Recently I did an interview on Radio 3RRR, on Rob Jan's long-running Zero G program, to promote my novel. Rob put the interview up on the web site in an MP3 download. For some reason I couldn't get it on my computer (and I'm still having trouble working out the joys of downloads - so far, it's impossible for me to download the BBC radio show of The Technicolor Time Machine, which I've always wanted to hear.). So I bought a USB stick and managed to get it down with no trouble on the computer at my mother's home. Then I brought it home and have popped the file on to my own computer. (The first time Rob reviewed one of my books on his show, I was lucky to get a cassette).

Thing is, the simple USB stick has nearly three times the memory on my first laptop. And THAT - one of those great little Macintosh clamshells - had 3 g - a lot more than my first computer, a Mac Classic II, which had about 4 megabytes on it.

For somebody like me, who grew up in an era when computers were just things that were kept in universities and science labs, who actually punched cards at RMIT for a survey we did during librarianship, this is science fiction stuff.

All my life I've dreamed of the day when I could call somebody up and talk to them on the screen, seeing each other's faces - and here we are with Skype. Once I work out how to get that started I am going to have such fun!

Remember those floppy disks they used on Star Trek to program the food replicator? We've gone beyond the floppy disks, but while we still don't have a food replicator, it's not impossible. While researching nanotechnology for a children's chapter book, I read an article in New Scientist that said it might be possible to do a food replicator using nano tech. I hope this is still the case, because I wrote a story based on the premise, "Grey Goo" which was published by Nelson/Cengage.

When I was a child, I thought how nice it would be to buy films like records. Now you can download them from the Net.

Books? Well, we're still arguing over the merits of e-books, but hey, my new novel is available that way already. I do prefer to curl up with a physical book and you can't get an expert to help you choose your books on-line, but it will be nice and convenient to be able to take all those books with me on the train. Given that we already have e-readers I wonder what they'll be using by the time of all those SF books we read?

For anyone who's better at downloading podcasts than I am, there was a prgram on the ABC the other day, Three Hundred and Sixty Degrees, which is on Thursday mornings, and last week's was on science and SF.