Not all ideas are good. This is an important thing to say, and I am by absolutely no means exempt from this fact. If I’m being honest it probably applies to me more than it should (see horse). I have taken up the practice of writing down any ideas I come up with in case one day they will be valuable to me in the future. Most of the time when I look back on these ideas I think ‘why would anyone ever write that down’ and leave it at that.

I don’t like giving up on projects. I like to think that if I take one of my ideas and start working with it, I should always be able to make it work. I think for most things, this is absolutely true. However, sometimes I get going and then realize that the time commitment required is more than I could ever provide, or I would have to spend way more money than I feel comfortable spending. I feel like the least I can do is acknowledge them here. Not everything becomes a presentable project and I think that’s an important part of engineering. Also it’s often funny.

SQUIRRELHUNTERMAN

As a kid who sorta knew how to code I went through the seemingly inevitable phase of trying to make my own video game. Only problem is that wasn’t really challenging enough I guess, so I designed and started to code it in 6502 assembly language. The 6502 is the processor that things like the NES and 80s home computers ran on and specifically I was coding this for the Commodore 64. I actually got to the point where the game was playable for the most part and I had sprites and all kinds of elements. Mind you this was before AI of any kind and I think I was 12. Long story short, I took maybe a week off and when I came back to the code it was so low level that I completely forgot how to do any of it. I have not touched it since and unfortunately I doubt I will. I used to be a lot more interested in coding than I am. I loved assembly and I wish I kept with it, but AI tools have taken the value out of these things for me.

And yes it’s a stupid name. I was twelve.

FOUNTAIN PEN

I am a bit of a stationery nerd and I though it would be a cool challenge to try to design a completely 3d printed fountain pen. My one rule was it had to be made on a standard FDM printer. This one has some pretty big physical limitations. I ended up with a design that sort of worked but the amount of ink I got on me and just everywhere put me off the whole design. This is one of those ideas that I set my limitations too high and hit a wall.

ORGAN

There was a point in time when I was really set on building my own instruments. If I was gonna write about all of those then most of them would end up here. My biggest failure we’ll say is when I tried building my own pipe organ. I did too much research on this, on how organs are powered and tuned and all the intricate mechanisms involved in moving air exactly where you need with no electricity. My plan was to make a fully wooden keyboard with square wooden pipes, like a bunch of huge train whistles. I even made and tuned several prototypes that worked well and looked good. That was probably the point where I did the math on how many pipes I would have to make and realized there were probably better uses of my time. To cheer myself up I picked up a free electronic organ from the late 80’s on facebook marketplace and it lives in the garage. My parents aren’t thrilled.