The time has come, my friends.

It’s been fun lollygagging around, lazily daydreaming about business ideas. But now it’s time to start throwing the dumb, unworkable ideas into the fire.

I won’t quiiiite make a final decision today, but I am going to narrow down my choices significantly, crossing twenty of the twenty-eight ideas off my list. In doing so, I’ll provide some broad reasons why I’m eliminating various groups of ideas.

And when all the eliminated ideas have been laid out on the table, we’ll take a brief look at the eight remaining ideas. And then I’ll try to clear my head, preparing myself for the increasingly difficult task of killing my remaining babies, until only the winning idea remains.

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I’ve noticed something remarkable over the last month or so:

Ideas breed more ideas.

Thinking about these ideas, and writing about them, is addictive in a way that reminds me a lot about playing Tetris. (Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll get back to work in a few minutes. I just want to finish up this one level first.)

Once I started brainstorming at the beginning of the 30-days-30-ideas project, it was difficult to turn off the spigot. The ideas came to me faster than I could write about them. So, in addition to the nineteen ideas that I’ve actually published here over the last month or so, I’ve also jotted down a set of notes for an additional dozen or so software and business ideas.

The only reason these ideas didn’t also get published here is because I spent so much time doing the analysis and writing the blog posts for each idea.

At this point, I’m not willing to let the idea-generation process further delay the decision-making process. I’m anxious to start designing some software. So, tomorrow, I’ll start crossing ideas off the list, either because I think the marketing obstacles or the technical challenges or just too high. Or maybe because I’m not very passionate about a particular idea.

But before I dive into the decision making process, I’ll publish my notes for some of those other dozen or so ideas. Let me give you fair warning, though: some of the ideas are only half-baked. I haven’t devoted nearly the same amount of time analyzing these ideas as I did with the other nineteen.

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I live in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah.

I love the city. I love the people. I love having the mountains just a stone’s throw away. During the winter months, I go snowboarding every week with six or seven people from my office. We manage to get a solid half-day in on the slopes, and still get back to our desks by 1 PM to finish off the rest of the work day.

But living in Utah has its down-sides. For starters, I consider myself pretty politically liberal, so living in the most conservative of all the fifty states often makes me feel like I’m not really participating in the political process. I have a solid track record, during every single election, of picking the losers.

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Wouldn’t it be cool if your computer could keep detailed information about all the music you listen to? Then, you could compare your listening profile to the profiles of other people on the internet, finding other people whose musical tastes are similar to your own, and scanning through their playlists for new music that you might like.

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I like to have art hanging on my walls.

Not prints. Art. Original art.

I’d rather have an original painting by a completely unknown amateur artist hanging in my living room than have a dozen poster reproductions of Van Gogh, Picasso, Da Vinci or Magritte.

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Okay, it’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally made a place on the website for a small collection of my paintings and drawings.

Click here to check out the art gallery when you get a chance.

(Or use the ‘gallery’ link in the main menu.)

I’m not crazy about the current organizational structure of the gallery (I really just tossed it together), so it’ll probably be an ongoing project.

When I was very young (probably five or six years old) I wrote my first piece of music.

I spent several hours thoughtfully sketching out the notes of my composition onto a staff. I gave deep consideration to the pattens of notes in my piece, as well as to the recurrence of patterns and themes within its structure. I wanted to write something with clarity and depth. A thing of beauty.

I poured my heart into this composition, and my final rendition consisted of a full page of a music that I was very proud of. Though I was untrained as a musician at this point, I assumed that my hard work and creativity would be apparent when the piece was played by a competent performer.

A few days later, I went with my older brother to his piano lesson, where I asked his teacher to play my composition. To her immense credit, she gave it her best shot, faithfully playing every note that I had put on the page. And my heart sunk to realize that my composition had no musical value whatsoever. Where I thought I had been writing music, I had really only been drawing dots onto a page.

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Have you ever used one of those online reminder services?

Let’s say you have a dentist appointment next Tuesday at 3 PM, so you configure the software to send you a reminder email at 2:30.

Then, if you’re anything like me, on the day of the appointment the reminder note arrives in your inbox and you dismiss it almost thoughtlessly, saying to yourself “Oh yeah. The dentist. I’ll get up and go in a second, as soon as I finish debugging this one function.”

The next time you blink your eyes, it’s eight o’clock in the evening. Not only have you missed your dentist appointment, but also your dinner.

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Those of you calendar-savvy readers following along at home have probably noticed that I’ve missed my deadline.

Sunday July 9th was the 30-day mark, and to date, I’ve only posted fifteen of my promised thirty ideas.

Now what?

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I’m a few days late to dedicate today’s software idea to Independence Day, but in my opinion, it would still be a fitting tribute.

I’ve always been intensely interested in American politics. I read the news every day. I listen to NPR. I’ve even written letters to the editor of my newspaper and to my congressman.

But the government is so big, it’s difficult to keep track of what’s going on, and I think the public is very poorly informed.

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