Wizard of Oz is fantasty - but you could argue the second one is more science fiction

Sadly, I am not any further in The Wizard of Oz than I was previously. This week saw a return to reading other long-neglected books that I'd stacked up under my bedside table. One of them was "Mass Effect Revelation", a written prequel series to the game, was my favorite. The books get a lot of flack from others, but I found the pacing engaging, the new characters fresh, and the older ones you know from the games receiving good backstory.

The older I get, the more science fiction I find myself reading. I used to be a straight fantasty/wizards/elves kinda gal. But science fiction holds a lot more promise to me these days as I see our technology matching up with books that were written thirty years ago.

It's sort of like a backwards form of prediction, reading those things and seeing how close those writers were to guessing what we would have NOW. I remember when I was twelve reading the role-playing core book of "Shadowrun", a futuristic, cyberpunk game, and being astounded at the idea of having handheld devices that allowed you to store information, call people, and solve complex problems. (Or Penny's book from Inspector Gadget, for example.) We have all that now. All that and more. I remember at 15 falling madly in love with William Gibson's "Neuromancer" and yearning for the day when we would be able to "jack into" this computer based reality.

And here we are, with all of that, so widespread is the technology that we are teaching our gradeschooler's how to use it. It is awing to me.

Although, to show how far we've not come....why in the hell are most academic centers still using Internet Explorer? It's on par with AOL, Geocities, Hotmail, and Myspace. In other words, it is a creature that has long ago lumbered off to die and we should let it do so. Prodding the ancient, slow, decript, and no longer user-friendly programs to do what they no longer can quite handle seems wasteful and short-sighted.

My father still uses AOL. Then again, he just finally bought a cellphone with a long distance plan. Previously he'd used a cell phone that only made local calls, charged for sending and recieving texts, and charged a higher monthly bill than any other national carrier with far more lenient data plans.

Someday I'll get him to switch to a Gmail account.

We'll have to take it slow from there, though. I think Google Chrome would probably make his head explode.