The Gallery of Ideas

I identify strongly with that kid on Meet the Robinsons.  "Keep moving forward":  this wisdom of Walt Disney drives me.  Outside the box?  What box?!!  The human mind is capable of anything and everything we've yet to imagine. We sent a monkey to the moon and if we can dream it, we can do it; our lives are immersed in air and opportunity, with TIME being the only true limitation to the construct of our creativity... ergo dum spiro, spero. 

Most of us have made some inventive predictions based conclusively upon supply & demand.  In the 90's, for example, I ranted about how ludicrous it was that delivery food was limited to pizza and Chinese, and surmised that eventually, all types of food would be available for delivery, even beer.  I first ordered delivery beer in Odessa, Texas in 2016.  Incredible.  Other ideas that became a reality were (1) the concept of "The Parking Spot" company near airports, (2) on-demand water heaters, and (3) airless car tires, to name a few.  Some have not yet become a reality, such as my "wireless revolution" prediction and in-home recycling stations.  This gallery is dedicated to ideas... some I've tried, some I've succeeded in, and some that simply just need a push.  Hopefully this section gets your innovative gears turning!  

I am a dream machine.  At least once a week, I wake up with some new mind-blowing, life changing idea.   Invention = art.  My own inventions include physical artwork, words, phrases, poems, songs, articles, books, screenplays, films, business ideas, business names and logos, machines & minor machine innovations / upgrades, recipes, process systems, process improvements. games, apps, websites & domain names, toys, clothing designs & brands,  and variousproducts & product names. 

Creative rights?  Please.  Life is short and it would be impossible to make every idea a profitable venture!  So I share.  Fundraising / capital-raising is also not a strong suit for me... I'd rather buy all my kid's candy bars than hustle our friends and neighbors to help him win that bike, and my most successful entrepreneurial venture was self-funded by pawning some guns... the business lasted 7 years and employed nearly 30 people over its course.

Bottom line, if you're feeling froggy, jump (if you can take an idea from this site and turn it into something, go for it)!  :)  ...If I feel strongly enough about an idea, I'll patent it or turn it into a business before you've read about it.  So until then, here's my little black book--get inspired!

When I was in the Marines living in North Carolina, my next-door neighbor owned a strip of storage units.  He ranted about the benefits of owning a rental business--"rental ANYTHING," he said.  He was particularly fond of storage units (high profit margin, low overhead, reusable / sustainable), after his numerous business ventures that were less successful over the course of his eighty years.  Then, just before a long deployment, I remember watching everyone in my unit take leave to drive their personal vehicles across the States, to keep with their folks or whatever.  You see, enlisted members of the military don't usually have much to their name... everything's provided by the government.  EXCEPT their ride.  And most will put all their time and money into those wheels.  Suddenly I envisioned a storage unit rental facility dedicated only to cars and motorcycles, offering different packages (silver / gold / platinum) for varying add-on services that optimize the storage experience, such as running the vehicle periodically, fluid flushes, full detail, etc., plus free pick up & drop off of owners.  Perfect business for military-heavy regions, due to deployment cycles as described above.

Here's another one related to cars, with inspiration from my time in the Marines.  On the weekends at any military base, there are two places sure to be packed... the bowling alley and the auto hobby shop (some bases also have DIY body shops).  The hobby shops are so busy that you usually have to call and reserve a time in advance.  In this country, outside of a military base, I have never found a car shop for do-it-yourselfers.  Here's the gist:  long metal building, 40 bays... 20 on either side, facing each other, the four on the end with hydraulic lifts.  Two or three people on staff.  Someone meets you outside the bay with a clipboard to get your name & payment info, and to have you sign a waiver.  They then direct you into the bay, where you inspect the rolling tool chest contents and sign acknowledgement.  Each bay has an air line, vacuum line, oil pan & waste oil drum, and a drum of speedy dry / kitty litter.  Tool chest has 5 serialized dog tags that you can take to the 'free tool rental' counter to sign out impacts or specialty tools.  Bathrooms with showers & locker room, pro store for common parts, lubester with different bulk fluids purchased by the liter, media room for free weekend classes.  So about a decade ago, I bought shares of AutoZone stock so that I could communicate with their boad of directors as a shareholder, and pitched the idea of the first HobbyZone, complete with business plan and artists' rendition that incorporates this idea as an attached structure to an AutoZone new build.  "Corner the market!"  I urged.  No dice.  Most see this idea as liability-heavy... however, DIY "pick-n-pull" junkyards continue to operate profitably across the US in every state today.

About four years after Wikipedia was founded, before it was common domain, I had this idea that I still believe has potential.  I started a 501c3 nonprofit called American Dreamwriters, incorporated in the Commonwealth of Virginia.  Here's the gist:

The WWII generation was dying off at the cyclic rate.  I wanted to be able to capture the individual stories of everyone who took part, either in uniform or on the homefront, and to create a US national / international repository of living (changeable, editable) biographies using an army of volunteer writers (family members, friends, etc.) across the US and then the world, focusing first on WWII and the Holocaust, and then covering every major event in modern history... wars & conflicts, genocides, incidents, etc.  Unlike Wikipedia, this collection would include ordinary people who survived or took part in extraordinary events, and the biographies could be stored as versions which could be purchased as physical books (or eBooks) for families to pass down.  Think Wiki + Facebook + Ancestry.com + Kindle.  Anyway, the undertaking would be massive and though I planted many seeds and applied for many grants, I simply couldn't get this one off the ground.

I used to love running.  Ran or biked more than sixty international 5K+ events-- including 35 marathons, ultramarathons, triathlons and adventure races--starting at the age of 13.  Another nonprofit incorporated in Virginia in the early 2000's, The Great American Race Association was my humble attempt to organize a national 10K run that covered all 52 weekends of the year in literally every major municipality of the US (a few cities or towns in each State, changing annually over a five-year revolving calendar).  The proceeds of each race would benefit the law enforcement and fire departments of its own municipality, and each municipality would host the race every five years.  Boy, I tried to make this work, but only within my own region.  Living in Chesapeake VA at the time, where the climate / landscape was sympathetic to such events, I pushed and pushed at every municipal office within the seven cities of Hampton Roads (Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Suffolk, Portsmouth, Hampton, Newport News) to no avail.  The closest I got was the approval of an existing 5K route in Chesapeake, wherein the city refused to commit police, fire department, or other municipal assets except at two critical junctions. 

While GARA may still be a viable undertaking in the future, my interests have shifted to THE GASH, or The Great American Scavenger Hunt... maybe it needs a different name.  You see, we went from being a non-secular Easter-celebrating family (no eggs or bunnies), to having backyard egg hunts just for shniggles.  As the kids grew, so did the scavenger hunts and the stakes.  from something akin to a neighborhood 'hash run' to a full-blown over-the-road thinking game, uncovering clues to find silver coins and wads of cash!  The annual event for my family has attracted support from friends and neighbors who love just being along for the ride.  As a once-a-year national event, this could really blow up with mega purse sponsors.  And it will, eventually... whether I kick it off or someone else does. 

Before the advent of Yeti cooling technology, I relied entirely on my classic Stanley thermos for keeping my coffee warm throughout the day as I worked.  In the winter of 2010, while working on snow-covered drilling rigs in northeast Pennsylvania, I decided to give 'ol Stanley a boost.  Using an old pair of jeans, a military field jacket liner, an emergency space blanket, some Velcro, a deer antler, a spool of indestructible Nomex thread and some rudimentary sewing skills, I drew out a pattern and stitched together a tri-layer removable thermos cover, which buttoned up with antler buttons and incorporated a fold-back hoodie with a Velcro tab.  Conducted tests to prove its worth:  set my thermos in the snow and gathered data at intervals using a heat gun (laser thermometer) with / without the sock.  Findings?  The cover gave me four extra hours of warm coffee in blizzard conditions.

The possibilities seemed endless.  I could envision hundreds of styles of the ThermoSock offered for sale in the camping aisles of Walmart, Target, Bass Pro Shops and sporting goods stores everywhere.  Team logos, fluffy animal styles with ears and whiskers, all made to fit the standard sizes of Stanley or Thermos or Igloo-brand products.  I still use that Stanley and ThermoSock # 1 today.  While the thermal technology of the aforementioned products may be dated, I believe their nostalgic value to be enduring, especially in cooler climes and during the holidays.  For this reason, the idea of the ThermoSock is still at least a mild innovation that has yet to pop.

Have you ever parked somewhere to make out or get intimate, or looked for a secluded spot under the stars to lay a blanket & cozy up for the night with your Amor?  This idea is for an adult app that lists those places on a map... abandoned buildings, bridges, parking spots, secluded trails, wooded hideaways, etc.-- even other people's permissive properties--complete with user ratings.  Of course, such an app would have its share of drawbacks, equally unlimited as its possibilities... which is why I never pursued its development to date.  Still, I'm sure somebody will come up with something similar eventually.  Just something to think about ;)

Allow me to explain this idea to non-rednecks (which is not to say that I am a redneck... I reserve the right to remain boldly unbranded and unaffiliated with pretty much every demographic):  remember Jeff Foxworthy?  He's the southern American comedian who in the 90's coined the phrase, "(If you do this...) You might be a redneck."  Well, in one of his popular sketches, Jeff gives us a list of redneck 'definitions' or word uses as given in a sentence, among which is the word sensuous.  "I told my old lady, 'sensuous up, get me a beer!'"  The definition, of course, derived from misuse of the phrase "since you was."

Alive and well today as an urban adaptation of the American English language, particularly in serious beer-drinker's circles and all across the US South, when someone gets up to grab another beer, you may hear one or more fellow drinkers call out "Sensous!", implying "Hey, since you're up, how's about grabbing me another beer as well?"

For this reason, it blows my mind that among all the craft breweries in the US, no one has yet thought to label 'Sensous Beer'.  So if you're reading, and you're a brewer, and you beat me to the punch... give me a call and I'll sell you the domain name sensuous.beer.

Someday, when I am tired of chasing dreams and I settle contentedly into some tiny geographic corner of the world, I'll spend my days woodworking and my nights tending bar at my own offbeat backyard shack, where the amassed trinkets and worthless treasures of an adventurous life are crammed layer upon layer into every nook and cranny.  The name of my pub?  Among the top contenders is Sixish Bar, where the community phrase will be "See you at Sixish."

I started Rig Angel LLC as a one-man-and-a-truck operation in the most active oilfield of the Americas, the Permian Basin of West Texas.  Over a seven year period, I lived in a pickup truck for at least two, and briefly, Rig Angel became a household name in the field of oil & gas drilling.  Primarily, I and my team fixed rigs when they broke--as mechanical, hydraulic, electricial and electronic technicians.

In late 2014, I pondered the startup of a sister company, which I was going to call Unique Oilfield Rentals. initiated to exploit some serious gaps in the industry's drive for continuous operational uptime.  One of the lowest-hanging fruits existed in providing portable air conditioning solutions to remote drilling sites in the devil's heat of West Texas / New Mexico summertimes.  In 2016, I encounteed one of these AC units on a rig, being leased for $450 a day for nearly a month.  By the summer of 2017, when a standard double at the Best Western in Odessa cost $735 a night and an Orla travel trailer barber made national news raking in $400K / yr, these AC units were in high demand and only one company had about ten to provide.  Today, the portable AC market for drilling rigs in the Permian is past saturation.

EQUALLY IMPORTANT to preventing non-profitable downtime on these rigs, however, is a rental unit that does not exist, at least not within this industry or region:  a portable high-capacity trailer-mounted cooler for precision / pressure hydraulic systems, consisting of a 1000-gallon glycol tank with a high pressure thru-tubing coil capable of allowing 50+ GPM flow, a giant radiator / fan assembly, and universal connections.  A fleet of ten units can be built with my design for $50K, and would rake in nearly half a million dollars each summer in this region with exceptionally low service liability.

When I entered the oil & gas sector in 2010, I was rapidly promoted into a senior management position for the largest land-based US oil & gas drilling company.  For scope, my region had over $1B in operating equipment assets.  One of my responsibilities was to assist in P&L management over these assets, directing a group of managers and supervisors across four US States.

I quickly realized that we were spending a lot of money repairing electrical service loops--bundles of 480V or 600V power cables along with accompanying auxiliary power and control cables, up to 250' long, which hold up to fifty individually-insulated, sensitive circuit wires in each cable.  Half of our fiscal losses were the result of repair and replacement, while the other half was surprisingly attributed to 3rd-party electricians who diagnosed the problems with these service loops.  I sought to cut down on these third-party costs... first scouring the web to find an engineered, automated solution--and finding none--culminating with a visit to Radio Shack.

One weekend, I worked with a technician to build a multi-conductor test unit, which we built inside of a Pelican Case using my drawings, a 24V power supply, LEDs to build a ight-up panel (think 'Lite Brite), and male / female sets of each multi-pin plug in our inventory.  This way, we could slash the cost of expensive, out-of-state 3rd-party labor by giving our operating teams a simple testing device to diagnose the health of their multiconductor cables.  The invention was a hit, and it was passed between rigs every time a rig move was to be conducted.  When I resigned from the company, the corporate headquarters sent a team to collect and reverse-engineer the device for patent.  When they arrived, the technician who partnered with me on the project had already disassembled the entire unit and re-distributed its core parts back onto warehouse shelves.  "Testing unit?  What testing unit?"

Forget Cards Against Humanity, Escape the Room, Farkle, Spades, Guesstures, Charades, Pictionary and Yahtzee.  This little story is about how twelve oilfield technicians sharing three adjacent apartments created the coolest party game of all time--vetted by probably fifty seasoned 'party hards' of varying backgrounds.  Designed as an adult-ish game which we originally dubbed Game of Games (a title which now belongs to an Ellen Degeneres game show), I have also adapted it for use with the kiddos.

It all started when Maria bought these ice rocks from the liquor store, which are meant to be frozen and used to replace ice cubes in one's drink so as not to water the drink down when traditional ice cubes would melt.  These rocks were cube-shaped and posed one problem which was not advertised:  they'll make a martini taste like chalk.  So we shelved them.

One day, instead of pitching them, I used a Dremel tool and some paint to create a set of dice.  I made one, and then an idea formed (imagine that).  What if... what if we created our own dice game?  I started brainstorming on paper.  For the second die, instead of numbered dots, I engraved shapes... star, diamond, square, circle, triangle, and 'blob' (just to be weird).  This would come to be known as the 'category' die.  For the third die--the 'who' die, a pair of glasses, a shoe, a T-shirt, a spiky hairdo, a classic bathroom sign man, and a classic bathroom sign woman.

The fourth die--aka punishment die--had a stick person running, a teaspoon, a scorpion, a sharpie, a shot glass, and a laughing emoji.

Here's how to play:

On a piece of paper--the "Game Matrix"--at the top left draw a star and then list the numbers 1 through 6 underneath with minimal spacing.  Then draw a diamond and list the numbers 1 through 6 under that.  Continue with each shape as described on the category die in Part I of this instruction (alternately, instead of shapes, you can roll a numbered die once for category, and a second time to determine 1 - 6).

Next, come up with 36 mini-games to fill in  next to the numbers on the Game Matrix.  Here's an example, use this or make your own:

5-Card Draw, 7-Card Stud, Baseball, Blackjack, Ladies First, SlapJack / Manotazo, Matching Game, Speed, 3-Minute War, Highest Card, Lowest Card, Egyptian Ratscrew, 5-Minute Rummy, 5-Roll Yahzee, Roll Snake Eyes, Farkle to 500, Paper Basketball, Paper Football, Thumb War, Arm Wrestle, Quick Hands / Hand Slap, Blinking Contest, Smiling Contest, One-minute Sketch, Pickup Sticks, Jacks, Five Minute Tallest Card Tower, Jenga, Best Joke (vote), Move a Cracker from the top of your head to your mouth without hands, Spoon Hang on Nose, Draw Straws, 5-Minute Crossword, 5-Minute Word Find, 5-Minute Sodoku, Maze...

In a picnic / park / backyard or other outdoor setting, you can add the classic games of crab walk, bear crawl, spin around the bat, sack race, basketball, volley, egg / balloon / pie toss, egg spoon race... you get the picture.   

Where games are between only two people, their must be an elimination plan to create one winner.  In games that take a lot of time, involve an egg timer or an arbitrary time limit... you get it, involve some controls.
At a table setting, the first Dealer rolls the shaped 'category' die and numbered die.  Everyone plays the corresponding game.  The winner will then roll the 'who' die and the 'punishment' die.  For the 'who' die, the winner gets to take creative liberty of interpreting the die.  If it lands on a woman, the dealer may say, "Ok, women are excluded from this punishment," OR "This punishment applies only to women."  If the 'who' die lands on the shoe image, the winner might say "Anyone wearing Nikes," or "The person at the table with the biggest feet will be punished."
The punishment die works as follows:  the running stick figure represents exercise.  Don't make the game stupid.  Limit it to 5 or 10 repetitions of something silly, like Smurf jacks (jumping jacks while squatted down).  The scorpion represents pain... again, don't be stupid.  After one table full of losers received permanent brands with a glowing-hot beer can tab, we graduated into using the rubber band standard, like a rubber band thwack to the earlobe or tongue.  You can scale up or scale down... you create the rules for your version of the game.  Shot glass punishment, self-explanatory.  The teaspoon could be anything... a tsp of vinegar, soy sauce, mustard, cinnamon (not recommended)... also not recommended:  changing the size to a tablespoon, and snorting brandy.  The Sharpie on the punishment die, in drunk circles, almost always means that losers get dicks drawn on their forehead.  For the children's adaptation of this game, a silly face-paint mustache will suffice.  The laughing emoji punishment means that the losers have to each embarrass themselves with a quick funny story or admission.  Play with this, see where it goes, the game's an absolute blast. 

Details soon...

Details soon...

Food truck idea - alluded to in the Saboromundo food blog.  Specifics soon...

Web-based business, incorporates a programmable mechanical product with refillable designer packets containing specific nutrients based on type, size, and region of a plant.

Details soon...

It's a built-in, targeted nozzle car wash cycle--push of a button--for your industrial equipment.  Details soon... 

Amazing idea.  Napster concept.  Details soon...

It's a 24/7 multibillion dollar industry, prone to downtime events that cost a minimum of $800 per hour.  Its support networks work banker hours.  RigMart, open 24/7, is not a retail operation... it's a sales commission-based warehousing operation and hotshot delivery hub, with each location hosting 40 of the hottest companies that are already doing business in the oilfield.  Details soon...  

PUPU (Pickup Pickup... pronounced poo-poo) Ride Haulers

'69-Shine... a successful mobile car care business that caters to remote worksites.  Tried it for proof of concept... it works!  Profitable!  Just not my thing

TASOG - The Advanced Security Operations Group

PPS Postmortem Postal Service - time capsule concept - post-dated mail and parcel delivery (several names considered, need to find my notes)

Overbuilt Construction

The Stitch Bitch

Geronimo Staffing

Killer pop songs

Predictable clothing trends

Trend analysis software mods

Multilinguist advanced language learning

The List Shop

WallHouses (one sample is listed under Woodworking Gallery)... building a city, one structure at a time

Music blending app that doesn't exist

A kit that rapidly attaches explosives to anything underwater

A low-profile, field-expedient sniper tripod

Weapon optics for bifocal users

Piezoelectric sensor study findings

... volumes more to come :)