Staticfree Blog

Every once in awhile, while in the shower or some other such monotonous task, I get ideas that I think just have to be written down. My first instinct is to draw up a HTML document on the idea, trying to organize and formalize it. One of the reasons for this is - well - I want to pass it on and see what others think.

I wrote up two such ideas recently: a way of transporting an inexpensive object (say, a borrowed book, a burned CD, or such) across a network of people. People are constantly moving; why not try and harness some of that movement for a collective good?

The other (which actually has market potential) is a slight tweak to a used book store. This used book redistribution network favours the movement of the book - the more the book moves on through the network, the more money the people involved in its transport get. If it were implemented well and if it caught on it'd be nifty. Of course, to be effective the users have to grok it (one of the main issues people have mentioned so far; it's very confusing). Maybe someday when I have money to burn and time to waste on projects like this, I'll put it together. Until then, I'll continue posting wacky ideas I have in hopes that anyone cares.

Cellphone update: Well, as I feared, the replacement phone didn't actually come in the mail. I called on Tuesday to confirm that they sent the order out, and I learned that they didn't even have a record of the order in their system. After 45 minutes on the phone with a nice customer service rep., I got a confirmed order and was told that it'd probably arrive by Monday. Most of the conversation was trying to figure out how I could possibly get a phone that I could borrow for the weekend, so I'd be able to twiddle plans while in Boston.

A fun quote from that conversation:

Me: "So, are there any T-Mobile stores that can get me a temporary phone until the new one arrives?"

..pause..

Rep: "Is New York large?"

Me: "Pardon?"

Rep: "Is New York rather large?"

Me: "Uh, Yeah. It's about 6 hours from here to New York City"

It turned out there were no places in the "loaner program" near me and that I'd have to go on an 8 hour bus ride and weekend in Boston with no cell/Internet connection (horror of horrors!). So, I asked him if it'd just be possible to buy a phone (with Bluetooth) and return it within their 14-day "no obligation" trial period and he said that would work.

I stopped by the local T-Mobile shop in the nearby mall and got a Sony Ericsson T68i (it was the cheapest they had with Bluetooth and I figured I'd try a new phone for kicks). So far, it's been working great on both my Palm and my laptop. I still can't get over how light the phone is - it feels like one of those empty "dummy demo models" they have at cheap electronics stores. I'm not so fond of it though - not enough features - and look forward to toting around a Nokia 3650 again.

Combine GeoURL with RSS aggregation and what do you get? Localized RSS feeds. Localfeeds is an aggregate which finds all the feeds in 50 miles of a given city and displays summaries on the site. *Waves to the Rochester blog world!* It'll be interesting watching city-level events be blogged in one spot. I've certainly gotten a kick out of watching the spread of memes through the various sites I read in my aggregated feed.

My next step is to get a better system for posting posts. Right now, as I wrote my blog engine myself, the post system is written in Perl and requires me to ssh into my main computer to write entries. This isn't bad really, as I can use emacs to compose nice HTML, but It'd be rather handy to have some XML RPC methods which I can post with, and the accompanying clients on my various wireless devices. I've pondered looking into switching over to MovableType, but I don't really have the time to write a conversion engine or any such things. Just ponderings for future ways to waste time.

On an unrelated note, some day I - and my army of kitten-seeking red robots - will create a meme that will take over the world. Just thought I'd give fair warning.