Hardware technicians are always going to have to be local, too. Of course, you're often working for the same type of companies and being treated as badly as the IT guys, but if you know your way around the inside of a PC, a printer, even just the basics of physical networking infrastructure, there's a market for those skills too.
Speaking as a local hardware support tech (for a Fortune 100) who is in the process of being outsourced to an Indian support group, I have to disagree.
Fedex is the great leveler for hardware support. It (apparently) becomes cheaper to package it up and ship halfway across the world than to keep someone on staff to handle local issues. Sure, the users will have to wait a week or two for problem resolution, but when looked at from the executive suite, that's a problem only for the individual user, not the company.
As for knowing your way around a printer, most large companies have been using throwaway printers for small workgroups for years. In larger settings, Xerox and Ricoh offer high volume systems with service contracts. The local support guy is quickly going the way of the farrier; the need won't completely vanish, but will be reduced drastically in coming years.
Now I'm headed back to college for a BS in Psychology. I dropped out of an IT program during the dot-com days, but I have little interest in continuing work in an increasingly commoditized field. It's time to learn how to hack humans.
Every degree on your thermostat will save you about 3%. If you don't have a 7-day programmable thermostat, get one with 4 states, wake, leave, return and sleep. Increase the sleeping and leave temps to 85degF and then set to 78degF for the other periods. They are less than $100 and would pay for itself in a few months. Depending on the orientation (North, etc) of the windows, replacing inefficient single panes with double panes that have some reflective properties that can lower the solar gain significantly. With the economy in shambles, you can get construction work done at a great discount. Depending on the number of windows you need done, you can get them for about $300-$600 a window.
85F and 78F? Are you drying meat inside the house?!?
In winter, I program for wake: 70F, leave: 64F, return: 70F, and sleep 62F. (Summer is 74F, 85F, 75F, 72F) If you get cold at night, add a blanket. If I run the heat above 70F, everyone in the house complains that it's too warm. Of course, we try to keep the humidity 40%+ inside the house to help hold in some warmth. (And avoid the static nastiness that low humidity can cause.)
Of course, I live in the central US, where winter is 45F/35F and summer is 100F/85F, and our energy prices (electric and gas) are essentially unregulated, so we get gouged. Electric for my 3 bed, 1000sq/ft "ranch"-style house ranges from $35/mo in winter to $300/mo+ in summer, with gas going from $150/mo+ in winter to $15/mo in summer.
Still, if you're going to make jerky, get a smoker, don't hang it from the family room lamps.
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer