As I’m in a new contracting role, I’ve found myself evaluating work and what are it’s worths to my life. One of the most obvious is money. And I actually commented to someone that “I’m doing it for the cash infusion.” That’s pretty frighteningly like what might come out of an entrepreneurs mouth as he talks about taking some VC funding.That made me then think: What other types of unorthodox financing are available?We’ve heard of people maxing out their credit cards to fund their ideas. Those  who inherited money from their family. But has there been any entrepreunerial women (or men) who’ve turned to the lap dance to fund their ideas?This came to mind as I’ve read where some strippers who work in Vegas don’t live there and just fly in for select weeks/weekends when certain conferences are in town. They earn enough from that short period of time to live well for the rest of the year.Why not earn enough to fund that start-up?  Maybe the business has nothing to do with matters of an adult nature, but rather is a baby’s nappies estore and the spunky, go-getter mom who founded the company leaves the baby with her husband and heads to Vegas for a few weeks to bring home the bacon AND the venture financing.Would that mean that strip clubs would have to get detailed financial backgrounds on their customers? Would the SEC be following the money as it moved from the edge of the stage to the middle of the bosom (or other places too risque to go into here)?

You’re at work and you’re trying to locate someone. They’re not at their desk and you’ve asked the cubicle next to them to no avail.  What do you do?I bet if you did some traffic analysis (fancy term for snooping on people by pointing cameras around the office and hitting record) you could probably identify each person’s 1 or 2 most common routes through the office. That might be the path to and from the bathroom or maybe to the designated smoke area.  It could also be the path to the elevator as they sneak off to starbucks every ten minutes to get their fix.  Regardless of the why, you might be able to say with some degree of certainty, that if they are not at their desk, the next best place to find them is somewhere along that pathway.Now, if you actually went so far as to paint everyone’s pathways on the floor of the office, in addition to it looking funny, would it lead to a change in people’s behaviors? Would people change that route because they don’t want to feel predictable? Would they take a different route if they didn’t want to be found?

Why not make a collection of poetry that’s haphazardly created in modern spam email as the authors try to circumvent filters. It can be quite interesting. Like the cut-ups that Burroughs did.

From an actual piece of spam received August 30, 2005 by “Al Zamora”:

“Eskimos will marry the pediatricians. Disney characters sabotage the
directories of hard rock geologists. Square dancers compose lovely
sonnets about karate instructors. Rodents sicken technicians. Campers,
blenders and troglodytes all claim that screen dumpers hate to be mistaken
for aeronautical engineers. Buildings sabotage the directories of Disney
characters! Geophysicists surprise unwed mothers. The Texaco managers
insist that the electricians dance with reptiles.”

November 9, 2007 Update - Found someone who’s doing illustrations of SPAM subject lines. See it here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/linzie/sets/72157602417089145/detail/

1900 You Sing

Ad… Guy in a shower with various accoutrements of a recording studio in
it with him…
“Don’t just sing in the shower, record an album”

Ad… Woman in a car in traffic, in car is recording gear, backup singers
in the back seat, maybe a producer up front?
“Don’t just sing in traffic, record an album”

Set up a 1900 number where people can call, choose from a list of songs
and then have the actual songs, with lyrics play as they sing along. They
then get a chance to 1) listen to their recording, 2) order a cd, 3)
record another. Their vocal tracks are added to the karaoke tracks to
make a finished recording. It would then be available for download (for a
fee?) or on a cd.

Great pitch is to people hosting parties… they put their drunk friends
onto the service so they have actual evidence of the karaoke to use
against them.

Ad… “Your friends dragged you to Karaoke and proceeded to butcher ‘Love
is a Battlefield’ and you had nothing to show for your pain. Now you can
get the evidence in all its horror on CD or as an .mp3. Simply offer
1-900-Your-Song to your friends the next time they have the itch to sing
along.”

From a dream. Inspired by PBS’s infamous Ken Burns documentary
spectaculars…

The Gods of Jazz vs. The Big Names in Baseball

In a live television event. Watch them do battle. See all the action in
the wonder of panned freezeframes. Watch each blow land. Each note crush
the opponent.

And if you liked this, don’t forget to Tivo:
The Civil War Remainders vs. Lewis AND Clark

Okay, this one is destined for abuse. But why doesn’t an online store have a shopping spree - you get five minutes to click anything you want at tremendous discounts..  People would practice all sorts of ways to browse a site faster in order to get past slow download times. Or perhaps the site would be hyping its super-fast site/design.  Of course, bots and other types of automated programs would be an issue, but if the sites were trying to get rid of the stuff anyways… do stores really care when people are throwing items around in the aisles at box stores on those mass-savings days?  As long as things sell, no?

A site of just dead links. If the link becomes live again, it’s removed.

Helping to “fight back” on PageRank hogs?

Elementary school class shares the Nobel Peace Prize as they ended hunger in a small, developing nation with their contributions to the hunger relief program … with image of top ramen being delivered.

Forget how I came up with the name (wasn’t there something like Figlets?) but my definition was/is little bits of information which is non-germane to the context, yet “seems to follow” from the topic.

An example of this is when during a conversation which touches upon Latin and its use (or disuse) it’s inevitably mentioned that Latin is the still the language of the Roman Catholic Church/Vatican.

I’ve been a map nut since I was a kid. There’s just so much that can be seen. Every time you pick one up, you can see a whole new level of detail.

Sometimes all that’s needed is to see something in a slightly different whole. So why not take a different perspective on the geography of a place by creating maps that just show a sliver of the world - anything along a certain latitude or longitude.

Things you might see differently:

• All the different places that are at the same latitude and which should (in theory) share similar climates
• Get a better sense for how the world is curved… not as flat and gridlike as it seems on most maps.

That’s just for starters.