A couple Random Musings

This morning I had a flash of inspiration.

I was asleep. I mean, dead asleep. The kind of sleep where you’re actually paralyzed for a few seconds when you wake up.

Then I heard the puppy’s distinctive and unmistakable “I’ve really got to gooooooo. I have to use the bathroom. I gotta go! NoooooooooWWWW! I Can’t hold it much longer!”…Howl.

I went from horizontal and sleeping to vertical and running to open the door in just a few seconds. That’s when the inspiration hit me.

You see, alarm clocks to me are about as much use as a submarine door made of cheese-cloth. They’ve got the snooze button, they’re not loud enough etc. Usually, you could fire a cannon right next to my ear and it wouldn’t wake me up.

But a puppy-gotta-poopy whine bypasses your consciousness and speaks right to that little caveman portion of your back brain. Howling animals usually meant death in our not-so-recent past.

The second thought is that once you’re actually awake, if you don’t get up right now, your first activity for the day is going to involve cleaning up dog-crap.

Basically, a puppy is the ultimate alarm clock.

The only problem is that puppies are hard to ‘set’. You’ve got to feed them the precise amount at precisely the right time, and put them to bed at precisely the right time as well.

That’s a lot of precision for a ‘give or take an hour or so’ alarm system.

That’s when I came up with the idea. It hit me in a flash, just like Doc Brown’s idea hit him when he fell off his toilet trying to hang his clock.

The ‘Puppy Go Poopy’ Alarm Clock.

It gets delivered to your house, and bolted to your living room floor, so you can’t solve the problem by leaving it outside. Once the time is set, you have to wait two weeks to un-set it, meaning you can’t just set it for a later time.

Here’s the kicker, though.

The alarm is a howl, and if you don’t get up within 5 minutes of the first howl and reset it, it dumps a small amount of sewage, directly from your septic tank, through a cunning pipe system, onto your living room floor.

Now THAT’S an efficient alarm clock

One of the first things I did when I woke this morning was read through my blog list.

Kato was wondering whether he should start a Podcast.

I tried to comment, but or some reason, his word verification wouldn’t let me through. He raised a good point though.

Podcasts are nothing new. Streaming audio has been on the internet for years. The only thing new is the tacked on RSS feed.

Now, speaking as a true g33k, this is kinda annoying to me.

Only in the past few years has the internet, video games and computers in general become mainstream. Before that they where the domain of the geek. My theory is that one day, some hot girl walked up to a geek and said: “Is it true you can get free music off the internet?”…and everything changed.

The internet changed from smart people on dumb terminals to dumb people on smart terminals. Computers and internet went from challengingly hard to ridiculously easy. Now every 12 year old with a computer and a microphone thinks they should have a podcast.

(Umm, I’m not talking about Kato in that last comment…He’s proven his true geekiness, and his ability to entertain.)

However, the absolutely most annoying thing about something going mainstream is that most people think it all started when they first heard about it on the news. Plus, then some guy hears about the internet. Gets his first computer, and then after 15 minutes solid surfing becomes an ‘expert’.

Trust me, there’s nothing more annoying than getting computer advice from someone who thought computers started with Intel, and when asked what computer he has, says “Windows”.

Hey ass-hole. My first computer was an Acorn Electron in 1982. You can’t be a ‘133t d00d’ when you only own an X-Box.

…and let’s not forget the awards shows.

To me, you know something has finally lost its soul when it starts hosting award shows. Especially when it’s hosted and run by a group of people who had never even heard of a video game before 2005, but suddenly see it as a way to ‘get down with the kids’.

So far, I’ve caught snippets of three separate Video Game Award shows, each proclaiming to be the ‘first’, and they ALL involve pop-stars, TV-stars etc.

Yes, and hearing some ditzy pop-bitch say how great it is to be involved in this ‘Whole New Media!’ is like getting needles in my eyes.

Yep, videogames. Been around since the 70’s-80’s, nearing their 30 year birthday…and it’s a ‘whole new media’.

I feel like a Vietnam Vet: “I was there man! I was there at the beginning!”