Tech Babies

I was just about to leave for work this morning when I caught a glimpse of my computer screen. My 3-year-old was busy playing his favorite game, Need For Speed: Carbon, and I noticed one amazing thing: this 3-year-old could drive!

He took the turns just as I would, out-in-out, following an imaginary racing line. The thing is, he was winning races already! Excuse the exclamation marks, I'm simply amazed. The last time I saw him drive (before I did a reformat on my hard drive a couple of weeks back) he was running into walls and running the opposite direction most of the time. Now he was unlocking the challenge series one by one, IN SUCCESSION! And not just any challenge at that. Everyone knows that NFS:C does not have any difficulty settings that one can tweak. The challenges this baby was unlocking were the pursuit evasion ones. He knew how to evade cop chases and make use of Pursuit Breakers, then make his getaway after completing the challenge requirements. If you ask me, that's amazing for a 3-year-old toddler.

I guess it's the thing with the next generation. We thought WE were high-tech. We had the gadget revolution, we had the Internet explosion. We thought we were the most tech-savvy generation of geeks. We were wrong, for sprouting all around us are these babies who are born geeks, born not with silver spoons in their mouths, but with optical mice in their hands! I guess every generation one-ups the last, eh?

Know what my kid's first coherent phrase was?

"EA Sports, it's in the game..."

I have seen tonight's eclipse yesterday...

Yes, I have seen the eclipse happening tonight. Yesterday.

No, I'm not clairvoyant, silly. I'm resourceful. I saw the lunar eclipse, as well as the 9/11/2007 partial solar eclipse (from the best viewing location in the world) and other future celestial phenomena using a software called Starry Night. It's a "planetarium" program that lets you see the night, or day, skies at any given instant (read: past, present, & future) right at the comfort of your desktop. In possession of a telescope? You can also hook it up to Starry Night and let the program control the motion and position of your telescope.

Starry Night sells for about $200 but hey, you can't put a price on education. The amount of information inside this piece of software will have Galileo jumping and dancing with glee like a kid on Christmas Morning.

Now, excuse me, I'm off to watch the real thing...

Tech thoughts from a heavily medicated techie

During my severe asthma attack last weekend (yes, I'm asthmatic), I was under all kinds of medication and it kind of altered my mind for a moment (at least that's what I'd like to think, otherwise I'd have to believe that I really don't have a normal mind).

It was in this altered state that a realization hit me: we should combine a touch screen film, a scanner, and a glove. Yes, a glove. The touch screen film goes on the monitor, and the scanner goes into the tip of the glove's index finger. That way, if we want to copy a phrase or a word out of paper, or whatever surface for that matter, We can simply run our finger across the surface and touch the screen, and voila! The scanned words would then be pasted on the screen where we touched.

It's amazing what an overdose will do to the human mind. Imagine if I had a heart attack, the kind of technologies I could invent. =)

Ice Rocket : digital, medication, scanner, technology, touch screen, weird