ThoughtBlip

Summary - have a car seat that you can hook up to your car’s A/C to circulate air through the seat to cool / warm the seat for the child.

This idea came about when my wife and I had our first child, and it was often the case that when we’d take him out of the car seat, he’d be sweaty from the back his head down to the back of his legs. The problem may have been partly due to the material that the car seat was made out of, but it was also partly due to the fact that it’s simply hotter in the back-seat in most cars b/c of the A/C circulation, that the child is not free to move around to allow the heat to escape, that the padding and sides help to keep heat in, etc…

Part of the problem with this idea is that there is no universal A/C port to simply plug into (that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be - but I’d only see this ever happening on high-end models). Nevertheless, my VW Jetta, for instance, has A/C vents for the rear seats. They admittedly don’t do much - but there is *some* air that goes through those vents. In the case of my car, I can see having a kit that allows you to take out the registers for the vents and replace them with something akin to a vacuum-hose style adapter (obviously for blowing air as opposed to vacuuming air off your child ).

The car seat could be designed in a few ways to take advantage of a hose-type input for air circulation. My vision would be to have the hose flatten out and curve to somewhat match the shape of the seat - so that the connector hose will mostly lie on the floor, follow the contour of the bottom of the actual car’s seat, and curve into a flat section that is somewhat rigid - into the bottom of the child car seat. The child car seat would have large channels that don’t interfere with the structural stability or safety of the seat to direct the air through the seat and around the child. The air would not blow directly on the child at all - instead, the air would be diffused into the padding - almost like the air on an air hockey table but with much, much less pressure. The object is not to make the child into an icicle, but to simply remove the stagnant heat of the seat and the accumulation of body heat so that the baby / child is comfortable.

Now, there are obvious risks when messing around with temperature and children - particularly with heat and cold… So a ton of disclaimers and warnings would have to be in place. I’m not personally certain that anything could be done to fully idiot-proof this invention to make it worthy of rolling out to the masses at large and being able to sleep well at night knowing that people aren’t going to cook their kids in the backseats (unfortunately this happens already without the need for any fancy additions to the existing product line - simply giving someone a car to lock a kid in with nothing more than a cracked-open window while they go into a bar to knock a few back or play video poker is all it takes - horribly enough).

Things could be added to create some temperature safety - a temperature sensitive valve that can modulate the temp, and therefore the risks, might do the trick (but would also add to the cost).

There is the possibility of creating an after-market device to insert into/under existing car seat padding. Something like a very thin, padded bladder… a diffuser that would fit unobtrusively under the existing seating, and that would be positioned/located in a way to circulate just enough of the A/C to provide the same benefit as the “designed” car seat would. The device would again have to be deemed safe, and deemed to not interfere with the proper operation of the car seat safety features, nor to pose any additional safety risks due to the extra pieces/parts/connectors used to implement the cooling/warming system thru the vehicle’s A/C.

This idea to me is something that, should I be having another few kids (not likely), and some free time (again not likely given the extra few kids), I’d like to play around with and make a prototype - since the bladder-diffuser idea should be simple enough to manufacture and test out…

So, one of the purposes of this blog, before being violently derailed by everyday life, was to capture, document, share, archive ideas that typically float in and out of my mind on a regular basis.  One of the issues I encountered with many of my ideas is that I felt that they may hold some value for me - that one of the ideas may be something that I might personally wish to pursue.  In the end, I think that in many ways I became an idea hoarder - unwilling to communicate most of my ideas publicly when an idea was interesting enough.  The ideas and thoughts that were not interesting enough fell by the wayside as not being worthy of taking the time to document.

I have to wonder if others run into this same kind of dichotomy while attempting to share thoughts and ideas, yet retain some ownership for their own pursuits.Recently, I was reflecting on the ideology of EFF versus pursuits to capture patents on novel inventions - as they relate to the ideas and thoughts that I’ve been documenting behind closed doors in my own little notebooks offline.  It seems that having too many ideas to follow up on, and keeping them to myself “just in case” I have the time or interest in following up on one or more of them in the future does much good for anyone.  In some cases, some ideas are for products that I’d personally find useful and appreciate having regardless of who develops the ideas or inventions.  In other cases, some of the ideas have become a reality through someone else independently coming up with the idea or inspiration on their own - and following through with it.

So, I’m going to try a new approach:  START GIVING IDEAS AWAY FOR FREE.

Now, I’m not sure if anyone else will agree that any of my ideas have any real intrinsic value - some of them are kind of out there, potentially unrealistic (but that’s unknown at least to me in most cases without further investigation), and/or things that may have been already thought of or done by someone else unbeknownst to me (e.g. prior art - again requiring research)…

I’ll still be struggling with what to share and what not to share - but the attempt will be to be more open than not - erring on the side of sharing information unless I’m actively working on an idea, or will be actively working on it in the near future.

Let’s see if I go another few years before posting, or if I start to publish interesting thoughts

So I’m beginning to think that my dependency on mobile is surpassing my dependency on the Internet & a desktop computer.

Utility apps, gaming, news, social networking, email… all done more on mobile than laptop.

Sure, when I get down to serious work…extensive browsing, typing, development…I use my laptop. A full computer won’t ever go away for me (or at least the semblance of one) - but that’s not the significant point.

The significant point is the extent to which I and so many others use and literally depend on mobile - in new an novel ways that are constantly evolving.

For me personally, this dependency started with the Palm Treo 600p, and literally exploded when I started to use an iPhone. I never was a Crackberry user :/

Android is very appealing as well, but isn’t quite there yet for me - even with all the great devices and alternate carriers. As a developer, I’m sure I’ll end up with both eventually (thank you Google Voice).

One form of vendor tie-in that many underestimate is the app investment…both cost-wise, as well as effort/setup-wise. I’ve invested a fair amount of $$$ in iPhone apps … many are apps I can live without, and many are not…one thing that’s certain is that my investment and app dependencies are growing over time…and to switch to any other mobile device would require replacement of all these dependencies…Many apps have proprietary / non-portable data (which has its own issues when switching apps even on the same platform).

Point is, switching to Android for me is more than just a device / OS switch - it’s all the app baggage and cost impact as well.

So it’s been a while….thoughts have come and gone, many never to return I’m sure.

 I recently went through a serious neck injury.  It happened in an inflatable obstacle course during a teambuilding even at work.  We were all supposed to take turns racing through the obstacle course in a relay race - where the total time for each team would be used to determine the winning team.  The beginning of the course is a wall with a hole in it.  The person before me sprinted at the wall and dove through the hole - and then returned a minute or two later to tag me to go.  I ran at it as he did, dove through the hole, tucked to roll, and WHOOMP!  I went clean past the second obstacle and crashed into a wall.  It forced my head down harder and farther than you can imagine - chin to chest - and then some.  It was a horrible sensation, and every now and then I have a vivid recollection of it happening - something like a flashback where I can feel the immediate pain and tension. 

 I felt a pop.  I remember thinking “Oh sh*t, did I just pull a Christopher Reeve” and I froze.  My arms were buzzing, tingling, prickling all over as if they were plugged into sockets.  I made sure to stay completely still - not wanting to move, afraid I might actually paralyze or kill myself.  I thought to wiggle my toes, and they WORKED!  I tell people that was the happiest moment of my life outside of my son being born.  I could still feel my legs and my feet.. I then remember thinking to myself, literally, “As long as I don’t f*** it up, and as long as the paramedics don’t f*** it up, I’ll be OK… they can fix this”….Just had to make sure there wouldn’t be any further nerve damage. 

 The buzzing subsided - still felt weird… pain in my neck, back, and arms started setting in.  People kept pushing up against the inflatable course, which I was still lying on, to see what happened - inadvertently bouncing me around… I had to keep yelling to tell everyone to stay off…. I yelled for ice - to put an ice pack on the back of my neck to stop the swelling….it was very cold, but felt very good.  I wanted to minimize swelling to prevent any pressure on my spinal cord or nerves - just in case.

Face down on the vinyl/plastic surface - unable to move…skin on my cheek sticking to the weird material - and spit from my mouth smearing around…I was happy to stay put.  Happy to know that my spinal cord wasn’t severed - yet very scared not knowing what happened to me.. Did I break something?  Were there bone fragments from my spine floating around?  What would happen when I was moved?

Paramedics arrived - seemed like forever for them to get there… I’m thinking 20 minutes, but like one can tell in that position…. I’m sure I lost any real sense of time.  Man did they do a great job - I was in pain, but they were still able to get me onto a board - secure me, and lift me out into the ambulance without any sharp or scary pains… What a relief it was after I was moved and secured.

 I still couldn’t relax though - I was kind of sideways on the board, not quite centered… my body wanted to slump off to the left, I think it was.  My head was secured firmly though, so if I were to relax my body would have moved relative to my head - not good… I had to hold myself in position - one hand gripping the other to make sure I stayed completely fixed…

That’s all I can write now - will finish the story later….need to get up early for work, but it does feel good to write this down…. I want to get to the main point about how something like this changes you - your perspective - immediately - harshly- without hesistation…With an abruptness achieved in no other way than by something like this - something sudden, tragic, demanding immediate reflection, something you cannot turn away from because you have no other choice.  This is what happened to me.  Will write more soon.

I’m sure this has been thought of before, or at least wished for before… but imagine if you were able to simply plug your old spare computers together on a network and configure them to join a group of other computers… as a part of the whole… (I’m stealing the “Borg” name from StarTrek for now because of the “assimilation” factor).

Users of the “virtual” computer would not need to know or care when computers are added or removed from the Borg…all they would see is more HD space and an impact to performance.

 In a simple scenario, I can imagine the following:

1. installing a “Borg” on one computer with an identity. 
2. booting, say, a spare old laptop with, say, a bootstrap CD that will simply get the laptop up and running, and ask which Borg to connect to.
3. once connected to the Borg, the laptop is assimilated.

You wouldn’t have to interact directly with any of the hardware or peripherals - you’d just connect from another computer via a remote server display… or via another Borg.  File systems would automatically be merged into logical space, and mirrored.. the Borg would be fault tolerant once enough hardware was added so that if any single machine failed, it would be able to recover by shuffling information around from the parity or redundant data storage….

A system like this on current hardware without a large hardware base would be very slow given all the above overhead… but I can imagine the system being able to grow in power as hardware is added and removed, and processing is distributed among the hardware in the Borg… and much like TCP/IP where there can be redundant routing paths for reliability, there could be redundant processing requests so that computational failures and network outages don’t impact performance as one would initially assume…

The Borg itself would not be centralized - it would have to be a virtual system that is distributed, amorphous, constantly changing as people plug their systems into the Borg, and take them away…. It could even be possible to donate part of your system to the Borg, like with the search for extra terrestrial life….or all of the system to the Borg… When you are ready to remove your computer from the Borg, the Borg could even reinstall and configure an OS for you, or restore a backup… essentially allowing you to plug in, donate HW, restore to a previous state, and then unplug.

 Just a thought…

Everyone has heard the saying that “time waits for no man” or something like it.

Putting “something” off is to time as going into debt is to money.  The weight on your mind from putting something off is the interest you pay.  Sometimes circumstances call the debt due when not only is it not convenient, but it is most inconvenient.  Moreover, there can be consequences.  Time can be even worse than the roughest loan shark when it comes to calling unpaid debts due.

I’ve often wondered about the relationship between intelligence and financial success…

Why is it that there are so many people that are extremely well-off financially, even if they’re not the sharpest tool in the shed?

I started writing up my thoughts on this, and it quickly grew into something grotesquely huge…it quickly became a sprawling post of thoughts that I needed to drop and whittle down… breaking the issue down into manageable pieces.

For example, some of the constituent parts are:

• What do we think of as “intelligence” when we say someone is smart, intelligent, bright, etc.?
• What do we think of as financially successful?

I’m quite certain that all of us stereotype others whether or not we think it’s right (and whether or not we think we even *do* stereotype others). 

Without going down that rat hole just yet, I still propose that there are many successful people that aren’t necessarily the smartest people… and that many, or possibly even most, of the smartest people are not the most successful people (or even successful at all).  We’ll work the details out on the evidence of this later, but assuming that you agree for now – what could the explanation be?

I think it must be based on statistics and personality.  People that are “dumb” enought to try something - to believe that something is possible.  Being too smart for your own good comes into play here.  How often have you heard someone say that “if I had known it was going to be this difficult, I would never have done it.” ?  But they did do it, and now they’re immensely successful.

The “statistics” part is being willing to try and try (and try) again.  It’s a numbers game in a sense – if you keep trying enough, eventually you’ll break out.  Just yesterday, my dad mentioned a metaphor of a baby chick trying to hatch out of the egg… they don’t give up pecking away just because the shell didn’t crack open the first time… they keep pecking, and pecking, and they break out of the shell.  If they don’t, well, you know what happens.

The personality part is not giving up.  Being willing to try something new.  Wanting something more.  Not settling for the status-quo.  Being willing to work hard for something you believe in.  Without having these traits in your personality, you just won’t keep pecking… and the numbers most likely won’t play out in your favor.

So, to sum it up, I think the personality traits can vastly outweigh the intelligence factor.  Being a little smart helps, but just because you may be smarter than the other guy doesn’t get you a free-ride into the “success club” without having to take any risks or having to do any hard work… 

You’ve got to take risks… you’ve got to work hard… and the sooner you do it, the more often you do it, the more likely it is that you’ll be successful.

AND – A single taste of success is all it takes to fuel the fire to succeed again..and again… no matter what failures come your way.

So here’s my first thoughtblip post.  I have visions of grandeur for this site, but alas, I will be happy to finally share some of my thoughts, views, and opinions.  Right now I’m in the middle of a Financial and Investment Analysis course for Commercial Real Estate, taught in S. Florida by Joseph Petrole.  He’s extremely knowledgeable in the Commercial RE space, and his website is: www.petrogroup.com.  OK, back to edumakating myself so maybe I’ll be able to make some $$$ one of these days…