Originally Posted by
jralbert
You see now, that seems obvious when I read it, but I'd never have thought of it on my own and would undoubtedly have ended up cleaning up a mess instead. Clearly you are from the old school of the mechanically inclined - my mechanically-brilliant father-in-law drops these kind of tidbits on me all the time. Is that just the voice of experience speaking, or is there some fantastic resource I can go read somewhere that will learn me up in these ways?
I came by this the old way, by stealing the idea. I used to play clarinet, and this is the basic design of a
clarinet cleaner. Then it was simply a matter of seeing that something I used in another application could be adapted to this one.
I believe that the key to creativity is being open and seeing potential or something you can use in things totally unrelated to the immediate problem.
I'm also old school, where we weren't spoon fed solutions, but trained to think on our own.