What problem was that?
When my daughter was just a baby, back in the mid 80's, she kept throwing her pacifier out of the stroller and then would holler like hell, and I couldn't give it back to her to shut her up because it was now dirty. So I tied a string on it and attached it to the stroller. It didn't stop her from throwing it, but it did keep it from hitting the ground and getting dirty or lost.
But the string didn't work well for bottles, and untying knots was a real hassle, and something that couldn't stretch restricted her from being able to drink her bottle while lying down in the stroller. A string only worked well while she was sitting up.
Elastic and snaps...it was perfect. Other mothers saw what I had done and wanted one for their kids' bottles, too. I made a bunch and kept them in my purse, individually sealed in little zip-lock bags. They cost me less than $1.00 to make, and I sold them for $2.00 each.
Then a good friend of mine suggested I get a patent for it and find a company to mass produce them and make mad amounts of money on royalties.
He put me in touch with a company that supposedly specialized in helping inventors get their products patented and bringing them to market.
Word of advice: Don't deal with these companies. They will do nothing to help you. It will cost you a lot of money and you will get nowhere.
After paying $400 for a rather poorly written "market study report", they managed to talk me into paying another $5000 and entering into a 5 year contract with them, promising to contact manufacturers and pitching my idea to them, and if a company was interested, they would get them to pay the cost of patenting it in my name, and I would get a royalty on every single copy of my invention that they manufactured, regardless of whether they actually sold any.
They convinced me that it was far cheaper to let them handle it, since they had offices all over the world and could set up meetings with company executives. They said my cost in air travel alone would exceed the $5000 if I tried to do it myself, nevermind hotels, paying for expensive lunches, drinks, etc. They also said they were experienced and knew what to say, so I would have a better chance of getting a deal. And they had their own contract lawyers, specializing in royalty agreements, to protect my interests.
I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. I took out a personal loan to cover the cost, from a financing company that turned out to be owned by them. It took me 2 years of high monthly payments to pay it off.
And what did they actually do for me? Did they contact all the big name baby product companies like Gerber or Fisher Price? No, they contacted publishers, like the one that produces Parents magazine.
They mailed out form letters to the editors of magazines targeted at the consumer that would be most interested in my product. They never contacted a single manufacturer. Those "inventors help" companies do this all the time, for any and every product idea that comes through their doors, no matter how good or bad the product idea is. The magazine editors are used to it and know it's all crap and toss every letter in the trash without ever opening them.
And they tied my hands for 5 years, preventing me from doing all the work myself, otherwise I'd still have to give them a large cut of my royalties if I succeeded in finding a company willing to manufacture it, on my own.
So I decided to wait till the contract expired. There was no way I was going to let these swindlers have another dime.
Before my 5 year wait was up, a conversation with someone made me realize that my great little invention had no hope and would cause the death of many innocent babies that had idiots for parents. The more popular my invention was, the greater the potential for it to kill, because stupid people that don't watch their kids properly and don't follow instructions, would end up using it in cribs and playpens and leaving their children unattended for hours, or using it in car seats while they were driving and unable to pay attention, resulting in strangulation deaths.
It was perfectly safe for use by parents that actually watched their kids and only used it in a stroller where they could watch what was going on.
If my invention had made it to market, I would have no control over it and no way to stop stupid people from buying it and killing their children with neglect. My product would be blamed and not the neglectful parents, and if it became a popular product the CPSC recall could have been huge, costing whatever company that produced it enormous amounts of money in recall costs and defending lawsuits, and ultimately, cost me a fortune, too.
And I would have these deaths hanging on my conscience for the rest of my life. I would never get a peaceful night's sleep ever again.
So that is why you can't buy my invention and why I never became filthy rich.
Photo credit: außerirdische sind gesund
I am feeling a little stunned today.
I found out that an article in the July issue of the American Bar Association Journal, recommends one of my software applications, Instant Boss.
This is the magazine read by half of all lawyers in America. And this isn't in some small article buried somewhere in the back of the magazine that nobody is going to read. This is in their cover story...the main article.
It made #31 on their top 101 productivity tips & tricks list:
31 If you have trouble staying focused, you can make Instant Boss your digital taskmaster. You can set it to time your tasks and your breaks from those tasks, allowing it to nag you on a schedule of your choosing.
This was totally unexpected.
Now I will have to go out and find a copy, and buy it. :-D
The only criticism I really have with the article, is that the online version doesn't contain any links to the sites of most of the software mentioned. I am hoping there was a page at the end of the print edition article that contained the URL's.
Of course now I'll have to get busy working on the next version of Instant Boss, including in it all those great ideas that I have been collecting for the last year.
I got an attack of creativity earlier today and this little character was the result.
I made a couple of posts on the DonationCoder forum that were from the same site. Normally, I would include a screenshot of the web page in case mouser wants to blog it.
The problem was, if he decided to blog both, the pages were similar enough that they could be mistaken as being the same image. It wouldn't look right on the blog.
One of them linked to an article about a throttled proxy for the purpose of web designers being able to see what the experience of visiting their site would be for dialup users, at various speeds.
Something about the content of that article hit close to home and made me think of all the time I was stuck on dialup with the old P1.
So I opened up Paintshop Pro and started playing around.
I took a photo of the monitor from my old P1 computer and a screenshot of Firefox from this computer, combined it with some text and drew the snail's body with my mouse.
Like magic, this little guy appeared on my screen. I think he is cute and has a lot of personality. My daughter named him Laggy.
Laggy moves at a blazing dialup speed of 33.6k. He doesn't talk, verbally. Every idea and feeling he wants to express, appears on his monitor. Read his screen and you basically read his mind.
I plan to continuing working on this idea and improving it as much as I can, although I don't think it will get much better than it is right now.
I wish I was as good of a digital artist as nudone. Maybe I will throw this idea in his direction and see if he wants to take the idea and expand on it. I think it could become something great in the hands of someone with real talent and skill. Laggy could be the perfect compliment to Cody...a sort of side kick or friend.
Every once in awhile, Google will provide me with something really stupid that amuses me.
My latest 2 amusements were links pointing at my own sites.
Here is an interesting Google result:
And then there is this little amusement from Gmail that just arrived in my inbox:
Yes, that really is the title of that page. I just think it's funny to see that text in link form, all by itself, with no other description. I mean, really...don't you just want to click a link in an email that looks just like that one?
Kind of reminds me of those 'don't click here' links that ends up crashing your browser when you can't resist temptation and click it. (no, there isn't anything nasty on that site...just a few time wasting amusements)
Visit Instant Boss homepage.
This is donationware. If you like it and find it useful, please consider making a donation to me to show your appreciation. Your donations is the only money I make for all of my time & effort invested in creating my software.
Donate to author of Instant Boss
I have been spending a lot of time over at DonationCoder.com.
They have this great 'coding snacks' forum where visitors can request small utility programs and volunteers will create them. It's a great way to get project ideas, or kill a bit of time doing what you know you love to do...code stuff.
Someone there requested a stopwatch with a global hotkey to control it. They wanted it to either always stay on top or be able to be minimized to the system tray.
Since I had already done a stopwatch like this, all it needed was the addition of a global hotkey and the request would be filled...so that's what I did.
The hotkey is Ctrl-Shift-F9.
Hitting this will start/pause/resume, depending on the current state of the clock.
This will even work to control the stopwatch if it is minimized to the tray.
Enjoy!
Download: StopWatch
comments & suggestions welcomed
