Well, this past week I spent many hours researching new cell phones for Danielle and I. I had decided, after seeing brother Tito’s Bluetooth setup in his new Acura, that Bluetooth was something I should look into. Of course, bluetooth led me into a whole new direction once I learned everything I could about it. I came across a website that was about one man’s obsession, his car pc. Yes, he put a full blown computer into his car. I guess if you really think about it, this is really not a big deal, as most cars have had a computer running things under the hood since the 1980’s. More and more cars are coming equiped with high tech gadgetry like GPS systems and what do you think they are running on?

But, it is what led me to the car PC site that has my head spinning. I remember back when cabled networking jumped from 10Mb to 100Mb. This happened while most of you were sipping your coffee and reading the morning paper. But, for us tech geeks, this was a pretty big deal, as it really wasn’t much more expensive to buy a 10/100 switch over a 10 Mb switch. But, we are talking about sending 10 times as much information per second over the same cable. Today, there is Gigabit technology that has taken things up another ten fold. This is what is enabling things like home media PC’s to become a reality. You can now store all of your music, movies, pictures and any other digital media on a computer that can serve it to multiple sources around your house. Ok, well that is all fine an dandy as I realized today, most people don’t care about the technology, they care about what they can get out of it.

So, let’s say you have a machine in your house that serves up all of your music up to your multiple stereos in your house. One for you in the living room, while Lisa listens to her music in her room. Your wife is watching a movie in the bedroom while you listen to the radio in the kitchen. Your wife calls down to you and you miss part of the program you are listening to on the radio. No problem, you simply rewind it, just like a Tivo can do for your television. Sound crazy? Well, it is not. It is all available right now. As a matter of fact, Media Player 10 from Microsoft (which is free) can do that right now. You just need to know how to set up the rest of it.

Ok, sorry if I am not making much sense here. I have so much to say, and this is just going to get some of it off of my chest it appears. So, back to the car PC. You have the home media computer, but why not have all of the albums you have in your home media pc in your car? I mean after all, you spent countless hours ripping those CD’s to MP3 right. Plus, you have spend many hours pillaging MP3 from Napster and your friends’ iPods right? Wouldn’t it be awesome to have all of those in your car as well? Well, you can. The car pc is ready to do that for you. As a matter of fact, why not just have your car and your home computer sync up (if one computer’s library gets updated with new media, the other updates when connected) and update each other’s database of music, movies, pictures, etc. How about it happening automatically, because your car pc uses an 802.11 wireless internet connection just like you have in your house. When you pull into the garage, the car syncs up with the home computer all without you doing a thing.

This is all possible with today’s technology and while I have not seen anyone doing this yet, I am sure they are out there. Plus, I am spec’ing out the system right now so that I can implement it as soon as I can.

Hopefully, your head is not spinning like mine is, but I am pretty fired up about this whole technology. I will try and break down each segment of what the car pc can and will do here. That way it will be a lot easier to understand and make a lot more sense.