{"id":3691,"date":"2008-11-25T06:22:19","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T11:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3691"},"modified":"2008-11-25T06:22:19","modified_gmt":"2008-11-25T11:22:19","slug":"yet-another-opportunity-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3691","title":{"rendered":"Yet Another Opportunity Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I was a kid, I built a <em>ton <\/em>of models &#8211; plastic replica airplanes, cars, ships and tanks, mostly.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>One of the keys to building a good model was getting a <em>thin <\/em>coating of glue on the surfaces that were to be joined together; toluol-based model glue operates by chemically melting plastic surfaces to basically &#8220;weld&#8221; them together.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This was back about the time that felt-tipped markers first came on the\u00a0 market.\u00a0 I thought &#8220;<em>Hmmm &#8211; how about if you could put glue in a felt-tip marker to guarantee a super-thin coating of glue<\/em>?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Not being a chemical engineer, that was about as far as it went &#8211; but when I was in my mid-teens, I saw that someone had indeed invented the glue pen.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had a few other such ideas &#8211; including, I have to say, <a href=\"http:\/\/apple.slashdot.org\/apple\/08\/11\/23\/1738254.shtml\">this one<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Two mobile applications, NMobile and Trapster, are providing drivers with up-to-date maps of speed-enforcement zones with live police traps, speed cameras or red-light cameras. Each application pulls up a map pinpointing the locations of speed traps within driving distance and an audio alert will sound as vehicles approach an area tagged as harboring a speed trap. Both applications rely on the wisdom of the crowds for their data with users reporting camera-rigged stop lights and areas heavily populated with radar-toting police officers via the iPhone or their web-based application&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So close, but yet so far, again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I was a kid, I built a ton of models &#8211; plastic replica airplanes, cars, ships and tanks, mostly.\u00a0 One of the keys to building a good model was getting a thin coating of glue on the surfaces that were to be joined together; toluol-based model glue operates by chemically melting plastic surfaces to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}