Anyone that follows me on twitter likely knows I’m a big coffee drinker.  I couldn’t wait until they started building Starbucks in my little corner of Alabama.  I used to have a credit card that gave money back for my kids education until Starbucks came up with the Duetto card that gave money for coffee (they say you start ignoring your family when you get addicted ).  I also visit most of the coffee houses in my area. Will this change?   Maybe.  More on that later.

The picture above is of my newest toy, a Tassimo coffee maker from Bosch. You will see a rack in the back of cartridges, mostly coffee but also tea, hot chocolate, and milk. It creates a single cup of coffee from one of these cartridges in about 60 seconds.

Each disk has a bar code that says what temperature, amount of water, and flow rate should be used for the coffee, expresso or other drink.  For the engineers and tech geeks like me, check out Hacking the Tassimo Part 1 and Part 2 for the details of the bar codes.

Here is what I’m so keen on this thing (other than it being a cool gadget):

1. It makes REALLY good coffee. It surprised me how good.
2. It is a single cup.  My house is high traffic with 3 older kids. Five of us plus friends and we all like different types of coffeee (plus, my daughter likes hot chocolate and my wife likes tea)
3. No mess. Sometimes you have to wipe it down because of a coffee splash but still much easier than a regular coffee pot.
4. There are many different coffee options.  The Starbucks tastes a lot like what I get at Starbucks.

The one thing I don’t like about Starbucks is the difficulty of using the Wifi. I overlook it for the coffee and ambience.   The way it works is this… you get a starbucks card, register it, and use it once a month. Then you get a login to the ATT Wifi. Sounds good but it isn’t.  You see I use my Duetto card which I can’t use with the Wifi.  So I have to get ANOTHER Starbucks card and buy a little bit with one card and a little bit with the other… crazy. Plus, I usually visit with others like family or friends for work and if they don’t have a card or ATT wifi, its a pain.

Now, with Tassimo, I don’t really need to go for the coffee (Starbucks, I’m still glad I can get Starbucks for my Tassimo).  The other coffee houses have free no-hassle wifi so if you do something like a tweetup, it is easier to go someplace else. Now, the economy sucks.  

Local Starbucks, I hope you have a plan.  At the very least, start selling Tassimo disks.

I was driving to work the other day, listening to the news about the latest stimulus package when, BAM!, it hit me. Or rather, I hit it…a pot hole.

Now I’m not a politician or an economist so I’m sure this is a stupid idea, but why not fix our roads?  I mean, better roads are something everyone can get behind, right? It’s a local problem. I don’t want to take your money or borrow money against your kids to fix roads in another state. I want them fixed on your street.

It is also a measureable and trackable stimulus package.  For each dollar of stimulus, how many pot holes did we fix?  How many new jobs were created? How much of that money stayed in the US? We could even do metrics or competition between states and counties. If you waist your road money on vacations or bonuses we will know.

A friend who is a journalist has a phrase, “Follow the money”.   So let’s follow the money.  We give $1 to the county (or whomever) with the pot holes.  They hire people from the unemployed pool of workers giving the people a salary and medical benefits.  Need flexible hours? There is no bad time to fix roads.  No skills? If you are able bodied, it’s not a problem.  Over qualified?  Math and computer guys, we have a new problem for you called the traveling road crew problem (find the shortest distance between a set of  potholes fixing each pot hole only once).  Sales guys, we need you to negotiate a good deal on equipment.

Local businesses, guess what?  We have a lot of thirsty, hungry people out there fixing the roads.  The need shoes and clothes and good washing machines. Ok, we might be subsidizing the beer industry a bit more than some people like but no plan is perfect. 

Now I’m not saying to make this a total manual effort just to create jobs.  If it makes sense to buy equipment like a dump truck or earth mover, that is fine. We want the most roads fixed for our money. So some of that stimulus dolar goes to buying some equipment from local companies.  

Now some people will say, “hey, a lot of our equipment is from overseas.  We want to help OUR people”. I understand but it’s never that easy (do you know what % of your car is actually American made?) . So, instead of spending stimulus money for the new, amazing pothole fixer from Japan, we send corn or software or something that has at least caused money to cycle through the American economy at least once.

CEO’s, eventually this money will come to you as people buy new cars or dump trucks or baby clothes or start putting money in banks.  It is “trickledown economics” – ok, “trickleup economics” but you get the point.

 So is it just potholes I’m thinking of?  No but it’s an easy metaphor for starting locally. Is this a stupid idea?  I’m sure it is.   At least if it fails to fix the economy our children will have good roads to ride their bicycles.

When I was at school at the University of Florida, I was big into both mechanical engineering and computing. In my senior year,  I worked on a hand control for robotics that gave force feedback.  When the robot arm was lifting 500 lbs, it would feel like five lbs to me. When it lifted 1000, it would feel like 10. You could also make it work the other way. Consider a tiny robotic arm for surgery. Bump up against some delicate tissue and it would feel like a pound to the doctor.

In some ways, this was a simple example of “Augmented Reality” so when I read Robert Rice’s blog today I was glad to see some enthusiasm for the future.  Some technologies have longer paths and this has historically been one of them.  Check out his post on “Is it too early for augmented reality”

Being kind of a virtual world guy, one of the videos I like is this combination of  Second Life and the real world done bye Georgia Tech:

I also liked this new Coke commercial I found from Robert’s blog: