top 10 Ideas for inventions by me.

Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door.  At least that's what they say.  The they is Ralph Waldo Emmerson.  He didn't build mousetraps, He wrote.  The sentiment is still the same.  Everyone has an idea about how to make things better.  99% of these ideas are stupid and not well thought out.  Oh, but that miraculous 1% is truly amazing.  The fact is, you have to wade through quite a bit of the 99% in order to actually get to the 1%.  We have had some great inventions in our time and those great inventions build on even greater innovations.  We live in an age of excess for less.  Thanks to invention/innovation we now live better lives than all the kings of antiquity.  All they had was good food and a soft bed.  We would be very mad if that's all we had now.  Well, my inventions are not life changing ideas that will turn society on its head.  Instead they are minor contrivances designed to make my easy life even easier.

1.  Shrink wrap present wrapping - So this idea is a pretty easy one.  It was made for guys like me that think present wrapping is for the birds.  you just have colored patterns on a bag made out of heat wrap.  drop whatever you want to wrap in, pick up the blow dryer and bingo bongo!  Instant wrapped present.

2.  Philadelphia cream cheese EZ style - So there I am in the office and someone has been kind enough to bring bagels and little tubs of cream cheese.  I'm spreading the cream cheese on my bagel and it hits me.  They have cheese in pressurized cans for spreading on crackers, why not cream cheese in pressurized cans for bagels?!  It makes perfect sense.












3.  New Christmas Day - I know I've harped on this one before.  Valentines day is a stupid holiday.  Christmas is in the wrong place.  We already know that late December is NOT Jesus' Birthday.  In fact Christmas was picked to be in December because of a bunch of Druids and winter solstice.  Great.  I don't know any druids, but I bet they wouldn't mind us taking our copy of their holiday and moving it to Valentines day.  MUCH easier to find snow and the other 2 holidays that surround Christmas will gain more meaning.  Thanksgiving and Newyears.  I'm not sure how you go about getting this changed, but I think it's a good idea.

4. LED lights around skate tracks. - My son dabbles in speed skating.  I've watched a bit here and there and I noticed that they superimpose on the ice, the flag and name of the skater as they go by.  This is great for the folks at home, but it sucks for the live audience.  Then last Winter Olympics there was in incident where the first place skater was incorrectly told by his coach to change lanes and it disqualified him.  That was horrible.  Then it all hit me.  They should have little LED chaser lights embedded in the ice.  They could be deep enough that they wouldn't impede skating, but they could shine the different color for each skater.  They could even light up based on the fastest time so you knew what you needed to beat.

5. LCD window shader. -  I had this one a LONG time ago, but I've seen it in practice since then.  I actually saw it on Knight Rider (the old one).  You adjust the LCD slider and the shading of your window changes from clear to dark.  I know they have it, but I had my idea around 1984.  Yeah, I know, a day late and a dollar short.

6. Medical Testing like fast food. - A lot of  Medical tests are not rocket science.  They take a sample from the subjects and mix it with some chemicals and tada!  You have your results.  Some are easy and some are a little more involved.  But MANY of them are just as easily read by the consumer instead of the local health official (with it's associated costs).  A couple of years ago I took one of my boys in to the local clinic after having given him a strep test.  While he did not test immediately positive I looked again after 24 hours and the test gave me a faint positive.  That warranted a trip to the Doctors office where I told the doctor that I felt like my son would pass the long strep test.  The doctor asked why I thought that and I told him because I had already tested him and it came up vaguely positive.  He looked at me like I had just looked into his magicians hat and discovered it's false bottom.  They administered the strep test and it came back negative.  I told him the long test would say otherwise.  He said 'I doubt it, your son just has a virus'  This is hypocratus greek for 'Yes you are sick, thank you for your money'.  The next morning the clinic called to ask me where to phone in my sons antibiotic treatment because he passed the long test.  The most interesting thing about this all is that MY strep test costed about 3 dollars.  Their strep test costed me about 80.  So I thought that a convenience store type of place where medical tests are sold but not administered would be a good idea.  a nurse practitioner could be on site to inform people on how to read various tests and there you go.  I would make a boatload of money just by charging 8 dollars for a 3 dollar strep test.  I would be embarrassed charging 15 and ashamed to charge 80.

7. Dart Board with LED through fiber-optic to approximate the bristle effect. -  I love to play darts.  Unfortunately I'm not that good, but I still like to play a lot.  I have an automatic scoring steel tip dartboard.  It's great fun, but as I was playing I thought 'wow, those bristles are really not any more around than fiber optic cable so why not sprinkle the dartboard with cheap fiber-optics so we can see visual effects and targets etc?  I think it would be great!  (probably good for a lot of games)

8. Faraday cages to house movie theaters. - I'm tired of people texting and getting calls etc. in the Theater!  It totally puts me off of my movie experience.  Well, if you put the theater in a farraday cage, no signals would get in.  It would be awesome!  I would also love to see the looks on peoples faces as nothing shows up on screen and all the bars are 0.  Can you hear me now?

9. Large returnable containers for real BULK foods.  - My political leanings are definitely to the right.  That being said it doesn't mean I think that we should run around filling up holes with trash.  Without going into the political sides which I know only too well, I will say this.  If the people embrace recycling as an economic engine then it will work.  I don't like the idea of throwing away plastic packaging over and over and over for the same goods.  It seems a waste, and it is.  We have 'bulk' food areas in the grocery store but we really just give them a cursory glance.  they are called bulk because they don't have packages.  But we need packages because we need to hold our stuff.  So I thought that any dry good could be held in large bins and filled into smaller plastic containers  once used those containers would be handed back for washing and a rebate against the next container of product.  Not a really original idea I know, but I think they have the scale wrong.  I would like to see an end to cereal boxes.  But not the prizes.  I would miss those, so i'm not sure what to do with that.

10.  Universal Time Zone. -  Mountain Standard, Pacific, GMT, UTC (the current time model for the world, and it already started off on the wrong foot.  UTC stands for Coordinated Universal Time or CUT which I guess doesn't trip off the tongue like UTC does.) it's all nonsense.  Since we are a more connected globe perhaps we should act like one.  We should take a time zone that has nobody living in it.  Say, the international date line and make THAT our UT or Universal Time.  This would be the real time all around the world.  Yes, I know, the problem is, that if it's 10 Oclock all around the world, in some places that would be the middle of the night and others it would be the early morning.  That's ok.  But when I'm traveling and I have a flight to catch and I have to base the timing of that flight on when the people of that particular region get up in the morning thats when I think things aren't quite right.  If it's the same time all around the world, then that flight leaves at the same time no matter where it is because it's based on the International Date line (out there in the Pacific Ocean).  Also cross country business meetings conducted on the phone would not be missed because of some daylight savings nonsense also rooted in time zones.  I'm afraid it's like the metric system in the US.  Nobody is in the mood to change to it, even though it is more efficient.

Thanks for reading!