(Warning: Disorganized Thoughts Ahead) Dru over at Misnomer has been reflecting on voluntary payments and enabling micropayments for web self publishing. That got me thinking about what opportunities I have to pay for commodities after I can fully assess their value. The only situations I could think of were tipping for service and throwing money to street performers. Even when I donate money to an organization, I am not absolutely sure what they are going to do with it. I am trusting their past performance. Suspending reality for a minute, what if I could pay for a movie after I saw it? Would I always pay some base fee that I felt represented my appreciation for the effort made to entertain me and then tack on an additional amount that expressed my enjoyment of the film? It seems that service or live entertainment is more suited to the concept of paying afterwards because the people involved have an incentive to please you. Back to the subject of web publishing, if I wanted to collect payment for my published thoughts, I’d probably want the reader to decide how much they wanted to pay. Information has different value to different people. Although, as Dru says, most information becomes more valuable as more people see it, there are intellectual properties that are more valuable (or, more precisely, profitable) if only a few people know about them. And how best to benefit from potentially profitable intellectual property is something a writer needs to figure out. As a reader, I’d pay the most for writing that was emotionally moving, hilarious or extremely thought provoking. Bonus for all three.

Here are a couple of amusing high tech gadgets. The Fone Pen from Buka detects cell phone calls so you can turn your ringer off and have a visual indicator for calls coming through. But I have this suspicion that if you are surrounded by other cell phones, perhaps when you’re in a movie theatre, it will light up when your neighbor’s phone rings too. The second item is something I’ve been suspecting would show up sooner or later: a digital photo frame that hooks up to the Internet. It plugs into a phone line and downloads from your private online photo album. Someone I showed this to emailed back “I wonder what’s going to happen when someone hacks their site and starts shoving spam and/or porn down to people’s fireplace mantles?” There you go; they should give it to you free if you are willing to cycle ads through it!

Just saw Aimee Mann and Michael Penn performing at a club in San Francisco. Aimee’s voice is just as gorgeous live as on her recordings. I did something I hadn’t done before: waited outside the club like a groupie. She eventually came out after doing an interview for Associated Press and sweetly signed autographs for the few of us still there. I had had only enough cash to buy one of her new CDs which I’m giving to a friend, so I rummaged through my purse, found my movie ticket from seeing Magnolia and had her sign that for me. She seemed amused.

Do you know about Chindogu? I like the Hay Fever Hat and duster slippers for cats (gotta make my cat some of those…I wonder if she’ll do windows too).

Just in case you missed it, DO NOT MISS the eerily beautiful Eskimo Nebula picture from the fixed up Hubble.

There appears to be a trend going around with women taking off their clothes for worthy causes. First the calendar in England which raised $550,000 for leukemia research and now female streakers have hit the ice rink at Rockefeller Center in New York to protest people wearing fur.

@Home is putting limits on the upload speed for their cable modem service, according to this NY Times article. Seems “bandwidth hogs” are ruining it for everyone else. Instead of finding the abusers, they are capping upstream at 128 kbps. Bummer.

I noticed at the bookstore that Joel Glenn Brenner’s book The Emperors of Chocolate is now out in paperback. It is a well written expose of the history behind Mars and Hershey. The revelations are startling. You learn how the companies are run, why American milk chocolate tastes sour (it really does!) and why M&M;’s are so addictive (they make them that way, of course!). There’s Mounds (pun intended) of enlightening facts about the candy industry, a few of which are listed here. Consider giving this book in lieu of chocolates to your favorite subversively-minded Valentine.

Unisys announced that they have received a patent for a natural language technology. The patent title is a “System and method for creating a language grammar using a spreadsheet or table interface”. I don’t know too much about natural language processing, but I do know enough about computer software to feel a bit wary at the description of the system and algorithm being patented. If anyone else uses this same method to create a grammar, they would be in violation. sigh. Yeah, and I used a spreadsheet to add a few numbers together for my taxes…can I patent that too? (sadly, probably.)

Here’s something I should’ve figured out, oh, maybe three startups and two boyfriends ago. Psychologists at the University of Hertfordshire in Britain found that men are less able than women to cope with their partner’s work stress. Women could become anxious about their partner’s work stress but were much more successful in not being depressed by it. The article in the Mercury News (online access to it may expire soon) ends with a quote from the report’s co-author: “Couples need to pay attention to the way they communicate with each other regarding work. If you go home and offload on your partner, it will have an effect on them.” Sounds so common sense, but I can’t tell you how many times I would forget that.