This is a little silly but might actually be somewhat practical.  I work on a dock on a lake in North Carolina.  Out here with the bugs and the frogs and it is generally very peaceful.

The thing is that I do a lot of work with technology, including video conferences.  Now, at night if I run my normal web cam, it doesn’t pick up my image too well, because it is dark in the office.  If I turn on too many lights, it will be a bug magnet.

So a year or two back we had some break ins around the neighborhood in our old house.  I happened through Sam’s Club one day and bought a security camera with night vision capability for $40.  Its been sitting in a closet ever since.

But this evening, I am going to try and connect it up through my web cam connections and see if I can use it for a night vision web cam.

I’m sure there will probably not be too many people in need of this type of setup, but if it works, I’ll let you know!

Its this type of weird stuff that makes my job fun anyway and it sure beats the conversations I used to have about budget software, ERP systems, etc. when I worked as a finance manager. ….

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Not too long ago I upgraded my kitchen. We tore out of wall that separated a dining room and a kitchen that were both rather compartmentalized and we’ve put in a great big Island with cooktop stove. Cooktop stoves do not have range hoods to suck out the hot steamy air that would rise up off conventional stovetops. Instead it has a fan built into the center of the cooktop stove that draws the steam and smoke down into the cooktop itself and out through events that go up through the floorboards of the House.

This technology fights the natural progression that hot air would like to make as it attempts to rise, however it does do a good job of minimalizing the impact on the space above the cooktop.

The laptop analogy to cooktop stoves

Now as I look at the fans used on cooktop stoves, I come back to the fundamental question and problem that I always face with my laptop. How to keep it cool and running efficiently and strange conditions especially when I’m working outside life and this evening. I have to wonder if the would be possible to create a desk similar to a hockey table where you play air hockey that has holes in it that move air. Those holes could instead of pushing air of suck air down pulling the hot air surrounding the laptop service down into the desk and out through events. Instead of blowing cool air on the laptop you could take the hot air away essentially.

Similar to a aerosol can that contains compressed air, the air leaving the can could even serve to cool the of the desk. There’s got to be a better way it’s a simple thing…

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Personally, I love 3G and apparently so do all cell phone users today. We are all just so thrilled to have been using 3G phone services over the last few years that its almost impossible to contain ourselves.

Now, wouldn’t it be interesting if that were true! 3G is taking forever and a day to actually make it to consumers. As we wait and wait and wait and wait, I thought to myself, I wonder if there might be a high tech alternative? I thought about the promise of wifi and microwave technologies and all sorts of things, but came up short. Then I remembered a company founded by Motorola that almost went or did go bankrupt, Iridium.

Remember the idea of low flying satellites offering up phone access all around the world?

Ever wondered what the rates on that would be like?

Well take a look here:

I searched out a dealer and came across a company called Global Star USA (not an endorsement just the first one I found in Google).

They offer rate plans that look surprisingly close to the cellular rates that many carriers were offering 6-8 years ago.

Plus they offer Data compression options Now!

Maybe, satellite has the opportunity to provide broadband to the home, broadband to the car and broadband to the laptop, not tomorrow or 10 years from now, but today!

It would take a bit of new financing for the satellite phone industry, but if they could convert over users to a satellite option, say stealing a page or two from Dish Network marketing book, they might just hook enough customers to bring down the rates and be competitive with the larger celllular carriers.

Voice Pricing: Airtime Pricing: Globalstar

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