, parking was a dream. We couldn’t believe how much space there was. But you had to get into your car every time you left the house. There were no sidewalks, and everything was so far away (not to mention the darn heat), that you wouldn’t want to walk anyway. During the time we lived there, we saw a housing boom, then a big bust. We were able to make a profit on our house before moving to Northern VA, but we were lucky. When we visited Charlotte last summer, it was like a ghost town. Many new housing developments were just sitting there, half-finished and vacant. And a lot of the businesses we had frequented were boarded up, out of business. This was due to the bank crash and the fact that Wachovia and Bank of America are the main employers in Charlotte and they were hit hard by the financial crisis of 2008.

I have lived in all three types of environments and they all have their advantages and disadvantages. I now live in Suburbia and am happy. In all three areas, population is growing, though much slower in the rural areas, where jobs are scarce. Gentrification is a thing we are seeing wherever we go - out with the old, and in with the new. In Vienna, even today, old houses are being torn down daily to build new "mcmansions".