The couch is where the fun is (not what you think!)

I saw a program on TV which relayed the latest in camel racing from Dubai. Yes, the desert kingdom has had some pangs of conscience. After years of using young boys as camel riders for racing, they have succumbed to the criticism of their fellow human beings and have started using robots. That’s right. All the camels are mounted by robots, only half the body is required, fixed on to the saddle. But these robots also have whips in their hands. And there is a speaker installed in the robot to convey messages to the camel.

A road runs parallel to the camels’ track. In this road, Arab men (the women are busy in the Gucci and Louis Vuitton shops, I think) race down in their sport utility vehicles (SUV’s), driven by their chauffeurs, while constantly making clicking and other noises that the camels like to hear to egg them on to faster movement, into their hand held devices. I presume they also regularly click the button that will make the robot whip the camel! Welcome to the new high tech world of camel racing.

Now, this gives me an idea. An entrepreneur can organize betting on which of the cars would win the parallel race in which they are racing!

But we need to see where else we can take this idea. For instance, the whole race can be conducted from the couch. All you need are a few cameras placed along the track, and the Arab camel masters can sit comfortably in their couch and race their camels, with all the same accoutrements they now use. That would also be eco-friendly since they will not be racing their gas guzzling vehicles.

Let’s face it. We are punching buttons all the time. We start at an early age. Have you seen the little children with a Play Station or Game Boy in their hands? Have you noticed the bulging muscles on those little fingers?!

Punching buttons can be fun. Look at people in the casinos. A few years ago, they would have to pull down a lever to turn the drums and see whether all the bananas lined up to make them a winner. Now, there is a lever on the side if you want to exercise one arm (like the tennis player does), but pressing a button on the machine will also get those wheels turning. There is a channel on my TV that relays poker games on a 24 hour basis. Unfortunately various state and federal laws prevent betting on line, on tv, etc. But that will soon change since people need something to do when they lose their jobs, and they are losing it in large numbers. Why not start showing those slot machines on TV and one should be able to turn those drums with the remote, seated on one’s couch. Another button on the remote should darken the room, and create the requisite casino ambiance. And this will be eco friendly. We do not need to travel to those casinos.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention. The Georgia Institute of Technology in the US is designing battlefield robots. Various versions of robots are already in existence. They are sort of boxes, (or vehicles), that are used for mine detection, and so on. And there are un-manned planes, called drones, that can be sent flying deep into enemy territory to bomb a target. Some of these drones sent to bomb in Pakistan and Afghanistan are operated out of command posts in Nevada in the US heartland. But the new robots will be different. They will resemble humans (remember the movie Robot Cop? That was a good one!) and the professor who is designing them has promised that the software will make the robot soldier ethical. That is, it will not allow the heat of the moment to cloud its judgment and misbehave. No chances of walking into an Iraqi house and mistakenly killing the whole family.

Let’s get back to that couch. We are seeing a future where the US soldier will each be assigned a robot and can sit in his couch at home with his family around him and search for weapons of mass destruction around the world, or replace nasty dictators ethically with the help of a remote. Family friendly wars.

Here are my stock picks for the future. Invest in couches and remotes.

Get a dog if you have Vista

Barack Obama, president elect of the US, began his acceptance speech by saying that he was going to get a puppy for his two girls to have as they moved to the White House. He, I guess, meant it as a reward for his children on his success. I think he also meant that he would have more help in the White House so he could afford to have a dog.

Dogs are high maintenance pets. You need the time to re-arrange your life if you have a dog. There is a new product available on the market that can help you to rearrange your life and generate those extra minutes that you never knew you had. The advantage is that if you had this product, if will also raise your stress levels and having a dog will not only use that spare time but help you reduce those stress levels.

Thus, I think the other reason why Obama is getting a dog, that not many people know, is that he will also be getting a new pc when he moves into the White House. And that pc is going to come, loaded, with the new operating system from Microsoft, Windows Vista.

The reason I am able to make these perceptive connections is that I have a new Notebook that came loaded with Windows Vista operating system. And having a dog has been a lot on my mind. You see, if you had a dog, you would need to play with it and take it out for walks, etc. That requires finding some minutes to spare in between various daily activities. Now if you have Vista, you would find several such minutes in between your activities, since the amount of time it takes for the system to load, the amount of time it takes to ‘Switch Users’, the amount of time it takes to put it to ‘Sleep’ and the time it provides you to wonder if the system has shut down or just some program is loading, etc., gives you those minutes you need to take the dog for a walk, to give it a bath, to give its food, and so on. Of course, if you did not have a dog, you could use the time to make a cup of coffee (or tea, if that is your pleasure), to polish those shoes that you have been putting off for a long time, to dust those (real) windows, etc.

I was skeptical of this Vista business even when I purchased this machine. Various news reports warned me about it. Even this Fujitsu Notebook machine was sold with the older Windows XP till June this year, but I procrastinated and bought it in August. So it came loaded with Vista. Too bad.

But wait a minute! What do I find in the box that the machine came in? A disk that will allow me to downgrade to an XP! Microsoft, collaborating with Fujitsu, have thoughtfully provided me with a way to switch to the older system. (Bharadwaj wants me to perform the switch sooner than later so it does not mess with other files that I may be storing. But I worry if I am going to mess up anyway and have been procrastinating.) But let us reflect on the market power of a company that knows that it has put out a dud product, and gives people a way to switch to a product that it thinks it has improved upon! Wow! And this company makes profits, and has not collapsed like all those dud banks have been in the recent past.

Now Dasharath, who wanted a dog when he was young (and was refused by me since I did not want to do all the work that it takes to keep a dog), still cannot use my reasoning above as an opportunity to get a dog, because he has a Mac, whose operating system responds much faster to his needs and therefore does not provide him with those precious minutes to perform various dog related tasks.