Our neighbor’s dogs are of the most annoying type, they never stop barking and bark at everything. There are times where I feel like grabbing my Red Ryder and letting loose. Just a single pump and maybe I can tag them on the tail. So Merry Christmas to Frank and Frannie, I will be purchasing the Bark Smart Deluxe in hopes of enjoying our afternoons again and letting our daughter sleep peacefully (since they bark right outside her window). The range of the BSD is about 50 feet so I can hide it nicely in my daugther’s playhouse. I realize the ultrasonic tone will affect our dogs as well, but they don’t bark nearly as much and it will be interesting to see how it affects dogs of all types and sizes. I’ll be sure to work on a before and after video for everyone’s viewing pleasure.

We had early Christmas this evening with my extended family since we’re heading out of town for the weekend. Danny and Cooter (pretty much my younger brothers), to my complete suprise, bought me a pair of freeline skates. These things are INSANE. I grew up skateboarding and rollerblading, but have never experienced anything like this. They do take a considerable amount of work to learn how to use them. I’ve by no means figured them out, but am able to skate downhill a good ways. The toughest part is figuring out how to keep momentum and “pump” them to increase speed. Your feet are completely independent of each other and can go in any direction, which ain’t a good thing. I now know what I’ll be doing most of my Christmas day. I could go on and on, but check out the videos and a huge thanks to my boys.

I always love the “why didn’t I think of that” product. A good example is Blue Line Innovations’ PowerCost Monitor. The PowerCost Monitor allows home owners to quickly gauge cost of power consumption at a glance. Think about going outside and reading the meter (spinning quickly or slowly) vs. looking at a digital display of cost/hr and total cost.

Products like this are inspirational because aside from coming up with the idea there’s a significant amount of funding and R&D involved. There’s always the hurdle of coming up with the idea vs. actually implementing it. I can’t count the number of ideas I’ve come up with and felt were decent, but I didn’t either have the funds or time or knowledge to implement.  I believe that’s one essential characteristic that separates entrepreneurs from everyone else.  It’s the “just do it” attitude once they get on board with an idea.

Yet there are those ideas that are brilliant and easy to implement, which means it’s easier for competion to mimic what’s being done. In BLI’s case there’s a barrier of entry for most companies to jump into the marketplace. But since we’re talking about power consumption and the multi-million dollar corporations in this market maybe a few million dollar investment is nothing at all.  Maybe BLI’s path to the top is some sort of patent.  We will see.

What’s most appealing to me about this product is the technical approach of hooking up a component to the meter outside the home and then broadcasting data wirelessly to the display inside.  Click here to read how it works.  I LOVE this kind of stuff and the next step will be to hook this up to SensorLogic’s Platform and get your usage remotely.  Yes that was a shameless plug for the company I’m currently working for

That sounds about right.  I’m currently getting about 50 comments posted a day in my blog and on average 5 of them are legit.  I get the 92% number from the Akismet homepage, which I just finished installing.  I generally spend about 15 minutes/day filtering through comment spam and although that doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s much more than I’d like.

What I’d really like to know is how effective the poker, viagra, and home mortgage comments are.  I’m anxious to see how effective the Akismet service is in filtering out all the crap and I’m glad it exists.  I’ll post as I learn more about it and if you’re running WordPress then installing Akismet is a breeze.

I used to make fun of My Little Ponies until my daughter fell in love with them. She carries around what she calls here “neigh neigh” bag with about 20 My Little Ponies stuffed inside. All of them have names that consist of Orangey, Minty, Snowflake, Rainbow Dash, etc. I can’t believe I’m actually posting about this.

What convinced me that the product was somewhat cool was when I found out the each pony has one magnetized foot. This allows you to stick them to any metallic surface, the refrigerator being one of Ella’s favorites. I was recently surprised when I went out on the front porch and saw her ponies hanging upside down.  It’s the little things that make dad proud.

I found this to be a pretty cool product that I’d like to purchase for the office. Maybe I can get Jamie to let me splurge for our bedroom….but the chances are slim. Blik has all sorts of wall decals with some really cool designs. One of my favorite has to be the Invader design and the action photo below definitely gets the most creativity points. I wonder if these will adhere to my car window?!?