The High-Tech Edge

There are no alarm clocks in Casa Gonsalves. Don’t need them. The whole place thrums to a beat that I’ve set. The temperature rises and falls, lights go bright and dim, music swells and fades, shades open and close─all in a choreographed pattern. It’s a smart home, after all. Is it wrong to want my favorite songs and movies close to me wherever I wander? Should I suffer trudging all the way down the hall to adjust the A/C or be reduced to peering out the window like some modern-day Gladys Kravitz to see who might be coming up the drive? Was I raised by wolves?

The brains behind today’s most comprehensive home-automation solution is a rather bland-looking server stored beneath the main flat-screen TV in the living room. That machine serves up an entire control system powered by Microsoft’s Windows Vista and augmented by specialized software add-ons from Exceptional Innovation’s Life‌ware 2.0. Common Xbox 360 game consoles act as remote servers, making every TV a window into the inner workings of the house. Simply grab a touch-screen remote control and make anything that would normally require a finger and a switch happen automagically. I can virtually thumb through every CD and DVD I own, including the cover art. I get real-time weather feeds, Internet access, even TiVo-like recording features. And the Life‌ware system can monitor the entire house over the Internet, a helpful feature when I’m sitting on Cape Cod in August wondering if the dehumidifier is still working down here.

And at the risk of sounding too geeky to live, here’s one of my favorite little side features. I can plug in all of my fantasy sports league picks. Then, while I kick back in my DS225 Swedish massage chair to watch the game, the system downloads fantasy stats in real time. One click and I can see that drafting Daisuke Matsuzaka is paying dividends. Speaking of which, I can check my investment portfolio from here, too.

A typical home automation system runs around $70,000. Matt Peters, president of Wireless Home in Naples (www.buywifi.com) sells packages ready-made for retrofitting into existing homes. "We see a lot of interest here from folks who are looking to make the most of their time and to make the best of their lives in what is already a pretty special place to live," says Peters.

High-Tech Highway

The high-tech goodness spills out of the living room and into the garage, where technology has made driving in our lifetime not only incalculably safer, but also a darned sight more enjoyable. DVD players and navigation systems are old hat these days. But if you go all in for the additional features in the latest Garmin Nuvi 680 GPS, for example, wonders await. At $950, the Nuvi (www.buy.garmin.com) does all the stuff a GPS should do, plus it incorporates details from real-time traffic reports and acts as an MP3 and audiobook player. You can also edit the maps, which means you can plug in all of the indefinite lane closures and barricades on Immokalee Road. And it acts as a Bluetooth-enabled speaker phone for hands-free cellular calls, clearly not yet a popular option in Southwest Florida. But one can hope.

The fact is, cars are pretty high-tech already.

I’ve always prided myself on being able to parallel park. But it’s nice to know the Lexus LS 460 will do it for you. You do still have to control the gas and brake pedals, but skirt sensors and an onboard computer parking algorithm handle the steering. And at least a dozen manufacturers offer things like heads-up night vision displays based on infrared technology to let drivers see past their headlights. Armadillos everywhere will thank you. Two other must-haves are the KVH TracVision, which pipes 185 DirecTV channels plus local stations into your ride. The TracVision A7 ($2,995 at www.kvh.com/landmobile) includes a beefy, 30-inch square antenna, however, so this is best left to the big SUV/Hummer crowd for now.

And to take advantage of the information already on-board, Linear Logic (www.scangauge.com) makes the $170 ScanGaugeII, which plugs into a car’s computer and displays fuel economy, battery voltage, coolant temperature, trouble codes, maximum speed, average speed and a ton of other helpful info. Plus it gives you something to look at when there’s nothing on the satellite TV.

Grip It and Rip It

Getting out of the garage is a bit of an engineering feat itself. One-car stall, two cars. No problem. The Phantom Park Lift by American Custom Lifts keeps one vehicle neatly parked atop the other. They can be found at www.aclifts.com, and the unit will set you back around $60,000.

Outside the home, technology follows me and my family wherever we go, making the mundane manageable and the good life even better. There are not many daily activities that a few bits and bytes can’t improve.

As my wife and I part ways for our Saturday activities, the spirit of Dean Kaman and others like him come along for the ride. For her, the ride is headed to a tee time at Stoneybrook Golf Club in Estero. Time to interject some futuristic touches into the ancient art of smacking a stone with a stick.

My wife may be a novice golfer, but she’s got a secret weapon. And no, it’s not the constant coaching from her 14-handicap husband. It’s a green, cellphone-sized gadget clipped to her pink, polka-dotted Keri golf bag. With it, my wife is the only one on the course not asking, "How far is it to carry the water?" She knows. To the exact foot. And that’s a significant advantage when you’re staring across the pond to a stone wall at Stoney’s "Little Devil" 14th hole.

The genius of the GolfLogix GPS is how easy it is to use. My wife downloads her favorite courses into memory, then cranks up the unit on the course. While the rest of the ladies are searching for sprinkler heads or yardage markers, the satellite magic in the GolfLogix figures my wife’s precise location in relation to all of the features on every hole. Bunkers, water, lay-up areas plus the front, back and center of the green—they’re all in there. Data for 85 courses in Southwest Florida are available for the rugged, shock-proof GolfLogix, and more are being added every month.

But is it legal? Well, Brian Carle, the assistant manager at Edwin Watts Golf in Naples, which sells the $349 GolfLogix, tells me that both the USGA and R&A have sanctioned the use of these satellite-based measuring devices in competition. Which is more than we can say for Polara anti-slice balls … and mulligans.

Watch and Learn

While my better half is off ruining a good walk, I’m lacing up my Keen trail running shoes for a jog in, around and through the Estero Bay Preserve State Park. I know the regular trails are marked, but if I do it right, I’ll get off the beaten path, head down the power lines, cut back across to the marsh and circle around back to the start. All told, about an 8.5-mile loop. The Keens are admittedly a step down from my Adidas 1s, which have an onboard computer that senses the difference between road, gravel, sand and grass and adjust the cushioning and support accordingly. But in Estero, there’s always the low-tech hazard of sloshing through tidal pools to contend with.

Normally, I’d be skittish about running in the Florida heat on an uncharted course into a fairly rugged environment that I don’t know very well, an environment often shared with snakes and the odd herd of feral hogs. So as I pull on my CoolMax shorts and Dry Weave tank top and cinch up my Ultimate Direction pop-top hydration belt, I’m also getting wired. No. Not with performance enhancing substances. But I do get a rush from my Timex Ironman Triathlon Bodylink Trail Runner Watch. Like the gear in my car, this baby will tell me everything that’s going on around and inside me as I slog through the sand and scrub. Naturally, it works as a watch and a timer, but this ruggedized device also measures heart rate, speed and distance data. On-board GPS gives my longitude, latitude, altitude and compass heading and allows me to set routes and navigate to pre-set waypoints. The device ($350 at www.timex.com) will even predict my finish time in races. And best of all, I can just tell the watch I’m lost and it will help me follow a trail of digital breadcrumbs back to where I started. Phew.

Grapes of Math

We’re entertaining this evening. Nothing extravagant, just two couples from our church coming over for my renowned blackened redfish with crawfish sauce. Folksy enough, I suppose, but I want to hit the right combo of comfortable and classy with a proper wine.

I could go rifling through my cellar, dog-eared Robert Parker guide in hand, trying to find the perfect potable to pair with my delish fish dish, but the folks at Media Access Solutions have a more genteel solution. With a few presses on a touch-screen interface, the eSommelier system displays every wine on hand, what rack it’s on, how long it’s been aging, how it’s rated and even what I thought of it the last time I drank it. The wines can be sorted by country, region, variety, winery and vintage. And an on-board database of more than 130,000 wines makes adding new bottles to my collection a snap. Add the optional bar-code reader and your cellar can be full—and fully organized—in no time. The devices run about $6,000 and are available from wine dealers such as www.wineenthusiast.com.

So, according to eSommelier, I’m a big fan of the ’04 Hugel gewürztraminer. Who am I to argue? And eSommelier also tells me I’m down to my last bottle. If there’s a better use for technology, I haven’t found it.

While I tend to the fish, my wife mans the Zojirushi NS-ZAC10 fuzzy logic rice cooker. Yes, even the most ancient of grains can benefit from technology. It works like this: Rice goes through four stages while cooking, from standing to boiling to steaming to resting. The heat needs to be subtly adjusted along the way to make the perfect rice. Heat is turned up or down for each stage according to each variety of rice. Essentially, a fuzzy logic rice cooker mimics what a real cook does, using its senses and intuition to turn out the perfect, fluffy white grains.

So thanks to modern technology, and my mad fish blackening skills, dinner is an unmitigated success.

A World of Wonder

The evening complete, the wife and I settle in. Life‌ware has dimmed the lights, closed the shades and activated the remote security. I check the weather and see that rain is coming early tomorrow. Luckily, my WeatherTRAK ET plus irrigation system from HydroPoint Data Systems knows the same thing, since it’s connected to the same weather data. If it knows rain is in the forecast, WeatherTRAK ($650, www.weathertrak.com/smart-controllers) keeps the sprinklers from coming on. Thrifty and cool! Knowing that the lawn will be dry for a while means this is a good time to cut the grass. And yes, I know it’s 11 p.m. But my Robomow from Friendly Robotics ($1,995) is battery-powered and virtually silent. With a touch of the remote, Robomow comes out of its little charging cubby and races around the yard cutting and mulching. Sensors locate a buried perimeter wire to keep the RoboMow on track (and out of the neighbor’s impatiens).

Standing by the window watching as my robot groundskeeper does its thing in the moonlight, I think about Dean Kamen and, of course, Thomas Edison, our own prototypical tech geek. I imagine they’d have been fast friends. For one thing, they both had sobering ideas about technology and innovation. Edison especially loved to talk about his big ideas that fell flat on their face. As I fish for an Arturo Fuente Hemingway Short Story cigar in my CAO Vision auto-regulating, LED-lit Vision Sensi-Box humidor, I’m reminded of a quote by Kamen: "We can’t live anymore in a world which is based on stuff and not ideas. If you want to live with the world of stuff, we’re all doomed." I blow a smoke ring.

I don’t want to be doomed, Dean. I’ll settle for comfortable and distracted. In the end, that’s really what all these buttons and knobs and blinking lights are for.