Ever have a great idea, and lack the necessary skills or wherewithal to make the idea a reality? Well, I have… several times. And each time it happens, I later discover that someone else has done it, to varying degrees of success.
DARK LORD WAL ‘D’ MART
A fan of the Harry Potter films (I am unwilling to invest the time in the books) from their premiere, it occurred to me that the name “Valdemort” sounded a lot like “Wal-Mart”. I thought it would be amusing to write a character called the Dark Lord Wal ‘D’ Mart, combining the Potter character with some of the criticisms of the retail giant.
Lo and behold, a Wal-Mart watchdog group did it. And, naturally, they did it a lot better and funnier than I would have. There wasn’t any money to be made from this concept anyway, so I don’t feel that badly about missing the boat.
LASER TURNTABLE
As a kid who was always into technology, and always into audio, I was fascinated with how recording and playback devices worked. I learned how the needle of a turntable worked, and how the sound was created by the physical friction of the needle against the impressions in the vinyl. I found it ironic that the very method of playing back a record was exactly the activity that would eventually scar the disk and gradually degrade its quality.
When I learned about how a CD player worked – the laser reads millions of strands of tiny binary-like code, and from there, a computer chip decodes the data and distributes it as audio – I thought, why couldn’t a laser do the same thing with a vinyl record? Why couldn’t it read those impressions in the grooves on the vinyl surface – without the damaging effect that contact with a needle has? A computer could decode the physical properties of the disk, and records could last forever while still being used.
Contrary to what I originally thought, I’m obviously not the smartest man in the world… because somebody else had the same brilliant idea.
On one hand, I’m pleased that my idea worked. On the other… DAMN IT!
PODCAST
This is the worst one, and the one that stings the most. I mean, I had it… then I lost it!
Growing up, I loved radio. I played radio host as a kid, doing a little show with whatever equipment I could muster in a makeshift studio in my bedroom. I mimicked my favorite broadcasters, and I was in love with the format. It was a love that never really went away, and eventually, it became an adult hobby.
In January 2001, I started doing a radio show in my dorm with some of my buddies. I determined that I could spread the word about this show over the web – which, at that point, was still very much dominated by the dial-up connection. But I needed a method of distribution of the show, and I did not have the resources to establish a stream or a full-blown website, and limited bandwidth made it unlikely that large audio files would be distributed very easily no matter what method I tried. So what I did was make the shows available on Napster. No, not the Napster you see now – corporate owned, iTunes-wannabe garbage. This was the original, grass-roots, honest-to-God file-swapping Napster. The Napster that made the record industry take a collective dump in their pants. THAT Napster.
And as far as I knew – and as far as I still know – my show was the first show to do such a thing: produce for and distribute via peer-to-peer file-sharing. In other words, I had one of the first podcasts.
Yes, I’ll say it: I’m the father of the podcast. Sue me.
I ended up doing it as a hobby for seven years. By the time I stopped, everyone and their mother had a podcast, and a couple of them had figured out how to make money on them. That, of course, is not something I was capable of figuring out.