duh

Do the wipers on your car suck? Ours do.. we have to get them changed but I don’t feel like taking the time to set up an appointment with the garage, drop off the car, etc. I also don’t want to do it myself and I don’t want to go to some quick Jiffy Lube type place.

Everyone should replace their wipers every six months. Some people should do it every 3 months. Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a service that took care of this for you? I see it like this. I go onto the “wiperman” website and sign up with my cc info, my car make and model, my license plate and my home address. At some periodic time the folks at wiperman send me an email saying they’re going to be changing my wipers. I do nothing. One day I wake up, get in my car and there is a flyer under my wipers saying something like “all new.. brought to you by Wiperman”. Yup, I’ve done nothing and the folks at wiperman have found my car on the street and changed my wipers. And they will for all eternity (as long as when I move I tell them)…

There could also be a one time service call where the guy comes out at night and it’s done by the morning: you call or set it up on the website, pay and presto, done. How cool would that be?

Man.. I am an idea king..

First off, let me say this. I’ve been in Second Life on three separate occasions. The first was way back in the beginning of the universe. I was a huge MMO player at the time and I was trying them all as soon as they came out. SL was no exception. I downloaded the software, fired it up and spent about 20 minutes there before I quit and uninstalled it. It was quite primitive graphically and the UI was no better. The second time was a few years later after I’d read in Wired about this guy who had bought a huge piece of land in the game and was renting out shops, etc. I thought perhaps I should pop in, buy some land and then wait it out as an investment. So I downloaded, installed and went through the new tutorial. I lasted about an hour this time. The last time was a few months ago. I just had to see if the world had improved.

I was more impressed this time, but something just didn’t feel right with the UI and somehow the world was too complex and open. Since you could teleport or fly anywhere, real estate location was irrelevant. Furthermore, the supply of land was limitless since new servers could be added at any time. But the world (I keep wanting to call it a game, but its clearly not) is popular isn’t it?

Why is this crappy MMO so popular? Why have real companies invested there? Why do they have so many people like me logging on to try it (granted, many like me don’t last long there)? It’s simple. We all want the Metaverse to be real. For those of you who don’t get the reference, run out and buy and then read “Snow Crash” by Neil Stephenson. It is clearly what SL wants to be and clearly something that if it existed would be really cool. I mean, how amazing would it be to really be able to have a virtual second life? We all want to push our reset buttons and start again don’t we? Or at least we want to try our a dream we may have had instead of the drudgery of our current lives/jobs. We all crave what SL is trying to bring us.

The bummer is that SL does a piss poor job of it. I’m not going to go into details, but SL to me doesn’t realize that dream. But, and here is the important part, the fact that there is so much interest tells us something. It tells us that people want the Metaverse to be real, that we want a virtual second life. You could also interpolate all the fantasy on the internet to indicate the same craving. We just need some company (hmn Blizzard are you listening?) with the talent to build a great world and then unleash it. Watch it fly!

You’re going on a 3 day trip by air and don’t want to deal with the hassles of packing, lugging, checking in, waiting for, lugging and unpacking (and then again on your way home again). Why not rent your clothes? Available in many popular locations, all you need to do is log on to our website, use our catalog to choose what you need (we have casual to dressy), give us your hotel info and we’ll have everything placed into the drawers and closets in your hotel room before you arrive. When you check out.. just leave the clothes.. we’ll take care of everything for you.. no hassle travel!

note : this is an idea I just came up with. If you are ready to make a mint, get to work and start up this company! The idea, as all of them are on this blog, is totally free!

I’ve had this idea for quite some time but I don’t think I’ve put it down in writing yet. In either case, I’m not going to make this a long post (though it deserves it). Ok. so here’s the thought. Pay attention to the types of conversations that people are having. Either on the cellphone “I’ll be there in 5 minutes”, or just sitting around eating lunch in some diner or on the subway or whatever. You will find that most conversations are completely inane and pointless. We talk about work (not what we’re working on, but office gossip or complaints), we talk about entertainment (and not the topics that are brought up but of the social lives of the entertainers themselves), we talk about society (but not about social issues or problems, but of who is dating who and who said what to who).

Most conversations in America are simply pointless in the big scheme of things. As a good barometer of the importance of a subject, just ask yourself (If I changed the names of the people in the conversation, would it be any different?). We talk about the same shit all the time. We waste all this time together and all this thinking energy doing nothing at all but spinning our wheels. It’s kind of like what I complain about all the time when it comes to political apathy and the local news. We just don’t want to get deep about anything at all.

To do something useful with our existence we as a race need to spend some of our time and our brainpower on things that matter. We need to sit down at dinner with each other and actually talk about something of substance. We need to debate, we need to advance ourselves. If we just did even a little of that we would be better all around. Our brains are what separate us from other animals. We should use them.

So here is my proposal. I don’t have the specifics worked out yet but what if every month we had a national issue raised… Some question that we could all ponder… And that month we as a people would have a responsibility to talk about that issue? Perhaps the local news instead of doing pieces on celebrity gossip could do something about the issue of the month… maybe interviews some college professor about it, etc. Bloggers could comment on it, groups could meet to debate it, etc. Every month we could as a county have something interesting to talk about with each other and perhaps we could solve some problems, perhaps at the least we could focus on things that are useful and important. Perhaps we could transition to a society that uses their brains.

What kind of topics? There are dozens of them. Take almost any of my previous blog posts. Take anyones. “Should we spend more on the space program?”, “Should drugs be legalized?”, “What is the benefit of organized religion?”, “Why don’t people vote anymore?”, “Why is there so much killing in our inner cities?”, “how do we end poverty?”, etc. One topic a month, every month.

A while back we all had a laugh when John Street did his “take a deep breath and put down the gun” TV address. At the time I was pretty convinced that it wasn’t going to solve any of our gun/murder problems. I was right. For a while I thought that the solution was to just add more cops on the street, or push for better education, etc. But I was wrong. I just read the most amazing article in Philly Magazine about the issue and I urge you all to do the same.

The thrust of the article is twofold. First it demostrates how pathetic and sad and detrimental our 911 system is. The thought of all that wasted effort by cops responding to calls hours after they have come in just makes the logical/organized part of me just cringe. The second part of the article talks about an alternate solution. One that has worked all over the country (including NYC) and thats for police to focus on looking for guns that people are actually carrying. The thought is that gun crime occurs in the same areas over and over again and often for stupid reasons (like someone looked at someone wrong) and if we can deter people from carrying guns we can actually cut down on these senseless crimes. The cops (according to this plan) should spend time in these areas focusing on crimes where they can actually frisk people and then take away their illegal guns. This, if done often enough would deter people from carrying them all the time.

“Looking for guns on the street is not a lock-’em-up strategy,” he says. “It’s not a fill-the-prisons strategy. It’s a specific and focused deterrent strategy that is trying to deter one thing — and that’s people carrying guns around. Because if people don’t carry their guns around, and somebody bumps into them and doesn’t say ‘Excuse me,’ or somebody looks at them with a stare that they find offensive, then they may have to go home to get their gun to do something about it. But by the time they come back, the person may not be there, and the impulse may pass.”

That “stare that they find offensive” is the sort of thing over which young Philadelphians have so often been dying _lately — “Stupid arguments over stupid things,” as police commissioner Sylvester Johnson recently put it.

“Sometimes fights are followed several days later by an assassination, so there’s no guarantee that people won’t get shot when those disrespecting incidents occur,” Sherman says. “But what the evidence suggests is that it’s going to happen at a lower rate if they don’t have their guns in their pockets.”

And what about Philadelphia?

“The police in Philadelphia are not looking for guns in the street, and that has a context in this 40-year story that we have to understand,” Sherman says. “But we also have to understand that as far as the evidence is concerned, the National Academy of Sciences says it is the one thing we know works to reduce the homicide rate. And it’s the one thing we’re not doing in Philadelphia.”

The sad thing is that we were on this path with Timmony and the COMPSTAT system (which we have but don’t follow in any useful way). But now we do stuff that does nothing to solve the problem. Think about it. Why is Philadelphia the one city where this problem is getting worse when all across the country it’s getting better?

if you wanted to play it as safe as possible, you’d model your police department on Philadelphia’s. You’d keep officers in their cars. You’d control and monitor their movements by tying them to the _never-_ending queue of 911 calls. You’d initiate a program for which there is virtually no supporting evidence, like Operation Safe Streets, in which officers do little more than stand on corners. (From a recent study in the scholarly journal Justice Quarterly: “Operation Safe Streets failed to have a significant citywide impact on homicides, violent crime or drug crimes.”) You’d have COMPSTAT meetings, but you’d excise their most important element: accountability. In New York, COMPSTAT meetings are renowned for the rough give-and-take between the top brass and precinct commanders. The prospect of being dressed down in front of your peers was one of the ways former commissioner William Bratton ensured that local commanders would take ownership of their precincts’ successes and failures. John Timoney brought COMPSTAT to Philadelphia, but officers tell me the current version is a far cry from New York’s. “Here, we have COMPSTAT lite,” a former Philadelphia officer told me. “We just go through the motions.”

“Every police chief is just one headline away from losing his job,” Commissioner Johnson told this magazine in 2004. He’s correct, but the history of big-city policing in America offers a caveat: A chief may lose his job if there’s a corruption or brutality scandal, he may get fired if he commits a personal indiscretion, but if the homicide rate jumps up, he is actually pretty safe. The recent history of Philadelphia proves that.

Ugh.. we have to do something.. The sad thing is that there is a solution but nobody seems to want to follow it. What’s that all about? I bet if Milton Street could make money off this system it would have been in place long ago..

Do you have a pet? If you are like me, you have one or more pets (I’m talking about dogs and cats here) at home. I am often worried that a) one of my pets may get out of the house and out into the “wild” and b) someone elses pet may get lost and someone may see it and think it’s a stray and c) maybe I won’t be at home and there is a fire and my pets won’t be saved.

Well, I thought of a soution to this problem and whoever makes up this web site will make some serious money while doing an great service to pets everywhere.

My idea is a web site that acts as a pet registry. What makes it interesting is that you somehow make it very localized (ie. accessable to anyone within 5 blocks of your house) so you can only be aware of pets that are living nearby. The website can have photos of the pets with their names and some contact info and your address. This way if someone sees a pet they can scan the site for the pets in the area (some search tools? cat/dog, big/small, colors?) and see if it belongs to one of the neighbors. In the event of an emergency they can look and see if your address has pets associated with it, etc.

The more I think about this the idea of a ‘neighborhood’ portal is applicable to more than pets. If one can get the localized concept working, they can do all kinds of things.. (neighborhood message board, car registry, children registry, etc.).