How much is my idea worth to you?

The other day I was talking to a friend and I mentioned that an app that I wished that I had. Now what happens if he builds that and makes enough money to retire? How much money was that idea worth?

Zero. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

I don't think that the idea is worth anything. What would be worth something would be the designing, testing, implementing, marketing, support, etc of the idea. That's where the cost is. The cost isn't in mentioning something in passing that popped into my head.

I think that the idea of things like copyright are good: provide someone a temporary monopoly in order that they can have a chance to make back their costs. Something as a reward for putting in the effort of "creating" in the first place and to encourage more creating. If someone is not going to create a product, I don't see any point in a copyright or patients. If they could only grant those based on intent, but how could you judge intent?

What would I ideally like to happen if I acted as a muse to someone? Well, a free copy of their product would be nice, but what I'd really want would be a cold beer on a warm patio. And I'd buy the second round. ;-)

No risk, no work, no reward. I understand and I am okay with that.

When buying photo stuff, what I'd do different

It's not been a long time since we've bought photo stuff, but I think that if I was to provide advice to someone, I'd tell them to do it slightly different than we did it.

1) I'd make sure that the tripod that I bought has a quick release. It's pretty annoying to spend 1 minute putting the camera on, than another minute taking off, all for a picture that might take 10 seconds to take. Slow, annoying, and if it's cold, freezing because using the screw isn't something that you can do with gloves on.

2) I think that rather than buying zoom lens that have a max aperture of f/3.5 I'd get a normal, prime lens with a max aperture of f/1.4 or f/1.8... something really fast. That way when taking pictures of all the children that people seem to have right now I could use available light and have the shutter speed fast enough that the kid isn't blurry. I find that the things that I get most frustrated with any camera that I've used is the low light performance.

3) This last thing I'm still not sure about. We bought the entry DSLR. It's smaller, has less features, but is less flexible by the types of lens / accessories that it can take. For autofocus to work, each lens has a motor that does the focusing. With the next line up in the camera focusing is done with a screw from the body. Our camera body also isn't compatible with Nikon's new GPS attachement. However, it's our first DSLR and if we find that it's actually limiting what we're doing, we can also upgrade / buy another. I mean, disposable income has to go somewhere, right? :-P

If a dollar was a second

I just finished watching an episode of 22 minutes and they were talking about how much debt the Americans are in. They used an analogy of "if a dollar was a second". If that's true, then 1 million dollars would be about 11.5 days. 1 trillion seconds would be 31,688 years.

Now if you look at wikipedia, "As of March 16, 2009, the total U.S. federal debt was $11,042,553,971,450.47". Now that number is 349,925 years. Even if you take the other possible, smaller "public" debt of 6.74 trillion, that still works out to 213,582 years.

It's a bit funny to try and change a number so big into something tangible to understand the scale of it, but it's scary that you end up with an equally large and abstract number. The scale just boggles my mind. To give some scale, the oldest fossil record of humans is from about 130,000 years ago.

The future is now

One of the things that occurred to me as I was video chatting with Laura tonight is just how much "now" - is how the far off future was imagined to be by some. Video phones, huge flat tv's, 100's of channel, instant communication from "anywhere", the worlds information accessible at your finger tips, having robots do our dirty work for us (until the uprising that is...).

Know what the funny part about this is? I had the same impression almost 5 years ago too. I guess that means that the future was then. :-P

What would I do if I didn't have to work?

One of the "general interest" questions that I've heard asked in an interview is "what would you do if you could do any job and not worry about money?". When, an an interviewer I was asked this question as well, I didn't have an answer. I think that I've figured it out though. I think that I'd travel and take photos. Take classes when I felt I needed improvement in either. Rinse and repeat.

For good or bad, I think that if I tried to switch to be a travel photographer I'd starve. I really enjoy eating so I don't think that I'm going to switch jobs any time soon.

Experiment means most of the results are crap

I love our newest addition to the family. Our little niki. I took a walk with niki last night snapping some experiments and playing with things like aperture, shutter speed, lightening levels etc. The key word is "experiments". As with science, I think that the results of most of my experiments were crap and should be deleted. I mean, how many blurry pictures of ducks do I need?

As a self confessed digital packrat I find deleting anything very difficult. I'm working on it though. It's one thing to delete travel pictures, but it's another thing to delete shots that I took while walking in my neighbourhood. In any case, I think that I should be more selective with the pictures that I upload. I should probably be doing more post-processing (cropping, colour tweaks, etc) and just not upload everything. But when bandwidth and storage are effectively free, there is little incentive to be selective.

Telebacon

With Laura in the Sioux Sioux Lookout for four weeks, we figured that it would be weird being away for so long. Before she left we popped over to bestbuy and picked up a 30$ webcam to use with google video chat. The quality is "okay", but it's better than using the phone.

One of the things that we've been doing is eating our meals together. Somewhat weird I know, but nice none the less. It gives a sense to normalcy to the situation. Today we had our normal Saturday breakfast together. We both set up the computer in the kitchen and cooked the same meal together, 1,316 km apart as the crow flies (1,834 km as the driving directions go). I'm finding it much easier if we eat together. I'm not sure why that makes sense, but it's working for me.