Contact Search on mobile phones.

Maybe its just the makes and model of mobile phones I have used, but 'contact search' has really be awful on the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm phones that I have used in the last 8 odd years of smartphones.

A contact these days is more than just a name and a phone number or an email. It has an address, notes, organization name, notes and much more...

Why cant I search a contact by just how I remember a contact. e.g. I sometimes remember people by their organization or by where they live, and I know I have stored that info in my contacts. If mobile phones (e.g. iPhone) can index all your emails and let you search that, why not index everything in a contact and search by anything or everything.

e.g. I wanted to find out a contact, and I knew the phone number started with area code (916). Why cant I just start typing 916... in my contact search, and it starts shortlisting people.

Again, simple, but still missing.

Adjustable toilet seat (height from the floor).

We as humans have customized car seats but one-size-fits-all toilet seats; even though we have been pooping way longer than we have been driving cars.

Its sometimes too low for tall people and too high for short people. Unless you are the average height human, its not as comfortable to attend nature's second most frequent call as it should be.

And I think, the solution is very simple. What I would really like to have have 2-3 toilet seat lids. If a tall person needs to adjust the height and make it (the seat) higher than the floor, they can put all the 3 lids down on the seat and make it higher. On the other hand a short person can put down just 1 lid on the seat to keep it lower. These lids can be of varying thickness too.

That would really allow the seat height to be customize-able without much investment. Also in a house, where people are very nit picky about cleanliness, you can have different lids for different people.

You KNOW its Friday, when I come up with totally weird ideas... :D

non inflatable soccer/basket balls

So if we can have non inflatable tennis balls that get hit at 100mph, why cant we have non-inflatable soccer balls and basketballs? Every now and then we are running out of air on those bad boys. I am sure there is material out there that can replicate the same 'bounce' needed in a basketball without 'filling' it with air.

App to search within photos.

Text recognition has been there for ever since OCR (Optical character recognition) has been around. Google search even integrated this in their search Algo a while ago.

But how come no one has come up with an App (for phones and PCs) to be able to install and just search your personal pics. This App can be configured to point to your photos folder where it 'indexes' this pictures and optically recognizes text in them. It might take a while to index all the pics, but it will be only one-time deal for all existing pics.

I even want to take it a step further and say - why just recognize text in pictures, why not recognize objects like, flower, roads, sea, trees etc.... So next time I have to look for a pic, I do not have to go through the pics or go through my haphazardly organized folders to look for a pic.

All I do is search for 'Ruchi+ucd graduation+stage+black dress' or 'ocean+tree+rocks' and it shows me the list of pics to sort through.

Adjustable Brake and Acceleration Pedals.

We just came back from a nice weekend in Lassen Volcanic National Forest. And I drove the ugliest rental car in the history of rental cars - Chevy HHR. Its not only ugly from the outside, its uncomfortable for anyone and everyone from inside too.

Anyhoo.... The biggest problem I had was, as you can guess already, the pedals. The brake pedal was so awkwardly placed that I could not keep my heel on the (car) floor and my toes on the pedal at the same time. And as we were driving hills most of the time, my foot was awkwardly hanging all the time. If I were in flip-flops, it was even worse.

So, my question is: Why do we have adjustable car seats, adjustable steering wheels, adjustable rear-view mirrors even adjustable hand/arm-rests - but not adjustable car pedals? I would really love to adjust that brake pedal an inch towards my foot on the ugly Chevy HHR.

And, HAPPY BIRTHDAY RUCHI... :)