It’s rare that technology thrills me. Sure I can be impressed with some technical gadget, but rarely does tech make my heart skip a beat. Today is an exception. Today I found online a picture that had me captivated.

That is what I saw and it left me breathless. It looks like a diecast replica of The Homer, from the Simpsons episode O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Can you believe that it’s a fake? That object doesn’t exist. It was created completely by computer. I was totally fooled. I actually spent 20 minutes searching on eBay and Google for one for sale. When I couldn’t find that, I tried just searching for any other mention so I could confirm its existence. Then when I Googled the creator’s name, Carlos R. Bisquertt, I discovered the truth. What a fantastic job he did.

I am just thunderstruck that something so realistic could be created with some simple tools. Check out the shadow underneath it. That is some attention to detail. The only thing I found odd were the Goodyear tires. I didn’t think any diecast maker would bother with that sort of detail because they would have to pay Goodyear for using their logo. I didn’t know what to make of that.

At the same time that I feel this thrill at how realistic a computer graphic can be made to look, I’m also a little sad. I SO wanted The Homer to be real. I would have plunked down a few hundred dollars to get one. Sadly my wallet will have to remain closed.

Btw, in case you’re wondering, I know there is a snap-together model of The Homer available. I don’t want that. Those flimsy plastic things suck.

It’s refreshing to see sexy design come from a company besides Apple. This beautiful piece of technology comes from a Inventec, an anonymous Taiwanese company you’ve almost certainly never heard of.

It recently won a 2008 iF Product Design Award. That award is about more than just good looks. That curvature in the UMPC’s body makes it easier for the user to see the screen while using the keyboard. On most UMPC’s (I’m looking at you OQO) when you open the keyboard you lose the proper alignment between your eyes and the screen. If you move the UMPC to fix the alignment then holding the keyboard becomes uncomfortable. The curvature in the UMPC-7-A solves this dilemma.

At first glance it seems Inventec has hit a home run with this, although the final judgment can only come after performing some real world tests. I do notice some flaws with Inventec’s marketing. To start with I really wish companies would spend more time thinking up some product names. I don’t want to tell people, “I want an Inventec UMPC7A!” Give it a name! Give the device an identity. Would the iPod still have its cult status if it was called the Apple V1-20?

The other thing that bothers me is the giant Inventec logo emblazoned across the bottom. Maybe I’m nitpicking but that logo is annoying. If you’re going to throw a logo in my face at least make it nice looking.

Now I wish I could give you a proper review of this but I can’t. For one it doesn’t exist. Okay, don’t spit in disgust yet. Since it won an award from iF there’s every reason to believe it will exist. Just wait a few months and it should hit stores. However, there’s also every reason to believe I won’t be able to afford it. Sucks to be poor.

I despise flying. I hate the maddening crowds at airports. I hate the small seats with no legroom that leave you wedged against some random person. I hate the flight delays that seem to come with ever increasing regularity.

That last point was discussed in The Economist. More frequent delays aren’t a figment of my enraged imagination. The problem stems from more flights than the airspace will allow. I know sounds ridiculous but flying is not a seat of the pants operation and that great big blue sky is highly regulated. Today’s air traffic control system uses multiple radar stations to keep tabs on all aircraft, which are all confined to air corridors and have their distance between them closely watched. I find the regulated distances between them amazing. Vertical separation is set at a minimum of 1000 feet at altitudes below 29,000 feet, and 2000 feet above that. Horizontal separation is set at a minimum of 5 miles. That is a huge volume of space wasted.

The amount of air traffic is growing beyond the ability of these regulations to cope. It’s simply a matter of fitting more planes in the same volume. The solution offered is a set of new government regulations under the name of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NGATS). Learn that acronym because that is too many letters to type repeatedly.

What’s really sad is we’re having a crisis of airline traffic today and NGATS isn’t even completely designed yet. The system isn’t supposed to be running until 2025 when traffic is forecast to be twice to three times what it is today. I can’t stand flying now. Imagine the misery it will be in 2024. That is of course assuming there will be no delays or glitches in NGATS deployment and that the system will function exactly as promised.

How could there ever be a problem when the group in charge of creating NGATS has an organizational chart like this.

Good ol’ government.

Why does the government have to be in charge of this at all? It’s not as if military craft are directed by these air traffic controllers. Why can’t the system be spun off into a private industry group? Everyone, business or person, who owns an aircraft will have to pay a yearly membership fee to fund this group that runs the private air traffic control system. No matter how you set it up, I think the big commercial airlines will control how it’s run. They own the most planes after all. The only problem I can see is protecting small airlines and personal aircraft from being shut out of the system by large airline companies. You’ll have to guarantee their rights in the founding charter of the group, and perhaps organize it so revisions to the charter would need the approval of the FAA.

The real solution though is Free Flight, but I can’t see it ever happening. Free Flight would do away with ground based air traffic controllers. Instead aircraft would use the GPS to track their own position in the air and broadcast the data. You would receive the data from other aircraft’s transponders and instruments in the cockpit would display all the aircraft surrounding you. It’s like putting an air traffic controller on board every plane. This would do away with contrived air lanes and allow pilots to choose direct routes to their destination; saving a lot of time and fuel in the process.

I think it’s a fantastic idea. It would do away with the massive bureaucracy of air traffic control, and for that reason it will never happen. Without air traffic control the FAA would simply be the aircraft inspection agency. They would never willingly let go of control over how people fly in the US. Guess I’ll be putting more miles on my car.

Just a day after I start to want a scooter I run across the GreenEmotor company. This company produces electric powered scooters. Sounds great doesn’t it? One of my concerns about actually getting a scooter is the frequency of trips to the gas station. Sure these things get about 60 to 80 miles to the gallon, but they only carry about one and a half gallons. So every 150 miles I’m stopping to refill, which is about twice as often as my car. An electric scooter would be a welcome break from the gas station.

Plus these scooters look pretty good. I’m not sure if GreenEmotor builds their own or if they convert another brand from gas to electric though. Either way they aren’t bad scooters. I don’t care much for the names though. Using “E” as a prefix is so generic. I’m not going to grow attached to something that doesn’t have a name. If they want to highlight the whole electric propulsion thing, pick a name that sounds like electricity. Electra jumps to mind.

There is one big thing that bothers me about these scooters. They have such crappy performance. Check out the specs page. They have a maximum speed of 30 mph; half of a gas powered scooter. That makes it really difficult to take this on a main road. Worse yet they only get 40 miles to a charge! I didn’t like the idea of refueling every 150 miles. I sure don’t like the idea of recharging every 40 miles. I don’t care if I can do it in my house. Every time I get on the road I’ll constantly be thinking about my range.

Sorry treehuggers, this scooter is just sub-par. You have to be a hardcore environmentalist to put up with the lousy performance. A 40 mile range is nothing. If someone could double that, then maybe I would reconsider. The speed should be at least 40 mph too. You have to reach the speed limit on a main road otherwise you shouldn’t be driving there. Electric scooters aren’t a terrible idea, but these just aren’t good enough for daily life. Such a shame too because I was really pumped about this at first.

Soon I will need to test some webpages and that means viewing them in a variety of environments. It’s easy to install Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera on your Windows machine, and say all done. That will cover probably 95% of everyone who visits your site. To be really thorough I’m going to try and test in an Apple environment as well. I sure as hell don’t want to give thousands to that egotist Steve Jobs just to look at a few websites, so I am going to take an alternative route.

PearPC is an amazing bit of software that you use to simulate Apple’s operating system on your Windows system. I’ve only heard of this though; never actually used it myself. So this is going to be a grand experiment for me. In between writing this and lounging in bed I am setting it up on my PC.

I’m a little excited about it. I have shunned Apple for as long as I was aware of computers. My one and only time using an Apple computer was a mess. It was one of the first of those candy colored iMacs. The computing center at college was divided between PCs and Macs. All the PCs were taken but there were rows and rows of available Macs. All I wanted to do was check my email so I figured why not give them a try. I stepped up to one and grabbed that hockey puck mouse. I was already aware of the complaints about it but that still didn’t prepare me for how uncomfortable it was. But I persevered and stood there and tried to figure out how to telnet using an iMac. I stood there awhile. I couldn’t find a link and I couldn’t find a command line anywhere. So after five minutes of scratching my head and banging that terrible mouse on the desk like a caveman, I gave up and got in line for the Windows PCs.

I hope I set this up right. I would like to see what the fuss is about.

I don’t really understand why this exists, but Kevin Federline has his own search engine. I can’t imagine he had this idea himself. I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous though. Either one of his friends suggested this, but that couldn’t be because they would know as little about the Internet as he would, or K-Fed has a staff working to promote his image. However the very idea of people making a living off of Kevin Federline’s celebrity seems laughable. A celebrity-branded search engine seems like such a ridiculous idea by itself. Maybe one of Federline’s friends did think of this.

Whoever cooked up this cockamamie scheme tried to give people a compelling reason to use it. When you search you’re entered into a prize drawing, but the prizes are awfully weak. So far I’ve seen “Entry into Autograph Sweepstakes” and “Kevin Federline T-Shirt” as prizes. If K-Fed wants to get more publicity than a few blogs sarcastically mocking him he needs to up the ante. I would totally switch over to this search engine if there prizes like “Have Kevin Federline serve you lunch at Burger King” or “Make Kevin pump your gas”. Demeaning? Sure. But I’m certain there will be cameras on him.

Microsoft is finally selling its brand new operating system, Vista, and they’re making sure the world knows it. They’ve had acrobats on billboards in cities around the world, put LeBron James in commercials, paid TV networks to alter their between show graphics to copy Vista’s flip screen feature, and paid for a slew of traditional advertising too. Microsoft isn’t saying how much all this costs, but the Windows XP launch cost $200 million.

I planned on ignoring this hoopla until I realized one person is going to ask me about this. This would be a particular coworker who often comes to me with computer issues. She won’t start asking about Vista right away but I know she will in a couple of weeks after the advertising sinks into her brain. I can already hear the questions. So tonight I was doing some preemptive research. Yes I already had my preconceived notions about Vista. For the last year I’ve heard the angry cries from the nerd community about the DRM being built in. I had pretty much written off ever using it. I figured the DRM checks and user license verification would be so onerous, Vista would not be worth the trouble of installing. I planned to stick with XP for a few more years before finally moving to some type of Linux in the future.

Anyway I started searching for some concrete complaints about Vista. Eventually I found my way to Bad Vista, an anti-Vista website set up by the Free Software Foundation. I looked through it and I am left dumbfounded by the FSF. That site is of no use to the average person trying to learn why people have a problem with this new operating system. Bad Vista is a site written for linux zealots. The site provides a few links to free software, but in the section “What’s wrong with Microsoft Windows Vista,” which I was expecting to be a gold mine of info, it had nothing. They said to read their news section and left four links to long articles I don’t have the energy to pretend to care about. Titling your article with “Microsoft’s Suicide Note” does not give me a reason to read it. Really those articles were written so zealots could read them and whip themselves into a frenzy bitching about Microsoft. Most likely while chatting on IRC.

If those Free Software people want to persuade a regular person to avoid Vista, they need some accessible content. Title your articles with something that lets me know it will answer my question. How about starting off the page with a bulleted summary. If you can get your complaints down to soundbytes, people will pay attention. Just link the bullets to more details. If I want to know more, I can always click.

I continued my search beyond Bad Vista but I didn’t get much info. If I understood it right, the DRM complaint is that videos with a content protection flag will require Vista to check if your monitor is HDCP compliant. If it is not, either the video won’t play or will play at a lower resolution. Only videos that have copyright protection are affected by this. I think this means that, for example, if I download a copy of an HD-DVD, I should have no trouble playing it because an HD-DVD disc needs to have its content protection broken to copy it in the first place. So the only people screwed here are those with legit copies of videos, but do not have monitors with HDCP. Do I understand this issue right? It seems like much ado about nothing.

If this is the only problem with Vista, then my mind has been changed. I see no reason to avoid this operating system. I’m not gonna bother to run out and get a copy now because I would rather other people work out the bugs first, but that just means I’ll be considering Vista in a year. I would love for someone to come along who can talk about this, and other Vista issues I don’t know about. After hearing phrases like “chock full of DRM” I have a hard time believing this one piffling issue is the cause of so much hot air.

Crap, as soon as I post here, I spot this story about Gateway on Slashdot. It’s sad but honestly it could have been said 5 years ago. Maybe longer. The PC business is pretty well fixed and has been for years.

I found this out last year when I was actually shopping for PCs to outfit the mortgage office. The first stop is, of course, Dell. That’s where you go to get a baseline reading of what you can buy and for how much. Everything else is comparison shopping. Sadly there is no longer much to compare. After Dell you can look at HP but those prices are either the same or worse, and the cases are uglier.

Some people might suggest Apple. The nicest thing I can think to say about those people are that they are blind to spending twice the price on a pretty case. Anything Apple makes can be bought cheaper somewhere else. It just won’t look candy-coated. Of course then these people will have to go on about their love for OS X. Whatever. I’m not buying a computer so that every component and every piece of software I use has to come from the same company. How these people live with the irrationality of hating Microsoft’s monopoly but evangelizing Apple’s tighter, albeit smaller, monopoly I’ll never know.

But I’m getting off topic… technically I could have used Mac Minis for the computer lab, but I still couldn’t for the processor’s computer. That needs Encompass and that won’t run on a Mac.

After looking at HPs, I remembered Gateway still existed. I checked out their site and damn was I disappointed to see they’re way overpriced with hideous cases. At the time, I think the cheapest desktop was $900? This was compared to a $400 desktop at Dell or HP. I was determined to find some alternatives to Dell and HP. Well, I pretty much failed. eMachines was bought by Gateway so they don’t exist. Alienware and Falcon Northwest only make premium (insanely expensive) computers so they were out. Sony Vaios are overpriced. Acer chiefly makes laptops and thin clients. The desktops aren’t worth mentioning.

No, the budget PC market is owned by Dell and HP. This is the market Gateway is trying to compete in, and frankly I don’t see how they’ll last much longer. Geez, remember when Gateway and Dell were pretty evenly matched? When they could actually be considered alternatives to one another? Where did Gateway go wrong?