Catch 22 VR-style...

Uh yeah.   I was gonna phone them about that...

Need An Edge? Speak To Me!

I often wonder about the most inscrutable of things.  Like, what is a "lucky bastard?"  Do they have to have unwed parents? And is that really lucky?

I mean - why is it that some guy gets on the New Inventors and gains an angel investor from it, with his absolutely crap Left Handed Stapler, when other people spend a fortune (and half their lives) developing the Totally Clean Renewable Energy System That You Can Buy For Five Hundred Bucks and never even gets one investor?

Here's the case that started me thinking. I've had literally hundreds of these kinds of ideas, and every so often one has come along that I felt just HAD to get developed.  I've then tried to interest investors to help develop it, and not once have I had more than a polite decline.

Stuff that had had me trying everything to get developed, came to nothing. Then, generally, someone else did it instead:

E-book readers.  I realised in 1996 that we'd soon be getting most content delivered via teh intartubes, and PDA devices were just becoming useable enough to make it possible. I thought "how hard could it be to get a device with rechargeable batteries, that could connect to the PC (umm, yeah, wayyyy before WiFi or Bluetooth) and download my books, documents, news articles, and other stuff?"  - the company I contacted, who DID do laptops and portable tablet style machines, said they couldn't see it being more useful than one of their existing machines.  Which turned out to be vaporware, just by the way - they never really produced a machine as far as I recall.

Music players.  Ditto.  I realised around that same time that if places could take the steps of - pressing to vinyl or CD, making album art, and shipping the physical product, - out of the supply chain, then they could deliver direct to the customer via dem tubes.  I was thinking of a home stereo component more than a piece of software like iTunes, but all the right concepts were there, including sending samples based on existing listening habits.   Chastened by the e-book reader debacle, I never followed up on this one.  One word.  Argh.

Charging any device via a single contactless (inductive) charging surface.  Would have required battery manufacturers to make batteries with a coil and voltage regulator built in, the pad would supply just an induced electric field.  Later I realised that if you had all that antenna already there, you could place a keyboard, a mouse, and a monitor on the same pad and keep them all powered by inductive power too, and also send the signals using low power transmissions via a scheme like Bluetooth.  (Which wasn't around back when I had this idea.)  But I notice a few ideas for inductive charging have surfaced but been slow to be taken up, and only now are manufacturers trying hard to get rid of the wire tangles, and maybe standardise power supplies/chargers to a single voltage with each battery having it's own individual regulator built in...

Solar power.  A way to get a few hours more charging time out of existing or new solar panel installations.  I still haven't seen anything else that is as easy to retrofit to existing installations as my concept, nor which would makes as important a difference to new solar electric generation equipment.

Water condensation from airborne humidity.  As soon as I put this idea on paper, I saw that someone had come up with a far more elegantly engineered and beautiful approach, so I gave it a miss.

Water recovery from ground water and grey water sources using solar energy: I still haven't seen any projects like my concept.

Location based phone services:  I wanted to develop this in 2005 - 2006, just that my partners and I fell in a heap because we were all time poor.  Now, it's all about GPS, GIS, and using them to deliver services locally.  Missed the boat on that one...

Solar powered, self-contained, wireless access point that works like a mesh networked repeater:  Seen Merakis?  They came along about two years later.  Sorry to my colleague whom I'll just call RC and who wrote this off as too hard to implement.  

Using electric/solar electric assistance for front wheel drive small cars:  Then came Prius...

That's just the "off the top of my head" list - there are a hundred that I didn't think would be important, and which are just rusting on the scrap heap.  Of the ten or fifteen ideas I've had that I thought were killer apps, about half have since proven out, just that it was someone else who developed the idea in parallel and managed to attract the right investor/developer/partner.

So here's my challenge, repeated again:  If you have a company that wants to develop a new idea, concept, device, or application - email me.  You can easily get my email out of my profile, or leave me a comment.  If you're anywhere I can get to reasonably easily, I'll come and see what you're doing, get involved with your processes for a while, and then see if I can't come up with your killer World Cam style idea that you can develop.  I'm semi retired and on a disability pension so I can spend a fair bit of time considering your sphere of business, and in return you'll treat me honorably and not just steal my idea without cutting me in on part of the action.  Can't get fairer than that...

Cookie Monster Attack "Hacks" Your Bank's Legitimate Website

New alert, new malware that will steal your banking details, only this time, it can do it when you're logging into the legitimate secure website. Read to the bottom of the article for a quick test of whether your bank is vulnerable to this attack.  Make them aware if they're not - the best way for them to fix it is to ensure that all cookies are sent via https as well, apparently, and the problem then ceases to exist. 

If left unpatched, this vulnerability will let the bad person open whatever account page you just left, and carry on the session as though they were you.  Do do do do do let the bank know if they are vulnerable.  Threaten to change banks, cajole them, offer them an underpants clad minister if you have to... 

Who's That Girl?

Little known fact about Sarah Palin:

Okay, okay - that particular meme has been Twittered to death already. But I'm seeing a very alarming side of that "pit bull with lipstick" as she styled herself. I'm reading about a pro-lifer. So pro life that she carried her child that she knew would have Downs Syndrome to term and is now "looking after" that child. Sorry - someone who uses the technology to discover that an embryo will grow up in a confusing world it will never be equipped to deal with but doesn't do anything to prevent it, is a form of self-martyrdom I don't want to see in someone whose job may one day be to push a big red button. Plus - look what happened to Martha Stewart...

Oh and speaking of that big red button - this is a woman who clearly has no idea that one should maintain a separation between State and Church, she advised her parish that American soldiers are on a mission from God. Yep, she has God's ear, and she knows that for sure. What she doesn't know is that these brushfires are spreading America's defense forces very thinly, and what she doesn't seem to be aware of at all is that the big Russian bear just a few kilometres away from the border of her electorate is licking his chops.

Meanwhile, Sarah is going to be taking her mentally defective child to hockey practice, adjusting the doilies on the mantelpiece, and signing Vice Presidential memos. She admitted she has no idea what being a VP entails, but she's happy to become one and fake it.

Plus, I see that slightly horrifying character that she has, sort of a Stepford VP-in-the-wings, and I think "Surely Americans can't watch her without feeling the hair prickling on the backs of their necks?" Between her and McCain, the USA would be somewhat worse off than they have been under GWB. I think that the time when the States were a world power are long gone, and that they are slowly coming across as a bunch of bucolic hicks with First Cousin Syndrome.

And BarakO? A man who slipped up and admitted "my Muslim faith" on air? Who's never had to think about pushing a big red button in his life, having never done a stroke of military service that I can find? Who was talking about Sarah Palin earmarking funds (porkbarreling) when in fact he's done the same thing for the University of Chicago where his wife worked?

McCain? He is old school, he has been imprisoned in war and no doubt carries deep psychological scars from that, which will make him react the wrong way in a crisis. And he's OLD. He stands a good chance of being the first American president to die during his installation.

Leaving a Mom In Glasses to run that defense department to further God's work. OMG can't you just see it? "Now send some troops in to that disgusting Asian country and make them stop eating dogs. God loves doggies, but he hates nasty foreigners. What? What will they eat? Oh let 'em eat cake!"

Yeah right. America is now officially fucked whichever way it turns.

Update:  Barak and John face off over a remark. And I'm stuffed if I can tell whether he was calling Sarah Palin a pig, or if someone's just calling a pig Sarah Palin...

The K-Rudd Pension Plan

I reckon that K-Rudd has a master plan regarding pensioners.

I think his plan is that if he keeps us on the starvation line for another nine months, then by the time the budget rolls around, there'll be less of us old bastards to pay due to dying off, so he'll save money. I was all in favour of this guy but he's just proving to be a bit of a pain all around. Maybe WA is an omen for him, if he doesn't smarten his shit up.

No I'm not a politician's asshole, I'm the first to admit it. But I also know that several million pensioners (and the people who are currently having to assist those pensioners, i.e. their family, friends, etc) are a sizeable chunk of the vote to piss off. And no matter how much he tries to starve us out, there will be more and more of us in relation to the whole population. Beware, K-Rudd! You're digging a hole you won't easily be climbing out of here!

Taking the shine off the Chrome. (And the Big 8...)

Just a thought, but maybe if people stopped being rabidly pro or anti Chrome/IE8/FF/whaddevva, and had a bit of a think about it, more constructive things would get done.

All this "IE8 does it and was the first" is great, but the fact is that Chrome was released within a few days of IE8 - surely not long enough for Google's nasty, Microsoft-plagiarising software engineers to build exact copies of all those functions? These features were no doubt on the top of many developers' lists of things to do, and the fact that Microsoft came out with IE8 a week before Chrome doesn't mean that Google stole all the ideas.

Also many claims of "hyping the features up" by bloggers and tech sites is a bit misleading - I've read half a dozen articles on Chrome (I'm not that much into reading gigabytes of data when a few thousand words will do) and of those, half acknowledge that IE8, FF, and Chrome all have very similar feature sets. It's hardly surprising, really. It's the direction they're all heading in, and they all have equally smart people working for them.

Here are a few REAL Chrome bugs though -

• Import your favourites from IE or bookmarks from FF, and see where all your folders go to. Mine vanished in the import, and several hundred bookmarks along with them.
• Or go to Facebook with Chrome and try and poke someone, the endless succession of reloading the same window will drive you to distraction. This is most likely because FB still don't have a user agent signature in place for Chrome and are sending out code without the pop-over dialogs - but wait, there's more: Also, try clicking on a message in your inbox and then the delete button. Great heaps of nothing happens...
• Oh and that's not to say that IE8 is any better - in Gmail, try dropping down the list of tags for an email and scroll down the list using the scroll wheel or the scroll bar - the browser has a basic bug of not putting focus on the righ part of a list element, and keeps zipping right back to the first item in the list, you have to use the arrow keys to move the highlight.
• IE8 also explodes pretty much when it re-uses certain of your toolbars and BHOs from IE7 - I had the worst time getting it to open and stay un-locked-up long enough to disable all the add-ons and then start re-enabling them one at a time until I got a relatively stable browser.
• One last thing - the impression that tab isolation was present in IE8 before it was in Chrome. But I've found that opening a new tab in IE8 still freezes the other tabs, whereas in Chrome that effect is much less noticeable. There's a difference between *claiming* tab isolation and *achieving* tab isolation.

So what I've found is that between IE8 and Chrome, I'm using FF most at the moment, at least until the other two sort some of their beta bugs out.

And on that subject, the bugs. Guess which browser lets me submit bugs the easiest? Chrome wins, hands down. So while I've been a regular IE user up to IE7 (even when the rabid controversy-fuelled bloggers were dissing it as the biggest POS ever) and a Firefox convert for the nice plug-ins, there definitely now IS a new player in the field for me. And I will give them all the benefit of doubt and promise not to hype or diss unless there's a good reason.

Can't find my way to support

That last post reminded me of another thing, how service affects bottom line...

About eight - ten weeks ago, Garmin opened operations in Australia under their own aegis. They'd been using another company as their presence here before that. I won't say who, but I will say I got my GME TX3220 UHF CB from them... %)

The day that Garmin went live, I phoned about a product they had, which would let me use my own GPS module with Garmin software and maps, on my laptop. After being on hold for ages (surely they couldn't have such a huge demand for support on their first day? Surely their product isn't that inscrutable?) I got through to a gentleman who had no idea what I wanted, and when I mentioned I'd downloaded their free software as an evaluation, he told me that he didn't have that software available to him, and he promised me faithfully he'd get back to me on both matters.

Four week later, I rang again and asked if anyone had made progress with the software bug I'd encountered, or with the commercial software I was quite prepared to buy. This gentleman swappee email addresses with me and promised he'd get back to me when he found out what had happened.

He didn't respond to an email I sent a few days later, so I let it rest. But another three weeks later (and almost EIGHT WEEKS since I'd originally contacted Garmin) I phoned again. I was, undertsandably, not pleased.

Turns out, the software I was after was not due for release in Australia yet. But no-one could be fucked to follow up and tell me, apparently.

And the "free software" as claimed on their website, is a free add-on, you have to have bought another piece of software first. Just that they neglected to mention that, nor could they be fucked to follow up with that, either.

Oh yeah - and I now have a really GREAT Uniden GPS for my vehicles, it's wayyy cheaper than this other product, works without needing their tech support to ignore me for eight weeks, and I totally love it! Pick one up for under $200 at any of several chain store outlets, wayyyyyy better than the G word.

Gas. (The bottled kind.)

I'm home, and I'm pissed off.  I just spent almost three hours and did around 30km of travelling for a very simple thing, thanks to a clueless supplier and greedy dealers.  Check it out here.

Yike! This is only spring!

Today.  I watched the thermometer inside the motorhome climb to 26.8C (which is 80F to metric-challenged people) and, intrigued, I put a thermometer outside, in the shade.  28.5C. (83F.)  That was around 13:30 - 14:00 today, will be interesting to see what the weather bureau will say on the news.

It's the first week of spring, and I figure this summer is going to be a bit warm...  Luckily Trish and I joined forces and got two low-HP air conditioners, the old box type, for a very good price (thank you Retravision) and I've worked out a simple through-the-window bracket for use in the bus which will let me put the A/C in when I need it and store it in the boot when it isn't needed.

Meanwhile, (of course, *sigh*) I've chosen today, the hottest day this spring, to have an oven casserole of pork and veges.  Luckily the breeze is in and the afternoon has been beautifully cool and pleasant.  Ah - you have to love days like this!