A friend told me recently that she'd seen an article in a magazine that said in the next five years we would have achieved more technological advancements than in the past 1000 years. Holograms, virtual keyboards, virtual everything almost are on the not-so-distant horizon.

It's kind of exciting and also a bit daunting to try to keep up with it all. It's not that I'm a complete Luddite or anything. Thanks to an electric Golfball typewriter my mum brought home from the company she worked at during my teens, I learned to touch-type at high speeds. Early computers, however, had me flummoxed. A temp job at age 18 in an office at aforementioned company saw my efforts at mastering the art of DOS and its weird codes on an unwelcoming black and white screen, which might as well have been HAL in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, fail miserably. Apparently I deleted a shitload of important files and caused the damn machine to crash.

Fast forward several years to the mid 1990s. My girlfriend and I had the idea for our first book and the thought of typing it on the now rather old Golfball wasn't appealing but neither was the prospect of a repeat performance with the company computer. Enter my friend Mandy's friend Becky's boyfriend Richard, a rocket scientist (I'm not kidding!). Dear, geeky Richard helped me buy my first Windows-based PC. The pretty pictures and a 'mouse' to click on them totally grew on me and I was hooked. I was one of the earlier adopters of the internet, bagging a personal website when only a handful of weird people had them and when you had to load several floppy disks to set up your email and internet connection for a dial-up connection more suited to a tortoise.

Nowadays I communicate more by email with people than any other means, my typing speed has increased even more, I'm on MySpace and Facebook and know how to IM even though I choose not to. I can even convert music files and download them into my MP3 player. Texting until recently was the thorn in my techno side. My well-trained QWERTY typing fingers were loathe to hand over tapping duties to my thumbs, which were having a hard time locating the letters on a standard mobile phone layout. But, not wanting to be left behind in a modern world, I purchased a Dopod mobile which has a little pull-out QWERTY keyboard. It's too small to do touch typing but at least my thumbs know where the letters are and I can now text. Whew.

But technological advancement isn't without its problems. Forget 'tennis elbow'; according to the Brisbane Times, a New Zealand student has been diagnosed with the country's first known case of 'text-messager's thumb' or, to use the posh term, 'texting tenosynovitis', due to sending up to 100 texts a day.

The machines may be getting smarter, but I guess humans are not.