I’m not going to indulge in the shopworn habit of doing a year-end review or making predictions for the new year. Feh. Old mold and who cares. Instead, I am going to share my list of Most Wanted Computer Things.

Number One most wanted thing:
Inexpensive color printing and binding for the home and small business user. Inexpensive color printing is already within our grasp, if printer manufacturers weren’t gouging us on inks. Geez, guys, you give greed a bad name. Home Print-on-Demand is the killer app of the 21st century. Print out newspapers, magazines, even books ours own selves. It’s a natural- why maintain warehouses of inventory and a big shipping network, especially for transient publications?

Number two:
Voice-recognition software that works for both commands and dictation. You know, like on Star Trek. We’re never going to have powerful, useful portable devices until we do away with keyboards.

Number three:
Websites that don’t suck. I know, this is a perennial forlorn wish. Digg.com, for one famous example, since its site re-design is so slow and lardy it redlines a 3.4GHz processor. WTF does a Web page need that many CPU cycles just to scroll the page? Very slowly?

Number four:
And finally, I wish to have enough time and money to indulge in a grand World Tour to meet all my online friends I have yet to meet in person. I figure six leisurely months should be sufficient. Or maybe twelve. :)