My oldest, Scott, was so excited to have found a female canary for only $25 dollars on-line the other day.
He had called the guy and arranged for me to stop by and buy the bird.
I thought I was all prepared by taking an older, cleaned out, cage with a big blanket to keep the bird calm during the drive. I drove with the cage in-mind as to not need to stop too urgently. It was a gorgeous day and so I rolled the front windows down, thinking the bird would still be safe under the blanket. I even thought the bird my enjoy some fresh air! However, my my attempts at ‘safe-driving’ were cut short by somebody who sought to take advantage of the space between me and the car in front.
As fate would deliver, the approaching traffic lights were turning red and I was required to step on the brakes at an alarming rate. In the juggle of gauging distances and anticipating the bird cage rolling and while trying to close the 2 front windows, the bird cage fell over and out sprang the bird!
I was surprised at how quickly it navigated the interior of my vehicle and before I knew it, it had flown right out of my window!
I tried spotting the bird to see which direction to maybe retrieve it, but the car behind me didn’t appreciate the delay.
I turned around and headed back to ‘the bird man’, only to dish out another $25 for a lesson well learned!
Poor little bird, I hope she’s ok, wherever she decided to rest.
I could recover from this little accident though, nobody had to know about it. But then I recall that I had called home and told them how beautiful it was and described it’s colour with precision. Bird #2 didn’t align with my previous statements! Gulp… I headed home and hoped for the best.
“It’s kind of orangey” was the first words uttered from Scott!
Doh – my cover was broken, but I remained calm and collected… “Yeah – kind of orangey yellow” was my reply, “it must be due to the lights”. That seemed to satisfy, but I think he knew that something wasn’t quite right.
Scott and my other kids still don’t know what happened on my trip home with bird #1, however it seems to have caused the giggles with Kristy whenever anything about bird #2 is mentioned.
Therefore I vote I should be banned from future pet delivery services!
Better leave some bird food out for Bird #1, it’ll help me sleep better anyway!

Well – that is my foot and Kristy’s mouth!

What a week of fun it’s been! Sunday night I landed on my ankle while navigating over a gymnastics mat in the basement! and Kristy had to have a fractured molar removed! At 7pm on Tuesday, all is calm… me elevating my leg (doing what men do well – relaxing), and Kristy keeping to her busy schedule of teaching gymnastics.

I have to say that Kristy is my hero. What an unbelievable woman she is. Her energy is just so amazing that I wonder how she pushes through.  She experienced toothache Sunday afternoon and finally succumbed to the pain Tuesday morning. A quick visit to Dr. Vogel soon took care of her pain problem though, but she presses on, determined not to have her day fuddled up. What an inspiration she is.

So you can imagine my delight when I located a copy of this book on eBay. I had been searching off and on for a few years, hoping to bring Chilly Billy to life in the minds of my own children. Scott, my oldest at 11, instantly wasn’t fooled by such fictional content, but my 3 others were. It was great to see their eyes sparkle with their own imaginative ideas of Chilly Billy. You can ask any of my daughters about Chilly Billy and they’ll have an answer for you. Whenever our new Fridge makes a sound – Chilly Billy! That little banging in the freezer section – Chilly Billy! Somebody has to keep the ice from sticking together right?

Well, sorry to say Chilly, but your days are numbered. Electrolux / Frigidaire have released plans of using Open Source software to provide a new tech approach to maintaining the insides of your fridge.

So yet again, my mind is thinking about possibilities of hacking this device to do other cool things. I think if the fridge knew what was inside it, and could extract an ingredients list and suggest recipes, that would be a pretty cool. Of course food items would need to have an rfid chip and you’d probably have to inform the fridge of how much was available, a few inconveniences, but I would love it. Audio / Video could be attached to recipes or how about your own personal chef to oversee your cooking… maybe a wi-fi camera looking over your shoulder as you prepare! You could bring the whole culinary experience to your own kitchen, with chefs available from all over the world, right at your fridge! Now that is exciting my imagination!

Can Chilly do that? I think not… but hey, somebody still needs to turn the fridge light off and on right? 

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.

Both Scott and Toby helped out in creating a visual and audible light detector.
We used:

• 8 Light Emitting Diodes
• 9 resistors
• 1 photo resistor
• 1 piezo speaker

here is what our Arduino experimental board looked like:

We ended up creating the following C file to upload to our Arduino board to test it out. We found that in total darkness, all the LED’s are lit and there is no tone emitted. Whereas walking outside turned all the LED’s off and the speaker output a high note.

All American Scott Travel Bug

Happy travels Travel Bug!

Take a look at what we came up with:

Ready to receive a building!

Have installed a Logitech USB QuickPro 9000 USB webcam onto a Fedora Core 11 box, running fswebcam (with the logitech libwebcam driver). It’s capturing a shot (1600×1200) every 8 seconds from 6am to 9pm. What I really like about this method is that fswebcam is setup to run in the background (daemon) and so I can simply instruct cron to start in the morning and stop at night. NICE! This is a much better solution than my initial setup. What blows me away is that this is is all from a cheap $99 logitech 2MB webcam! Sure – we have a perspective issue (since it’s such a small lens) and an issue with the depth of field, but not bad!

Looking forward to getting back from Denver and Florida with snapshots for me to put into a movie. See you in 2 weeks.