Recently, I was at dinner with someone who had a Pebble E-Paper Watch. I love the idea of the Pebble, but during dinner, the guy kept looking at his watch. He looked at his watch almost literally every 5-10 seconds. At that point, I decided that I no longer wanted one. I am not sure that I have the discipline to totally ignore the watch when I need do (like I do with my phone), and I don’t want to be the person who looks at his watch every 5-10 seconds.

Today, my gray Pebble watch arrived (I backed their Kickstarter project). I sold it without even opening the box (people are really interested—it sold in just a few minutes). I think I might have kept it if I were planning to do some development work to make it more interesting, but I know that I won’t make time to do that.

As I was running out of the house on Thursday for CES in Las Vegas, I opened up my small messenger bag, removed my MacBook Air, and replaced it with my iPad. My reasoning was simple — I’d be running around the show floor at CES, and using a notebook computer would be impractical compared to whipping out a tablet and showing pictures or looking something up on the web (I use my iPad with a Verizon MiFi, so I still had network access — AT&T users were out of luck). I was also originally scheduled only to be away for the day.

When I arrived at the airport, a series of events led to a decision to stay in Las Vegas for 3 days. Suddenly, I was worried. I didn’t have a charger with me and had never tried to be productive on the iPad for such a long period of time. (read more »)

Lady Gaga at the Polaroid booth at CES

When I walked by the Polaroid booth yesterday, I thought to myself, “Hmm. I should go by their booth to see why they still exist.” Instead, I walked to the Canon booth (next door) and started looking at the prints in one of their displays. About half an hour later, Lady Gaga appeared at the Polaroid booth to unveil a few new products: a portable printer, some sort of camera, and glasses with an embedded camera (the first, they claim, but they were beaten by the Liquid Image Goggles long ago). She took a picture of the audience with her Blackberry, yelled “You’re fucking famous!” and printed the photo out on the portable printer.

Apparently, Lady Gaga is the new Creative Director at Polaroid. I find this to be totally bizarre — and, distracting. I’m not even a fan of her music, but I was so distracted by her presence and the huge crowd around her that I still have no idea what the new Polaroid camera is or does.

This photo, which was taken from a Gizmodo article called The Future of Charging Gadgets?, is soon going to be one of those old, humorous photos that make you think, “Damn — we were in the dark ages back then.” Early versions of new technology often invoke such a response in me. In fact, this photo pretty much already looks the part of a vintage tech shot, and would look perfectly in place next to photos of doctors using leeches, punch-card computers, and brick cell phones with shoulder straps.