Seriously. What is BBM? Hell, what is a Blackberry? I've never seen one. I hear about this old mythical creature but I don't know what it looks like and nobody else I know knows what it looks like. Hmmm.

Kind of off-topic but I love seeing stuff like this hit the news. I do IT work at Medtronic. Nothing related to the devices but rather supporting the software that the engineers, scientists, physicians, designers and factory workers use to make these devices. Its an interesting feeling that in the end my work is a little tiny piece of making stuff like this happen. Morally and emotionally I feel great going to a job at a company like this. Here a device like this is helping this man stand and eventually walk again! My prior jobs were all IT jobs in really dismal, "selfish" industries - banking, credit cards, health insurance. Nothing I did helped make the world a better place. The work I did made a CEO richer and that was about it. The companies were built on "How can we cheapen this so we make more money on it." The reason I mention this is I see a lot of IT people who go to their job and feel something missing or don't feel like they contribute to the greater good. I felt that same way for a long time. Then by luck I got in there. I think a lot of us have a moral, emotional, spiritual (or all of the above) compass and this is the kind of stuff that fulfills that.

Growing up amongst my friends (and in general) we had a rule that he who picked up the bill and looked at it (at least without discussing it first with the other people at the table) was on the hook for the whole thing. It was more or less a courtesy. If I went with someone who was older than me (ie. my grandma) and she brought me out to lunch it would be very rude of me to look at the bill that I'm not going to pay.

So if Google wants to get in the middle of my restaurant bill payment, well...

Can't we just store it in somewhere like Detroit? I mean they have the space, it's cheap, nobody seems to go there and they sure could use the jobs!

So will this help me get more drunk? Less hungover? Will I dance better? I mean, what else do you really use your liver for?

If we are truly capable of "better" or "super" abilities but with the aid of some kind of drug, stimulant or other substance... basically aren't we just harnessing something we already "have" but is not finely tuned or inaccessible? In the mechanical world this is done all the time - engineers scour all the possible ways to make a race car, an airplane, a piece of factory machinery more efficient. Humanity is looking for solutions to LOTS of complicated things. Why can't we make OURSELVES more efficient?

The bigger question to me is why aren't we naturally that well tuned, why do we have to take a drug to make ourselves more focused, better working, harder working? Were we generally more tuned in the past? What has this modern environment of cubicles, GMO food, blinding fluorescent light, lack of healthy and walkable environs, what has that done to the human animal and our ability to think and work?

I'm sure these iPads were touted as the "wave of the future" and that laptops were obsolete. Obsolete until you discover that the iPad is not a like-for-like replacement for said laptops! And in the process I'm sure some consultant handsomely profited on all of this. Like they said on The Simpsons, "Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!".

I'm assuming that AA has or will have Wi-Fi installed at the gates for this and that the pilots will sync the iPads as they get from station to station. I see a couple of neat possibilities:

- Immediate and instant update of flight charts and manual pages. Instead of the pilots (hundreds or even thousands!) having to update pages/plates in their Jepp books and other manuals - a very ardous and regular task that everyone has to be compliant on - you can send out updates instantly. The whole company can be instantly updated in a matter of hours or a day.
- E-mail! When I worked in the airlines I can't tell you how many pilots popped into our flight ops area to borrow a computer to check e-mail, connect with crew scheduling or check updates to schedules, etc. We of course were always glad to share our computer but this makes it a lot easier and quicker for the pilots to do so without having to go anywhere.
- Paperless workflow. Granted airplanes are required to carry a logbook for maintenance purposes (still on paper) but this could help facilitate maintenance writeups if they could find a different way to do this. The pages in the aircraft maintenance logbook are usually 5-ply carbonless copy papers and are difficult to read. The lines are tiny and just try writing in one while the plane is flying and you hit a bump here and there! If they could enter the maintenance writeups into an iPad and sync it when they get on the ground (or maybe even with the inflight Wi-Fi products?) that could get the wheels spinning faster for maintenance and reduce the need for actual physical paperwork.

I could see an ironic twist to all of this. Iran and North Korea could end up pooling all of their resources and make really cutting-edge antivirus and antimalware software. We've seen other countries put government money behind a problem (ie. Japan funded research to make better car factories) and solve it in this way. And when Iran and North Korea make this wonderful new software the rest of the world might just line up to to buy it. Who knows what else they will innovate. We could be creating a monster here!

So much for the Internet staying this amazing free marketplace of discourse. Since we all have jobs and need to make a living we need the anonymity afforded by these sites to say what we truly want to say. I used to get into great discussions and debates with people on various news websites, until they all started requiring you to post under your Facebook account. Conveniently my full name, photo, job title and employer get tagged in with those posts. So basically now all of my posts have to be something my employer would approve of; they are a conservative Midwestern insurance company and probably wouldn't approve of many of my ideas. You will all tell me to remove my employment information from my Facebook page but why should I have to?

One concern is if the owner is really hideous looking. There is the risk that it could shatter the camera lens and then the phone would NEVER unlock!

The Writers Guild of America requires that all members have unique names. There cannot be two of the same person as to prevent confusion. This is evident with David X. Cohen, well known as a writer for The Simpsons and Futurama. His real name is David S. Cohen but the Writers Guild of America already had a David S., so he took David X. Cohen.