wgc blog

I have to say it. I don’t use all these social/web 2.0 apps to be social. Really. I mostly use them to share my info with myself. It’s a secondary effect that I can share my stuff with you. Take flickr. I can share my pictures with you, and at the same time I can (a) backup my pictures across all of my machines and (b) make them available with a consistent user interface to all machines that I currently own as well as those I may own in the future. That’s gold to me. It’s one more thing I can cross off my list of “Things I would be happy to never have to worry about again”(tm)

Hot water is at the top of my list. If I never had to worry about having hot water at my house again I would be ever so happy. I’ve done a lot of work on my house in the last two years. One of the things I really want to do is install a tankless (i.e. on-demand) hot water heater. This would mean that I would never have to worry about when I could take a shower based on things like (a) is there laundry running, (b) is the dishwasher running, (c) did one of my housemates just take a really long shower and use up all the hot water? Those thoughts would never again cross my mind. The concept of running out of hot water would be like running out of cold water, which if it does ever happen signifies some bigger problems.

Einstein allegedly had 7 suits, one for each day of the week. This way he didn’t have to waste time thinking about what to wear today. I’m no Einstein, but I am into making life easier. He made his life easier by taking a choice out of it. That choice, made daily adds up over your life to a good amount of time and energy…time and energy that is better spent somewhere else.

Okay, so what do I have on my technology oriented Never-Again-Worry List:

• I would be happy to never have to personalize a computer and install all of my software. I usually spend about 2 days customizing a new machine when I get it. I’ve been really thinking about using Virtual PC’s to help solve this. If it was easier to migrate to a new machine, I’d probably buy more of them. I’m a complete sucker for newer/faster/multi-core processors, more RAM, USB 3.0, and 802.11 zeta. Make it easy for me to transition and I’ll fork out more money you crazy vendors you.

• Remembering or even dealing with a phone number. This is almost there, but if I lose my phone I’m hosed for a while. I often have to edit the numbers in my phone when I travel abroad to add or remove country codes. Context is one of the keys to solving this problem…and companies like Tellme seems to be well on the way to giving it a shot.

• Managing my music. I really need flickr (in the way I use it) for my music. Or a last.fm that actually stores all my content. I have over 50 gig’s of sound on various machines of mine. I would have a lot more if I didn’t lose 2 hard drives on an old machine. (Boo!) Will somebody write a music manager that just sits on top of amazon s3 and caches my high volume songs to cut down on bandwidth costs. Please. Someone. Please.

What do you want to never have to worry about again?