I just nabbed this from a picture someone posted on Plurk:: (^_^)

“It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached the point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done.”

That’s a pretty wicked thought.  I mean, initially each scenario has its difficulties.  One requires an entire industrialized society while the other requires a manual operation for each utensil.  While factories can churn out millions of plastic spoons each day, washing our metal spoons requires less infrastructure. (^_^)

I love to marvel at stuff like this.  Like just a few moments ago I see an Email pop on my screen while a split second later my iPhone vibrates to alert me of the same Email.  While it would have been easy enough to hand me a note written on a 4×6″ index card, the sender opted to type an Email and send it which causes the data to be sent to the Email server, stored in a database, be routed through the network so that it reaches my computer, in addition to being made WWW connected server which my iPhone polls every once in a while.  The hardware, software, and overall infrastructure necessary to accomplish that is daunting, yet, *PING!* there’s my message.  (^_^)

Same as this, my blog.  I’ll just type a couple hundred words of whatever the heck is on my head and the moment I hit the [Publish] button, it gets sent to a database as a public document with a “?p=” number, the contents are added to another document that makes up my RSS feed, and immediately it’s available to nearly the whole frigg’n world!  I mean, DUDE!  How can that NOT be wicked? (^_^)

I chat with friends via Gtalk, Skype, YIM, and of course Second Life… Each person is from some different corner of the world; be it U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand… And I can bloody go on for a day with that list.  Yet, while we’re chatting, the moment we press enter the text crosses the world and appears on the other person’s screen!  …Following a path made up of Cat6 cable, coaxial, fiber-optics, microwave transceivers, and what-have you… Just… *FOOM!* It’s frigg’n there! XD

That’s hot. (^_^)

And, mind you, all this infrastructure to tell someone, “… Now I’m bored. (._.)” =^-^=

With more recent technologies like VOIP, Bittorrent, Cloud Computing, and so on… The infrastructure has to grow to meet a higher demand.  Everything has to scale up.  Now, we’re getting promises of Gigabit web access.  But, what does that entail?  Okay, one person with one fiber line using one Gigabit doens’t sound half bad.  But, multiply that by 80 people in one neighborhood.  What kind of hardware does it take to move 80 Gigabits per second?  Frigg’n’eck that’s a serious ton of data! =^-^=

Where am I going with this?  Heck if I know.  I keep up just well enough to know what the latest programming and modeling tools are to get my job done as quickly as possible… Which also means pulling tons more data than I push out in order to research and learn about the subject I’m after. (^_^)

This stuff is big and it’s only getting bigger as time goes by.  Just like the plastic spoon; while it is more reasonable to use one metal spoon over and over by washing it… Come time you have a picnic the convenience of having 500 plastic ones that you won’t have to wash is a tempting necessary evil, indeed. (^_^)y