I’ve been in a few parallel universes recently and am noticing it happening more and more. I like parallel universes – it always smells like opportunity to me (plus I get to see how another “species” lives.)
The parallel universes aren’t just technology-based, but they often inform how I think about stuff. For example, my recent time in Italy on vacation was a completely parallel universe to my current time in the US bouncing between Boulder and Silicon Valley. And my day in Silicon Valley yesterday was another dimension of this (compared to the rest of the US.)
Even more specifically, I spent the day on Microsoft’s campus in Silicon Valley, which is a parallel universe to the rest of (a) Silicon Valley and (b) the contemporary software startup industry.
We can get even more granular. I’ve spent the last 58 minutes (since I woke up) waiting for Outlook to finish synchronizing itself over EVDO (namely my deleted and sent items folders) since I forgot to do this on my high speed network at home. Two weeks of not turning on my laptop (one week of being home and using desktops and one week of vacation) resulted in 100 godzillabytes of deleted data (which I don’t care about anyway since I don’t keep my deleted email) that now wants to sync itself over a small pipe. Simultaneously I’ve been using OWA on the [very slow] web just so I can do email while Outlook is spending an hour fixing itself (feel free to substitute Gmail for OWA.)
Don’t even get me started about Facebook and my social graph which happily lives in Outlook. I noticed that I have only logged into Facebook a couple of times since I got back from vacation – and that was mostly to check that nothing had happened except another 30 friend requests (ok – I played with J-Squared’s Glitter and looked at the Defrag Connector.)
I wonder if I’ll stumble into a wormhole tonight at dinner with Amy.