Now is a really good time in history to be a nerdy kid, or nerdy kid-at-heart.  Not only have remote control flying toys – specifically helicopters – come of age in sophistication and ease of flying, but they’re also extremely cheap.  That is, at least compared to how expensive they were just a few years ago.

Now instead of costing hundreds of dollars for something that will fly apart if you just look at it wrong, they’re only $30-$60 dollars, are relatively hardy, and you can even fly them around in your house.

Here’s two that I’ve been playing with for the last few weeks:

Think Geek’s Dark Blade ($29):

Air Hogs Havoc Heli ($29):

Basically we’ve arrived at a time where, if you’ve ever secretly lusted after those cool flying R/C toys you’ve seen the serious hobbyists playing with, you now have no excuse not to get one and indulge yourself.

What, you think you’re too old?  That since you’re an adult, you can’t do this?

Stop right there and rethink that.  If you’re not playing, you’re dying.

Let me say that one more time:  If you’re not playing, you’re dying.  It’s a fact that stress is one of the leading root causes of death in this modern world.  You need to unwind, relax, and not take everything so seriously.  And one good way to do that is to release your inner child and buy yourself a toy.

ThinkGeek.com has some of the most advanced designs, but — as I’ve found — the actual quality of the products are somewhat shoddy and if you have a problem with it, their customer service is lacking.

On the other hand, mainstream toy maker Spin Master, who produces the Air Hogs line of R/C toys, has pushed the price point incredibly low while still producing very high quality, durable, and innovative designs you can purchase at your local stores.  The Havoc Heli featured in the above video came from Toys R Us, and I’ve been seriously looking at their other designs in the Target right across the street from where I live.

The lightweight, powerful Li-Po rechargeable batteries and space-age construction materials are what have made these toys possible.  A twenty minute charge will give you about 10 minutes of flying time.  And each 10 minutes of flying will probably add another month to your lifespan, just by the pure fun it gives you.

I have one I fly around my corporate office environment, and while some may roll their eyes at me, most of them grin like a kid and their fingers itch to grab the controls.

I hand it over upon request.

Everyone deserves some fun.

Now this is just too cool.

Take a poor mobility-challenged kid and fit him with one of these suits, and what do you get?

An instant Power Ranger.  Just look at the thing, its right out of a Sci-Fi movie.  Sure, it could have been some utilitarian aluminum tube thing with clamps and soulless motors — but no, they put style into it, flashy blue lights, and made it look like a toy.

Any kid wearing this to school would be the star of the show.

And I think that’s wonderful.

“HAL” stands for Hybrid Assistive Limb, which makes sense, but methinks Cyberdyne just liked the name HAL (as, it seems, do a lot of companies) because of the 2001: A Space Odyssey namesake.  Which is weird, because that HAL went psychotic and murdered nearly everyone on the spacecraft.  Yet, companies love naming their products after it.

Anyone remember Lotus HAL?  No?  Oh well.

Helping disabled people is only one of the multifaceted plans Cyberdyne has for this technology.  They plan to market it — in a sort of true life “super suit” fashion — for heavy labor support and also in rescue situations.

Can you just see that?  Put on the suit, jump into the disaster area, and lift cars off of the trapped families, etc.  Real superheroes.

Um, put me down for one.  I’ll be Captain Geek, CyberKnight.  Available to FEMA and also children’s parties.

More information can be obtained directly from the Cyberdyne site:  What’s HAL?

And need I say it?  This is one groovy gizmo!

How nerdy-furry cool is this?  A digital camera that takes timed exposures from your pet’s eye view so that, at the end of the day, you can plug it into your computer and check out — from your pet’s own point of view — what they did all day.

You can set it to take a picture every 5, 10, or 15 minutes.

Is it just me, or is there a TV show idea in this somewhere?  Fido burying a bone, chasing a cat, snapping at the mailman’s heels and … what’s this?  Smoking cigars and playing pool with the other neighborhood dogs?

Get it for a mere $49 over at ThinkGeek.

Yes, I finally broke down and bought a Kindle.  I figured that I could keep it for a week and if I don’t like it, send it back within Amazon’s 30 day window.

I’m not sending it back.  I’m keeping it. 

It’s awesome. 

And not just because you can buy my novel on it – though you can, and of course I encourage you to do so – but because this has done for reading what the iPod has done for listening to music.

Reading on the device is not a superior experience to reading a traditional paper book.  The background of the screen is a grey that should actually be a brilliant white – technology is going to have to catch up here – but I did find I was able to read comfortably enough to forget I was holding a device instead of paper.

Where the device is superior is the fact that it’s connected, on demand and for free, to the Internet through a build-in cellular link.  And it’s not that surfing the Internet on it is wonderful (I’d much rather do that on my iPhone if I’m out and about) but it’s that you can peruse and read the first chapters of thousand upon thousands of books, at a whim, searching for something that grabs you enough to read the whole book.

That is the genius of this device.

It will never completely replace a paper book, just like a iPod never replaced something with external speakers.  It won’t kill book stores, especially places like Borders (my favorite) because people will always love to go and hang out there.

However, it may force them to evolve.  A book store ten years from now may be a completely different place than what you find today.  It may be more like a Starbucks, more like a hangout, where people who love to read come together and congregate, discuss, and fondle expensive collector’s editions with fancy binding and acid-free paper.

Perhaps customers will buy eBooks for their Kindle (or equivalent) on little cards that have codes on the back.  Or maybe there will be big wall-mounted touch screens where you scroll through them and press “Buy Now” – after which it gets downloaded immediately to your device.

One thing for sure, is that with the advent of the Kindle 2, the eBook reader has finally become a fixture instead of a curiosity.  One can only guess at the improvements on the Kindle 3, and also the rumors are flying that Apple will be coming out with something that, while not a dedicated eBook reader, can be used as one. 

Here’s a bit of irony.  High praise for the Kindle coming from none other than Bill Gates:  "Lately, Jeff’s [Bezos] pioneering spirit has taken him in some new directions. He would like nothing more than to be the first to provide a cheap and safe way for anyone to fly into space and started a company called Blue Origin to devise the technology. That’s pretty cool, but his biggest legacy of all might be more down to earth — a modest-looking white-and-silver digital device called the Kindle. This electronic book is Jeff’s brainchild and may well revolutionize not only how we acquire books and periodicals but also how bookworms like me actually read them. That would put him in the same ranks as Johannes Gutenberg."

Why is this ironic?  Because under the hood, the Kindle is running Linux.

Ran into this at the local beer emporium…

If necessity is the mother of invention, this inventor is a serious candidate for AA.

This morning at work I took off my coat and reached for my iPhone.  It wasn’t there.

Do not put your iPhone in a case that clips to your belt.

I noticed that carrying it in my shirt pocket tended to drag the front of my shirt down.  In a perfect geek world this wouldn’t matter, but my friends confided in me that it didn’t look flattering.  The iPhone is, by today’s standards, a rather large and heavy mobile phone — with good reason, it’s the ultimate gadget — and I saw the need to be a bit tidier in my appearance, so I found a nice leather iPhone case that clipped to my belt.

It worked out for about a month.  This morning, however, I was putting something in the back seat of my car, and the case came unclipped from my belt.  I didn’t notice it was gone until I got to work.

You have to understand — ever since I got this iPhone G3 16GB, it’s become a symbiotic part of my system.  An external portion of my brain and senses.  I use it for everything.  It never leaves my person.  I sleep next to it.

At first I didn’t panic.  I thought that I must have left it on the kitchen table.  I’d done that once before.  No big deal.

Then I remembered the part about putting something in the back seat of my car, and knew it could have popped off my belt while doing so.  That meant it could be sitting alone, abandoned, on the cold cement floor.

My iPhone.

I left work immediately, feeling sick, knowing that if it was indeed on the floor of the garage, there was a chance I could have run over it.  I imagined it smashed there, dead.  I wondered what the heck I would do.  How could I live without it?  I mean, I’ve already invested lots of money in software, lots and lots of time setting things up.  My bank account, my passwords, my shopping list … not to mention all the fun and nifty apps.  The GPS mapping system, which I had only recently come to depend upon.

So I got home, opened the garage door, and saw it there on the ground.

Worse, there were definite tire tracks on the case.

I FREAKING RAN OVER MY FREAKING IPHONE!

(“Freaking” is not the F-word I was using, nor is it the one I originally typed here.)

I have never ruined a camera, a radio, a stereo, a PDA, an iPod, or any of my beloved little gadgets.  Ever.  EVER EVER.

This was my favorite one of ALL TIME, and I RAN IT OVER WITH MY CAR.

Staring at the ruins of the smashed screen, I had a kind of religious experience.  This must be a message to me from God.  This is God’s way of telling me, I am way too attached to a gadget.

Gathering up my poor smashed iPhone, and my sick mess of emotions, I drove mournfully back to work.  I called Apple.  I called AT&T.  I searched eBay.  I examined my options.

Repair it:  $279
Replace it:  $399
Cut my losses and cancel my account:  $170
Buy a cheapo no-frills replacement phone:  $40

And then to my amazement, my phone rang.  My iPhone.  I picked it up, slid my finger across the broken screen (from memory) and lo and behold I was talking to someone.  After that I started fiddling with it.  The thing still works!  Only the screen is broken.

That says a lot about the case.  I don’t know of many phones that you can run over with your car and then still make a call on it.

So, technically, my iPhone isn’t dead — it’s crippled.  I still haven’t decided what to do.  I’m still wondering if the thing is a boon or a hindrance in my life.  I love the thing, but ever since I got it my writing projects — especially my new novel — have suffered.

I may just say goodbye to it, and learn from the experience.

Don’t love the tool more than the task.

I’m not sure what the heck this is but it looks fun.

I hear it from all sides.  I feel it myself.  Pride, and a feeling of belonging.

A friend sends me a picture of himself holding his new iPhone.  "I just got it a few days ago.  I can’t keep my hands off it."

Another makes this comment:  "The fact that I can’t get an iPhone hurts my soul."

Me?  I held out as long as I could.  Finally I justified it by telling myself it will be like carrying around a phone, an iPod, a PDA, a camera and an alarm clock in one neat little package.  And it is — it’s handier than a Star Trek Tricorder.  It does everything but shoot laser beams and open my beer.

Here’s the thing:  it does MORE than I thought it could.  Way more.  It’s even handier than I’d thought in my wildest dreams.

Also, I’ve bought more software in the past month than I have in my entire life.  More music, too.  And I’ll tell you why — it’s insidious — the software is priced low enough for impulse buying, and it’s always at your fingertips.  You don’t have to sit at the computer studying what would be the best for the money, and you don’t have to drive to the nearest software store.

During idle minutes at the doctor’s office, for instance, I realized I had a really good signal, and sat there browsing the App store for new things … and there’s always new things.  I spent twenty dollars without even thinking about it.

I write blogs on it (not this one, it’s too long and I’d go nuts trying to type all this on the little thumb keyboard).  I keep up with friends on MySpace and Facebook.  Every twenty minutes I compulsively check my email.

It’s my alarm clock in the morning.  Its my meeting reminders.  It’s my source for weather and news.  It’s my full blown English dictionary, and a Wikipedia portal.  It’s my life’s soundtrack stereo.

I balance my checking account on it.  Keep my todo lists.  My shopping list.

I use it as a map.  I’M NEVER LOST.

Keep up with my Netflix queue.

Convert units of measurement.  Network through LinkedIn.

I even have a program that tells me how far away the last lightning strike was.

The one thing I hardly ever do with it, it turns out, is make a phone call.

Other people who have them, they whisper to me in conspiratorial tones.  What games do I have?  Movies?  And always the question, "What is the coolest new app?"

Before I got mine, I used to be annoyed when I’d get an email where at the bottom it said, "Sent from my iPhone."  For the first few days, I took it off mine, so it didn’t say that.  Then … I have to admit this … I put it back on.

I couldn’t help myself.  It’s like saying, "Ha ha!  Look!  I have the coolest toy, and I want to brag, brag, brag!"  Now when I get email from others that feature that bragging line down at the bottom I feel kindred to them.  We’re brothers and sisters.

We belong to the same cult.

The cult of the iPhone.

And don’t say that it isn’t.  Look at it in the press.  Watch them yakking on and on about it on blogs like Lifehacker.  Or even, er … here.  Yes.

It’s a cult alright.

And I haven’t been in love with a piece of hardware like this since my very first computer, way back in the early 80’s.

The iPhone is beyond a groovy gizmo.  It’s life changing.  If they ever come out with a keyboard for it, it would replace my laptop.

I mean, after all, a laptop is no where near this cool.

Goodness gracious, great balls of grass!

This robotic mower concept called “Muwi” is featured over at Yanko Design.  It not only mows the lawn automatically, but instead of just leaving a trail of mulched grass, it forms the cuttings into compacted disks and balls that make it easier to pick up, or, perhaps, play with.

I have to ask you, though.  Who in the hell wants to play with balls of grass?

Still, I think it’s a fun and cool concept and hereby proclaim it to be a Groovy Gizmo.