14A: My life outside of comic books

To be honest, I enjoy comics so much, I could easily allow myself to do nothing buy buy, sell, and read comics all day long and I woud still be a very happy guy, but I wouldn't be very social and I'd probably grow old alone, gradually losing all of my friends except for Jeff at the Time Capsule. This week, however, I didn't really see anyone. I staed in touch with a few people by texting.. or with Scott, by facetiming. It's because of facetime, along with the new watch I got, that I'm realizing I've suddenly taken two giant steps toward the future I've been waiting for since I was a llittle kid. I figured I'd share it because I'm sure a lot of other people looked forward to this too.

Now obiously we were all told there would be flying cars. It didn't occur to us back then that the fling cars would be ridiculously dangerous, impractical because they would chug fuel like a frat boy doing Jager Bombs. The other dream did nothing but become more and more likely every day until now where we stand right on the brink of having our own personal wrist communicators that show an image and pla the voice of the person we're talking about, while giving us a location if they should allow it. This watch would also prvide all kinds of other ridiculous services like unlocking doors to scret hideouts, starting your car, paying for things via a credit card scanner, providing identification to police, heart rate monitoring, lie detecting, projecting movies or holograms, and maybe even date and time.
Most of those features are already available either on watches or martphones, and if there isn't an app for most of them, there will be soon. I'm simply looking forward to the day that the one device I need on my person is my wrist watch. Here's what makes me say we're almost there. At the beginning of the summer, I bought a new gadget from Nike called the Nike+ fuelband.

It improved my recovery process exponentially b giving me motivation by showing me concrete evidence and records of how hard I had worked. Here's my review of it that 534 of 559 people found helpful!

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2I5RGMPW72JV/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B007FSEMPY&nodeID=3375251&store=sporting-goods#wasThisHelpful

I really do wish I could give one of these to anyone in recovery. If you're thinking of buying someone a gift who needs to recover from something terrible, get it.

Okay, so there's that, and then there's this. I'm now wearing the “Pebble”. It's a watch that connects to my phone via bluetooth.

This thing has already made my life better, but because of it's developer friendly design, it's just gonna keep getting better. For now, it displays my text messages, so I don't need to take my phone out unless it's a message I feel like answering. It tells me where and incoming call is coming from, so again, I don't have to take out my phone, I can ignore it with a button on my watch, and silence the ring. This eliminates those awkward times in a quiet waiting room when your phone goes off and you're struggling to dig it out so you can silence it. I can control my music you have stored on your phone. This is cool if you're out biking with headphones on or in any situation where it's inconvenient to take out your phone rather than just skip with your watch. All notifications on the watch itself are vibration only.. so if you silence your phone, you'll still be alerted by your vibrating watch. The bluetooth range works at least from one end of my upstairs to the other end of my downstairs, so I'm really looking forward to using this when I go back to work. Phones aren't allowed at my watch, but if a friend texted me about an emergency, I'd know what's going on and I could judge whether I should run out to the car or not to call back. And finally, don't forget about the many different cool watch faces. It's just a cosmetic thing, but it's really cool. The display takes very little battery to keep running, because it's E-Paper like Amazon Kindle, and it's just kinda cool to look at your watch and see “quarter past four”.

I'm not trying to sell the product here. They're not even for sale. I got mine early because I donated to the project on kickstarter.com almost a year ago. What I'm pointing out is that we're only years away from having the awesome wrist communicators that must have been used on Ninja Turtles or G.I. Joes. I don't know where I saw it, but I wanted one, and now I'm pretty sure I will, because the way things are going, it seems like gadget makers had the same chilldhood dream.

I went to three comic stores since my last post, and I got a lot. I'll post about them in my next entry. but for now you can check out the new and improved checklist which shows the final 8 comics I need. This is where I need people to start keeping their eyes peeled. If you see any of those  8 missing issues, I'll pay you for them. $11 for #2,5, or 6,.. $5 for, 22, 33,, 127, 130, or 131.Thanks for reading!