Phillip Torrone is my favorite geek. Here he shows off his new shades with monitor built in. It connects to a Pocket PC with a video out card. That is hooked up to his phone via bluetooth and is also tied into a bluetooth GPS. When he runs near something his application (Flash based) will kick off a video, so he basically made location-based video. His first goal is to have email always checking as he jogs. The glasses cost $500.

OK, the Heiny family has three Tablet PC evangelists (and we haven't met two other members of this family yet). Here's the latest one. Layne, who is a high school biology teacher, writes why Tablet PCs are great for the classroom.

Just wanted to underline something else Layne admitted to: he switched from Linux to the Tablet PC!

Anita covers the meetup tonight. It was fun. The bowling alley only had one redeeming thing: free WiFi. Why they don't ban smoking indoors everywhere is beyond me. California has that one right.

We're having an RSS Winterfest. I speak on a panel at 10:30 a.m. today.

If you're in the Seattle area tonight, come by the Meetup. Rory Blyth, Jim Blizzard, me, and plenty of others will be attending that.

Garland Wong, the CTO of Kinzan, came to see me today.

After walking him to my office, he unfolded his laptop, and started showing me a demo of what he and his team has been working on for a few years.

But wait, what the heck was he showing me? He opened up Eclipse. And started showing me how his IDE and components let developers build apps quickly with no code. All in Java. Uses Model-View-Controller methodology. He built a web application in front of me that hooked into SAP. Then he showed how it easy it was to switch the site to use Siebel. And change the functionality of the app itself.

"Why is he showing me this?" I started asking myself. After all, I +do+ work at Microsoft and this was all running on open source and Java stuff.

But, I had to admit it was cool. I'd never seen a coding environment that was like this. Just plop a component down on the screen. Draw a line to connect it into the system. No code.

Then the shocker. He closed down Eclipse, opened up Visual Studio and did the same thing. Only this time his system used Visio inside of Visual Studio. He showed me the code it wrote. Showed me the XML file it created. And how it enabled a new kind of development team.

"Is this interesting?" he asked.

[expletive] yes!!

Keep in mind, this system is aimed at large companies. $25k just to buy the system, and then $1k per developer machine. But, his system has the potential to change corporate development as much as Visual Basic changed it.

It's something you need to see work. It's one of those things that a post on a weblog just won't do justice.

Have any of you seen this system? What do you think?

One other disclaimer. The Java part of the system is out today. The .NET part is still being worked on.