March 2001 || Volume 01, Issue 08

Craig Whips Out His Crystal Ball - and Goes for a Spin

I used to think my life was my own. It's not. Get married. Assume a mortgage. Acquire pets (or companions to those in the PRC -- People's Republic of California.) How much free time you have now?

Toss in children and if you actually take a part in raising them any notion of free time you may have is at best a dream. Poof! Not that it's not worth it. It is. But any free time you carve out for yourself seems to be at the expense of sleep. After a day of work, all the chores, lugging children to this and that, helping with homework, mowing, feeding the dogs, getting the windshield replaced in one car and trying to figure out the vibration in another, sleep is very precious. Those days of snatching 3 or 4 hours of sleep and bouncing back the next morning in any coherent state are far, far away in the very distant past. To sleep; perchance to sleep some more.

I cannot fathom the infinite number of merchants who screw up a bill that have to be dealt with. The incredible number of them who display their efficiency by telling you it took 10 days for your check to travel from a desk to one 30 feet away are legion. You spend who knows how much time writing letters to them. Notes to teachers with questions about schoolwork, letters to elected officials, various protests, complaints, and thinly veiled threats must be dispatched. They simply must.

So what's a block of time during the day that we can reclaim for ourselves to accomplish these many things? Travel time. That's right, in the car.

This is Where We Start to Get to Computers

If I could use the amount of time I'm stuck in the car for something useful, this would aid greatly in reclaiming life. Sweet life, as I recall. We are on the verge of being able to do just that.

It's a great thing, too! Consider my circumstances, which aren't all that peculiar for working professionals. I've been on the road three out of the last four weeks. This next week we go to New Orleans for my oldest daughter's basketball tournament. A few weeks from then we take Spring Break in Colorado while both girls, Hailey and Sonja, are out of school. A couple more business trips. First week in June at the beach. That's a lot of time on the road.

Even when not motoring about away from home, a full hour every day is taken up in the car. Maybe some school age kids aren't aware of this phenomenon called a real life, but when you aren't staying in your parents home or tucked away snuggly in a dormitory, life is infinitely chaotic. The more you own, the more there is to do.

OK, This is It. Really!

I ripped this article out some while ago. The paper's yellowing now. It struck me as important and how ironic that I spot it now. The Associated Press article I tore out of the local newspaper titled it "Palm and Delphi expand auto venture." For those of you that don't know, Delphi is General Motors' electronics division. Here's the article in its entirety:

Palm Inc. and Delphi Automotive Systems Corp. plan to sell wireless Internet services for the new hands-free communications system they designed for automobiles.

The system, called the Mobile Productivity Center, works by linking a Palm organizer and mobile phone to a car's audio system. No prices were disclosed for the proposed services, which will be designed specifically for the MPC, a cradle-like device the companies have developed to hold a Palm computer and cell phone.

Palm and Delphi are creating a new company, MobileAria, to begin selling the voice-activated devices, such as email and news, in the second quarter of 2001.

This is simply fantastic! It also reminds me much of some of the news on wearable computers, such as:

IBM's wearable PC may debut early next year

Ready-to-wear hardware doesn't come cheap

Wearable gadgets offer modern look for military

Let's face it, computers are becoming integrated into our lives in ways which were inconceivable outside the realm of really good science fiction even a mere ten years ago. Everyone's getting into the act. Everyone that is except our favorite fruit vendor. Or, if they are, it's a really good secret.

Here's a prophecy you can take to the bank -- if Apple doesn't jump into this act soon, it will be less like a fruit than a well-warmed grain product -- toast to be specific.

Here's the deal. I shouldn't have to have a Palm device in the car, a desktop computer at home, a laptop to carry about on business or vacation, a desktop computer at work, etc. What possible sense does it make to have to sync the email you sent and received from your voice-actuated Palm device in the car with your main computer and with your laptop? What sense does it make to have a muti-GB MP3 collection on the ol' desktop and have to play an old-fashioned CD in the car to hear my favorite tunes? What sane person would advocate keying in your trip to the automobile's onboard navigation system, sitting in the car, poking at little buttons from contorted body positions, when you could plot your trip in exquisite detail from the comfort of your own home then plug that info into the car's system? Bartender! Another Jack Daniels, please.

What I'm talking about is a reinvention of the computer as we know it. When the military has broken the computer into segments that can be relatively comfortably strapped around your waist, we should be assured that this is where the consumer market , i.e. you and me, is going as well. I hope you availed yourself of the above links to news on wearable computers.

The computer components are going to have to be packaged in some way that will allow us to unplug one essential module from our home computer and plug it into a slot in the car. That module would have storage, such as a hard drive and perhaps the processor. (I haven't thought this all the way through yet. I leave that to people smarter than me.) I'm thinking something about the size of 2 or 3 DVD boxes stacked on top of one another. Picture you driving down the road. Dictate a letter or two, check the road conditions and re-plot your coarse, browse the web via spoken text and voice command, have your car read your email to you. Reply to some. Delete others.

At work, simply remove that solitary module from your car and plug it into a slot on your "computer" at work. Voila! You would have certain essential subsystems in each host you plug your module into, such as power supply and audio/video circuitry.

This would take great standardization among several different industries, but it's going to happen. It's already happening. With Palm and GM on the move, others will move in swiftly. I read somewhere not too long ago about Microsoft working some deal with a car company. The details escape me. One night too many with not enough sleep.

Within the next few years we'll wonder how we ever got by without it. I know my editor will be thrilled. I could have dictated the next many months columns while tooling up and down I-81 [Editor's Note: In the future, I predict that Craig will make a deadline].

I had a dream the other night. My septuagenarian parents were shopping for their first computer and were asking for my advice. I recommended a nice bargain on a midrange NT machine. OK, so it was a nightmare. Get picky.

But the facts are simply these: Your computer's going to get well integrated into every aspect of your life. It won't involve tens of different computers.

If Apple isn't there when this happens, I'll be buying a product from whatever company is. I hope it's Apple. But, whoever can help me reclaim hours of nonproductive time so I can spend more of it laughing and enjoying my family is OK with me. That's real power.

Now that I'm done I can haul my fatigued butt off to bed. Night.

Craig Cox - craig@macosjournal.com
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