Trex Detector Series

Trex is that excellent plastic lumber made from recycled bottles and bags. It's expensive enough as it is, but I want to got one step further. I want that Trex to be embedded with sensors. I want to know torque information. I want to know moisture levels. I want to know projected lifespan of the product given the current usage. I want to know when it's too slippery to run on (a common problem with Trex). Gimme more data! Crackalacka!

iPhone Bluetooth Remote Keyboard

I want to use my iPhone as a keyboard for my Mac to practice my keyboarding. It's a BT device, why can't I have what I want? Hackers made it a universal remote, I'm sure they can make it a keyboard. And, a way to drive my remote control electric car. And a way to solve poverty and world hunger. Ahh, irrational exuberance.

Kinetic Bridges

Bridges sway all the time, (have you seen 520 in Seattle/Bellevue??) and that's a lot of kinetic energy. Have some heavy duty engineering done at the hinges and interstices of the bridge deck to pick up that precious power that's lost in motion. Could at least power the lights on the thing.

Solar Tube Glowing Diffusers

Nightlights that are charged by the sun. The solar tube concept is proven and fully excellent already, I just want to improve it one notch. The sun comes down a mirrored tube from the lens on the roof and lights up a room with beautiful natural sunlight, even down to the basement. The end of that tube is a diffuser. That diffuser could and should be laced with glow stuff, the phosphorescent glow-in-the-dark material that we know and love. It could charge up all day while still letting the right amount of light in, then continue casting glow-light for 2 hours more. Totally doable, yo. To quote my man Beck, Hell Yes.
To quote my man Obama, Yes We Can.

Visual DJ Battle on Giant Screens Downtown

Admittedly biased to the genre, I think there should be a huge festival that showcases live video DJ battles in a large format venue for the public to enjoy. The medium needs big bigness to get full effect sometimes. It's lights and sound and fury and entertainment. The live stuff would have to incorporate the crowd and the venue and the echoing of sound off the walls of Nordstrom's. Westlake, HO!

Green Retrofit Tax Breaks

If you improve your home's energy efficiency by a certain wattage or btu's, you should get a tax break commensurate with that savings. You should win twice. If you put up solar panels, the govt gives you some loot. Better than panels, you reduce your demand on this ever-more-fragile centralized power grid. Further, you might as well penalize those that don't get to reduction and conservation by a certain time frame as well. Carrot and stick, bro. I'd rather not charge a dime to the homeowner, and have the city/state/county/feds pick up the tab on every energy audit and consulting gig I do.

"Gut" is "intuition" is "genius"

Hybrid reporting from the field. It turns out that your gut feelings are simply those that you have without first thinking about them. Those, according to recent scientific research, are the most accurate and often more creative. It's your built in genius, the little voice that knows stuff already. The consummate synergizer in your wee little brain that has already sussed it out and has the answer for you, as long as you quit all that damn thinking. Turns out the harder you think about a solution, the more your brain gets in your way about it. SO: quit thinking so much. When I do this idea stuff, roughly half of all the ideas I come up with are those that start with a blank blog entry screen. True there are ideas that I cook up over time, or that I have been itching to get down but didn't have the right venue at the time. But most really good ones, honestly, are those that have sprung out of the raw necessity of trying to get 3 down before midnight! I'm no genius, but the intuition and gut reactions that YOU have might very well be righter than any stewed-over debate of a thought you got.

The other night I blew up my keyboard with ideas, coming up with 8 ideas between 11:26 and 11:52. Most days it takes hours to stew up that many ideas, sometimes they've been cooking for years. But when I looked at the clock and got cracking, the ideas flowed out one after the other.

I had recently read an article that basically says that ideas don't come better with stressful attention to them, but when the person is relaxed, not really thinking of that particular thing in the first place. In my case, ideas occur at all times, and often when I am indeed asking my brain directly for them.

It's true, though ,that the concept might be on to something. The study in the article (I may dig it up soon) went on to say that time was an issue, and that more time didn't equal better ideas or a better solution to a problem. I agree for myself at least. For me, the initial idea is usually on target, with a "gut" feeling when it hits. Intuition? I'm not quite sure. This one, my peeps, is still cooking...

Family Secretary

Not necessarily an innovation per se, but a darn good idea: Family Secretary. Somebody in every family, immediate and then extended, to document the family's existence and meaning. Who's taking the photos? Who's writing the epitaphs? Who knows the addresses of your 3rd cousins? Where's the family tree? Best get to making sure that somebody has that job. And, secretary has the word "secret" in it.
I lost my 6th grade spelling bee on that one. All the more reason to pay more attention...