2 software applications I'd like to see

Both of these are things that are either already possible or nearly so.

Virtual Reconstructor: given an archive of photographs and videos, construct a 3-D interactive model of the structure(s) and/or scene(s) depicted. If, for example, you took pictures of a house under construction, it would enable you to in effect see inside the walls. Or you could just take a trip down memory lane.

The Lazy Diary: I want something to remember my life for me, because I sure can't. It'll pull in my email, photos archive, voicemails, Facebook, Twitter, browser history, financials, and whatever other electronic data I generate, and construct a timeline of my life. Then I'd like to be able to ask it questions. "Where was I on June 4, 2005?" "When did I last see Chuck Norris?" "How many times have I been to San Antonio?" Etc.

Making the NFL draft more exciting

Continuing my interest in just about everything about football except actually watching games, I was paying attention to the NFL Draft today. It's a pretty exciting big event in its own right these days, but it suffers from one big flaw: number 1 comes first. Far more exciting would be a long build-up, with the top pick coming last. The mechanics of that would be tricky, but I'll take a stab at it. I'll admit that I only know the basics of the draft, but I'm never going to play armchair quarterback, so I'll play armchair whatever this is.

I figure two changes would get most of the way there. The big change is giving prospective players the right to refuse being picked. If Bobo the Back thinks he's second (to last) round material, but gets called in the fourth (to last) round, he can tell them to talk to the palm. The team that got refused doesn't lose their pick completely, but they go to the end of the queue (unless they have other picks in queue). The player is gambling on someone else wanting him more. Just like today, teams get allocated their position in the draft according to how they do, and they can deal and trade those picks in advance to their hearts' content.

What's to keep the system from reverting in practice to the status quo? The other change: putting a collar, especially a ceiling, on pay. Suppose someone picked in the eighth-to-last round has a contract of between $210,000/year and $240,000/year. Matthew Stafford (this year's #1) is going to laugh at that and walk away. But what if he gets called as the 10th-to-last pick in the final round? Does he take the $3.5 million/year - $4.5 million/year range guaranteed to the tenth-to-last pick? Or does he take the chance on someone wanting him more (the contract he actually got has a variable payout of between $6 million/year and $13 million/year)? That makes it more dramatic, and pushes the high value players to the end.

When would it stop? I've been saying second-to-last round and tenth-to-last pick, but there's no reason it actually has to be that way. Maybe it would be better to have no predetermined end. Instead, the teams would keep getting picks. BUT, the minimum salary would keep going up. If a team thought the price too high for the remaining pool of players, they could pass, and the next team in line gets their shot at the pool of players (who can refuse) at the same price. When every team passes at the same price, the draft ends, and everyone goes home. That sounds pretty exciting to me.

imgoingthereanyway.com

If you're planning a trip from, say, Austin to Houston, would you take $25 to drop a box of books off in Tomball (it's along the way)? I would. Would you take, say, $50 to bring an extra person? I might. And I figure I'm not the only one. The rest almost writes itself.

If you've got a thing that needs to get from point A to point B, you tell the site. If you're taking a trip, you tell the site where you're going. It tells you who or what needs to take the same trip.

Obviously, it's more complicated than that. How do you confirm delivery? How do you make sure your passenger isn't an axe murderer? How do you deal with paths that are inexact matches; i.e., Georgetown to Humble? What if you could get $200 by stopping in Giddings, but that means you have to go from Austin to Houston on 290 instead of 71/I-10 so you can stop in Giddings and collect $200. There are lots of details to iron out, and opportunities for extension. That's what makes it potentially valuable. I'm not going to build it, but maybe you can.

Blog levels

Software programs often have features for describing what they're doing. The usual term is log. Log messages are generally categorized by what part of the program is writing them. Usually there will also be a time and date. One of the key parts of a logging system is the idea of a log level. That's an indicator of how important the message is. Common log levels might include DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, and FATAL. You can tell the program to tell you everything, or to just tell you stuff that's really important. You set a minimum threshold of importance, and then it just reports stuff that's at least that important.

I'm starting to think I want blog levels. Maybe the levels I'd have would be TRIVIAL, SMALL, MEDIUM, BIG, and HUGE. This post would probably be a SMALL. A mildly amusing picture, like the Amazon oops, that would be TRIVIAL. Changing jobs? BIG. New baby? HUGE. And so forth.

You are apparently interested in me. I don't question that; I'm kind of afraid of the answer. Nevertheless, you're probably not interested in every stray thought that crosses my head. You probably don't want to run this weblog on TRIVIAL. I've already got categories. Those aren't quite right, though. You can select the posts in a category, or you can see everything. But there's no way to say "only show things more important than MEDIUM." It's nothing or one or all. So yeah. Blog levels. I want them.

Movie idea

I had an idea last night for a movie. A noted music critic encounters a busker on the street singing incomprehensibly while playing unusual instruments. He promotes him to the wider world. The singer does not appear to understand any language spoken to him. The chorus of speculation eventually reaches consensus that he somehow illegally entered the country, originating from some poorly known region of Central Asia, the Amazon, or some similarly obscure place. Linguists struggle to make sense of his language, and anthropologists are baffled by his novel instrumentation. Through it all, he wanders with apparent dim incomprehension, mute but for the enigmatic verses of his incomprehensible songs. Then we discover he's really an ordinary guy from Ohio who made his own instruments because he couldn't afford the real ones, sang made-up nonsense because he can never remember the words to any songs, and kept his mouth shut because he didn't want to get in trouble.

~ Fin ~

Search reruns

Every search on every site should have a little button you can press that says "Don't show me this again." If only I knew of sites with searches...

Also, while I'm on the subject... If you can refine a search by, say, geographical region, you should be able to pick multiple ones, not just one. Maybe you want to look at Austria and Switzerland, but not all of Europe. There's a middle ground between one and all. Actually, that particular example isn't all that useful. Amazon, though, could go to town with it. Newegg already does.

Celebrity comment-spotting

This comment on my last post suggests a way to get attention from Internet celebrities. Put the names of the people whose attention you want in your blog post and hope they have a search alert set up on their own name. Just make sure that it's an uncommon name. Like mine. Or Paul Tyma's. I know, most people wouldn't consider Paul Tyma a celebrity, but he is in my world.

Hey Paul, here I am again. I'll stop using your name in vain now.

Memo-inator

Call a number. Start talking. Everything that you say gets recorded and plopped as a WAV/MP3 file on a website. Use it for notes to yourself, surreptitiously recording a conversation with a police officer, or whatever. I'm gonna email Paul Tyma (Mr. Mailinator).

Restricted access

Linkedin annoys me every time I go to them because they're asking for my Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Whatever logins. Uh, no. I accept that some people find this kind of thing useful. But giving up my username and password? SRSLY? Uh uh.

There's a simple thing all these web sites can do. They can add restricted roles support. I should be able to log into Hotmail, create a restricted role called "Linkedin," give that role permission to look at my address book but not my mail, and then get a generated username/password combination to give to Linkedin. If Linkedin starts to annoy in some other way, say, by plaxo-ing everyone I know, then I can turn off their access. That's the basic level.

The even better level would be to be able to specify which information in which parts of the app the restricted role can see. Not just "Linkedin can see address book," but "Linkedin can see the first names and last names but not the email addresses." That way you can search for people you know en masse but avoid giving Linkedin the ability to spam.

Just thought of a social networking site for pigs: oinkedin(.com)

Jump back

Anything that plays any video or audio media absolutely needs to copy Tivo's jump back 7 seconds button.

Tech company benefits

Employers can be short-sighted and stingy with benefits. In the back of my mind, I've always kept the ambition that some day I would start my own software business. I'd like to think I'd be more enlightened. It's not about generosity in and of itself; I think that generous benefits can be a significant competitive advantage in the marketplace for talent. That makes it easier to get the best people and make sure they stick around. So far, I've come up with a list of ideal benefits I'd like to see:

• 4 weeks of vacation per year at start, with 6 weeks available for those who have been around for a while.


• 2 weeks of personal/sick time per year.


• Fully paid health insurance premiums for employee and spouse.


• 401(k) contribution of 5% no matter what the employee does, with matching of another 5%


• A severance fund created the moment an employee starts. This fund would have 2 months of salary in it. If the employee is terminated without cause, such as in a layoff, they get the whole thing. If the employee is terminated with cause, they get 2 weeks. I don't know what to do in the case of the employee leaving by choice; I'm wavering between giving half and giving nothing. The important thing is that the money would be funded (using, say, TIPS) as soon as the employee started. That way, no matter what happened to the company, the employee wouldn't be left in the lurch.


• 3 months fully paid paternity leave - it would be half pay for 3 months, with the balance paid out after the employee has been back on the job for a while, perhaps 9-12 months. If the employee quits before then, he doesn't get it. I've seen too many people take excessive advantage of this kind of benefit.


• 4 months fully paid maternity leave - same conditions.


• 4 day work weeks (maybe)

I have only a rough idea what this would cost. I think the vacation, sick time, and shortened work week would be free. People would be at work less, but more effective when they were around. The severance fund is less pricey than it looks; severance is normal, and this only differs in the quantity and the timing of the funding. The parental benefits would be expensive, but would only apply to some of the employees some of the time. I expect this would add 25%-40% to payroll costs on an annual basis. My hope is that these benefits would drastically reduce turnover and make hiring much easier. Vacancies are expensive, as is filling them. I haven't run the numbers, but my gut says it's the right thing to do. Hopefully, one day I'll get the chance to test this, and I'll end up being right.

Mac laptop as iPod

You should be able to plug a Mac laptop into anything you can plug an iPod into and have it work just like it was an iPod. For instance, if and when I get my iPod-capable car stereo, I should be able to plug in my work MacBook Pro and be able to control iTunes from the stereo's buttons just like I could an iPod.

GimmeMyData.com

That's one possible name for the Web 2.0 backup service. The .COM domain is available.

Web 2.0^2.0

One worrisome trend with the shift to web-based applications and services is that your data no longer live under your control. Companies have outages, cancel products, go out of business, etc. With local data, you can back up to physical media or use an online service. Data important to you can disappear, and you can do nothing about it. This is a problem, which means it's also an opportunity.

Any Web 2.0 startup worth using gives you access to your data. GMail supports POP and IMAP, Blogger and Facebook have APIs, and nearly everyone has some kind of RSS feed. It's too much to expect the average person to use those protocols directly. What we need is a product to do it for us, something that knows how to talk to Flickr or Tumblr or whatever and get a copy of our data somewhere safe.

This product would take one (or both) of two forms. One would be a web-based service. That's a gimme for a Web 2.0 offering. You pay them $5/month, they suck down and store your data. Naturally, they themselves would need a 2-way API. They'd have plugins for all the sites their customers use. You'd be able to view your emails or tweets or whatever on the site to make sure they're there. You'd also be able to download all that data in a single blob that you could back up yourself locally. Perhaps there would be two levels of service, one where they store your data, and the other where they merely provide a single point of access. They would also provide some way to reconstruct an account from their backups in case the original service had a catastrophic failure.

The other possible form would be as a desktop application. After all, if the goal is to protect you from failures in web-based services, a web-based service might seem beside the point. The desktop application would do exactly what the web-based service did, except the data would be stored locally. What you did from there would be your problem. You pays your moneys, you downloads your softwares. I can see a good case for either form, or even both.

If this is such a good idea, why don't I do it? Simply put, the risk is too great at this time in my life. I can't take 6 months off unpaid to work on something like this. Mortgage, kids, insurance... It's too much. However, I do know a few people (hint hint) who are ideally placed for this. I'll even try to come up with a good name for it.

Cheap sound-proofing

With a noisy 3-year old in the house, I spend a lot of time thinking about sound proofing. A lot of time. It's pretty expensive to get it done right, but I think I have an idea for doing it on the cheap: bubble-wrap. I gather that effective sound insulation is like insulating for temperature. You want to avoid solid surfaces touching each other and use lots of layers. Bubble wrap seems perfect. All those cells of air and layers of plastic. I figure a few sheets ought to do a pretty good job. I haven't gotten desperate enough to try it yet, or maybe I just haven't hit on the right way to do it.

A secondary loan market for Prosper

I've been dabbling in peer-to-peer lending at Prosper for a couple of years now. It's an interesting experiment, but I think it needs a couple of economic cycles to validate the idea; it's been a little worrisome for me seeing the spike in late accounts recently.

One thing that Prosper lacks is a secondary loan market. I cannot transfer the loans owed to me to another party. I like the idea of secondary markets in general; I think they're a natural and healthy thing. More practically, it means that I can't quit Prosper. I can't liquidate my holdings; I have to wait until the term is up. Hopefully they'll eventually add that.

For the time being, one could potentially work around that missing feature by borrowing an equivalent amount through Prosper at a lower rate. That's no guarantee, but there's no guarantee of getting a "fair" value for loans sold on.

bandwidth booth (tm?)

We switched to slower DSL because it was cheaper. It makes uploading videos so sloooooow. For everything else it's fine. I think there's a market opportunity there. Customers can come, plug in, and get access to a super fast connection. Charges would be either by the minute or by the megabyte. You could use it for either upload or download. Put them in grocery stores, Kinko's, libraries, or whatever. They could be basically completely automated. In a lot of ways, it's similar to an Internet cafe, but the modes of use would be different.