Check out this story about a mysterious technology/device code-named 'Ginger' due to come out in 2002, invented by Dean Kamer who, among other things, invented the insulin pump.

Hayden Books has shelled out a quarter-million dollars just to reserve the rights to the 'making of' book, to be composed by Steve Kemper. So what is 'Ginger'? Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Apple's Steve Jobs both think its a revolutionary product, amazing in potential and an instant hit. Kamer has hinted that it's an alternative to products that: "are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities." Of course, cars leap immediately to mind.

If the quote were 'an alternative for products that are...' I would think it was a device I'll call the navigator. Picture this, a PDA with a small GPS and wireless modem (too many 'I have a great solution' stories start out with that stipulation, I know). You tell it where you want to go, and when you need to be there, and it sees that you get there. By integrating in realtime with subway schedules, highway traffic patterns and accidents, train schedules, taxi companies, etc. it would give you the most efficient way to get to where you want to go, and it would do it turn by tunr, moment by moment, in real time. If the situation changes, it updates the plan.

Picture this: You need to get from Berkeley to Palo Alto as fast as possible, but it's 8am on a rainy Monday and the freeways would take two hours. Tell this palmtop device where you need to go (via address or clicking and zooming on a map) and it knows you have a car, and how you drive, based on 'watching you' on the road (with the GPS), and knows that that's not the best solution, so it directs you to walk to the bart station, where, based on your walking speed you'll make the next BART train to Montgomory St. station.

Once there, you need to get to the CalTrain station quickly to make the peninsula train down to Palo Alto. Your navigator knows exactly when your BART train will arrive, and will tell you which way to exit. 15 minutes before your BART train arrives at Montgomory, it placed a request with one of SF's taxi companies for the short hop, and told it exctly when you'd be arriving. You exit the station to see the cab, who's ID number and color description has been relayed to your palm, and you're wisked to the CalTrain station with a few minutes to spare to get your ticket and take the train down to Palo Alto, where either another cab is waiting for you or, depending on how much time you have and how much you're carrying (and your disposition towards walking) the device gives you block by block graphical and/or spoken directions to the door of your destination.

Of course, this doesn't need a dedicated device. A GPS springboard module (or the Palm equivilant) and a CDPD modem (a Palm VII, Ricochet, or OmniSky modem) would provide all the end-user needs. Of course the largest obstacle would be the realtime data integration between various transportation agencies.

Extra features come easily. You could toss a URL to a friend, coworker, or client, and they could track your progress, along with an estimate of your arrival time. If the navigator knows you'll be late (slow train or missed train, for example) it can fire off a message by phone, pager, or email to let the distant party know your updated arrival time.

Anyhow, I've gone off on my own distant tangent. I think such a product would be immensely useful, and if I'm off the mark, then I'm all the more curious as to what 'Ginger' is. It seems that whatever it is, it doesn't cut into the space of Apple or Amazon, given their principals' knowledge and acclaim of the project.

Then again, anything Hayden would pay a quarter million for probaby will have a large third-party development base. Hmm. I guess we'll see in 2002.

I hate waiting.

Does anyone know why we always have cables that are male to female, female to female, or male to male? Wouldn't it be easier to just have a 'bisexual' connector that would allow one cable to fill all needs? I was thinking of something like this:

With a connector like this cables could easily be connected anywhere, without worrying about whether it's an 'M' or an 'F' port. Moreover, get two cables and attach them end-to-end and you have a new double-length cable, without the need for an in-line coupler. This would be really handy for USB, where sometimes you need a short cable and sometimes you need a long one. You could just have four cables, 1, 2, 4, and 8 feet long and you can make any cable from 1 to 15 feet. You can't even do that with M-F extension cables, because they're only good for extending. I wonder if it's too late for that patent. I'm sure someone must have implemented this but if not, I call Prior Art!

Though I didn't know him personally, Jos Clarebout was clearly a genius. A friend of my friend Ray, Jos died of a completely unexpected (and pretty damn inconsiderate) heart attack at the age of 25.

A man after my own heart, Jos was still in the early stages of unleashing his Grammarbot on the internet when he passed away. The caretakers of his site, (stories, college application essays, et. al.) mention that they're hoping someone will take up his project where he left off.

With a domain like fury.com, I don't know that I can resist doing just that. It's right up my alley...

In the interests of postponing decisions about my future as long as possible, I turned in my application to Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems on Friday, and I'm interviewing at Yahoo! this morning.

They want me to come in and talk UI and I figure heck, it's only a 90 minute drive each way. Why not? (Irene, if you're reading this, I'm looking forward to meeting you. If you're reading after I've left, then make that a big Thank You!)

Scary, but I think Yahoo is the new Apple, at least for me. I don't know that I'd make a pilgrimage to their corporate HQ just to see it (oh wait, that's what I'm doing...) but when my devotion shifted from the Mac to the Net, I guess I had to find a new idol, and as much as I love Google, it's hard to follow a single page.

Blah, now I'm just vamping. Sorry for boring you all with drivel, on a Monday morning, no less. Personally, I'm curious to get a glimpse inside the division responsible for what can be seen as one of the most cautious, or at least minimal, graphical UIs in the business (and this is a good thing).

On deck is Nuance, who I might be interviewing with later in the week. Classes start a week from tomorrow, Macworld keynote is tomorrow morning. I'll be going to Expo on Wednesday, posting 5 new AOLiza conversations Wednesday (and 5 new convos every Wednesday thereafter). I've got a few client projects to wrap up before school starts, and my CMU application to make headway on.

Happy Monday!

Do you know of any good (or even decent) software for the Mac or Palm (or if need be, Windows or Unix) that acts as a contact manager and/or calendar with contact logs and ticklers? If you have no idea what I'm talking about, logs are chronological records of interactions you have with a person or place, and ticklers are reminders you can set to contact someone in a week, month, year, or whatever.

I desperately need something like this to get my life under control, and I'd rather not fudge it with existing web reminder services, Palm OS date alarms, or reinventing the wheel myself with mySQL/PHP (the solution to 63% of the world's problems).

Anyone have a pointer for me? Thanks! (Of course I'll share at I find...)

I never really understood: Are hopeless romantics hopeless because they're so romantic, or romantic because they're so hopeless?

I'm posting new AOLiza conversations tomorrow, but I just had to give you this preview which, in my opinion, is the best AOLiza conversation quote yet:

Fortyfive: "Trying to get you to say anything about yourself is like kicking dead whales down a beach in Nebraska."

If you want to know when new conversations go up, go ahead and add your email to the announcement mailing list on the AOLiza home page.

Wow, I was just reading the blog and I realized I haven't been talking about anything personal in almost a week. I don't know if this is good or bad, as I have yet to take the temperature of the audience (I hope to make a voluntary questionaire soon, so I can understand who y'all are and what you like about the site and what you don't) but Expos and linguistics aside, there's more stuff going on.

Most pressing is my application to Berkeley's School of Information Management & Systems. It's due by the end of the day and I'm doing a lot of work in Photoshop to finish it. Dear god, why Photoshop, you ask? Because SIMS, and nearly every other school I've looked at, thinks they're on the cutting edge by supplying their application in PDF format.

Now I ask, what are we expected to do with PDF copies of an application? Print them and handwrite or type the form? Handwriting is usually not the best route for a grad school application, especially if it's not a humanities degree or you happen to have less than stellar penmanship. Typing is so old school, I don't even know where I would go to find a typewriter right now. Anyhow, that leaves Photoshop's little-known ability to open and rasterize PDF files.

I've converted each page of the application into a 400dpi black and white photoshop file (24 megs apiece uncompressed) and am using the text tool to paint in my data. True, Illustrater is more suited to the task, but I don't own Illustrator, so there it is. It's a pain, but the results are nearly perfect...

Anyhow, next week is jam packed. I have an interview with Yahoo!'s UI department on Monday, a few school-related meetings on Tuesday and Thursday, Macworld Expo on Wednesday, a client project to work on, classes to get ready for (first day of classes is a week from Tuesday), my Carnegie Mellon application (due on February 1, but I'd like to get more lead time on it than I did for this one), and of course, some sort of social life, so I don't feel my winter break was in vain.

Oh, and some time this weekend I'll be putting up new AOLiza conversations, including a real doozy from the dorms.

So one of the designated Peanut Gallery participants in last year's SurvivorBlog competition was Comabound, a woman (presumably) who has gone through great lengths to keep her site public, while keeping her identity private. When I say great lengths I mean the "Enemy of the State"-esque 'if you want to pass something to me give it to suchandsuch and they'll leave it at the designated drop-off point' kind of privacy.

Anyhow, I helped her work out a way to send gifts from Amazon anonymously (by buying herself a gift certificate, then creating a fictitious identiy to redeem the gift certificate and send gifts to people without having to divulge a real name or address) but I guess she decided to go dirtworld instead. My doorbell rang today (which almost never happens because I live inside an apartment building and people have to ring the outside buzzer to get in) and by the time I opened the door, there was nobody there and a package fell from where it was propped against the door. On it was my address, a return address that just said 'Comabound', and $3 in postage that didn't have a postmark on it.

I grokked all this in about 5 seconds, and she (or whoever acted as her proxy) couldn't have been more than one floor down by stair. I almost chased her and blew her cover, but something stopped me. Instead I got my camera and hung outside the window, waitng for her to come out the front door of the building.

The only person who came out was my mailman, which is weird because in the 5 years I've lived here, he's never actually brought a package to my door instead of leaving it downstairs, and of course the package has no postmark.

I guess the only logical conclusion is that Comabound is actually my mailman! Unless she waited for him to come and asked him to drop off the package...

Well, however you safeguard your identity, Coma, I thank you for your Christmas present. Now who do I go through to get something to you?

And so Comabound's secret identity is safe, for one more day...

I took a look at this a few months ago, but now I'm starting to get really interested by it. Matias has created (and is now shipping) a one-handed keyboard. Unlike chording or fitaly keyboards, this one is based on qwerty, but includes the left hand keys only. To access right-hand keys, you hold down the space bar and press the corresponding mirrored left hand key.

Don't take my word for it. They have demo software for both Mac and PC (links at the bottom of the page) so you can try it with your existing computer and keyboard. It's surprising how easy it is to get used to it. I type 65-70 wpm with both hands, and while I can't hope to get that fast with a single hand, I'm already at about 15-20 wpm after playing with the thing for 5 minutes.

I'm a lefty, and it probably favors lefties, but it's worth checking out anyhow. What's more, they offer the keyboards for Mac, PC, and most varieties of Palm including the Visor.

This is definitely something I'm going to take a look at when I go to MWSF next week. I have plenty of desk space, but I might want one of these just so I can keep one hand on the mouse and the other at the keyboard.