Monday, December 05, 2005

Two Recent Random Thoughts

I often have really random thoughts... ask anyone who has heard me describe a dream, and they'll know exactly what I'm talking about. But, sometimes I just have random ideas/thoughts while I'm awake. Here is a random sampling.
1) This idea is actually kind of good... and if I had the time, it would be really fun to develop this. "EventCasting." This is just another use of "enclosures" in RSS. The basic premise is this: you get a plugin for whatever calendar system you use, Outlook, or whatever Lotus uses, etc. Then you subscribe to feeds that automatically add things to your calendar. Bands could have EventCasts. Venues could do it. TV Shows. Or it could even be a part of your Yahoo! Group. I got this idea as I was leaving my house last night, and got stuck in the traffic caused by people leaving Seattle Center, because I found myself wondering: "I wonder what was going on tonight." Since it adds to the calendar that you normally use, every time you sync up your PDA, Smartphone, or even your Audiovox SMT5600 (my favorite device of all time) the event gets sync'd too... so you'll always know what's going on.

2) I remember talking to a friend's dad a couple years ago about getting hydrogen for fuel cells. People don't think hydrogen is safe, and its also kind of expensive to "make". So, this is my random thought about hydrogen creation... and I have no idea if it has any basis in science or technology. If fish "breath" water, and extract the oxygen out of it... what happens to the leftover hydrogen? Could the corollary to the process that fish use to extract oxygen from water be used to extract hydrogen? Or am I completely bass-akwards (pun-intended)? Do fish just extract "free floating" O2 from water?

Anyways... I realized that I've never really written about this... but I'm working on my Master's Degree from Carnegie Mellon West. Its a ton of work... but my team (Team PANTZ) is awesome. And we're working on cool projects. Right now we're developing the basic functionality of eBay. I'm the Project Manager (just like on The Apprentice), so I'm trying to stay organized...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately fish don't get oxygen from the water molecules themselves, they get oxygen gas that's dissolved in the water - and if there isn't any then they die.

Some lakes get this problem at certain times of the year, when the surface water doesn't mix with the deep water. The surface water has dissolved oxygen (from the air or from photosynthetic algae) but the dark deep water doesn't, so nothing can live there.

hoyhoy said...

I like your scheduling idea, it's an interesting spin on the Internet Calendar standard that's starting to take off in some circles. I know a loose knit group of geeks hear that setup a similar system with Apple iCal Events for the Austin SXSW Film and Music festival, but it wasn't a feed-based system. It'd be entirely possible to setup perl script to "screen scrape" data from a web site, and translate them it into an iCal Event (or Outlook or Evolution, Lotus Notes, etc). Microsoft is actually trying to implement something called SSE into Outlook 12 which will allow syncing of calendars and emails from other people running Outlook. See here for more info: http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sse

Anonymous said...

Check out the hCalendar microformat
- which is pretty similar to your idea. Instead of using iCal through enclosures, the idea is to embed iCal into the RSS item through XHTML tags that are both human readable and machine parseable.

Anonymous said...

There's actually a video on Channel9 about a possible implementation of your first thought.