Document: WM-013 P. Webb
Category: Project 2017.07.27
Neglected Projects
Abstract
A/k/a, I’m easily excitable and distracted on a regular basis.
Body
The name of my company is "Ideas Never Cease" (!NC) because with me,
it’s true. Ideas, never ever cease. I am unable to turn my mind off
and it has been this way since I was eight. At 29 now, stopping isn’t
remotely possible and I like that.
The downside, of course, is that…ideas never cease. This means I get
super focused on a great idea and work on it for some time and
juuuuust when things are starting to get interesting, I get
distracted by another great idea and the cycle continues. What does
not continue, obviously, is progress on those previous ideas…until
six months to a full year later. Sometimes, even longer than that!
My fiancé recently bought me a dot grid notebook because it has gold
and marble on the cover, which matches my laptop[1] a bit. I decided
to use that notebook to keep track of my weekly duties and the
thought occurred to me to write down my neglected projects. Then I
figured I’d share with the world because, why not? I’ve been busy
with redesigning BeautyLynk[2] and building BeachfrontDigital[3] so
that’s my excuse for not working on these projects.
1. DSGN
I want to start a small web design and development firm so I can
make 1) my own hours and 2) more money so I can spend more time on
passion projects that I really want to work on and not expect a
profit from them. To do that, I need to actually design and code
the new website[4].
The good news is that BeautyLynk and BeachfrontDigital will make
great initial case studies.
2. FRSH×BTS
Man, I haven’t created music in years. My claim to fame is that
when I released "Music from the Love Lounge Vol. 1", people in
Barcelona/Belize were jamming to it. Or at the very least, one
person and their friend was. "FRSH×BTS" is the production name I
go by, "the Wibby" and "Spaceman Fresh" being my rap aliases.
I have my music on Bandcamp[5] at the moment because I never got
around to creating the perfect website for frsh.fm. In addition
to that, I want to remaster all my old work. This means getting
a Windows machine, installing Windows 7 and Acid Pro, inspecting
the arrangements, and replicating them in Studio One. I have a
boatload of tracks in progress that are great jump off points for
new songs and I don’t want to lose those. As you can imagine,
getting my catalogue remastered is quite the undertaking.
Le sigh.
Oh, and I still haven’t released "Waveform", my debut album. When
I listen to it though, the only glaring issues I hear are vocal
quality and leveling.
3. WEÖM
Short for "Wisdom Escapes Ordinary Minds", WEÖM[6] is a
space-centric lifestyle brand I started a few years ago. People
seem to like the snapback I designed better than the t-shirt and I
can understand why. The hat is dope and I wear it everyday!
I have done a shitty job of advertising it and generating buzz.
Obviously, that’s the only way I’m going to sell all the stock I
have but I have a hard time being a salesperson. Ideally, someone
else would be doing this for me and taking a cut of the profits.
Also, I need to design more products. Again, I have ideas for them
but haven’t gone further than sketches.
4. !NC
I created a web browser, dubbed "Aries", a few years ago just to
see if I could do it and it actually worked. Not only that, but
people reached out to me to tell me how much they liked the design
and how it worked. Then…I moved onto another project. I was using
Opera as my main browser back then and now I’m using Vivaldi but I
still have plenty of interesting ideas to challenge the way we
think of desktop web browsers.
"Hermes" is the name I’m giving the desktop email client I intend
to work on at some point. Back when the latest iPhone was 5, I
used a neat mobile email app called "SquareOne Mail[7]" and I
friggin’ loved it. You could train the app to put your email
into categories you created so only the most important messages
appeared in your inbox. I’ve heard that Gmail can do something
similar with filters but I run my own email server. The team
behind SquareOne got investors and were persuaded to pivot into
something (IMHO quite) boring…I don’t even remember what it was.
Anyhoo, Hermes would be an evolved version of the original.
5. SciLab
I’ve saved the best for last. Prepare for a lot of backstory.
If you follow me on social media or other online networks, you may
have wondered at some point what a "NetOp" or "NetOperator" is.
Well, that comes from a beloved video game series, called "Megaman
Battle Network" (MMBN). There are six main games in the series and
the timeline is set in the year 20XX…yes, like other Megaman
games. In this future, everyone has an A.I. companion called an
"Internet Navigator", or "NetNavi" for short. The people who
operate these A.I.s are often referred to as NetOperators. So,
combined with my rap alias you read earlier, NetOperator Wibby
became my online handle of choice.
Also in this future? A 3D Internet and a futuristic device
(Personal Terminal, or PET) that is basically a smartphone. Not so
revolutionary-sounding but when the first game came out (2001), it
was mind-blowing and captured my imagination. Can you see where
I’m going with this? The ideas never ceased.
It became quite clear to me that this awesome-sounding future had
to exist because…reasons. Like…it’s awesome. But, how was I
going to make this happen? I was only 13 at the time with a lot
of time on my hands. *Good grief, I spent 16 years thinking about
this stuff* 😰
When I (briefly) attended college, I enrolled in Software
Engineering for the sole purpose of learning how to write an
operating system, even if it was from a middle-aged man with
impeccable bright white facial hair and a tendency to
accidentally spit on students in the front row. However, I was
forced to leave because I found out I couldn’t afford college.
That dashed my dreams a bit but I taught myself web design and
development, got an apprenticeship, and eventually landed
good-paying jobs and skills that led me to think, "What if I just…
wrote an ’operating system’ in HTML/CSS/JS?". This is how
hikari OS[8] was born! For those keeping score at home, "hikari"
is the creator of the 3D Internet and NetNavis in MMBN. Hey,
innovation is a family business.
*hikari is an Electron app that will be designed to boot from a
minimal Linux distro in fullscreen on a Raspberry Pi.* It’s like
Chrome OS in a way. Anyhoo, I worked on hikari for awhile and got
distracted, of course.
For my NetNavi project, I’d need a good voice
recognition/synthesis library and currently, Google is the best
for that and I don’t consider them an option because they are
beyond terrible with user privacy. I’m not sure why they need to
store your voice commands on their servers for an unspecified
amount of time but hey, that’s what happens when things are free.
I’m not expecting my NetNavi project to be considered "real A.I.".
Siri, Cortana, and everything else are just elaborate
if/then/else statements. The PET is low priority because the
base being a Raspberry Pi makes things super easy (like, creating
a dock station, &c).
Lastly, the 3D Internet. In my research, I got downvoted to hell
across a couple StackExchange sites (I was told to ask a different
site, at least four times). In hindsight, that’s what I get for
going there for useful advice.
With regard to "NetCity" in the MMBN anime, I sketched a process
that would allow for the automatic generation of buildings based
on how deep a website’s links went. Take this site for example! I
have four main links in the header. Each of those links would
represent a different floor. Each page’s contents would be
represented on each floor depending on what it was. Blog posts
would become eBooks, mp3s would become a CD, and so on. Just like
search engine bots visit your website every now and then, so would
this 3D ’Net bot and it would report changes that would update
your generated building.
This 3D ’Net would be accessed via "the Network", which is
effectively an MMORPG where your NetNavi is your avatar. Aries
would have a built-in viewer for this, although I’d probably just
use three.js.
…This is going off the rails, I understand that. This is also
going to cost a fuck ton of money. Yes, the fuck was necessary
because unless I become super rich in the next 10 years, what I’m
seeing in my head will never see the light of day until I’m 60…
y’know what, that’s around the age Grandpa Hikari created the
Internet. Also, I just realized that he looks like a chubby
Vint Cerf.
&c
I could go on and on about my project backlog. Here’s a few more
that are in the incubation stage of my ideation process:
- social network that doesn’t suck, enables better communication,
provides ways for users to deal with harassment, and makes money
without selling user data.
- an outlet that showcases black excellence, positivity, and
training resources to aid small business owners and
aspiring freelancers.
- an eCommerce platform that allows for true customization,
doesn’t treat you like you’re dumb, and has a
self-hosted option.
- a curated site for lefties that doesn’t look like it was built
in 1999 and stayed that way.
I’ll get to these projects some day. I’ve attempted to work on
things on a schedule but my mind/enthusiasm doesn’t work that way.
I’m using a dot grid notebook as a weekly planner instead of the
weekly planner I bought months ago, simply because predefined
lines and boxes make me feel constrained. I’m not quite sure what
the solution is but I think if I had more time (hah, don’t we all
want this?) and made my own hours, I could figure this thing out.
Or at the very least, start knocking things out one by one. 🕸