Great article:

“Most of us go through life seeing the glass as half empty rather than half full. If I asked you to list your problems, it would probably be easy for you. If I asked you to list all the things that were good, that were working, your list would probably be much shorter and more difficult to produce. It’s not that there aren’t many good things in our lives. It’s that we tend to focus on the negative, on the cup being half empty, rather than half full.”

What should one think when one walks into the hallway of one’s office building where one works, and finds an abandoned shopping cart with one unused green garbage bag folded up sitting in it?

Got back from getting coffee, and it was gone. I imagine that even if it was there for nefarious purposes, it can’t be all that easy to make a quick getaway with a shopping cart.

Weird.

Tales of Future Past is a website dedicated to looking back at predictions of the future, and comparing them to where we really are.

“A few years ago, people talked about building a bridge to the 21st century. Now that we’re there, the phrase seems as odd as building a causeway to five o’clock. As Midnight brought in the year 2000 (or 2001 if you prefer), something odd began to sink in. For people of my generation, who had lived through the tarnished promises of the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the Computer Age, and the This That and Another Age, the year 2001 was a gateway. We waited twenty, thirty, forty years and some longer to pass though that gate into a time when spaceships the size of ocean liners plied between colonised planets, where cities were colourful collections of brand new towers without a single old building or blade of grass, where people wore jumpsuits like they were the togas of a technocratic Rome, where robots were our powerful and obedient servants, and where jetpacks were as common as galoshes.

Boy, were we off base. It isn’t simply that the predictions were wrong. No one with half a brain really expected that sort of accuracy. And true, though some marvels did not come to pass, others that were and weren’t predicted did. We certainly live very different lives from that of our fathers and grandfathers. That is not in dispute. But what did not happen is what many expected, though never talked about much. Assuming that we dodged the 1984, Brave New World bullet, our future was supposed to be a sort of technocratic, atomic-powered, computer-controlled, antiseptic, space-travelling Jerusalem that would at last free us from the curse of Eden and original sin. We expected some how, some way that we would be on the road to being freed from the human condition. We expected a sort of bloodless, benign French Revolution with Hugo Gernsback as our Voltaire and Carl Sagan as our Robespierre. And what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo. The fact is, science fiction and popular science had set the bar so high that only the Second Coming with ray guns would have satisfied.”

View this video of a car simulator (Windows Media link) - this thing will blow your mind! It’s a platform that the driver sits on that is on hydraulics about 10 feet in the air, and it moves around significantly in response to the driver’s actions on the simulator. Oh, and I should also mention the three huge flat-screen monitors.

I want one, bad. BAD. REAL BAD.

I love smart ideas. This one struck me as particularly clever - using “kid power” to run a pump by hooking it up to a merry-go-round. What a great idea - harnessing a small part of the boundless energy of children, without any negative impact on them.

If we could think up elegant solutions like this for every problem we face, this world would be a vastly different place.

And I’m excited!

What is your ideal computing environment? Is it one place, or many? Do you only need your information when you’re sitting at your desk, or do you need it with you, wherever you go?

PDA’s have become somewhat popular to people like me who want to be able to take all of their important information with them wherever they go. But as good as they are, they still suffer from the fact that they are not able to synchronize all of my important data.

With my current combination of laptop computer and PDA, I can be “mobile� in the sense that I can pack up my laptop and lug it around for serious computing, or I can ram my PDA into a pocket on my way out the door and still have most of my data available. But there’s still something missing.

The Tablet PC is very intriguing, because along with the fact that it is smaller and lighter than a traditional laptop, it has added functionality that allows it to be used in new contexts. Until the Tablet came along, it was really not realistic to do any form of computing while standing up, with the exception of PDAs. Now, you can have a fully functional “desktop� operating system available to you while on the move.

I have to admit, I love the idea of this, and can see many new ways that a Tablet PC will enable me to do all the things I currently do, and some new things. The only problem is that the Tablet can’t really replace one particular feature of a PDA: its form factor.

So now we’re back to the original problem. For me it’s all about context – I want to be able to have full access to view and modify all of my data in whichever context makes sense most for me at that time.

I only see two somewhat viable solutions:

1. Software creators become fully aware of PDAs, and include two-way synchronization features with their products. While Microsoft has done this well with some applications (Outlook), it has done a dismal job with other applications like Word and Excel. If Microsoft can’t get it together, who else will

2. A variable-size tablet PC.

Let me explain the second one a bit more, since I believe this is the only truly viable solution. This would essentially be a “modular� PC, where the CPU, memory, and hard drive all exist in a PDA-sized unit which includes a touch-screen, and is in fact a PDA. However it will run a full desktop operating system, with features to make the reduced screen resolution and touch-screen interface bearable, even convenient. This unit will then have the ability to dock into a tablet (slate) PC shell that includes a full-sized display, proper tablet pen digitizer input, and a larger battery. This tablet PC will then also be able to dock at a workstation, much as current tablets do.

Obviously I’m talking about something we won’t see for a few years, but at least it is something that is possible. In the near-term, I believe that Tablet PC functionality could and should become a standard part of any mobile PC. All of the functionality that is included in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition should be standard within all versions of XP, whether the system it is running on has the hardware to take advantage of it or not.

Microsoft, please don’t screw up the Tablet PC. It is arguably the best idea to come out of Redmond in the past 10 years, and from all appearances you’re letting it languish. I want to believe Scoble, but seeing is believing.

Check out InstaSnow, another “if you’re trying to find the perfect present for me” type of product. Totally useless (as far as I can tell), but incredibly cool, nonetheless. Here’s the main page that has links to different video files of different formats showing a demonstration of the stuff, as well as links for more information about it, and here’s a direct link to the high-quality Windows Media version of the video.

What do you get when you cross workout videos with a video game console? You get Yourself!Fitness, a new game that is being developed for Microsoft’s Xbox this fall, and for Sony’s Playstation 2 console for late this year.

I think this is a brilliant idea - and I expect that this will prove to be the beginning of a new market space. What better way to exploit the processing power of a modern game console then by using it to improve on what is already a very solid industry, that of exercise videos. Imagine celebrity versions, as workout videos already have - that’s the obvious next step. But the interesting thing is trying to imagine where this market might go!