On Wednesday night, I was fortunate to have seen Madonna at Madison Square Garden. The material girl pumped out yet another fantastic show with all the glitz and hallmark amazing choreography that we have come to expect and love.

This year, there were many that were not able to go among my friends for one reason or another. So I decided to “share” the concert via my mobile phone.

Now ordinariliy, there are guards who search everyone before entering the concert. They hate people who take pictures or worse, movies, and then share/sell/post them on the Internet or elsewhere. Today, it is different. Everyone has a mobile phone with a camera on it and they won’t confiscate that.

During the concert, I noticed many people taking pictures and recording movies with their cellphones, doubtless to send them to their friends like I was doing. And of course, many were able to sneak in digital cameras and 1 or 2 lone videocameras. The guards walking around the stadium didn’t seem to mind so much, or maybe they were blind.

I snapped many pictures first, and the moved onto taking 15 second movies. This was as much an experiment for me as it was the desire to share my concert experience. What did I find out:

1. The resolution on the camera is definitely lacking. Need more megapixels!
2. Need more zoom! 4X on my SLVR wasn’t bad, but I wanted to zoom in on Madonna and couldn’t.
3. Movie resolution was very low as well. Sound quality really stunk, but what can you expect in a crowded venue like Madison Square Garden.
4. Definitely you could capture the energy of the show in the movies. As you played them, the action definitely was portrayed as flashing lights and colors, barely recognizable as the images on the video screens and/or the performers.
5. Receiving technology definitely varied. Here’s the scorecard:
   1. Sending videos to phones overseas – Nada. Didn’t get anything.
   2. Movies to other advanced media phones. Worked great.
   3. Treo 650s and 700ps – sucked big time. MMS’s errored out.
   4. Email worked great. Came through as .3gp files whatever that was. Thankfully Quicktime was able to play it.

Someday, I’ll be able to stream an entire concert to my friends via my high speed mobile phone internet connection. Now that would be cool. It can’t be far off. And the music labels, concert promoters, and artists will be furious, I’m sure.

After lunch today, I was shocked to find that my mobile phone was NOT in my bag.
I ALMOST PANICKED! To think of all that is valuable to me in my mobile phone: my phone numbers, my iTunes music, my SIM card, and what’s really important, which is pictures of my daughter which I use as my background.
I called Cingular to put the SIM card on hold, and search all over the restaurant for it. Finally I find someone at the front desk who saw the phone. Geez. It was in lost and found! I retrieve it and then reactivate it.
I shudder to think about losing my mobile now. I have not backed it up like my Treo, which is always backed up through syncing. But then, I think about losing my Treo, which is probably even more problematic as I get my email on there. Or worse, I think about losing my laptop or getting it stolen. That would truly catastrophic.
Our lives are now increasiingly bound to the electronic world and to these small metal and plastic boxes. And they are small to be convenient and carried around, but also small enough to lose or to steal. It’s really scary.

Yesterday I was typing on my Treo’s folding keyboard in a conference room, awaiting the meeting to begin. The adminstrative assistant came in, saw what I was doing, and remarked that she thought that was a cool gadget, and that she just saw two guys come in with wrist braces, courtesy of carpal tunnel syndrome/tendonitis caused by typing too much on a Blackberry keyboard.
We’ve got so many devices. We make them so small so they are convenient and can be carried in one’s pocket. We make them untethered so we can remain connected wherever we are. But yet, our bodies aren’t adapted to using them very well. Our fingers are too big, our biomechanics more suited to hunting and gathering rather than pecking on sub-miniature keyboard.
A few years back there was a huge controversy about the effects of electromagnetic radiation caused by cellphones on causing cancer in individuals who use them a lot. The jury is still out, but one cannot ignore the enormous amount of energy being beamed through our bodies every time we use such devices, or are just in their proximity.
The fact remains that evolution has not caught up to our electronic lifestyles; our bodies are shaped wrong, our cells had not evolved to resist the effects of so much wireless energy.
Here’s my prediction. Evolution works slowly. Humans do not.
In the future, the rich and famous (and most desirable) will be defined by the number of physical braces and bandages they wear. The devices they carry will cause so much damage that they will be obvious symbols of their wealth and being able to afford the coolest, most expensive devices. And because they use so many devices, they are exposed to so much radiation that they have developed huge tumors on their heads and bodies.
Imagine the stud of the future. He walks by, wrist braces on both arms, and a huge tumor on his head, chatting on his Blackberry Mark XI and receiving direct internet feeds to his brain. Women walk by and turn and stare; they whisper amongst themselves, “wow look at the tumors on that guy; he’s sexy HOT!”

A while back a friend of mine told me about another friend who owned a Prius. She saw him on 101 in his Prius apparently tailgating an 18 wheeler. When asked about why he would do such a silly thing, he replied that he was trying to maximize his miles per gallon by driving in the draft of the tractor trailer.
How interesting…
Today, I decided to test that theory. I, too, was on 101 on my way to Palo Alto and found a convenient 18 wheeler in the right lane. With a wry smile, I pull up right on his bumper and look at the onboard computer. WOW. It was hovering between 60 and 80 MPG! Amazing what cutting some air drag can do for fuel efficiency. So I ride for a while behind him, and then he cuts left and I notice my MPG drops to 30.
Definitely aerodynamics can make a difference. The Prius is already very aerodynamic, but having another big ass truck cut the air in front of you really helps a lot.
DISCLAIMER: This REALLY a dangerous thing to do. I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND IT ALL. You could drive right up his tailpipe if he jams on the brakes, maybe even die underneath as he crushes your windshield to a pulp (although another friend of mine did remind me that 18 wheelers can’t stop on a dime, so you’d probably have time to brake to a halt even as your 18 wheeled friend was screeching wheels attempting to stop). A cop might just also give you a ticket too.
Don’t be an idiot; perform your aerodynamic science experiments some other way.