Last Saturday around sunset, I went out to do some photography on a bridge here in Portland. I brought my trusty 6-megapixel camera, and quickly shot a couple dozen images. Then I wandered over to a casual little cyberpunk coffeehouse. I bought some chai, found a table, and pulled an inch-thick silver supercomputer out of my tote and powered it up. It automatically detected the presence of a free 54-megabit wireless network connection -- operated by a local anarchist collective, nice guys really -- and seconds later I was jacked into cyberspace, where I could access virtually any information in the world solar system. I pulled a tiny half-gigabyte chip out of the camera, plugged it into the computer, and uploaded the images I'd just shot. A number of them had overlapping frames, so I instructed the computer to assemble them into a 32-megapixel panormaic image, which would be razor-sharp at 40" wide (not too shabby for a hand-held image shot in low light!). While I waited for the computer to accomplish this, I casually sipped my Chai and browsed through the latest images from Mars and Saturn. Once the image was assembled, I emailed it to a photographer friend of mine in India -- by way of showing off -- and five minutes later I received an enthusiastic "cool!" in reply.

Somewhere in the midst of these activities, I experienced an acute sort of future shock. It suddenly occurred to me that everything I was doing was just IMPOSSIBLY futuristic; that, flying cars and murderous replicants and perpetually overcast weather aside, I was basically living in Bladerunner land. And I liked it. A LOT. Ten or fifteen years ago, if you'd shown me this brief slice of my perfectly ordinary future life, I would never have believed it possible. I wonder what mundane life will look like ten or fifteen years from now?

Cheers,

Nathan.

Oh, and for the curious, here's the image that I shot. Just not all 32 megapixels of it. Not as impossibly great as the latest stuff coming in from Saturn, admittedly, but kind of nifty nonetheless: