So, I was installing Visual Studio today at work. (The reason is unimportant and I can’t tell you anyway, since it would probably violate some clause on my employment contract…) The install took so long that I actually had to leave for the day before it had finished. While installing, it shows one of those pseudo-progress indicator splash screens that doesn’t actually give you any useful indication of how far along it is - you know the sort of thing. And since Microsoft apparently know how long the darn thing takes, they try to amuse you by having it cycle through a series of cunningly designed ads which tell you how great their product is.

Which just seems like a waste of processor power.

Back in the day, when you used to load games on to your Commodore 64 computer from a cassette tape and it took up to half an hour to actually play the tape and read all the bytes into memory, they had things called Loadagames. These were tiny footprint games that could be loaded into memory within the first few seconds of the tape read, and that you could then actually play while waiting for the main game to load. An example is Invade-a-Load.

This is what modern software installers should do! Rather than spend half an hour staring at the uninformative and annoying “progress” screen while installing something, and unable to do anything else because you need to have all the other apps closed, you could actually be playing a cool game!

Remember Twister, the game that ties you up in knots? What about a 3-D version, where instead of a mat on the floor with coloured circles, you have holographically projected coloured spheres suspended at various locations in mid-air? How cool would that be?

From here it’s just a small step to 4-dimensional Twister, which is where the real fun happens!

mezzacotta Café patron Panpear writes:

I had stopped at the mezzacotta Café for brunch one day, and spotted this menu item. I asked what ‘insalata’ meant (salad, as it turns out), and ordered right away. There was a choice for real fruit or gummi fruit in the salad, but I chose gummi because it already seemed unhealthy in the first place, so why bother trying to make it healthy? Overall, everything was delicious and sugary; I would definitely recommend it.

We were discussing how unfair it is that sometimes you’ll get stuck in traffic for longer than seems reasonable, while other drivers in other lanes manage to creep ahead. Or how when traffic is bad some evil people will do sneaky things like using an inappropriate lane and then trying to cut in, to the frustration of the people doing the right thing and waiting patiently in the correct lane.

But on the other hand, maybe the person cutting in has spent hours in traffic already and actually deserves to be given an easier ride, while the people waiting have only been stuck for a really short time.

So we realised the answer is to have a big digital display on each car, which starts at 0 every time you set out on a trip. It counts the number of minutes and seconds you’ve spent sitting still in traffic. Then whenever a question of priority comes up, right of way is given to the car that’s been waiting for the longest.

Who gets to merge first? The person who’s had the most delayed trip so far! If there’s a queue of cars waiting at a blocked intersection, cars with large wait times are allowed to sneak up and cut in - as long as they don’t cut in front of anyone who has been waiting longer. Can’t get fairer than that!

This would smooth out travel times for everyone and make the roads fairer and less frustrating! Everyone wins!

Coming back from buying lunch across the street today, we entered the lift and proceeded to go through the routine of pressing the buttons for floors 5, 6, and 7, since we each needed to return to our desks briefly and we are spread across those floors of our office building. We lamented the fact that the process of floor selection was so incredibly inefficient, requiring us to hit three separate buttons to indicate what floors we needed the lift to stop at.

DMc pondered the idea of having 128 separate buttons, each one wired to tell the lift to stop at a different possible combination of the 7 floors in the building. For example, button 74 might tell the lift that people want to get off at floors 2, 4, and 7. All you need to do is calculate the value of 2¹+2³+2⁶ to get the correct button.

And then we realised we could make this incredibly cool idea even simpler to use, if we just renumbered the floors, so instead of having floors 1 through 7, we have floors 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. So all you have to do is add up the numbers of the desired destination floors, and press the button with the number corresponding to the sum!

A while back we had an idea that was so cool, we decided to fully bake it ourselves. After some beta testing, it’s now ready for launch.

First, the problem: There are lots of webcomics out there. And many of the best ones have been going for a long time, so have extensive archives. So if you look for cool new comics, you might find something like Wondermark, with over 500 strips, or Arthur, King of Time and Space, with nearly 2000 strips.

The standard way to catch up on these is an archive binge - spending hours or days trawling through the archive to catch up to the latest strip. This can be gruelling, takes a lot of time in big chunks, and you run the risk of losing your place when you inevitably need to stop to use the toilet, eat, or sleep. There must be a better way!

Archive Binge is a site which constructs custom RSS news feeds for webcomics. Not normal RSS feeds (which deliver the latest new comic a few times a week), but custom feeds which deliver strips from a webcomic’s archives, at a rate of 1, a few, up to 10 strips a day. So you can use your feed reader to keep track of the comic for you, read at a rate faster than the comic updates so you can catch up, but without investing hours at a time. And you can pause it if you go on vacation.

It’s like a digital video recorder for webcomics. Check it out. Tell us what you think.

Here’s an idea we came up with over lunch: Negative currency.

As well as having coins and notes for various positive denominations of cents and dollars (or pence or pounds or euro, or whatever), also have them for negative amounts. So if you forget to bring cash to buy your lunch, the sandwich shop can just hand over notes and coins worth minus $3.70 (or whatever). You take them, put them in your pocket, and keep them nice and safe, just like regular currency.

Later, if a friend still owes you $2 for something and it seems like he’s never going to pay you back, you just go and give him a minus $2 coin! And - here’s a really cool thing - unlike regular currency, if you ever accidentally lose a negative coin or note, you win! It’s almost like finding regular money!

What a great idea! Something that enables monetary transactions in cases where you’d normally just be unable to do anything, and which doesn’t have the disadvantage of being a bummer when you accidentally lose it. We’re still trying to think of any unforeseen problems.

Sometimes, one of our projects will start as fully baked and gradually make it’s way down to half-baked. Such is the case with my project Film Forensics.

The high-concept: It reviews flawed movies, and rewrites them to make them more awesome, whether that means making a credible twist for the latest M. Night Shyamalan film, adding a T-Rex to the latest romatic comedy or just cutting an hour out of the latest Transformers movie.

Because I am not a creativity-producing machine (unlike some Mezzacotta collaborators I could name), Film Forensics went enthusiastically for a while, and then fizzled. I update it once every few months at the moment. Still, it has a bunch of reviews I’m proud of (especially Snakes on a Plane).

Mr McLeish has written and posted a new review of Terminator: Salvation. Check it out!

After several months of rave reviews for its imaginative menu, combining classic and contemporary cuisines, the mezzacotta Café is pleased to announce that it has been granted a liquor licence.

The Café is now serving a selection of quality wines from its extensive cellars, carefully chosen to complement its unique menu.

I hate ad-breaks in TV! What I’d really like to see is a dedicated channel that continually shows interesting tidbits of footage which can be enjoyed in 30-second or 1-minute chunks - perfect for swapping to during the ad-breaks of shows you are actually watching. A totally random assortment of cool snippets from nature documentaries, technology shows, owned/pwnd/FAIL videos from youtube, stand-up comedy acts, 3-d animation, music videos, laboratory demos, actual good and entertaining ads from around the world, stuff blowing up, travel documentaries, famous-moments-in-history/sport/news, old newsreel footage, movie trailers, reviews of upcoming video games… the list is endless! A few hours of new content each month added to the rotation would keep things fresh - all that’s needed given you are probably only going to watch this channel a few minutes at a time.