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pat's Ideas

Sometimes I come up with great ideas. Ideas about a piece of software that should be written, a new communication protocol that could be useful, a name or nickname that sounds really cool...

And, more often than not, I end up not doing anything with it. Usually because I'm too busy to do anything about it.

The frustrating part usually comes about a year later, when someone else comes up with the same idea, actually does something with it, and is subsequently given the credit for thinking about it first. Or, in the case of a cool nickname that I've actually decided to use, someone (or some organization) suddenly chooses the same damn name to refer to something really big (for example, as a codename for a black project) and everybody ends up thinking that I was inspired by that.

Well, I'm tired of that.

From now on, when I have an idea that I find interesting, whether I decide to do something with it or not, I'm going to post it here, time-stamped by a trusted third party. That way I can at least claim (and prove) that I've had the idea :)

Interesting ideas

2005/01/08: Alteranode

PGP-signed timestamp: idea-0255703.asc

Today, pat@TZoNE.ORG had this interesting idea:

Chatting with Phil and Francis, I came up with the name "Alteranode".
It comes from the fusion of "alter" and "anode", two words that have the
interesting property of having the same spelling and meaning in both
English and French. You can also split "anode" into "a node", giving you
"alter a node".

I don't know yet if we're going to use this name or not, but it shows
zero hits on Google as of today, hence I file this as an original idea.

--Pat

I kept that one under wraps for some time, wanting to wait for the actual corporation and domain names to be registered, and then for some other form of publication on the Internet. I mostly wanted to wait for the company to have a nice home page so I could link to it, but the presence of Fabien's keys on the PGP key servers has made the name googleable.

Stupid ideas

I said earlier that "sometimes I come up with great ideas"... But frankly, for every great idea that I have, I also get a lot of stupid, useless, or simply bad ideas. What the hell, now that I have this page, I might as well keep track of those too! Worst case, at least someone will get a good laugh out of it.

2004/11/24: 1nv0k4t10n / inv0k4t0r

PGP-signed timestamp: idea-0248217.asc

Today, pat@TZoNE.ORG had this (stupid) idea:

Chatting with Phil, I typo'd "invokation", and Phil said that sounded
rather "hax0r". Hence my idea that "1nv0k4t10n" would be a pretty l33t
nick. Or perhaps "1nv0k4t0r". Both show zero hits on Google as of today,
hence I file this as an original idea.

--Pat