Too Frickin’ Cool

Now for an exciting round of what I call “too frickin’ cool.” The way this is played is that you describe some technology that is so futuristic, so Star Trekish, you can hardly believe that you are using it. When you are done describing this technology, you must be so impressed with your own story that you pause and punctuate it be saying, “Too frickin’ cool.” Optionally, you can add a “dude” or a “seriously” to further elaborate your point.

I’ll get the ball rolling. Yesterday I signed up for Google’s free service, Google Alerts. It sends me an e-mail any time my keywords newly appear on the Internet. My keywords are “Scott Adams Dilbert.” Now, I usually have my Blackberry 8700 in my pocket. So check this out…

Any time that 11-year old Vijay sits at his Dad’s computer in Lucknow, India, and blogs about his favorite Dilbert comic, Google finds it, and sends that link directly to my left front pocket. I reach in, pull out the Blackberry, click the link, and Vijay’s blog opens. I read it, just to see what little Vijay thinks of me today. In India. Minutes ago.

Now reverse it. From Vijay’s perspective, he’s writing about his favorite cartoonist who lives on the other side of the world. As soon as Vijay presses the “publish” button for his blog, it sets in motion a chain of events that ends with his words delivered to that author’s left front pocket. And in all likelihood, that author will read those words while his wife is scrolling up and down through the DVR’s online guide in some sort of shopper’s trance.

Seriously. Dude. How frickin’ cool is that?

Your turn. But you must limit your story to technology you personally use.

Comments

[Backpacking on Little Money]

In China you can pay like a dime to this guy with a Bronze Age pull-cart, and he can pull-cart you around town all day. For an extra dime, he'll even say, "Too Frickin' Cool, Dude!"

Backpacking on Little Money http://backpackingonlittlemoney.wordpress.com/book-1/chapter-one/

[Plenfonsops]

I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting!

[AmniPata]

Google is awesome google earth is pretty cool.

http://wwww.amnipata.com

[hi]

A lot of usefull info . Thanks

[hi]

A lot of usefull info . Thanks

[iknowall]

Search for in all major search engines simultaneously on the site http://www.iknowall.com.
Simultaneous search on Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search.

Try http://www.iknowall.com

[iknowall]

Search for in all major search engines simultaneously on the site http://www.iknowall.com.
Simultaneous search on Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search.

Try http://www.iknowall.com

[iknowall]

Search for in all major search engines simultaneously on the site http://www.iknowall.com.
Simultaneous search on Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search.

Try http://www.iknowall.com

[iknowall]

Search for in all major search engines simultaneously on the site http://www.iknowall.com.
Simultaneous search on Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search.

Try http://www.iknowall.com

[Becca]

At my college, I can have the washer and dryer text me when my laundry's done. w00t!

[Kevin Hicks]

Okay, I get up in the morning, put on my shorts and running shoes, and strap a small device that LOOKS like a watch to my wrist. I go outside, and in a couple of minutes the device locks onto GPS satellites. Then I can go for my run, and the watch will tell me my current pace, elapsed time, and distance covered, as well as elevation changes, and whether I am ahead of or behind my planned pace.

Then I can boot up my iMac and tell you more than you would ever want to know about it...

[Kalle]

Dude, why do you holster your mobile device to your left pockets? Mobile devices are supposed to be held in ones right pocket? Or are you a lefty (If so, is it true that being left handed is a cause of brain dysfunction)?

Thanks for the blog, comics and books!

-K

[Grant]

In New Zealand you can order subway with a text message. Just type a big long string of characters representing what you want and send it to your local branch.

You then wait five minutes, walk into the shop, past that big queue of 20 people and straight up to the counter where they give you your sandwich. You pay and then walk out again back past the 20 schmucks who stood in line.

Genius.

[KM]

Why stick to technology?

I can manipulate irrational numbers. People were stoned to death for suggesting they exist. I can manipulate non-Euclidean geometries. People spend millenia trying to prove they don't exist. I can draw fractals and space-filling curves in seconds by computer. Even the open-minded guys 100 years ago felt the world was at an end when Weirstrauss drew the first everywhere continuous, nowhere differentiable function.

Okay, nobody outside math would appreciate that. So, look up a fractal zoom video on YouTube, and try to imagine drawing that with a ruler and compass. Yeah. Pretty fricken cool.

[gorf]

I work at Shaw cable probably the second largest cable company in Canada. There's is so much technology here that it blows my mind sometimes.

With all that said - it's a program that was made in the 80's that makes me say: “too frickin’ cool.” Using this program we can shut off and control certain aspects of the cust cable box - even control what the customer can watch - if we want. No that pretty frickin' cool.

[-B-]

'Acoustics' I’ve understood this term quite late … all the while I was thinking acoustics is a design to enable clear transmission of sound … now that could be a problem

In the new office that we have moved, acoustics has done the damage … I mean the architect has been excellent … to a level more than required for such a building. The kind of acoustics that this building is equipped with is designed for Space shuttles, Echo chambers etc.

Recently I’ve had a meeting in one corner of the office …. The acoustics are so excellent that everyone on the floor has heard all what was discussed. In-fact if you would want to call the whole floor for a meeting… its easier to go to the conference room and call aloud … mails n phones are things from the past.

Forecasting this … I suggest that the management provides all the associates with Ear plugs and makes in compulsory for everyone to wear it all day at work so that you don’t listed to something that you are not supposed to hear. Only when you are authorised by the management can one remove the earplugs and listen what happening.

I’ve personally decided to be dumb .. anyway it helps me conserve energy further !!

[Donovan Young]

While perusing one of the many infosnippets which arrived in my RSS aggregator the other day I ran across something so fantastically cool I just had to share it.

I grew up in the 70's and 80's and like so many other good little geeklings at the time I must have seen the original Star Wars at least thirty or forty thousand times. At least. Any stick I happened across (broomsticks, twigs, my brother's clarinet) morphed in my hands and I became a light saber wielding Jedi Knight like 'ol "Obi Wan" and Luke and, yes, even Darth. I wanted one so bad my hair hurt.

Fast forward to today. The new Apple Macbooks have a motion sensor in them which is used to detect when the laptop is moved for any number of really strange reasons. Seriously, I've had a laptop for many many years and can't remember even one time saying to myself, "gee, I wish my laptop knew it was moving", but I digress.

Anyway, someone finally figured out a truly useful purpose for that motion sensor and wrote an application which mimics the sounds those totally awesome light sabers made whenever your laptop is moved! Now I can wave my Light Saber, uh I mean laptop, around and pretend to be battling the forces of the dark side WHILE I'm reading the infosnippets which constantly harass my RSS reader!

I mean, seriously, how frickin' cool is that?!?

[Tony Baloney]

Okay, here goes.........

I work for an ATM network. BIG DEAL, right? However.......

While I realize that withdrawing money from your bank account through any one of a gazillion machines located practically everywhere in the civilized world at almost any time of day doesn't seem all that special nowadays, my career in banking started almost 30 years ago. When there were no ATMs.

The only way to get your cash back then was to show up at a bank branch sometime between 9am and 3pm, Monday through Friday, to cash your paycheck. (This was before we created direct deposit as well) Otherwise, if you needed money, you were S-O-L.

I was there and played a small part in a major change in the way society operates. I think that's pretty freakin' cool.

[arindam giri]

hmm,

I jus love my wireless internet through my cell phone(though dialup n bit slow), but still it cool...like browsing web pages anywhere I go in the state from any remote place - provided that you gotta have some signal-bars in cell.

Thts freakin cool.

[evden eve nakliyat]

very very nice.thanks alll people nice and good works

[James]

My story is kinda strange. I received an unexpected email from Germany late last year. The writer had discovered something I had written 7 years ago , and put on an old blog about 3 years ago, describing my visit to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. I was twenty at the time, and the visit opened a world of horror to me that I had not previously known. As I look back now, the story I wrote and forgot about seems melodramatic, but the email message I received in return was something else. It really got me how something lost so long ago could be found, and come back to me.

The letter can be read here - http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/blog/?p=27

James

[dj]

I love vinyl records.

I did a lot of home bedroom DJ-ing in the 80s.

Back then records were expensive, so I dreamt of
a pair of golden records that would magically change
to play any tune I want.

The years went and mp3 arrived.

Then over 10 years later somebody invented groove timecode records which contain only timecode messages. You connect the turntable to the laptop soundcard and this to the hifi. Select the song on the laptop, put the needle on the record and the magic disc plays this song. You can scratch, play the record backwards, speed it up, slow it down, anything. It behaves like that magic golden disc from my dreams with the only exception of not beeing gold.

This is the perfect example of cool (and useless) at the same time.

[Richard]

The fact that your blog entry here just uncovered some of the coolest new technologies and online social trends in one go. How frickin' cool is that!

[ltg]

I'm absolutely mad about a technology called Holosync (www.centerpointe.com). It mechanically puts your brain into the frequencies meditating monks hit (without the years of sitting on the floor like a pretzel). Doesn't even matter if you can't keep from thinking. All the mental and physical health bennies without the frustration. How frickin' cool is that!?!?

[Katherine]

Edit: Find.
I don't have to scan documents, or webpages; the computer does it for me.
I've got a new Portable Media Player that I can download tv, movies, music and photos to with 30Gigs. I can watch a movie while it downloads a show I'm missing on tv and I can watch it the next day on the train. And if it's really good, I can send it back to my tv and watch it on the big screen (ok, I've only got 27", but you get the picture) Too frickin' cool.

[jisakujiens]

That is hilarious; you are kibozing* the entire web.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibo / http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kiboze

[Joe Frickin]

I signed up for Google's free service, Google Alerts. It sends me an e-mail any time my keyword newly appears on the Internet. My keyword is my name "Frickin". Now, I usually have my Blackberry 8700 in my pocket. So check this out…

Any time anyone sits at his Dad's computer and blogs about me, Google finds it, and sends that link directly to my left front pocket. I reach in, pull out the Blackberry, click the link, and the blog opens. Unfortunately, thanks to your column my Blackberry has been going nuts for the last week. How fricken annoying is that!

Oops. Hang on, be right back, my Blackberry just sent me a message.

[Evelyn Saungikar]

I'm studying Mandarin Chinese with a tutor actually in Beijing, using VOIP. It's great because of the time difference; I only have time after 10 pm at night, which is the middle of the day there. I get private instruction at 1/2 the cost of university tuition.

I can scan my written homework and e-mail it; the tutor can then discuss my mistakes in real-time.

How frickin' cool is that?

[zaphod2016]

This morning I woke up, laid around my house drinking coffee for a few hours, and then "went to work" simply by checking my email. I finished a quick programming job for a client in California, and then a conference call with a company in Chicago. No office politics, no pointy-haired boss, no cubicle.

I was done by 4:00 pm. Now I get to sit here reading a Dilbert blog while sipping water beside the pool and enjoy a 73* sunny afternoon while my would-be co-workers sit under flourescent lights waiting to drive home.

How freakin' cool is that?

God bless the Internet. RAmen.

[Anon Y. Mous]

This is useful to know. Now whenever I see a blog post that I think you should read (for your own good, you know), I can just leave a comment and stick the word Dilbert in there some where.

Let your education commence.

[srr]

My brothwer and I were travelling with our parents in California last year. My parents will only eat vegetarian.We never bothered with travelling guides. Wherever we were my brother would call my sis -in law in NJ and she would tell us the name and address of the nearest Indian restaurant from Google.

How frickin' cool is that

[techguy]

I took my Cell Phone with me this week to Orlando, on a short trip where I was supposed to be working on a software release, but my wife was going there on business and needed some tech support. So, I set up my regular little walkman phone to do Windows Messenger, read my work e-mail, and have Google Maps on it, with unlimited use of all of that for 10 bucks. So while I was at SeaWorld riding a roller coaster, I could check in with my co-workers to make sure nothing was too broken, I could check my e-mail to see if they sent me any bugs that weren't really mine, and I could look on google maps to figure out where the airport was, all on a tiny little 128x160 screen. Too frickin' cool. Oh, and I hooked up my laptop to keep up with my blog, linked below.

[Sunny]

Just yesterday, I was looking at the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the Forbidden City, and finding an apartment to rent for the month of October, in Prague. I love Google Earth.

[Adi]

I can be taken up in a helicopter to the top of a glacier which would be near impossible for me to climb. I can strap into a snowboard and begin snowboarding from the top of this glacier at speeds up to 40mph. I can do all that being blind as I have a little wireless ear piece in my ear in which I can hear the voice of my guide who is 20 feet behind me informing me of the dangerous crevasses and cliffs to avoid. I think that is too Fricken cool dude, I mean seriously, website to prove it:
www.feeltheedge.com

[Tony]

seriously dude - you have way to much time on your hands if you look at your blackberry sends you a message from a kid in India...

[Hunter]

A few months ago I matched our geneology chart against a listing in a Louisiana militia roster and found that my great-great-great grandfather, his four brothers, and a first cousin joined pirates, Chickasaw Indians, and freed blacks to whip the tar out of the Redcoats at the Battle of New Orleans.

That was the first any of us ever knew about it and it would have been lost to history if it weren't for Google.

Oh, and I have a GE refrigerator circa 1955 that still works, and hasn't seen a repairman in probably 20 years, if ever.

[John A. Robb]

I'm not sure if this is the current state of affairs but a while back I used PGP encryption software. During the install it listed a number of countries that I wasn't supposed to export the software to because the software was a "restricted munition". That's the one and only time I've used software that was a 'munition'. I thought that was pretty frickin' cool.

[Christa]

I'm amused by how the instruction was to include some or all of the following words:

Seriously. Dude. How frickin’ cool is that?

and at how high the fraction of people who can't copy the spelling of "frickin'" is.

So I guess I'd be pointing towards Spell Check as a technology, but as an editor, I have to say, Spell Check sucks. It's okay when applied intelligently but it's no substitute for intelligence AND integrity (and clearly, people who can't copy "frickin'" don't care about spelling or communication integrity, so the Microsoft product will not do them any good anyway).

Go ahead, call me A. R. But I get paid to be that way.

Best old-fashioned technology for any writer: a human editor. We think, we feel, we process, we've got Attitude, and we talk and type, too. How frickin' cool is that? Seriously, dude. It's cool.

Christa

[Dogbert]

Go you!

I have a webpage dedicated to you. Go to: http://www.angelfire.com/punk/aerith/dilbertpage.html.

Thanks, and EMAIL ME!!! (at jackitigerstar@aol.com)

As for tecnology...
Google Earth is awesome! I can be in another state, boot up my laptop, and say "I can see my house from here!"

[Step]

Quote: I just signed up for GMail when I purchased an item from someone on the internet. In one e-mail he said he would ship the item Fed-Ex overnight. Then in a e-mail two days later he sent the tracking number, with no mention of Fed-Ex, or even that it was a shipment. Just "Here is your tracking number". As I was reading the second e-mail, low and behold, what to I see in the side-menu. A link to Fede-Ex tracking for my item. GMail took 'Fed-Ex' from 1 e-mail and the tracking number from another, combined them and gave me a direct link.

Ben, Google recognizes Fed-Ex numbers when you search on them, or in GMail (and probably other places) automatically. It didn't "combine" the information from the two emails, just guessed that a number string meeting certain specs was a particular type of number.

It's still pretty frickin cool.

[Jason]

I drove up to a parking garage, got out, and the car was parked automatically. I didn't have to worry about valets, dings, scratches, maneuvering into a tight parking spot, or getting dizzy on the outgoing ramp. Just walk in, swipe a card, and walk away - the robot does the rest.

How frickin' cool is that!

[brian]

I have a car it holds all my fishing, Hiking Camping gear it also has a radio cd player a cigarette lighter and most importantly a roof, In this car I can travel well over 200 miles a day and not get wet even when its raining
I can also sleep in it and it has a heater. I go where I want to go when i want to go.
How fricken cool is that

[Crimson_Sky]

My moment was the other day. It's probably not the best technology, but I'm totally in love with it.

Google SMS. (It's kinda interesting how many times Google comes up). I found it the other day. It's basically a search engine beta for your cell phone. You simply text what you're looking for, along with a simple keyword for certain types of searches, and within seconds you get a text back with your results. I've been texting it with any little fun thing I can think of.

It's great for finding bussiness addresses and phone numbers. Gives you driving directions. Movie showtimes. Basically, a lot. One of my favorite features is the area code lookup. I don't know how often we get telemarketers calling from various places across North America and get stumped by the area code the number is coming from. Normally by the time I'd get to my computer I forget to check it up. Now all I do is type the area code and press send. Taa-daa. It texts me back with the exact locations it's used in. Simple as that!

It even does language translations and conversions and such.

How fricken cool is that?

[Rob Swan]

I just got a GPS dongle for my mobile phone. It tells me exactly where I am. Using satellites. In space. It talks to satellites in space. I mean... how frikkin' cool is that?!

[Sean]

For me, I think the "too cool" factor is always things that I never expected; google and wikipedia are great, but my expectation for what computers would one day do were pretty high.

DVDs are too cool. I love everything about them, from their compact size to the many special features that come on most disks. (I love commentary tracks especially).

Laser printers are too cool. Yeah they've been around for quite awhile, but I never thought I'd own one.

Big TVs are cool. When I stop to think about it, it blows me away that the TV I own is considered small; it has so much more screen that the TV we had when I was a kid (which was a big set for its time).

[David Martin]

Call me easily impressed, but I've been using Vonage's VOIP service for the last 3 years, and here's the coolest thing about it.

You can take the adapter box anywhere in the world and use it wherever you can find a broadband Internet connection with a standard phone (unlike Skype). "Broadband" is a pretty liberal term -- I currently have a 256/128 connection in Bangkok and it works perfectly well. So I still have my number in the US, I still have up to 500 minutes of free calling (or whatever you signed up for), and the quality is generally very good.

They've reduced the size of the adapter box to slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes and it's very light, so it's not problematic to carry arround.

[Turil]

Biofeedback computer games. Particularly the Wild Divine. It's sounds new agey. And it is pretty darn new agey, but the technology is too frickin' cool! You put these sensors on your fingers, and then follow along the Myst-like looking computer game, and you do stuff with you mind and body that changes the game. For instance, you blow on the screen at a picture of a pinwheel, and the pinwheel spins. Too frickin' cool! If you are a smoker (unike myself) you will cough while you are blowing on the picture of the pinwheel, and it will spin like crazy!

Watching silly characters and objects move around just because you're thinking about something, or breathing in a certain way, is seriously too frickin' cool.

The added bonus is that you are so busy playing with this stuff, you don't realize how healthy you're getting, because the game is designed to train you to be able lower your heart rate and put your heart into certain rhytms that are supposedly really good for you. Sort of like meditation without most of the boring stuff.

[hallie]

i will frequently be chatting on yahoo messenger, on my laptop, while the baby falls asleep in my lap. it's a little harder to type around the baby, but this is the sacrifice we make in the modern age for togetherness.

so because my arms are still at work, the baby settles himself into my lap like i'm a soft, pre-heated Baby Barcalounger. i have the webcam on, so it feels like i'm not across the country from my favorite cousin, who i love. he's facing away from me, so i can't see for myself when he's fallen asleep and i can roll him into a more comfy situation on the sofa beside me. i ask my cousin, who's looking at us both in the webcam. 'excuse me, cousin who is 3,000 miles away - is the baby in my lap asleep yet? i'd like to lay him down before i develop carpal tunnel,' and she'll say, 'oh yeah - totally zonked,' or 'not yet - but that was a lonnnng blink...' and then i'm informed.

three cheers for technology!

i also hear emails ping my cell phone when i've set the laptop down, so i'm not wasting my time turning it on if there's nothing to check. especially if i'm waiting for something important, *and* there's a sleeping baby. no point disturbing a sleeping baby for nothing, you know.

[Juryu]

Wo-hooo, that one's easy. My favorite too-frickin-cool technology is Skype. I love that you can purchase a phone number from basically anywhere in the world and it rings in your computer. I live in New York and my family lives in Rio de Janeiro, so that's already pretty convenient.

The next layer is their forwarding, which means that whoever calls that number in Rio is actually calling my cell phone here.

But few people actually know that number, they know my cell number in Rio. Which is off all the time now, but then you add a third layer - I set my brazilian cell phone to forward calls to my Skype number.

So when that friend I haven't spoken to in years calls my old cell phone number that he still has, his call is forwarded to my skype number, which rings in my computer, but I'm not there so it forwards again to my cell phone and I can pick up, say, on top of the Empire State building. Seriously, dude. This exact thing has happened. And all for a couple of cents a minute. Old telephone systems are dead.

[Stu]

Couldnt he of just sent you an E-mail? its not like you dont have an E-mail address!

he he

[Chris Owens]

I got a Slingbox A/V for Christmas, but just got around to hooking it up this week when I got my Palm Treo 700wx. Basically the Slingbox is connected to my Digital Cable DV-R box and my home network. Now I can connect to my DV-R from my cell phone and completely control it...AND watch live TV and recorded shows on my cell phone from anywhere in North America. How frickin cool is that, dude?

[Jeff Turkelson]

I'm an undergraduate Industrial Designer. Rapid Prototyping has to be the coolest technology ever. They are essentially 3D printers- just as you would print a photo with your inkjet, you can 'print' a 3d Model file into a real life model, made of a plastic composite material. And let's say your model turned out well, and you want your contracted company in Korea to get a preview. Send the file to their printer to model. 3d faxes, amazing!

And I don't think many people truly appreciate how 'friggin cool' molding processes are, like injection molding and blow molding. We take our cell phones, cars, computers, and ipods for granted, but it's amazing how much goes into the production of the materials.

Also, the Wacom Cintiq is amazing. I want one.

[Sian]

I love Shazaam - the other day I was in a bookstore on my way home from work, and loved the music they were playing but didn't know what it was... so I punched in '2580' and pressed send on my phone - a minute later I received a text telling me the artist, album and song title. I went home, bit torrented the her entire discrography and in no time was listening to an entirely new, fabulous album. I then loaded the album onto my phone, which incidentally was charging my phone while it was connected to my laptop - and did all this sitting on my bed, laptop on my lap, watching Judge Judy and eating a salad. Before 7pm... an hour or two after I finished work.

How fricken cool is that?

[Bluesfish]

I got myself an IPod for Christmas, my first foray into the downloaded music world.
Anyway I’ve mostly been uploading my CD collection and playing tunes on my PC speakers at work or in the car with one of those cassette converter thingies (neat-o). While uploading an old Stanley Turrentine CD I purchased many moons ago, I-Tunes pulled up that very album so I took a look at it. You see, I bought this CD used and couldn’t return it. It had a defect; the last two tracks listed on the CD artwork were NOT on the CD??? After a just few clicks I was able to correct the problem and now, after 17 years the album is complete. Too Frikin Cool!

Dude! You know how many CD changers I’d have to put in my trunk to match what this sliver of aluminum can carry?

[Crikey]

Errmm..
You don't have any idea how search engines work, do you?

It's not a "push" system. Every webpage ever created/ updated does not let google know.
Google crawls the web looking for new pages, and updates to pages.

So the minute Vijay clicks publish, you ain't getting nothing on your phone. Only when google gets around to crawling his website.

Still cool technology, though.

[Mervin S.]

Here's how my cool technology works.
First I put a program on my blog that registers the IP address of anyone who accesses my site. Then I go over to http://www.ip-adress.com/ and copy/paste their IP address into a little box. After that I just hit go and it gives me the Google Earth picture of the persons location. In other words, I know where you live.

[FzySqrl]

I'd have to say remote ignitions for cars. A few weeks ago I was in a Target parking lot putting my kids in the car when the car next to me started up. There was no one in the car but it started up, and a few seconds later the owners showed up, got in and drove off. I was so impressed that I almost forgot to finish putting my kids in. My wife, however wasn't quite as impressed.

I wonder if the 10 commandments cover "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's technology"

[Joce]

> "NASA ... normal pen wouldn’t work so they spent
> millions of dollars .... the Russians used a pencil ..."

Not true, as a quick google would tell you.

http://www.google.com/search?q=nasa+millions+pencil

On balance, Google has to be the coolest thing ever.

[BobUK]

AJ talks about the old story of NASA spending millions designing a space pen and how the Russians used a pencil. Finish the story AJ:

The specks of graphite floated off the pencils and got into the circuits of the spacecraft they were being used in. The circuits fried and important systems failed. I've never found out if anyone was killed but the pencils were replaced with NASA space pens (or something like them). Sometimes techies spend money wisely.

And for the record, I own a space pen and they are the dogs!

[Chris]

sadly enough the Russians didn't use pencils - the graphite flakes off and gets into the electronics. Graphite is a conductor so this is what they call a "bad thing". Apparantly ordinary Biros do work in zero G (although I haven't tried it myself)

[Peter Fleming]

Hmm, cool freakin'things in my life. There's a booster compressor that was made the same year I was (1970) running not 30 feet from this control room. It runs 24/7/365, except when I shut it down twice a year for about an hour each time for maintenance (change filter, etc.)

Even cooler. I used to live/work on a boat that sinks on purpose (submarine), which is powered by invisible particles (splitting the nucleus of an atom, which are so small, despite all of man's technological advances, you still can't see them directly with the most powerful microscope). Even cooler still, the crew made their own water and air, and are self-sufficient except for food. Did I mention that it carries weapons of mass destruction, that can be deployed from the otherside of the planet, with an accuracy, that is very disturbing? Or that the crew slept between said weapons (on average 2.5 months at a time), and that the average age of the crew is maybe 23, and only 10% of them have a college degree. The whole concept, flawlessly executed by a bunch of almost adults, piloting a vessel, underwater, with no windows, using gyroscopes for navigation, and 1950's technology to propel it through the ocean, carrying weapons that can result in mass extinction. Maybe not cool, but in the grand scheme of things, a little bit on the "whoa" side. I don't know, maybe launching/landing jet fighters on an aircraft carrier is more impressive?

[Rofa]

Alright, here goes, since I actually had one of those "Dude!" moments a couple of weeks ago.

It was nearing the end of our wedding party, and, as wedding night was approaching, some of our friends decided that they wanted to play "Business Time" by Flight of the Conchords.

We had a Powerbook connected (by wire) to the audio system, but no WiFi coverage. Luckily, someone had a 3G cellphone, to which we were able to download the song from the web.

After that, we used bluetooth to beam the song over to the Powerbook and play it.

Afterwards, the amazement hit us, and we were, like, dude, how frickin’ cool is that? Seriously!

(though I realize it would've been soo much cooler if the laptop-amplifier connection would've been IR...)

[Ben]

I just signed up for GMail when I purchased an item from someone on the internet. In one e-mail he said he would ship the item Fed-Ex overnight. Then in a e-mail two days later he sent the tracking number, with no mention of Fed-Ex, or even that it was a shipment. Just "Here is your tracking number". As I was reading the second e-mail, low and behold, what to I see in the side-menu. A link to Fede-Ex tracking for my item. GMail took 'Fed-Ex' from 1 e-mail and the tracking number from another, combined them and gave me a direct link.

Too Frickin' Cool!

Leave it to Google to be the king of Too Frickin' Cool.

[Pandu]

Scott,

Cool would be for you to go comment on the kid's blog.

[Gina-Lisa]

This is cool thanks!

[delicat]

I put some food in the microwave and it zapped it hot in a matter of seconds!

Too frickin' hot!

[wonderchops]

sat nav.

even if i take the wrong exit off the motorway, a nice lady politely tells me how to get to my destination, and estimates to the nearest minute when I will arrive.

my wife, instead of arguing with me about directions, now argues with the sat nav.

brilliant

[mishima]

hands up everyone who's spent the last hour uploading blog posts insulting Mr Adams, titled "Scott Adams Dilbert"

[Leonel]

I'm sure this was caused by some incomprehensible aberrant technological phenomenon:

The other day I was watching the news from a kingdom thousands of miles away and they said Bill Gates sneezed! Bam!!! A couple of hours later, the price of gasoline at my local pump got higher! It was the same frickin' gasoline that was there before! What gives?! This is NOT cool at all...

[Bob]

This is a general "how cool is the internet" experience. I'm a web designer, and about a year or so ago, I put up a web site for the artwork of my great-grandfather. I think his work is great, but he did not manage to make a name for himself, so his art is virtually unknown. Until I put up a site for him, there was nothing on the web about him anywhere. So just a couple weeks after making the site live, I got an email from a woman in North Carolina. She had been visiting in Baltimore, MD, and saw a C.H. Moor watercolor painting in a consignment shop. She was originally from England, and recognizing it as an English watercolor, decided she had to have it, even though she'd never heard of the artist. She bought it, took it home, and looked up C.H. Moor on the web. She found my site of course, and emailed me. She even took a digital pic of the painting and emailed it to me. So, thanks to the internet, I have laid eyes on one of my great-grandfather's paintings that would otherwise have been lost to me. And the woman who bought the painting was able to talk with the artists great-grandson and check out a bunch of his other paintings as well. How friggin' cool is that???

[AJ]

Just a point I think is quite funny when NASA first thought about putting a man/person in space they realised that given weightlessness a normal pen wouldn’t work so they spent millions of dollars creating a pressurised pen cartridge that would be able to work in space (also under waters etc we now know them as space pens etc. Cool hey (the Russians used a pencil! I think that says everything that you ever need to know about the people in charge!

[Julie]

My husband and I are podcasters - real small time podcasters. We do a podcast that consists of walking tours of Washington, DC. We try to bring a local point of view, but we haven't caught on like wildfire. We're up to about 350 listeners a week. Not too big.

A number of months ago we got an email from a guy in Germany, who came to DC for two days and used five of our podcasts (Capitol Hill, Pennsylvania Avenue, and a series of 3 of the National Mall) to see the city. And even wrote us about it.

We've had listeners on every continent except Antartica. (I guess they don't like us down there).

Here we are two middle aged suburban folks who like hanging around in the city near where we live - and we put up podcasts that people on other continents use when they come to visit our neighborhood.

How frickin' cool is that?

[Tim]

I was sitting on my couch with my laptop in my lap, watching TV. My computer was in my lap, not connected by any physical means to any other device. I realized that I needed a copy of the document I was working on. I hit the print button in Word, and an actual paper copy of my document came out of the printer in the den two rooms away. I am amazed every time I print something wirelessly. Seriously, dude, that is too frickin' cool!

[naz]

Dear Andrew P, you cannot possibly have four desktops on all sides of a cube. A cube has six sides, Dimbulb!!

[Ariel]

And I do believe the prize goes to Google for inventing/improving/innovating some of the best ususally FREE technology we use everyday.

My favorite being google maps. I have no idea how social work was ever accomplished before it! My theory is that in the dark ages before Google maps, an uncounted number of social workers went out on field assignments, but never returned, being sucked into the vortex of subdivision hell...

But now I can type, click, and even get a satellite view for landmarks-turn left at the IHOP! How freakin' cool!

[Rosemary]

So, I'm out at the shop, getting food and realize that it is 9:00! My episode of Bones is starting and I am missing it. I've waited all week for this episode, and I don't like the idea of having wait another, so I flip out my phone and set my sky box (it's like Tivo and cable but for the UK and Ireland) and hit record. From my phone. In the shop. Seriously, dude....that's frickin' cool.

[Sugata Banerji]

I worked in Hyderabad and was away for a week long vacation in Kolkata 1600km away. Before going away, I had signed out of Yahoo Messenger on my PC and had signed in using my cellphone. One morning, I get this message on my cellphone saying, "You have been logged out of Yahoo Messenger as you have signed in on another device." First I was puzzled. Then I realised that someone who knew my password (one of my teammates) had started my office PC and it had automatically logged in to Yahoo Messenger, causing my cellphone to log out. So in actuality, my PC had suceeded in informing me 1600 km away that someone had been handling it. Now seriously. Dude. How frickin’ cool is that?

Another thing that comes to mind is Wikimapia. Go to the site http://wikimapia.org/ type "Abhilash, Mitrabagan" (the name of my house and locality) in the search box and hit the button. Voila! You get a link to see actually the satellite view of my house (mango tree and all), and read info about it. Of course, I have added that there beforehand, but it still seems amazing as my house is in a small suburban town 40 km away from Kolkata, and yet i'm able to explore the bylanes of my small hometown. That's too frickin' cool for me.

[Listo Entertainment]

I sit infront of my computer, and, using the magic of internet, I get a lot of free porn.

Too frickin’ cool, dude.

[Christine]

I still think the fax machine is awesome.

I worked at a fashion designer's studio for several years, and we used the fax machine all the time. I would call a pattern designer in Prato, Italy, and tell him what we were looking for, and a few minutes later, a page would spit out of the fax machine with the design on it. I would get it and take it into the meeting and have it approved in seconds. From conception to runway, the whole thing took about a week.

How frickin' cool is that?

[Håkon]

My palm with GPS let's me hook up to several satelites and guides me to where I want to go in my car. How frickin' cool is that?

[concatenator]

What's frikkin cool is how the universe was created.

One the 6th day, after accidentally deleting everything, God said "Undo", and behold, it all came back from the Great Recycle Bin in the sky.

The 'Undo' button is the ultimate technological miracle. No invention should be allowed to leave the lab without it.

It can even decide major questions like who gets to have nuclear weapons and who doesnt - "Have you got an Undo button for total nuclear annihilation? No? Well, then, back to the labs"

That's my new motto as well - "UNDO unto others as you would have them UNDO unto you"

[Chris]

Sitting on my computer while it does trillions of calculations a minute for my degree course, using a program I wrote. I not a computer programmer, I am a mechanical engineer who has had 10 hours on how to use this program and it still was simple and easy to use and has produced results I wanted.

Amazing.

PS The program inestigates how big a hole you can run into before you fall over.

[Cristiano]

While travelling in an unknown city, I sent a message to a friend (I knew he was there): "Let's have lunch together?", and in 3 minutes I received "14pm, W19°16'47" S25°27'31".
Our girlfriends were astonished.
How frickin' cool is that?

[Jon Tyken]

When I was a kid, if I wanted to see my favorite show, (let's say, "Kolchak, the Night Stalker," I'd better be home that night. Maybe, if I was lucky, they'd re-run it a few months later. Eventually we had VCR's, but you had to make sure it was programmed correctly. Now we've got DVRs, or you can watch most shows online the next day, or buy the DVDs a bit later and have a complete series to watch whenever you want.

[Naman]

Every time a transaction takes place on my bank account, I get an SMS. That makes going out on your pay day with colleagues much easier - you know when you can upgrade yourself from draft to Heineken! And all that for just Indian Rupees 50 per month ($1 per month).

[AB]

www.pandora.com - The Music Genome Project. Way too cool!! If you like music, you'll love pandora and no they did not pay me to say this!!!

[Oli]

Dude, I press this button, and light, it just APPEARS, I mean, out of nowhere, how frikkin' cool is that? VERY FRIKKIN COOL THATS HOW COOL, im like god!

Let there be light!
*click*

Genius

http://ramblingsofanofficeworker.blogspot.com

[Felipe]

Imagine hords of talented engineers which only job is to draw version #794 of a wing profile at McDonnel-Douglas, back in the 50's.
Hords of experienced engineers doing calculus with a logarithmic table by hand, same era.

Now a PC that is 20 yr old is far more powerful than that, just imagine what a 2007 computer can do: playing all day long at Second NoLife or War of NolifeCraft in 3D while chatting for hours, how frickin' cool is that?

Or those Teraflops supercomputers asked to send humans to Mars or to scan through libraries of millions of (virtual) chemical compounds for a few candidate drugs that could cure successfully cancer, without even having to develop them for real, at least in the first hand.

[光芒万丈]

I'm using 2 very cool apps : Miranda IM and Launchy。

[Guyb]

I guess google alert is not that cool. what lesson did we learn today ? by the time you find it, its old.

[Stuart - Velkairiwyth]

Quote from 'Rin

"My laptop turns out to have a feature where I can use its built-in webcam as a security device. Once I set it, if anyone enters the field of view, it makes a loud alarm noise and takes pictures of the intruder."

ROFL - I love it :) But I suspect if the intruder had half a brain, (i.e wasnt panicking because of the alarm)said laptop would be easy to locate and pinch :D.

[Goran Mitrovic]

It's pretty cool that I can drink milk without owning a cow. That's much greater leap in technology/economy than Google will ever accomplish!

[Workerant]

I was giving a lecture about the Internet to a group of nurses at a hospital in England and e-mailed a friend in the U.S. to go outside and wave at his University's web cam. He did and by the time he got back to his desk, I'd sent an attachment with a screen dump of him waving at us. that was seriously good technology.

[DL From Heidelberg]

As a child, whenever I came into the house, my mother would always ask, "What trouble have you gotten into now?" How did she know? Is that fricken cool or what? Seriously. Dude.

[Carlbert]

“Scott Adams Dilbert”

Did it work?

[Mark Martinez]

I wasn't going to comment on this post, because I didn't really think my "too frickin' cool" was that cool, but after reading through the first 20 or so responses, I gained a little more faith in its coolness.

This morning, shortly after you wrote your post, I received a notification in my GreatNews RSS reader. As I looked up from my Lenovo ThinkPad X41 Tablet PC, I waited for a lull in my class to read through your new post.

One second I'm using an electronic pen to take notes, simply pointing and tapping my pen to switch between my 4 most often used pen colors to create detailed and organized notes. Almost instantaneously, I'm reading the musings of someone on the other side of the country. Two seconds after reading your post, I click again when I remember to check your new comic for the day, which I'm also notified of in my RSS reader.

My classmates sit around me, using their downtime to doodle crude drawings on the edge of their paper, stare at that one cute girl in our CS class, or fall asleep. I use my downtime to read your blog and catch up on news in my RSS reader.

How frickin' cool is that?

[Marty]

I LOVE my remote central locking. I've only had it a few months and it's magic!

I used to have to walk around the car, unlock my wife's door, then walk back around to my side and unlock my door. Or I would just get in my side and lean over to unlock my wife's door while she waited in the cold. Now I just press a button and the doors magically unlock themselves. Also, when we get home I don't have to remind the kids to lock their doors and then check to make sure that they have locked their doors - I just wait until the doors are closed and press the button. Fantastic!

Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." So it is with remote central locking.

Really. Dude. How frickin' cool is that?!

[Salticid]

Dude-
Real time Polymerase Chain Reaction. Restriction Enzymes that let us cut and splice DNA like paper snowbunnies! Today I went into an itty bitty Genetics Lab in South Dakota somewhere, and using PCR product that was taken from DNA that was taken from less than 3 microliters of some poor unlucky Spiders' Hemolymph, I cleaned all the RNA, and junk out of my PCR product using only some nifty chemicals and a centrifuge. DUDE!

Being able to run electrophoresis on gels that are the size of the palm of my hand. Being able to sequence DNA in one day. Being able to be female AND work in Science, AND work with Spiders without being burnt at the Stake. Thats TOO FRICKIN COOL!

[-B-]

A study room with LCD TV panel, connected to Windows Vista Run PC (with Broadband) with wireless keyboard and Wireless headset n a convertable sofa. Switch channels, Blog, Record, Play online radio .. do whatever

thats frickin' cool

[Caleb]

I cannot believe how over-looked and under-cooled my favourite "too frickin' cool" item is.

Every time I use it, I marvel that I actually am living in the future:

Automatic Sliding Doors!

Why don't more people have these as internal doors within their houses? They open just by going near them! And then close behind you! This was the kind of thing that was mad science fiction not so long ago, and we all know how on star trek "they used to just have stage hands who pulled the doors open as the actors approached", so what are we all waiting for? Too frickin cool.

[Caleb]

I cannot believe how over-looked and under-cooled my favourite "too frickin' cool" item is.

Every time I use it, I marvel that I actually am living in the future:

Automatic Sliding Doors!

Why don't more people have these as internal doors within their houses? They open just by going near them! And then close behind you! This was the kind of thing that was mad science fiction not so long ago, and we all know how on star trek "they used to just have stage hands who pulled the doors open as the actors approached", so what are we all waiting for? Too frickin cool.

[Lisa]

I like staplers.

To FREAKING cool are STAPLERS man???

As far as I know these 'staplers' are all the rage in Modern Western Society. You fill them with tiny little metal wiring and then push them into your wound to seal it up.

These metal wirings cost around 49cents and are well worth the price!

Staplers can also be used to hit people and stray cats with... If your accuracy is decent enough.

I 'heart' staplers... They are the way of the future.

Thankyou and goodnight.

[Bonehead]

We do diving in Mozambique. Sometime we must use gps with maps for routes that we have not travelled before. Some of these maps are outdated and incorrect, so you can get quite lost. The road infrastructure is reasonably non existant.
Enter Google-Earth. We located our position on Google earth, checked the landmarks and sand tracks and navigated to the correct spot. From the middle of a remote spot in darkest Africa we could access satelite images of our position and work from there.
Cool or what?

[Andrew]

I just found a cool piece of hardware on my mouse.

The mouse wheel spins around and around and around, with almost no end in sight.

With just a small flip of my index finger I can scroll down your blog page endlessly, then put my finger backdown and, wala, a random bolg response to read.

It feels like a super power, page go up, page go down, with no effort.

is that frickin' cool or what!

[Alfred von Campe]

I don't have a Blackberry or integrated PDA cell phone, so SMS is as high tech as it gets for me with cellular technology. But being able to access the power of Google via SMS is just too fricking cool. If you haven't tried it, just send an SMS to GOOGL (46645) and you'll get a response in a few seconds usually. Great for finding restaurants, weather forecasts, etc.

[Dennis Hamon]

More of a memory...
New Years Eve 1999. Sitting in my house in a small mid-west town watching the year 2000 arrive in each of the world's time-zones live on tv.

Technology has gotten alot cooler since then, now you can see live pictures from webcams all over the world -which blows me away when I think about.

But at the time, it was too frickin cool. Then again, so was watching Neil Armstrong.

[Robert Hamilton]

OMG, Dude! I win! I'm driving in my car (I swear - to - Gawd) and I press one button on this box, and I'm like hearing Dude's voice! like he's IN THE CAR! Swear to frickin Gawd! But the dude is like, miles away sitting in some room and has no idea that I'm listening to every frickin thing he's saying! Dude, Dude! that's not the end of it! Dude presses a button and I'm hearing and singing along with the Del Vikings! I swear! And check this out, you won't believe this. There is no one plaing any music! Dude! I could not make this up! It's what they call a recording, it's too frickin cool! Then they put in on these radio waves that no one can see or hear or touch. Dude, I have not been smoking today! Then dude comes back on after I'm done singing the back up to Whispering Bells and tells me what time it is, and he's right! I almost crashed my grandma's 72 Nova!

[EternalMarksman]

Yes...i am the uber geek

i have this rear view mirror for my computer. and a footswitch that can instantly minimize my games, IMs, or any screen i want. Very stealthy. i also have a camera attached to my usb port that allows me to look around corners. i also have a nerf missile launcher attached to my USB port. And a drink cooler...and a minifridge...all i need now is one of those autopee things (preferably that attaches to my computer), and i will never have to leave my computer.

[Kristina L.]

That's coll, but have you considered that whenever someone insults Dilbert, you'll also find out about it?

[Ronni]

Okay so I see my pastor sitting on one side of the sanctuary taking notes on his PDA. I realized that I needed to email him something. I had it stored on an online storage site. So 20 feet from him, I pull out my PDA, jump on the net, email him the info, and finish taking my notes during the sermon all from my comfy padded chair. I got something done without even getting up, and nobody noticed that I just saved the world. (kidding).. Friggin cool!

Oh, and I took two pictures, uploaded them, commented on myspace, and IM'ed a friend in the other end of the church to meet me for lunch too. Yup. Technology rocks. (Her AIM texts her phone when I IM her. I could have just texted her but hey, I was surfing the net... )....

[Chilblsni]

Consciousness. The idea that all these all these random atoms collect together not only to form this soft machine, but on some level give it what I can only describe as free will (illusion or otherwise). The ability to make all the great technologies here, and the desire to do so.

[SJ]

Dude it's frickin' cool that I can use Peer-to-peer file sharing and video download/Torrent software to download movies that previously were only seen in film festivals.

[CaughtUP]

Today morning I opened my eyes and all the millions of neurons together with the transparent cells of retina and non-transparent cells of some-non-retina,my lashes, eyelid, brain, sunlight, reflecting bodies - all damn things together worked like a miracle and I could "see" !!

How frickin' cool is that ? :-)

[Okgenuine]

The first time I saw Jurassic Park in a theater, I was like, Wow!? And then when the Motorola Razor phone came out, I was like, Wow it's the future! But my 18 year old cousin is like, What?

[Freddy]

I have two. One: FIREFOX. It doesn't need any explanation. It is THE web browser. Just go to mozilla.com/firefox and get it. Now. Two: temporaryinbox.com. When ever I need an email that actually exists but I'm never going to check it, I go to my toolbar at the top of my web page, and voila! A new fresh, email address for weird things!

[webar]

Okay this is not technology, but someone needs to acknowledge the frickin' coolness of completely unexpected and unearned, excellent customer service.

In the middle of a perfectly miserable day planning a memorial service for my late mother-in-law, and boxing up thousands of her small mementoes, I realized that I needed to change the date of my flight back home. I called Midwest Express and talked to a real human being who walked me thru my schedule options, changed my itinerary and was even able to give me good directions from the airport.

At the end of the phone call, I asked the service rep how much the charge for changing my flights would be.

She said, "there's no charge, ma'am, on bereavement fares." She said, "You can change your flight as many times as you need to, don't worry about it".

In a sad and difficulty day, this woman's kindness and understanding was more than frickin cool. It was disarming and touching.

[Thomas Mitchell]

For those of a certain age, way before Star Trek: Captain Midnight and his sidekicks had tiny radios and could contact one another over enormous distances (they were called "locators"). Now that my wife (of 37 years) and I have even smaller cell phones, we have the equivalent. We are never out of touch. That thought is what does it for me. Er, dude. Seriously.

[Andraste]

I have a bluetooth device and feaure on my phone that let's me say, for instance, call Grandma, then seconds later with the phone in the other room I am talking to my grandma like she is the room with me and no phone visable. How freakin' cool is thaqt dude?

[Kiran]

Google Earth! I can zoom in and see the baby pool in my backyard.

[Kiran]

YouTube!! Every time my 3 year old wants to know hear a song or I want to find out how the "Pink Toothbrush, Blue Toothbrush" song went, I search on YouTube and ALWAYS find it.

[SMASHING SUCCESS]

Dude, that is seriously frickin cool.

I've never talked like that before. I feel like a new person. Thank you Scott Adams.

Justin

[Brian]

I just played Mario Kart against someone from Japan.
How frickin' cool is that?

[Jed Snole]

I was just thinking about this sort of thing a few weeks ago. I live in New York State. I had to attend an all-day meeting in Atlanta. I got up in the morning, had breakfast, drove to the airport, got on a plane, flew to Atlanta, spent eight hours in a meeting, then flew back to New York, and was home the same day. It all seemed pretty amazing that one could do that sort of thing. What was even more amazing was that it was possible 40 - maybe even 50 - years ago. The propellor planes of the 50s might have been slower, but people didn't have to go through security checkpoints.

[Eric]

I remember an interview of some StarTrek writer guy who said that it was very complex for them to find frickin' cool stuffs that didn't exist yet. His best quote was "I am glad we have the beaming up thing, because almost every other cool things in StarTrek already exists in real life..."

My frickin' cool stuff of the day: My GPS watch has a "Find home" button :o)

How frickin' cool is that, Dude?

[D. Mented]

Indoor plumbing. (ever hike to an outhouse in bad weather?)
automatic furnaces.(no fire to light, keeps your home warm all night)
gorcery stores.With fresh produce all year.
cars. Airplanes.
RECORDED MUSIC
certain movies and television shows (not all of them)
special effects.
My father showed me the computer at his (government )workplace: it was as big as the downstairs of my house and had all the power of a really cool pocket calculator...NOW look at them!
I've been having health problems all my life that no doctor could diagnose. A few hours of persistant research on the internet and I discovered for myself that something I always knew I had (low stomach acid) but never realised it was a problem, was selectively starving me - mostly of proteins and vitamins. Not so cool that dozens of doctors were clueless, but absolutely amazingly cool that I was able to get information from all kinds of sources and solve a decades-old and ever-growing problem like that.
Geo-cachers hiding notes and trinkets for eachother all over the world just for fun!
We can't even list all the cool things and the amazingly creative applications for them because more keep popping up while we're typing...
Dude - how cool is that!
D. Mented

[Canadian]

Well, the other day, I was, like, writing, on, like, a sheet of, like totally white paper, and I'm like, "Dude, my pencil, like broke. I'm gonna, like totally have to get a new one." And my teacher's like, "Dude, go, like sharpen it with, like a pencil sharpener!" And so I go, and I'm like, wow! This thing like, sharpens my pencil! Serously dude! Like, how frickin' cool is that?

[Rogue]

Ok, so i'd like to point something 'to frickin cool.' in the gaming aspect of the world...(Which leads me to wonder how many other gamers like scott's blogs...i haven't read all the comments...)But i have a Nerf wireless PS2 controler....Thats right for some odd reason Nerf is making controlers....Why not it works. I got it because my cat knocked the wired off the stand i keep the PS2 and busted it. This one the cat can't break, because the hand grips are made entirely of foamrubber an the entire thing is also coated in foam rubber.

Now that in itself is kinda cool, cause its been knocked down by the same cat and has bounced back up to the stand. But it also has a 32 foot non-direct sight range. Which means i could play my PS2 from my friends house without moving the PS2, if i felt so inclined. I donno why i would because it occures to me that would be rather pointless not being able to see the T.V. or what i was doing. The point is though that i COULD should i ever feel so inclined.

Now that is to frickin cool.

[JBange]

I would consider it too frickin' cool if there were some invention to silence the nimrods who consider themselves the height of wit describing here the common automobile, pants with holes in for playing "pocket pool", and the printed book (under the so-clever acronym of Personal Information Storage System, PISS).

[COIceBear]

My Blackberry 8703e is frickin' cool - I was on a road trip and having problems with my car. I was able to Google the dealership which had the phone number - I was able to call the dealership right from the page.

[Paul]

I was travelling for business, but when I got to the airport I discovered that my company had reserved a ticket, but not paid for it. The check-in girl is saying "sorry, but your $700 flight isn't paid for". So I call my office tell them, then hang up and stand there.

...

...

"Okay sir, your flight is payed for, have a nice trip"

Seriously, how cool is that?

This is why I shouldn't be president. Wouldn't you want to call in an airstrike, just because you could?

[Dan The Car Dude]

Hey man. Skype is it. Unlimited long distance in the US and Canada when calling from PC to home or cell phones for $14.99 per YEAR. Completely free when calling computer to comuter.

For an additional $34.99 you get a local telephone number that people can call your computer from their home or cell phones.

It gets better...for $180 you can buy a Skype Wifi phone and you can make calls and people can call you anywhere in the world where there is a hot spot.

I know it sounds like a commercial, but for me, that's the latest greatest frickin' technology use I have seen in awhile.

[CodeSamurai]

My mug is made of titanium.

Who is aggressor animal now?!

[John]

I love the wireless network which lets me listen to all of my music anywhere in the house, from a network attached storage device upstairs.

[Michelle]

Dude, I was wearing my favorite pants yesterday, and just my luck, I ripped them on a nail sticking out of my desk. Only seconds later I took out my handy fix-it-all laser gadget and it beamed my pants back into perfect condition while I was wearing them. Now my favorite clothes can wear out.

That is the coolest gadget ever!

[Woody]

I no longer have to use carbon paper and get ink smeared on me and have to make difficult corrections on the typewriter because of this marvelous invention called the copy machine. I've been told that I don't have to use those IBM punch cards for programming anymore, either.

[Kanon]

One word: computer
How frickin' cool is that?

['Rin]

My laptop turns out to have a feature where I can use its built-in webcam as a security device. Once I set it, if anyone enters the field of view, it makes a loud alarm noise and takes pictures of the intruder.

Also, I'm still amazed that my new ipod is the size of a stick of doublemint, and yet it holds more than 250 songs.

[Alicorn]

I have a Wacom drawing tablet. I can fire up Photoshop, pick up my pen, and draw without any paper involved. The response time is perfect and the control is excellent. I draw my entire webcomic this way.

Too frickin' cool, dude.

[tord]

We've just had the "ashes" test cricket series here in Australia. Play in each of the 5 matches of the series may continue for 5 days. Some of the games in the series (played between England and Australia since 1877 I think) have been mighty close and a hot conversation topic between my co-workers and friends. My new internet capable mobile let me keep up to date with the scores and play by play accounts. During the games I could be the most up to date "man on the street" when neighbours commented on the games... How fricken cool is that??? Dude.

[CookieMonster]

Rubber bullets for my gun, Dude.

[Simon]

I remember being in Vijay's position...

When I was a 15 year old child (back in 1996), I decided that it would be fun to set up a website to tell everyone how great my favourite cartoonist was, and I included a few of his cartoons on my site. My favourite cartoonist's lawyers wrote to my ISP and had my site taken down without even bothering to inform ME that they planned to do this or sending me any cease and desist letters.

I'm not sure that my favourite cartoonist should be given the ability to find out instantly where his work is being used online.

[Real Live Girl]

Video iChat. A little bit 'o Star Trek technology right there on my desk.

Closely followed by flipping open my tri-corder looking cell phone with built in digital camera, video camera, MP3 layer, wireless web, email, IM and other stuff.

Still waiting for my phaser though. I promise to only set it on Stun-you-very-much. You can trust me with it - I'm a vegetarian.

http://scottadamsdilbert.blogspot.com/