Next time I have an idea, I'm building a damn prototype and applying for a patent

Back in the 1980's, when I was working as an administrative assistant at Standard & Poor's, I used to talk with my boss about Things You'll Be Able To Do With Electronics In the Future. I had the idea that someday, instead of mail order catalogs, you'll get catalogs on a VHS tape, and you'll somehow be able to order right through your TV, probably via your cable system.

A year and a half later, Home Shopping Club launched nationwide.

About five years ago, after spending an evening copying recipes onto index cards despite the computer sitting upstairs, I thought how nice it would be to have some kind of touch-screen internet terminal PC that you could flip down from your kitchen cabinets and surf for recipes instead of having cookbooks around or printing out recipes from the Web and having them clutter up the kitchen. Then in September I read this:

DREAM kitchens may soon include a computer along with the latest refrigerator or oven. That way people gathered at the family hub can satisfy their digital needs along with nutritional ones.

Hewlett-Packard’s new TouchSmart IQ770 PC ($1,699 at Circuit City) is designed for that kitchen of the future, where people turn on the computer along with the coffeepot, and then check the screen for the weather, ball scores and the family calendar as they breakfast.

It's not quite a flip-down, but it's small-footprint.

A few weeks ago I was talking with a co-worker who was complaining about the heavy textbooks her son has to shlep around, and how quickly textbooks become outdated. I said that the successful e-book reader is going to be something that approximates the experience of reading a book.

What I envisioned was something like a small, very thin laptop, hinged in the middle, with screens on both sides. It would have thumb-buttons on each side for next page and previous page, and an interface through which you could search for specific words or terms. It would have a black-on-white display so that it would actually look like reading book pages. It would use an SD card and you would download the book from a web site. It would decimate the used book market at colleges, but it would also hopefully reduce the ridiculous cost of textbooks if there were no distribution issues for updated versions.

Have I mentioned today how much I hate this fucking guy:



That little gadget he's holding is the Amazon Kindle, and it's a wireless book reader:



And except for the fact that it doesn't have a two-screen display, it's almost exactly what I was describing to my co-worker.

Next time I have an idea for a great gadget I'm going to get going on it. This is getting to be a pattern, and I'm sick of watching other people come up with the reality because I can't get my shit together or don't know the right people to get it done.