An Idea - Paperless Receipts

Here's an idea that I thought of a couple of months back, a couple of months back in 2006 to be less than precise... :-)

To everyone who carries a wallet, have you ever notice that after every few weeks, your wallet seems to be growing in thickness and in size? When you opened it up to inspect, you find yourself sorting out the credit card receipts, car park receipts, and all sort of other shopping receipts.

If you are anal enough, you can probably sort the receipts out chronologically and neatly arranged in piles according to your personal categories such as car petrol receipts, dining receipts, parking receipts, gadgets receipts, repair receipts, etc.

So why do we keep receipts? Why are we slave to these little pieces of thermal papers that does nothing but add dead weight to our wallets?

The answer is simple. Security. Yes, we need the security it gives us.

Each time we put a credit card receipt in our wallet we are thinking, "Phew... I am safe from credit card fraud now." Or that gadget receipt, "Now I have complete warranty!"

Personally, I seem to be emotionally attached to credit card receipts. I would keep them in my wallet for months. Then when my wallet gets too thick, I would sort and go through them one at a time and then remark to myself, "Hey, did I have a drink here? Who was there with me? Oh yeah, it was with so and so for blah blah blah..."

AIIYAH!!! I am side tracking.... I seem to have gotten lost in what I wanted to write about... LOL.

Getting back to topic, won't it be nice to have a device that is able to capture receipts paperless-ly? Example, after you purchase a book, you hand a "receipt device" to the cashier, whom via a virtual connection, download the receipt into the device.

Each time you make a purchase at any shop, you will be storing receipts (only if and when you want) in the "receipt device". And if you so desire it, you will be able to print any of the stored receipts at your own leisure, whether for tax purposes or for some verification purposes.

Further imagine that this "receipt device" happens to be your smart mobile phone. Great! No more thick and bulky wallets.

Now all I need to do is to get the cash register manufacturer to incorporate virtual receipts beaming device in their machines. A piece of cake!

The First Post in Blogger.com

Well, this is going to be the beginning of a blog migration. Decided that this would be the best place to start this new blog. Hope I will stay and keep at it.

So many things to do, so many things to explore. Never thought that I would not have time to play my PS2 games. So many movies and TV series to watch... damn ASTRO just added so many happening channels... getting a case of INFORMATION OVERLOAD... liao!

Currently fooling around with video streaming.... been testing and finding my way around VLC and Windows Media Encoder streaming out to my PPC. Keep getting the fragging irritating error, "The parameter is incorrect" when I tried to open a stream on my PPC Media Player. FINALLY solve that fragging problem.... all you need is to add a trailing space after the slash!!! WTF!!!!

Also, while getting Windows Media Encoder to encode my video files, I keep getting some frag shit audio encoding error!!! When I encode just the video... no problemo... but the moment I added audio to the encoding... BANG... the application terminated. Still cannot solve this fragging shitty problem!!!

Stressed nya!!!! So much for the first post... LOL...

An Idea - Inflatable Cast and Splint

Over the weekend, while watching one of the Battlestar Galactica episodes, where one of the soldier had a broken leg, it came across to me that it would be a good idea to use inflated plastic/fabric/related materials as a cast or splint for broken legs or arm.

So I did some research on the Internet and found that no one has had this idea of making an inflatable cast or splint yet, which could mean a few things. Either, this is a stupid idea or that googling around and considering it research is not enough... LOL. Almost all the articles I found were about plaster or fiber glass cast. There were a few companies that manufacture casting tapes, pretty cool but tedious to apply.

Anyways, just to take the idea further on inflatable cast. I think that an inflatable cast would be easy to apply and very portable. Depending on the materials and internal lining, the inflatable cast can be very rigid and sturdy.

They would be re-usable. They are light and does not hinder a patient's movement as compared to a plaster cast or a fibre glass cast. The doctor could easily remove the cast to examine how the patient's bone is healing.

I would imagine that a lot of prototyping and research need to be done in order for inflatable casting to be viable and later to go into production.

I cannot think of any problem that cannot be solved by good and innovative design.

Can some one tell me the "con" of an inflatable cast? If not would you like to invest in this venture? LOL...

Originally posted - 26 Apr · Thu 2007