Archive for January, 2007
Marketing idea
If I ever have to create an cutting edge new character to save a flagging enterprise, like PeopleSoft or whatever, I would focus on appealing to young people. I would make my character be named “Attidude.” It would be a guy who had witty rejoinders for EVERYTHING! Plus, he would be really hep like Chester Cheetah or that new Kool Aid guy who wears pants.
Mnemonic Generator
This is a pretty good idea for either remembering things or for pretending you are cool!
You can type in any random number, like a phone number or a social security number, and it will search the Bible, plus latitude and longitude to find out if anything interesting is there, plus the law in your country, state, city, etc., so you can automatically find out what that number means.
Like, maybe “Gomer” from the Old Testament or that part where the guys ran Jehovah out of town with their iron chariot, plus “Stockholm” or “the Statue of Liberty,” and “operating a bawdy house” or “having a sign that makes too many revolutions per minute.”
This should probably be some kind of web thing that just queries a whole bunch of databases.
This could help you to remember your telephone number, plus also you could tell people about it and they might think it was interesting.
Maybe, if I got the right kind of hat for it, I could be a mentalist or something with it, too.
TO DO: Hat
Fake CIA agent scams 22 for $1M – The Clarion-Ledger
Goddamn it. The best idea I came up with today was “Burrito Week.”
[Stacey Finley] claimed to be a CIA agent who could have satellites scan people’s bodies for disease, then have CIA agents administer secret medicines to them while they slept.
TV scroller obliterator
Another proof of concept, for other people to figure out how to do and stuff like that.
This is a feature for televisions, where you can black out parts of the television, line by line, to block portions of the TV screen. So, you can scroll up with your remote to block out the ticker on the news, or Joan Rivers on the TV Guide channel, or the little ads along the bottom of TV shows. Maybe even allow for horizontal scrolling to block out those animated promos and station identifiers, even.
That’s up to you. I’m way too busy coming up with good ideas to be implementing any of them or thinking about little details.
Plus another pretty good idea is to have the most tags of anyone. LOLLERSKATES!
OK. Bye!
A pretty good scrapbooking idea!
I am compelled by demographics to include some pretty good ideas for scrapbooking, which is like kindergarten, except for sexless middle-aged white ladies.
Unfortunately, scrapbooking places smell like stale fuck plus they play weird Jesus songs, which gives me APD, or Automatic Punching Disease, which is a medical disorder that makes me do the fisticuffs against people.
As such, my pretty good scrapbooking idea is kind of old and does not take best advantage of state of the art scrapbooking technologies or anything.
Here is a picture of me to add visual interest to this post. I should totally make a joke about “After the jump,” but I’m not going to.
When I was a kid, I used to read the comics and other things, and sometimes I would not get a joke in something. So I would think to myself, “This is probably a pretty good joke that I just don’t understand yet because I am a kid. It might even be dirty! I had better save it for later, when I am more educated and can understand these no doubt hilarious and sophisticated jokes.”
So I would cut out the Marmaduke or the Reader’s Digest “Life in Uniform” or whatever, and then I would carefully paste it into this scrapbook thingy someone gave me. I accumulated quite a collection before it occurred to me that the reason I didn’t understand the jokes is that they were stupid.
So I had a whole scrapbook full of every stupid and unfunny joke I saw in print for a year or so. I think I got mad and threw it away once I realized what had happened.
Yeah, so that’s my pretty good scrapbooking idea.
Cooking with guns
This is a pretty good idea for making dull kitchen tasks quicker and less boring.
So, like, if you had to chop up a bunch of cabbage or an eggplant or whatever, instead of standing around with a knife and chopping it like some doddering old Grandma, you could instead just shoot it with some kind of exploding bullet.
I hope to follow up this general idea soon with more specific recipes and calibers and such.
donk
One other invention is a word, donk, which is a verb describing the act of communicating in an overly and artificially loquacious manner, including not just using unnecessarily large words, but also inventing words and adding extra syllables to existing words for no reason except that it makes you sound like a big shot.
The root of the word is that it is a back-formation of present continuous tense of the verb, donking, which is just Don King squished together. Get it?
Because Don King totally talks like that is why.
Anyway, I think that’s a pretty good word, and you should use it.
I invented yogurt!
I am tired and busy (busy being TIRED) today, so I am just going to link to my instructable documenting how I invented yogurt.
My fingers look like big pink hams, but I cropped the pictures so nobody would ever know.
Information display for reputation enhancement
This pretty good idea is a pretty good idea for having a very visible and very arcane display that is visible to friends, family, and neighbors.
The idea behind this is twofold:
- Be able to see some information or whatever
- Intimidate others with your ready access to cryptic looking information
This device will consist of a large display board and an input device to allow you to control the display of information.
Plus, there will also be some kind of information appliance or whatever, but the details are not worked out for that yet.
The display
This could take any of a number of different forms, depending on your information needs and your overall design scheme.
Something like the big LED displays at the stock exchange, or the CRT departure and arrival boards at airports would give the impression of being pretty important in business or whatever, whereas something with Nixie tubes or dashboard type dial display things might make it seem more like you would know how to make different bombs and poisons and things. So it’s important to evaluate your goals and get a good feel for the image you want to project before you start ordering the parts or anything.
The information you actually display could be anything. Time and temperature, stock performance, the GPS coordinates of somebody you have a tracking device on, or whatever you can get from the internet, or some kind of wireless transmission (like radio signal or ambient network or something like that. Details. These are all little details you’ll need to work out.
Following is an illustrative mockup, showing just one possible display:
The input device
Here:
This is an important part of the project, as you can see. A red AT&T 500 model rotary dial phone. Ideally, this will be housed under a large glass dome, like the kind they have in diners to put on top of a cake or whatever. In movies, anyway. I don’t think I’ve seen that in real life, but you get the idea. I think I’ve seen that on The Twilight Zone a lot. So if you don’t know what I mean, go watch the Twilight Zone until there’s one with a diner.
I even have a glass cake dome cover or whatever somewhere around here, but I can’t find it, and I’m not sure whether it is large enough to cover the phone. So there’s something for the To Do list. Find phone-sized cake dome.
The reasoning behind this choice of input device should be obvious: It makes you seem more like Batman.
Of course, the information serving appliance, whatever it is, will have to somehow recognize that clicky-click input from a rotary dial telephone, so figure out how to do that, and then program in your custom information codes appropriately. So that, like, you dial in your zip code to get the current temperature, or you dial in different unique identifiers for GPS tracking, or whatever, and it will automatically query the selected information and display it on your board.
Installing and setting up your new information display
The final step in this project is to properly set up and display your new information display system. This is arguably the most important aspect of this project, as your ultimate goal is only accomplished once others have seen you casually using this system.
The ideal arrangement for this is to have a house that has a large picture window facing the street, so that you can be observed using the red phone to manipulate the information on your display.
One important note: Try to look fishy. Pretend that you’ve left the curtains open accidentally, and if you ever make eye contact with an observer, give them a stern and threatening look, then abruptly close the curtains to obscure their view.
To Do List
To summarize, the steps to completing this project are as follows:
- Establish image you want to project. Influential bigwig? Potentially dangerous scientist? Some combination thereof?
- Think of good reasons that you have to install a large information display, in case your boyfriend asks any nosy questions, getting all up in your business.
- Purchase house with large picture window facing a public street.
- Learn whatever science and computer things you have to know to be able to make the project.
- Buy the things for the project.
- Find a cake dome that is the right size to fit over an AT&T 500 model desk phone.
- Complete project.
- Practice making the right kind of face at anybody you catch looking at your thing. It should be sort of angry and surprised, and it should be very intimidating. Like a sharp, level glare or something.
