As if micro weren't enough - without even realising, were're stepping into the age of the nano. Microcomputers are so last centuary. If you're reading this 20 years from the date of writing, really sorry that I'm using pretty last-decade words here, but today, at the horizon, we're talking about the dawn of quantum-channel-based communications, DNA computing, nanorobotics and genetic therapy.

Yes, so much so that we keep on losing the big picture, the long-term view. Remember, at the dawn of navigation, we used to use stars as our guiding lights. And before we the industrialisation, we used to build everything to last forever. Now, everything has an expiry date. A namespace. A domain. A locale. We forget how the whole system is held together, how one nanosecond flows into the next and how the next flows into eternity. How boats on a stream that lightly knock against each other actually take on individual lives and lifestories after that brief and anonymous encounter on the floating market. Put it bluntly, we seem to have stepped into the age of one-night-stands. Transient, isolated and intense.

My maid (aka domestic helper; just in case "maid" still means unmarried woman where you're coming from) just went off to the airport. It's been a good one year. She came not knowing anything, even innocently tossing some of our plastic covers into the bin, not knowing the difference between plastic covers that keep lenses safe and disposible plastic packaging that come with the food we buy at convenient stores.

It is hard to imagine the depth of the journey that she's gone through in her stay here. So many things we take for granted must have been pretty challenging for her, as much as it is to us if we had to live in a distant and strange land. And even harder to grasp is how her life, after she's gone back, will continue in parallel to ours, even though we may not make contact ever again. How (if I may borrow a term from computing - not that I haven't been doing so :P) massively multi-threaded the real-world is! (Oh yes, and how real-time it is also...)

Ya, it is an exciting world. But how very helpless it also makes me feel everytime I attempt to grasp how the whole tapestry is held together.