I’ll start with a minor disappointment from my little world, which started with a potentially good idea.
On Thursday, May 22, I was eating dinner with Liz at our kitchen table. The table is right next to a window that faces due west, and the sun was shining through our blinds right into my eyes. I didn’t want to close the blinds because it would darken the room, and then I got a flash of inspiration: Instead of having a single tilt controller that opened or closed all the slats in the blinds, what if the blinds came with two regions – a top half and a bottom half – where you could adjust the tilt of the top and bottom halves independently? You could have two tilt control wands and two tilt mechanisms. That way, you could close the top half to block the sun in your eyes, while keeping the bottom open to see your backyard and get some light in the room. As an even better example, it would be great to have one of these in the bathroom, where you could block the bottom half so you prevent the neighbors from looking in, and keep the top half open so you can use daylight to light the room.
Pretty good idea, eh? I thought so, too. Pretty obvious idea? Yeah, but only once somebody tells it to you. It’s like the paper towels with the perforations that let you tear off half-sheets. That’s a great idea – obvious in hindsight (well who WOULDN’T want half-sheets?), but requiring some sort of inspiration to come up with it the first time.
So I, being a patent agent, immediately saw the path in front of me: file a provisional patent application (which doesn’t cost big $ since I can write it myself), approach the major blinds manufacturers with my great idea, and get licensing agreements for them to use my patent in their products. All of these things are very easy to do – I do all the patent stuff every day, and I work with people who can easily do the licensing stuff.
Now normally, a solo guy with a patent to his name doesn’t really have a prayer selling his invention to big industry. I know this firsthand. I also know the reactions I got when I mentioned my idea to Liz and to the other patent attorneys I work with: “I’d buy one of those.” And I know that to implement this would require practically no effort from the manufacturers – an extra gear mechanism, an extra wand, and some extra string. It doesn’t even require additional holes in the slats. So I got to work…
I started by visiting a store in Hopkins, MN, called “The Little Blind Spot”. We’d bought some blinds there a few months ago, and the staff there was terrific. I thought they’d help me find out a few things. Within ten minutes, I had a list of the major blinds manufacturers, and the proper industry terminology for all the parts and options. I highly recommend the store – they’re the kind of people you want working with you when you’re redecorating.
So that took about one day.
Next, I wrote up a little bit for a provisional patent application. Now I know that none of you are patent experts, but I thought you might be interested to see what this idea looks like in legalese.
First, the figures. These were just draft sketches, but they get the point across. I think they’re kinda funny.
The last section of every patent is the “claim set”, and it’s a legal description of your invention. It’s analogous to a real estate claim, which sets the boundaries for the land you own. With patents, the claim set defines the edge of what’s yours; you’re entitled only to what’s inside the claim.When you draft patents, you typically start with the claim set, and that’s what I did. This is a rough draft of my claim set:
We claim:
1. A window blind, comprising:
a plurality of horizontal, tilt-controllable slats, arranged in sequential, vertical alignment, the plurality of slats including a mutually exclusive first slat subset and second slat subset;
a first tilt controller for controlling the tilt of the slats in the first slat subset; and
a second tilt controller different from the first tilt controller for controlling the tilt of the slats in the second slat subset.
2. The window blind of claim 1, wherein the slats in the first slat subset are contiguous.
3. The window blind of claim 2, wherein the slats in the second slat subset are contiguous.
4. The window blind of claim 3, wherein the second slat subset is adjacent to the first slat subset.
5. The window blind of claim 4, wherein the first slat subset is disposed above the second slat subset.
6. The window blind of claim 5, wherein the first and second slat subsets include an equal number of slats.
7. The window blind of claim 5, wherein the first and second slat subsets include a different number of slats.
8. The window blind of claim 7, wherein the second slat subset includes at least twice as many slats as the first slat subset.
9. A window blind, comprising:
a plurality of horizontal, tilt-controllable slats, arranged in sequential, vertical alignment, the plurality of slats including a mutually exclusive first slat subset and second slat subset;
a first tilt controller for controlling the tilt of the slats in the first slat subset and the second slat subset; and
a second tilt controller different from the first tilt controller for controlling the tilt of the slats in the second slat subset but not the first slat subset.
10. A window blind, comprising:
a plurality of horizontal, tilt-controllable slats, arranged in sequential, vertical alignment, the plurality of slats including a mutually exclusive first slat subset and second slat subset;
wherein the tilt of the slats in the first slat subset is controllable; and
wherein the tilt of the slats in the second slat subset is controllable, independent of the tilt of the slats in the first slat subset.
11. A window blind, comprising:
a plurality of horizontal, tilt-controllable slats, arranged in sequential, vertical alignment, the plurality of slats including a mutually exclusive first slat subset and second slat subset;
wherein the first slat subset is contiguous;
wherein the second slat subset is contiguous and is adjacent to the first slat subset;
wherein the tilt of the slats in the first slat subset is controllable; and
wherein the tilt of the slats in the second slat subset is controllable, independent of the tilt of the slats in the first slat subset.
The legal requirements for writing claims require that I describe my invention in one sentence, which begins with a capital letter (technically, the sentence begins with “We claim” or the equivalent) and ends with a period. The words “comprising”, “wherein” and “plurality” all have very specific legal meanings (there are others, too, that didn’t show up in this claim set), and as a result, I try to avoid them at all costs in my daily conversation.
(Aside for those of you who wonder what my actual job is: I basically make patents happen. I take invention disclosures from the client, which are usually pretty brief, and flesh them out into complete patent applications. I write all the text, I sketch out most of the figures myself, and I get help from a professional draftsman for the difficult stuff. Plus, I interact with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to jump through the necessary hoops to get the patent issued. Most of the job is like a really specific writing exercise, where I’m describing a particular invention in a very specific writing style. The bulk of the patent is usually written in fairly straightforward language that an engineer should be able to understand; if it doesn’t read well to an engineer, then it’s a poorly written patent. The claim set should be unintelligible to basically everyone except patent people.)
So I was getting set to work on some more figures for my provisional patent application, when I came across this, just this morning:
Uh-oh…party’s over.That figure from the 1986 patent is pretty much what I had in mind all along. It’s an expired patent, so it’s in the public domain, and anyone is free to use it. So there’s nothing legally stopping Hunter Douglas, Levolor, Bali, Graber, Kirsch and the other blinds manufacturers from offering this as a feature, today, with no royalties to anyone.
And that’s pretty much the end of the story. I didn’t file any patent application because my idea’s already been done. All the important features I came up with are right there in FIG. 8 of U.S. Patent No. 4,621,672, titled “Mechanism for window blind”, issued on Nov. 11, 1986 to Hsu. Oh well, my great idea lasted from May 22, 2008 to June 3, 2008. Fun while it lasted…
And now, to bring you all up to speed on what else has been going on since December…
January – Still enjoying being downtown for work. Got some better pictures from my office window. Quite a view, looking due east from 17 floors up.
I’ve set a goal for myself of eating at least one menu item from every restaurant in the Minneapolis skyways. To give you an idea of how ridiculous this is, there are allegedly 8 miles worth of skyways downtown. As of June, I’m probably 50% of the way there. I’ve attached a map of the skyways, just for giggles. I put a bright green dot on my building, the “US Bank Plaza”, formerly known as the “Pillsbury Building”. The express buses to my suburb, Richfield, run up and down 2nd Avenue, so I literally walk out the front the door of my building, walk across the street, and wait for a bus. It sure beats driving!
Mid-January – Grandma turned 97 on the 19th, so the whole family packed up and celebrated with her in Washington, DC. Coincidentally, Liz and I celebrated our 1st anniversary on the very same day.Late January – Discovered a company that has an office here in the Minneapolis skyways. They’re called “OMG INC.” OMG! Their office is right by my dentist, and I’d walked past there a few times before I had the nerve to duck my head in and ask what they do. They’re a marketing group and they’ve been around for over 20 years. Oh.
Mid-February – Saw “Michael Clayton”, then sneaked into “Sweeney Todd” afterwards. Our illegal cinematic streak continues! We thought “Michael Clayton” was excellent, but I didn’t care much for “Sweeney Todd”. I don’t think we can see any more movies without sneaking into other movies…February 25 – The last Krispy Kreme store in Minnesota closed, bringing an end to the era of ubiquitous Krispy Kreme donuts. They were EVERYWHERE, including gas stations, Target, and every fundraising function you can imagine. Liz really liked their Blueberry Cake donuts, but the rest of their lineup really didn’t thrill us all too much. And for whatever reason, be it corporate mismanagement, overcapacity, or just the novelty wearing off, the donut chain has come and gone in MN, leaving only indie donut shops, supermarkets and bakeries to fatten us up. (There really aren’t any Dunkin’ Donuts out here. I’m sure there’s a good reason, but that’s for another Big Life Update.)
R.I.P. Krispy Kreme in Minnesota: May 3, 2002 - February 25, 2008Early March – Visited Liz’s family up in Ada, MN. For fun, we went with Liz’s brother to the “North Dakota Winter Show” in Valley City, ND, about 60 miles west of Fargo. I, as you know, know nothing about farming, so I was enthralled with the huge equipment they had there. For the price of my house, I could buy a GIGANTIC tractor, with wheels that are taller than me! Tempting… maybe for my birthday…
Late March – I overheard Liz talking about her car. She said, “I haven’t opened the moon roof at all since a bird pooped on my head.”Late March – We had a boatload of work done on our house, and it finally wrapped up around the end of March. It started with a mold problem in the garage, which motivated me to hire a contractor to replace the old, leaky garage windows and rip out the insulation and drywall that was out there. (Detached garages shouldn’t have insulation and drywall at all; it violates new construction codes, as I understand it.) So I had the contractors paint the garage, and repair the soffits on the house.
Just so you know, the soffits are the wooden structure just beneath the roofline on the side of the house. We used to have gutters that were right next to the soffits. The problem we’d had is that there were squirrels that would run through the soffits and make a lot of noise. It got to be a real nuisance, since the soffits run the entire length of the house, right outside our bedroom windows. Many a time on a weekend morning, we tried to sleep in, but the squirrels woke us up. We vowed revenge…
The neighbors told me that the previous owners of the house had had the same squirrel problem (and that was over 11 years ago), where they chewed through a corner of the soffit and then stored food inside. Or whatever squirrels do.
So our contractor replaced the chewed-up wooden corner of the soffit. The very next morning, we heard an incredible amount of scratching outside our window. Apparently, the contractor had boarded up the squirrel inside the soffit, and, understandably, the squirrel freaked out and chewed his way out.
Later that week, the contractor came back and repeated the repairs. Only this time, the squirrel was locked out of the soffit, away from whatever he valued so much that was inside the soffit. This time, he chewed his way back INTO the soffit.
At this point, the contractor suggested that I call a particular pest control service. You know, to … ahem, control … a certain pest. Liz said that it was one particular squirrel, which was easy to identify because he didn’t look quite right. He had sort of a disheleved mohawk-like “haircut” on his squirrel head, and Liz said that his eyes looked crazy and didn’t point in the same direction. We referred to him as the deranged squirrel. And so we called The Guy to take out the deranged squirrel.The Guy came to the house and set up two traps on our roof near the chewed-up soffits. Four days and two squirrels later (the guys removed the squirrel corpses from the traps, but they were up there long enough to terrorize the neighborhood kids), the problem seemed to have cleared up. The contractor finished up the soffits, and we’ve been squirrel-free ever since.
If you have a squirrel problem, I can recommend a Guy.
We also had a bunch of interior rooms painted, scraped the horrible popcorn ceiling off the kitchen and upstairs hallway ceilings, got new blinds and curtains in all the downstairs rooms, got new storm doors, and got new light fixtures, but none of those involved killing off any wildlife.Early April – Liz took a short vacation to Seattle to visit her friend, Coral. Had a good time, too.
Mid-April – Liz did something strenuous. I can’t remember what it was, but afterwards I remember thinking it seemed like a silly thing to do. She was complaining that her back was sore, and I said something along the lines of “Well, of course you’re sore. Your back muscles are trying to get at your brain to strangle it!” Good husband, I am…
Mid-April – Liz took another short vacation, this time with her friend Melanie. They went to Key Largo, and did a whole lot of water stuff, like scuba diving and snorkeling. Liz bought a new camera with an underwater kit just for the occasion, and got some cool pictures.
Mid-April – I heard that New Kids On The Block were reuniting for the first time in 15 years. Believe it or not, I saw them many years ago as part of a Z-100 birthday bash-type party in New York. That would have been 1989 or 1990, and they shared the stage with acts like Stevie B, Cyndi Lauper, Paula Abdul, Debbie Gibson, Was (Not Was) and Hall & Oates. Truth be told, I don’t remember much about their performance except that it was loud – WAY louder than some of the other acts. I was not impressed.Over the years, I’d accumulated quite a bit of New Kids memorabilia. Not because I like the New Kids, because I don’t, but because people would give me their New Kids junk. Or I’d find something for a dime at a garage sale. And so on, to the point where I had three moving boxes worth of New Kids crap in the basement that had absolutely no sentimental value to me whatsoever.
KFAI’s pledge drive was in April, so I made my gigantic New Kids memorabilia collection a pledge drive premium. We did a lot of promotion for the giveaway, and Liz took photos of the collection so we’d have something to post on the web. The collection was so large that it took 14 pictures to fully document the whole thing – all 14 pictures are included below, for your snickering pleasure.
Donnie Action Figure, a Stage for Action Figure Concerts (with "moving disc for great dance moves") and three hats:
Five 500-piece Jigsaw Puzzles:
For the nighttime! A Pillow and Sleeping Bag:
A pink Lunchbox, a white Wristwatch (still shrink-wrapped with K-Mart price tag!) and four fun facts Paperback Books:
Three large framed pictures of the Kids (cute gray cat, Poohead, not included):
Really large (huge, actually) silk-screened picture of the Kids in wooden frame (no, still can't have Poohead):
Backstage Pass, plus an actual minted NKOTB Coin in fancy autographed sleeve:
One side of the coin in its fancy sleeve:
The other side of the coin in its fancy sleeve:
Sixteen NKOTB books and scrapbooks of various sizes and shapes:
Two NKOTB tourbooks and three Harvey Comics comic books:
A set of playing cards - The New Kids On The Block Card Game:
Dozens and dozens of NKOTB trading cards, all in a collector's book:
NKOTB Buttons - 11 little ones and one really big one:
Congratulations to my friends Matt & Janice, who won the whole thing and now have years and years of gag gifts at their disposal.
Mid-April – One of KFAI’s volunteers, Doug The Thug, has a natural gift for visuals, and took it upon himself to make posters for some of his favorite KFAI programs. I was one of the lucky programmers who got a poster, and “Crap From The Past” now has awesome posters. We’ll be giving these away for the Fall pledge drive at the station. I have one professionally framed on my office wall.April 19 – I saw the German synth band Kraftwerk. I know, Kraftwerk! Hard to believe! They played exactly four shows in the entire U.S. – some place in California, Denver, Milwaukee, and Maplewood, MN. Not even Minneapolis proper, but Maplewood – a fairly distant, woefully unhip suburb in the northwest metro, which is also home to 3M. They played a venue I’d never heard of, called “Myth”. “Myth” is a gigantic club that used to be a really huge shoe store (“Just For Feet”, as I understand it), and it was completely packed.
They had a monstrous video screen behind the band, which showed some mighty cool video clips to go along with their songs. I think at one point I described it as the coolest PowerPoint presentation, ever.I use the word “band” in a clean, minimalist, German way, rather than a sweaty, interactive, James Brown way. Each of the four guys in the band had his own little pedestal workstation, with a laptop and mouse. And they spent the entire concert doing stuff on their laptops – moving the mouse, clicking, occasionally typing something. They didn’t interact with the audience at all, and only barely interacted with each other with a word or two here and there. To me, it looked like they were in a coffee shop and we were watching them check their email and surf the web.
They did two encores. For one of them, all four guys were absent from the stage and were replaced by robots. That’s right, “We Are The Robots” indeed!That’s not to say that it wasn’t enjoyable. It was indeed – the sound system was amazing, the videos were mighty cool, and we were just awestruck that Kraftwerk – Kraftwerk! – would come to our little town!
May 13 – Was (Not Was) came to town. You best know them for “Walk The Dinosaur” a goofy funk hit from early 1989. They’ve been off the map for the last 17 years or so, but they put out a new album in April 2008! And this was the tour to promote it. I’d seen them as part of that Z-100 thing, but I really don’t remember them – that whole concert was just a blur.They played the Cabooze, a fairly small club here in town, which was a perfect way to see them. Liz and I were up front and way off to the right of the stage. We were so close that we could have shined Sir Harry Bowens’s shoes at any given point during the show. Don Was played bass about 6 feet right in front of us – the most laid-back, unpretentious, un-flashy bass player I’ve ever seen, but he can work a groove with the best of them. David Was was at the other end of the stage, with his flute and occasional vocals. And front and center was Sweet Pea Atkinson, a sharply-dressed soul singer to be reckoned with. They’re all from Detroit, and they show their soul/funk roots with pride.
They were tight. Probably as tight as any funk outfit I’ve seen, and I’ve seen the Average White Band and the whole Parliament/Funkadelic/George Clinton/19-people-on-stage show. Sweet Pea sounds as good as he ever did, and he’s been doing this for 30+ years. Afterwards, since it was such a small club, they stuck around for autographs and pictures and all that. I got autographs on some really obscure 12” singles from the early ‘80s. Truly a great show, and the album they’re promoting “Boo!” is just as good as “What Up Dog” from the ‘80s. Just plain awesome…
Mid-May – It turns out that April was a tough month for a few of my friends. Janice, Michael and Charles all lost parents in April, and our sympathies go out to all of them and their families. It was 10 years ago in April that I lost my stepfather, Phil. 10 years… where does the time go?
May was a considerably more upbeat month. My brother, Kenny, and my friend, Eric, both got engaged. To their respective girlfriends, not to each other. Congratulations all around! Liz and I are extra-thrilled to finally have Kenny’s girlfriend, Maria, as part of the family. She’s the greatest! Plus, her friends just love Liz, so it makes visiting family out east that much more fun.Early May – I knew that here in Richfield, one can get rid of nearly anything by putting it out by the curb, and once the weather got nice, I used the curb extensively. We got rid of a TV stand, an extremely heavy exercise bike, a few plastic crates, a metal rack that was in the garage, a wheelbarrow, a baseball bat, and lots of other junk that was cluttering up the house and garage. I still don't know who grabs the stuff, but it always disappears from our property. Which, of course, makes us very happy indeed.
Early May – Probably the biggest lifestyle change for Liz is that she started grad school in May. She’s getting her Masters in Nurse Anesthesia. When she finished in August 2010, she’ll be a Nurse Anesthetist. That’s a very good thing to be, because there’s a lot of demand for Nurse Anesthetists, and the demand is only supposed to increase in the next few years. She stopped working at the VA, and she’s now a full-time student.
She’s adjusting to doing classwork again. It’s quite a change going back to classwork after you’ve been working full-time for years, but she seems to be coping well. She’s been taking the express bus downtown with me, then taking a connecting bus to the school, which is a mile or two away from downtown. She says the work is hard, but it’s still 1000 times more enjoyable than working full time. So far, so good…
Late June – We have our annual group camping trip coming up later this month. This is the same trip where Liz and I met four years ago. Four years already – where does the time go indeed! Should be fun.
One last event from late June – Earlier in the week, I’d driven past a “Baker’s Square”, which is a pretty bad chain restaurant that has OK pie but lousy everything else. I thought I’d seen a sign in their window that read “All you can eat pie – $5.99 after 8pm”, but I wasn’t sure. I called to confirm, and it turned out to be true, and valid for every day of the week.
So on Saturday, I dragged Liz on a bike ride. Her parents had gotten us a bike rack for Christmas, and we tried it out. It worked nicely, and we were able to start our ride from Hopkins, a suburb west of downtown Minneapolis. We rode a really nice crushed limestone bike trail due westward, and since I just HAD to know where it ends, we rode it all the way to the end, past Excelsior, past Lake Minnetonka, all the way to Victoria, MN. There’s nothing in Victoria, so we recharged our proverbial batteries at a Holiday gas station in Victoria, downed some beverages and junk food, and rode back to Hopkins. Total mileage – 33 miles. Much farther than we’d ever gone before, and I wore Liz out.
But I wore Liz out deliberately, and worked off a bunch of calories in advance. And so on Saturday night, we went with our friends, Kris and Marie, to all-you-can-eat pie at Baker’s Square.
Turns out that they have rules for this sort of thing. One whole piece, and all the rest are half-pieces. No brownies, no ice cream, no carrot cake. Just pies. And, above all else, no sharing. OK then.
My plan of attack was to go for the fruit pies, and try to go through as many as they had. I didn’t quite get there, and it was probably because I categorized “banana cream” as a fruit pie. Mistake. Each of us went through 6 half-pieces of pie, plus they were nice enough to give us our full piece, let us take a bite and decide that we couldn’t finish, and let us take it home. Bleh. I etted too much pie.
Have a good summer! Stay cool and dry!
Ron & Liz Gerber
