I want to “rebuild” something in the house.  I’m not sure whether it’s just a room that is a replica of another room of a house I lived in, or a famous room from somewhere else, like the Whitehouse.  At Winterthur and Nemacolin Woodlands, they have areas where the walls are actual storefronts so the room or hallway feels like a city street.  Something like that would work too.

So Kallie and I need about 1.2 cars.  I walk to work and most places we go together.  Every once in a while though, we need to go separate ways.

I’m envisioning a car that can break in half basically.  I think there are people like us that need more than 1 car sometimes.  There would also be a market for couples in the city with 1 parking space.

I’m thinking 2 small engines, one in the front, one in the back, driving each axel independently.  When you have the “cars” together, the two engines work together.

You’d have to make the extra tires fold up or something when it’s in 1 car mode.  I don’t have any design ideas yet, but I think there’s a need, and where there is a need and some imagination, you have potential.

This is another one of those ideas that came to me in a dream.  There was a popular guy that ran this coffee shop hang out place, and I went to him all excited about an idea to help his business.  He had all this wall space that he liked to hang paintings and photos from local artists.  My idea to him was to have people be able to take digital pictures they’ve taken of the city, and print them out in his place.  The idea would be, if the photo was really good, he would offer them the opportunity to have their photo featured on a postcard and sold in the store.  So you’d have these racks on postcards all from local people basically on consignment.  It’d be a great starting place for art school students or even indie photographers to get started and make a few bucks.  It wouldn’t have to be limited to postcards, but I would think it would be the most marketable item (and the store was downtown by point state park).

I want to invent something.  Something that will require a patent.  So basically, I just want to have a patent on something.  I think they’re pretty cheap.  I have a lot of ideas, but I never do anything with them.  I should start writing them down more…

I had this dream monday night and I think I have something here…I was on some sort of luxury cruise or on a resort or something like that, and there was a gambling room.  There was this large table set up, very much like a roulette table, with a numbered wheel, a tall grid of numbers beside it, and then some other marked areas surrounding it.  An employee came to the table and announced that she would be starting a game of ‘Sapienza’ if anyone wanted to join in.  (if you’re not familiar with poker rooms, this is a common practice where a croupier announces the buy in and limit and anyone interested can go to that table)  Everyone seemed a little disappointed that it wasn’t a regular game of roulette, but I actually wasn’t too sure what the heck was going on.  Since no one expressed interest, I said that I’d play sapienza, but then I asked for clarification on what it was.  Then someone said that it was like "P", which was what they called normal roulette for some reason, but sapienza was a new game.

So then I woke up, with this visual of the table, but no idea how to play it.  It was a felt table, mostly tan colored with stripes of orange as a design pattern.  Then I thought, I should make this game.  The rules, strategies, and statistics have been running in my head ever since this dream.  I think I’m going to invent this game and try to market it to a casino.  I’m liking it, but I’m also designing it, so I’m a little biased.  I’m starting to organize my ideas and map out a course of development to concept to business proposal…I’m going to need some help eventually with this, but I think I have a new hobby.

BTW, I have no idea where sapienza came from.  Apparently it’s italian for ‘wisdom’.  I like it.

 - There was this incident with an M80 one windy night where Travis held it behind his head ready to launch, i put my hands around it to block the wind, and Dallas lit it…

- When I stumble over my words or spelling of those words.

- The toilet.  I’m always amazed out how simple it is.  It dumbs it all down to 1 little lever.  Sometimes, you don’t even have to do anything at all if it has one of those lazer sensors.

- There’s a lot of innovative ideas that are born from stupidity or boredom…probably just better off youtubing "stupid idea".  That’d be far more entertaining.

- food for zoo animals?  If you can mess that up and the zoo animals can’t, you’re pretty stupid. 

There’s a bunch of lists out there, and I’m sure you’ve heard how geeks are great lovers, but I think I have a few things to add to the list.  Geeks are great.

10.  Getting to know a geek is easy – just google their name…or sometimes, their alias…or aliases.  You can find pictures, blogs, forums, newspaper articles, anything they’ve done or been involved in.  Throw in some myspace and facebook stalking, and you’ve got a good sense of what they’re all about and their friends.  You can make a pretty good judgement of how interested you should be based on these alone, and you didn’t even have to meet them in an awkward place!

9.  It works both ways – rest assured, they’re going to do the same google stalker on you too.  Geeks want to know what they’re getting themselves into while satisfying their stalker tendencies.  Geeks are thirsty for knowledge, and this time it’s about you!  You should be flattered at how much they want to learn about you and be able to have a conversation with you right off the bat instead of just having small talk.

8.  They leave an audit trail – If your geek shows up with a tan one day…you know something is up.  They’re life is well documented, email use, text messages, new facebook friends and wall posts, twitter updates, blog posts, etc.  They great thing is, even if you can’t get an idea of what’s going on in their lives from all these things, if they stop activity…you know they’re distracted by something…

7.  They’re easy to please – All you have to do is smile at them and they’re in love.  If that fails, just buy them a new gadget like an iphone or some GPS thing-a-majig.

6..  They’re devoted – Geeks like reliability.  Once they spend all their time in building a new computer, they don’t want to see that hard drive crash.  They’re the same with their relationships.

5.  They’re connected – So you want to take a trip to London, but don’t have the money for a hotel?  Don’t worry, your geek probably plays World of Warcraft with someone from London, and you can crash at their place.

4.  They’re only 1 click away – Email, text, call, IM, facebook, and probably lots of other ways should make for an easy way to get in contact with your geek.  Alternatively, you can find out which one they check least often, and send a message there, then you can say, "oh, i facebooked messaged you that, didn’t you get it?" and you’re home safe.

3.  Full of potential (too) – Let’s face it, you’re geek spends a lot of time on his or her computer.  This doesn’t (necessarily) mean they’re an introvert or misanthrope though.  Chances are, they’re just waiting for someone else to come along and see if they want to do something.  They’ll probably be full of ideas of things to do that they read about on wikipedia or digg, and you can do them together!

2.  Mr Fix it – Yeah, they can fix your computer.  Yeah, they can figure out why your wireless router isn’t working.  Yeah, they can hook up your new HDTV for  you.  They can also do some awesome research on webMD or How stuff works or any other resource out there to do what you need done.  Like I said, they’re thirsty for knowledge because they believe human knowledge belongs to the world.

1.  Dropped connection – If you decide it’s time to end the relationship, just tell them that you’re going to South Africa to live in a hut and you won’t have any internet.  They’ve read stories about those places, and they don’t want to go there, or be with anyone who could live there.

Had this idea for a story during the night, when i was partially dreaming, partially awake, which really makes the best setting for cognitive creativity.  Your mind has the boundaries of normal thought and imagination removed, but your logic is present enough to keep it all in order.  Anyway, I digress.

The main character is the narrator, even though I criticize that so often, it must be done.  He’s a ~30 something guy, and everything around him, life as he knows it is in reverse.  Everyone and everything is moving chronologically and silently backwards.  It’s as if someone hit the rewind button on his life, but he’s not there.  It wasn’t always like this, he lead a normal life, up until something traumatic happened, like his wife dying while giving birth.  So as his life is moving in reverse, if he interacts with life to change it, he gets to participate in "forward life" again.  So, he likes to hang out at morgues, funeral homes, and read the newspaper, to see what happened, and then he can go change it.  As an less dramatic example, and maybe how he finds out this ability, he’s walking down the street, sees a girl trip over the leash of a guy walking his dog, so as everything is moving backwards, he stops to pet the dog and delays the owner from tripping the girl, and all of a sudden, it’s forward life, and he’s talking to the owner and maybe even he makes a comment that the girl hears like, "These dogs are so excited!  You better hold them back before the end of tripping these beautiful women walk by." 

So he becomes a superhero of sorts, but he’s not getting any recognition because he’s alone.  So, pulling in "Early edition" (remember that TV show) and maybe even a Quantum Leap (since he’s zapped back to reverse life) story possibilities, but the circumstances are unique.  But there’s a lot you can do with that set up, add some humor with him liking to just sit at home sometimes and watch movies in fast forward.  You can throw in some religion with him asking what his purpose is, is he supposed to be saving lives, did he make 1 mistake and he’s getting a redo, it’s just taking a lot of time to get there?  And then what happens when he reaches his own birth?  He’ll be aging like normal.  I have a few ideas, but obviously I can’t give them out here…

you’d think I’d have something to say…something to rant about…after a week of nothing notable being posted, surely I’d have some storehouse full of interesting thoughts or ideas…surely something would have happened in a week that I could share with you…but I’m at a loss.  I’ve been too busy with work and life to have time to sit down and think.  I’ve been defaulting to my lack of motivation home life where I veg and stare lifelessly at the television watching america’s next top model walk by.  I think if i took a vacation at this point, that’d be all I’d do anyway.  Vacations need to be timed just right for me or they’re wasted.  I just got to keep my head above the water until my head gets straight enough to see what needs to get done and then I’ll get it done.  weeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I’m going to put it out there because it’s true.  I want to write a novel.  I have tons of ideas written down on note pads for stories and characters, but never really get beyond that step.  I’d love to write something like Palahniuk.  If worse comes to worse, I had an idea for a series of books, sort of like the "Whatever : for dummies" books.   It’d be something like "A local’s guide to : Pittsburgh"  and it would contain all the underground info about the place that only locals know.  Sure it’d have the incline, primanti’s, etc  but it’d also talk about the mattress factory, the O, student rush, when to get a tour of Heinz Field, all the running paths at schenley, places to catch live music, etc.  Details!  because of the potential of outdated information, a website would go along with it (of course!)  something like localeyes.com or localize.com and each city would be a subdomain, pittsburgh.localeyes.com