Smart Watch Wish List

• Perfectly fine in the water. Recognizes swimming strokes and possibly evaluates them.
• Seven day battery life while in monster-tracking mode. This would give some kind blowing regular mode life, like a month or something, but how cool would that be? Go hiking for a month, tell time, record all your fitness stuff for after.
• A camera. I know I'm being silly, but hey - a camera with storage to the cloud through 4G or whispernet or smoke signals and fairy dust. Storage of a dozen or so photos on device.
• Crazy accurate constant heart monitor
• Steps, stairs, running, calories, sleep tracking: all the stuff we take for granted in a fitness tracker
• Auto recognition of activities: swimming, hiking, biking, running.
• Fitness activity database and common activities selection (yoga, martial arts, calisthenics, weights, elliptical, rowing)
• Electric nfc for locks to front door, garage, gym locker, personal fire safe, bike lock, etc.
• Check in at work or school - GPS maps
• Proximity sensor / locator for team watches 
• Scan and track others in your team (Vivian is swimming, Heidi is still, Ethan is on a run - over 3 miles so far, Graeme is listening to music)

Plant speak

Even plants can twitter now. What i think would be cool is if the sensor used wi-fi and were encased in a weather-proof, possibly cool looking, housing, preferably with a solar cell somewhere for the power supply. Then instead of listening to my houseplants, I could get updates on the roses or the vegetable garden. Now that would be handy.

Wait a minute. David and I can build one of those.

String Theory

String theory: "Let's take mom's yarn and run it All Around Everything We Can Find and then be proud of our Contraption!" I swear "contraption" was Graeme's favorite word from 24 months onward. These days, we have a workshop, complete with table saw, drills and other dangerous things. The child is definitely heading toward an engineering degree: for his birthday he asked for 17 tons of dirt, and for Christmas he wanted a pallet of cinderblocks (i am so not kidding).

This month I started getting all my non-perishables from amazon, since the price is better than I can find anywhere, the selection is better than the co-op, and they deliver it right to my 45-miles-from-Anywhere front door. David and I unpacked the shipment last night, and this morning, Graeme came up to me, eyes all sparkling, and said "Thank you thank you for all the cardboard!" He had just been in the mudroom where we had stacked the (dozen or so) boxes. This child's paradise probably closely resembles a junkyard.

Mine looks like a sun room with a bunch of houseplants, big windows with window seat cushions, a Kindle and a pot of tea. Is there anyway to blend a kindle and an iPod? For now I would be happy to have the two devices separately -- one can charge while I use the other.

wow

Holy cow. I've been waiting for a decent electronic book interface for nearly two decades, and it looks as though Kindle might actually deliver. I'm looking forward to seeing if it lives up to its press. It sounds like an iPod for books, only even easier to use, given that there is no computer required, no cables, no syncing. Add to that the wireless access (using cell phone type technology, only without the bill) to Wikipedia, and the darned thing will become indispensable. Turn wireless off and read for a week or more before recharging.

Dang. This changes everything.