Monthly Archives: January 2010

OK, so I take on too many projects at a time, but it’s fun that way.

I’m currently working on my bike headlight and alternator. That’s been my primary focus for the last year or so. I’m also getting a regular dose of toying around with my Arduino, doing various things like tuning the fade patterns of a mood light and testing out new sensors and stuff.  Still lingering in my garage is my Rolling Ball Sculpture, which is mechanically complete and I need to put the electronics together and make the controls and displays look nice.  And of course, I just finished updating ChesterFamily.org.

Now I’m also building another temperature-to-speed controlled fan.  It’s similar to the desk fan project, but this will exhaust heat from a cabinet with network gear in it for a friend of mine.  The feature list is about the same as my desk fan, but this one will be almost completely digital and have an LCD display to show the temperature, fan speed and set-points.   It’s an Arduino project!

Wow! You can’t imagine the scope of the impact when something as popular as American Idol affects you sort of directly.

This week on American Idol, Avril Lavigne was a guest judge and wore some of her Abbey Dawn clothing line – in particular, she wore one of her hoodies with the little horns on the hood. It’s very cute.

As it happens, Kelly had a big batch of these hoodies in her eBay store. Well as soon as the East Coast saw Avril wearing that hoodie on Americal Idol, it seems the entire population over there was on line ordering one for themselves! That started a wave of purchasing which persisted through the West Coast airing schedule and on into the next morning.

At first, we were baffled.  A few had sold since they were listed – but all of a sudden 15 had sold in about a half hour.  Then it clicked: Alexis noticed last week in the preview for this week’s episode that Avril was wearing the hoodie.  She exclaimed “Hey! She’s wearing my jacket!”  After putting it together, we knew that was it.

Over 30 of them sold in under 24 hours.  And some of Kelly’s eBay friends had the same experience.

It was so much easier than how I was doing it before!  But I have completed the migration from the old site to the new.  And I updated some small details as well.

Take note of the little image to the right.  That’s a new feature I kinda like since it gives you a little exposure to what can be seen in the photo gallery.  I’ve also filled in the projects section a little nicer, especially the Digital Picture Frame project.

Now, on to some new ideas!