Woah. Deja vu. It’s like the early 90s or something.

Microsoft actually has a product I’m interested in.

Check out Microsoft Surface.

Surface is the first commercially available surface computing platform from Microsoft Corporation. It turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, interactive surface. The product provides effortless interaction with digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. In essence, it’s a surface that comes to life for exploring, learning, sharing, creating, buying and much more. Soon to be available in restaurants, hotels, retail and public entertainment venues, this experience will transform the way people shop, dine, entertain and live.

Surface is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor that’s easy for individuals or small groups to interact with in a way that feels familiar, just like in the real world. Surface can simultaneously recognize dozens and dozens of movements such as touch, gestures and will be able to recognize actual unique objects that have identification tags similar to bar codes.

Surface will ship to partners with a portfolio of basic applications, including photos, music, virtual concierge and games, which can be customized to provide their customers with unique experiences.

The marketing squad did their homework. Go to the site and check out the videos. Impressive–I want one.

The company seems to promise this thing will be fairly ubiquitous in the near future. You probably won’t see these in use until next year earliest, though, since they won’t start shipping until “winter 2007.” In Microsoft years, I guess that could actually be 2010.

This is officially the worst photo I’ve ever taken.

I don’t know what the hell happened.

I was trying to take a photo of my friend walking across the stage at his NCO Academy graduation. I use this camera all the time, and usually the photos are usable at worst.

I think it’s very adult to be able to share my failures with you.

A very calm Bellows beach early in the morning

We went to the beach at Bellows again on Saturday and there were three-footers–maybe three and a halfs–the best I’ve seen there yet. That beach is prime for boogie boarding because it’s shallow, so you can just stand in front of the breaks and jump down on your board in front of them. A few of them took me eighty yards or so, all the way into the sand. Great day at the beach.

But today my chest is sore–it feels like I got hit by a truck. I guess all the jumping and smashing around in the water on the boogie board caught up with me. Damn, I’m getting old.

Zade swam for almost two hours straight. He just frolicks around in the waves, letting them push and pull him around. Once he came up after a rather large one tumbled him over and found himself face-to-face with a sea turtle. He said this thing was medium sized, more brown than green, and just looked him in the eye for a few seconds before going back under the water. Crazy. We looked around for the turtle for a while after that but didn’t find it.

There’s always a Man-Of-War advisory at Bellows. I mean every time. I’ve seen them, both out in the water and washed up on the beach, I’ve also been stung mildly once, but I’ve never seen thousands of blood-thirsty jellies like you might expect after seeing the signs all over the beach.

Bellows is sweet. Even though my chest feels cracked open, there are likely plenty of Man-Of-Wars along the beach, and the traffic will probably be hell (Memorial Day weekend), I think I’ll be able to convince Amy to go back tomorrow.

Yep, I will. She just asked me what time we’re leaving.