IDEA 20090101 IDEA

When in 6th grade, my best friend, Shalen Stamps moved away. I also hit my adolescent growth spurt a bit early and I realized my own mortality. Taken together, these events put me into a much different state of mind. I realized I had to take control of my own fate. My grades went from random to above 100% when possible and I started reading every book on science. And, as crazy as it sounds, I became obsessed with the future, time travel and inventions. I made a routine to make one invention every day on a path to creativity and invention like Thomas Edison. At some point, I deviated from that plan with the busy-ness of going to high-school and discovering music and girls.

Today is New Years Day 2009 and I'm in my home town from my normal location of Beijing, China, and I spent the day with my wife, my parents, and my parents' best friends Jane and Dennis Porter and their son Tom. Dennis is a professional inventor and seeing him reminded me again that since childhood I've always wanted to be an inventor.

These two stories coupled together helped me forge a plan to make an invention a day for 2009 much like I did as a kid. Every day in 2009, I will record an idea along with any images, sketches, and miscellaneous debris to this wiki and at the end of the year, I will collect all the pieces and publish a book from the items. I hope to do this for the rest of my life, but I want to set a doable goal for the first year.