My Creative Friend

On this part of the planet, a colder-than-normal chill passes through the air. The baby, El Niño, and the cooling/warming Arctic, have combined to make winter cold again.

And winter brings people indoors, where we share new ideas and show off new home furnishings, new tools in the garage or new computer games.

I am not an inventive person. Instead, I hang out with my friends who have the skills and fortitude to design new inventions of their own.

For instance, a good, close friend of mine (who wishes to remain nameless) uses his house as a giant experimental breadboard / laboratory.

Back during the Thanksgiving holiday, I told him about my desire to keep the door to the entertainment room open but at the same time keeping the noise of the 7.1 surround sound system restricted to the home theatre so that my wife and her mother could entertain friends in the nearby kitchen and living room while I cranked up the sound of the football games.

So, between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve, my friend went to work on an invisible soundproofing wall.

Have you ever walked into a building and noticed the "wall" of heat you walk through just inside the doorway? Or have you ever paid attention to the way cold air is circulated in those open bins / coolers in the grocer's market that hold vats of butter, crates of eggs and cases of beer?

Well, that describes my friend's new device.

He invited me over to his house last night for a demonstration. On one side of a doorway, he had set a 12" subwoofer enclosure, some speaker boxes configured with a variety of tweeters and midrange noisebangers, and a guitar amplifier. He had me stand a few inches from the doorway. He walked over to the stereo system and turned it on, or so it appeared. I heard nothing but I did see some odd flexing images, as if I was staring into the room across a hot carpark or desert, a mirage of my friend and his gear in front of me.

He then walked over to the doorway and flipped a switch on the wall. My ears felt like they had burst when the blaring of a Jimi Hendrix tune blasted out of the room. My friend flipped the switch again and I was left with ringing ears and the same wavering mirage.

He walked back to the surround sound system and turned it off. The mirage effect lessened. My friend flipped the switch on the wall and I heard him in mid-sentence say, "'...t do you think?"

I asked him what I'd seen so he explained in layman's terms the device he'd created and installed in the doorway. It was some sort of sound cancellation system, with an incomplete visible light alteration system in place, too.

He showed me the plans and told me he'd sent the design to two teams, one in Japan and one in China, having them work with one another to perfect the overall look and manufacturability of the system. Meanwhile, he'd contacted his American, Russian, Brazilian, Canadian and Indian software designers to come up with better algorithms to control the visible light control system. He guessed that by mid-March he'd have a working unit for me to install at my house.

We played with the doorway sound cancellation system some more. He pointed out to me that he hadn't eliminated the floor vibrations of the subwoofer but since it didn't bother me any more than the effect of a distant passing automobile full of teenagers listening to music, he'd assume that most people would accept the fact the door device was only eliminating sound through an open doorway. If they wanted more than that, they'd have to build an entertainment room in a more isolated, soundproofed room of their house.

We watched a lopsided professional American football game for a while, downing a few holiday brews, and then went downstairs to his workshop.

My friend's always toying with wood. He, like most of my friends, grew up with fathers and grandfathers who carved and sawed wood for home furnishings or children's toys. My friend's latest creation is a folding step ladder that forms a spiral staircase. He mentioned that he was tired of the same old A-frame shaped step ladder and wanted something he could unfold in a tight space that offered some stable footprint for standing on its own (unlike an extension ladder) but didn't require a huge footprint. We talked about the ladder for a while and realised that there might be a market for this ladder in the treehouse world. Or maybe even for access to lofts or other tight spaces.

I can't tell you my friend's name but I can tell you his nickname - Goldfinger. Everything he thinks about or touches turns to precious metal. If I just had the nail of that finger, I'd be a rich man myself!

As I was leaving his house, I joked about the effect one person has on society, recounting all the inventions of his that had made it into production and improved the standard of living for others. He laughed. He pointed out that one person can make a difference in many ways, including the misguided Nigerian, whose recent actions on an airplane changed the lives of others flying during the holiday season in the U.S. When did we start letting terrorists decide how the rest of the free world is supposed to live? There are times, he said, when we should ignore the actions of one person and not pretend to make our lives safer by harassing the lives of ordinary, law-abiding travelers. Not only is it demeaning but it reduces the efficiency of people transportation, like running a railroad car full of sand through a hand sifter to look for a metal ball bearing instead of using a magnet at the sand processing plant to keep metal out of the sand in the first place. Easy for him to say - he never flies on commercial airplanes. He's rich enough that people he needs to meet usually fly to his house, or if he needs to fly he takes his own private aircraft.

Anyway, can't wait to see what he invents next. Every time I open my mouth, he responds with something to improve my life and make more money for him, which he typically donates anonymously to research centers around the world, never knowing which society's going to create the next set of geniuses.

More later...time for lunch. This cold weather's making this big boy hungry! Maybe I can invent a new way to mix peanut butter, Nutella and some other ingredient for a special sandwich today.