Perhaps we will soon see CDs and DVDs go by the wayside as a preferred media for movie viewing. I just saw a USB memory stick or flash drive or whatever you want to call them, with 8 Gig of memory! That's enough for two full-length featured films! One a device that can fit on your key chain! You can now run your movies through a viewing/capture program, and then dump them to your key chain! Then when you go over to Harlod's house to use his wall-sized ultra plasma home entertainment center with wireless surround sound and Dolby 25 MegaBlast stereo in his sunken living room with Internet access, just throw him your keys and say, ?I brought the movie, you supply the brews.? Imagine how impressed he'll be when he pops it into his PC and the Windows Media player starts the movie automatically! Ah, technology, where is thy end?



You can also use the things to haul around your latest home projects, like all 20+ hours of that edited home video stuff; imagine dropping in on your neighbor with a week-end's worth of home videos? What could be more exciting?

Now you can also store all your ?special? stuff, you download from those video sites that you searched for under ?sexy?, ?hot?, ?totally hot?, etc. You can also buy a bunch of USB hand drives and store things on them by categories. No more taking up valuable HDD space when you can slap it onto a USB and view it virtually anywhere, even down at the library! Their PCs have USB slots, right? All those crazy videos that you morphed into totally weird and awesome movie works of art using Avnex's Movie Morpher Gold can now be instantly produced out of your shirt pocket. The next time someone thinks you have some thing up your sleeve, pull out the USB with Uncle Harry doing the Cha-Cha at the last family picnic. The possibilities are endless, and we haven't even talked about audio!

Say you put all your audio files on one of those 8 giggers; how many songs would that be anyway? Eight thousands? Probably some room left for a program or two? Certainly room enough for those voice files you created in Voice Changer Software Diamond from Avnex, you know, the ones you use in the MMRPGs? What a great time to be alive, eh? What can't you put on one of those little babies? Well, please don't put any information on there you'd want falling into the wrong hands, such as your SS#, any bank account info, basically any personal information, especially financial. There are encryption programs that allow information to be securely copied and stored, but I could never remember the clever code words I'd invent to encrypt the data, so I just don't put it anywhere electronic, nor should you.

So, with there seeming to be no limit on how small they can make storage devices, pretty soon we'll all be able to carry around the combined written knowledge of the ages on a key ring. Until then, enjoy your tunes and video just about anywhere.

BIO: Wayne Rice is a freelance journalist, copywriter, photographer and artist. He currently resides in the United States.