Stray Hawkeye

In light of the recent Bigfoot / guy in a hoodie sighting here in Minnesota, I’d like to see a late night talk show where the host is Bigfoot.  It would be just like a normal late, late night talk show – monologue, short skits from the desk, interviews with washed up second rate actors – except that it would be hosted by a hairy, seven foot tall woods creature that never seems to be well lit and in front of the camera at the same time, and who is rather skittish.  And he would talk like this for the entire show – that part’s important.  If nothing else, it would at least make for some entertaining interviews.  A sort of Borat from the North woods, but, you know, funny.  You could always start it as a series of videos on youtube and go from there.

And while we’re at it, here’s a Bigfoot vs Paul Bunyan t-shirt – especially fitting since the recent sighting was in Bemidji, which is also where Paul Bunyan is currently residing.

Make a refrigerator that consists of several horizontal draws, kind of like a clothes dresser. This would keep the cold air in better when you open it because the cold air would attempt to go down, but is stuck in the drawer, so it can’t pour out the bottom like in a normal fridge. It would also only expose a small amount to the fridge to heat, so when you open it, at worst you’re only letting out about a fifth of the cold air. Air could circulate between drawers through the rear of each, allowing for one cooling unit, and each could be sealed off pretty simply when they open.

This design would also make it easier to clean (take out one drawer at a time without needing to let the whole thing warm up). It would also help eliminate the waste of having empty space at the back of shelves, and letting cold air out as you try to dig to the back of a shelf looking for something.

You could also then adapt the idea so that the fridge could be more horizontal that vertical (maybe 6 feet wide with 3 columns of drawers, and a couple of feet tall) so you wouldn’t need to bend down to get to the bottom, or stand on your tip toes to see the back of the top shelf.  This would take up some valuable counter level space in the kitchen (or could be just below counter level, as the food would be in drawers that you would still want to look down into), but the fridge is easily the most accessed part of any kitchen (except maybe the sink), so I think it justifies the space it would take.

It would also keep kids and pets from attempting to climb into the fridge every time you open it.

A quick programming note – I know it’s not Friday, but I forgot to hit “Publish” on this one on Friday before I left for the weekend, and since I’m probably not going to do a Friday post over the holiday weekend, I’m splitting the difference and officially declaring it Free Idea Tuesday Evening, though I’m keeping the title the same, just because.  Also, I’m not numbering Free Idea Friday (for example, “Free Idea Friday 6 – A better video slider”) any more because: 1. I have a hard time keeping track of what number I’m on, and 3. I don’t think it adds anything to number them.  Cries of anguish over the change shall be heartily ignored.  Anyway, the post:

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This one is more of a request than an idea.  So, the problem I would like to see solved is to have a better time / location slider in media players.  Most media players have at least figured out that the slider that shows how far in to a movie you are should go across the bottom, and span the entire width of the video.  This in and of itself is a huge improvement over the ones that have a fixed width slider that doesn’t expand when you resize the player.  The problem is that on really long videos (a 2 hour movie for instance) it’s still very hard to do a fine grain adjustment with the existing sliders.  For instance, if you’re 1 hour 23 minutes and 8 seconds into the movie, it’s hard to go back to 1 hour 23 minutes and 4 seconds just to catch that last word again- a single pixel is already a few seconds long so it’s extremely hard to move the mouse a single pixel with any accuracy.  So, I would like to see some mechanism to use the mouse for both fine and course gain position adjustments in the same control.

The best idea I’ve come up with (and it could probably use improvement) is to make it so the area right around the current location in the clip is warped, so that if you adjust it just a pixel or two in one direction, that pixel is only worth a second or two, but if you move it 100 pixels, it’s worth far more than 100 seconds.  That would let you make fine grain adjustments more easily while still allowing large leaps in the same interface, and showing about where you are in the clip.  More of a logarithmic scale than a linear one (I think).  I’m not sure if setting it up this way would make it more or less intuitive.  I think the warping would also have to interplay a bit with how quickly you move the slider.

So, using VLC‘s slider for mock ups, the slider normally looks like this:

In my idea, when you click on the slider, it would bow out like this:

And if you move it just a little, it would only move the media a second or two, but quickly moving it past the bowed part would move it much further, at which point the new location would bow out.  To show the scale, if you added ticks, each showing an equal amount of time in the video/audio clip:

Or, to illustrate a little better, zoomed in, with 3 equal sections shown, with the assumption that each tick in the bowed section is one second, and outside the bowed section, each pixel is one second:

The length would still have to vary some depending on the length of the clip, or you could vary how large of an area is bowed out.  A little hard to explain clearly, but I think it would be fairly intuitive once you got it working.

Start a bar simply named “Cold Beer”.  Bonus points if it’s in Minnesota or an equally fridged state.

I’d like to see a website that consists of an interactive tree, displaying which company owns which other companies / brands. For instance, show that Pepsi owns Frito-Lay, Quaker Oats, and Tropicana (among many others), and then show that Quaker Oats in turn owns Cap’n Crunch, Aunt Jemima Syrups (but not frozen foods), Rice-A-Roni, Gatorade, and so on. Direct ownership would be considered a strong link.

You could also show weak links, such as person A sits on the board for company X and Y, or investment firm Q owns a large percentage of company J and K.  For instance, Indra Nooyi, who is the CEO of PepsiCo is also a Class B director of the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve, as is Jeffrey R. Immelt, who is the CEO of GE. GE owns NBC and Universal Studios. NBC co-owns MSNBC with Microsoft. Denis M. Hughes is a Class C director on the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve and he’s also President of the New York State AFL-CIO. And James Dimon is a Class A director on the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve, and he’s CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, which owns Chase. And on, and on, and on.

Ideally you would show all of this in visual, interactive form (click on a company and it expands out its associations). Bonus points if you use corporate logos to represent each brand/company.  It could look something like this for showing the connections listed above, and a couple more:

In photo shopping that graphic, I’d say there’s already a need for a way to show/hide some things so it’s not just enormous, and the links probably need directional arrows to show who owns who, and maybe labels to show what exactly the relationship is.  You would probably also need a way to decide which way is up (market cap?), and how to space things, because in the above, it looks like Microsoft and Pepsi are closely linked since they’re next to each other, but they’re actually fairly far apart (as far as I can tell).

If you’re really ambitious, you could also show links through things like business partnerships (companies linked to Microsoft through large scale licensing deals), memberships in various professional consortiums (like the W3C or the IEEE), or ongoing advertising deals (Target Field / the Twins). You could also show who competes with who in what market. That would be really interesting.

You could also work in time phasing it.  Such as, when did Pepsi acquire Quaker Oats? Who owned it before?  Where did Indra Nooyi work before becoming Pepsi CEO?  It becomes a sort of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon after not too long.  Which is really a little scary in its own way.  Throw in political campaign contributions and we’re really cooking with fire.

I admittedly only know a very small subset of how different companies relate to each other, but I always find it fascinating and I think there’s a fair number of people who would like to know more about this kind of thing, so you’ve got an audience. I’m not sure how freely available this kind of information is, but I would assume it’s public knowledge for any publicly traded company (all the stuff I used to make this post is from Wikipedia and reasonably easy to trace).  It would just be a matter of finding and organizing the data, and then presenting it in a more understandable manner than how it currently exists.

Of my free ideas so far, this is the one that I’ve gone back and forth the most on actually doing, so if you do give it a try, let me know, I’d be glad to work on it some.  If I ever find myself bored or just in need of a break, I might work on it some anyway.  So, this one’s more of a “half free but I’m still holding on to it a little bit” idea.  Perhaps a “partnership idea Friday”.

Make a show / podcast that features very, very basic, bare bones recipes. Things like how to make scrambles eggs in the microwave, or how to use a George Foreman grill to make a full meal. Also include some of the more creative / interesting, yet simple, recipes for single serving cooking. Think dorm room and bachelor cooking.  Call the show “Probably Edible”.

Organize a 5k race.  (Or whatever distance, but preferably something short.)  Have the proceeds from the entry fees / sponsorships benefit a local GLBT advocacy group.  Encourage cross dressing and flamboyant clothing.  Name the event “The Drag Race”.

You could probably even set it up as part of Pride weekend, especially since they tend to close some streets for that anyway for parades.

A while ago I went to a performance by the Minnesota Orchestra where they showed an old Charlie Chaplin movie, and played the score to the movie as it went. (Side note- the Minnesota Orchestra is doing it again with another Chaplin movie in early January.  I’d recommend it.  It’s fun.)

It was really cool not only because it was a live performance coupled with a great movie (City Lights is awesome, highly recommended), but because it’s also the way silent movies were originally shown – with a live musician either performing the score along with it (often on just a piano), or completely improving a score for the movie as it played.

I also remember that at some point even longer ago, I saw something on TV about old movies, and I believe one of them was a Charlie Chaplin one as well, where they were saying that it’s a bit hard to restore a definitive version of the movie, because it was originally produced with 4 different scores, any one of which could be played with the film, and each one of which had a very different tone and style, each giving the whole movie a very different feel.

So, here’s my idea for the more cinematic crowd out there. I’d like to see a website called Four Score (intentional pun on Lincoln’s speech) where a film maker produces a modern silent movie, and then releases it to the website. Any user (or possibly a select group of preselected composers, up to you) can then submit a score / sound track for the movie in the form of an mp3 to be played along with the movie. The best four are voted on, and the 4 different versions of the movie are then released on the site. I would tend to imagine this would work best with shorts, maybe in the 5-10 minute range, just so people would be willing to watch the different versions, and so the idea of coming up with a score for them would be at least somewhat within reach of the average user.

So, I tend to come up with a lot of ideas where I think “wow, that would be cool, someone should make/do that”, and then I realize that I don’t have the time / motivation / commitment / talent / upfront capital to do it. So, I’m starting a series of posts of free ideas.  If I’m not going to do them, at least someone can. Or, if nothing else, others can be entertained by the thought of doing them as well.

Given the vastness of humanity, and the Internet in documenting it, it’s possible someone else may have done some of them, and I’m just not aware of it.  In that case I would more than welcome people to point them out in the comments. It’s always nice to see your ideas come to life, even if someone else does it, and even if they came up with it and did it before you even thought of it.

I’ve decided Friday is a good day for posting these ideas, because:

1. It’s the end of the work week and gives people free time to work on them if they like.
2. I like the idea of your mind / ideas being freed at the end of the work week.
3. It gives me structure so I remember when to post them (I have a couple written already).
4. There are no days of the week that start with the letter “i” and I like alliteration.