Omarstradamus returns

No, not the Twitter account, just my now-annual attempt to gaze into the future of personal tech. It was Monday’s Digital Savant column, written ahead of vacation, predicting what I think might happen in 2012 in technological areas important to our lives such as:

• What’s the deal with Netflix?
• And Facebook? What’s up with THAT?
• OH MY GOD, WHAT ABOUT APPLE!? We should have asked about Apple first! Tell us, O Oracle!
• Will I die? Please be honest.

Incidentally, here were my 2011 predictions. I’m so glad I didn’t predict we’d be in flying cars by December like I had originally planned.

I have another column coming next Monday that I wrote before the lengthy vacation into which I am currently nuzzling my warm puppy nose.

In the paper this week, I also had some blog pieces reverse-published including this write-up of Grande Communications’ new TiVo Premere box and a review of Sony’s 24″ 3D Display.

Mostly this week it’s been quiet and I’ve been trying to rest up after a really, really busy weekend with family and with the girls. One break in the vacation that was a surprise, though, was that I got a call on Friday to appear on NPR’s Tell Me More. The live segment was produced on Tuesday morning and you can hear/read the whole thing on this page. It’s about Amazon’s Price Check app and small retailers. I had a whole page of notes about how the app works, where the tech comes from and who else is doing stuff in this area, but we didn’t really get to any of that. Instead, I got to say, in a nutshell, “Yeah, I can see why business owners would be upset.” Very different pace than All Things Considered or At Issue with Ben Merens, but the behind-the-scenes of it was that they run a very tight to-the-minute ship even though it sounds pretty free-flow. Even when things like this are unpaid (and the only time I’ve ever been paid for radio stuff was with All Tech), it’s still a good lesson to see how these shows work and to get a sense of what their producers do or don’t know about tech culture and trends.

The girls I mentioned before have been running us ragged, fighting over new toys and getting up at all hours of the night, completely wired and destabilized for the holiday season. They went back to daycare yesterday and I’ve been enjoying the relative daytime quiet before they come home and it turns into something out of Mad Max to get them bathed, fed and to bed.

On the other hand, it was nice not to have deadlines and a bunch of stuff to write and to be able to just hang out with them or with family without stuff hanging over my head like most years. Why was I thinking I’d be doing a bunch of work this week? That was dumb. I’m going to go run through like 20 hours of sitcoms, read some books and do some baking instead. Who wants cookies?