Caffeine Invention #1

I am greatly effected by the drug caffeine. If I have a lot of it--or even a little of it, if it's on an empty stomach--I get very noticeably high, and then an hour or two later undergo a very noticeable and crabby crash.

Anyway, during the high part, I tend to go into a sort of creative overdrive--coming up with new arguments, inventions, and business models, and also producing a surprising variety of impromptu insults and made-up showtunes. It's not as if the quality of any of these things are particularly good, but, still, they come out.

A caffeine invention I had today was something called "browser masks". What this would be is basically a browser plug-in that allowed you to draw basic shapes on a webpage so that you could cover up annoying ads. The browser would remember the positions of the masks so that they'd still be there if you ever returned to the page.

I'm not sure if this would be doable with current browser technology, but you could certainly accomplish it with AIR, Adobe's new runtime that, among other things, lets you manipulate HTML in any Flashy way that you want.

Of course, you could make whatever other superficial markings on a webpage--add comments, etc., and go ahead and take that in all sorts of interesting directions (esp. if you were to start tracking all this meta-info on a backend). But for now, I'd be happy with the simple, opaque masks.