DAN’S BLOG

Halloween was a total success! I had a great time. It was all worth the effort. Everybody else had a great time too. Lots of people were on the webcams watching the action, including UK Dave, Sue, Garb, bob, Jesse’s dad, and bubba (names from Shoutbox). We had 361 trick or treaters come to the window. Yes we counted. We captured many great shots with the snapshot camera and Hagitha. We had a very positive response to the preview headstone monitors. More people seem to notice them now than before and I think the increased response time to display the images helped a great deal.
It was a great evening. Children screamed with terror at Shaun of the Dead. Some kids actually began crying at the sight of Hagitha, others cried after being sprayed with Hag’s nose spray. LOL. Some kids were a little combative towards her, but she can dish it back. LOL.
Some kids were so afraid of all this stuff, they totally avoided our house. They even went around my car on the street to avoid Shaun of the Dead. LOL. However, some kids that were on the other side of the street decided to skip the other houses and b-lined straight to our house to have their picture taken with hagitha. Towards the end, a few cars came down the street stopped at our house only. That’s saying something when they drive down our street only to visit us!
I’ve had recomendations to add another snapshot camera to Shaun of the Dead so he takes pictures whe he pops up. This could be doable. Maybe next year.
This year the setup consisted of:
3 computers
1 camera for snapshot cam
5 webcams
160 Watts of blacklights
1 Strobe
some regular lights
Shaun of the Dead - IR beam trips Shaun to pop up quickly while screaming.
Hagitha - Animatronics witch with compress air/water nose spray
An ass load of wires and cables
Stereo for ambient music
25lbs of dry ice
2 17″ CRT monitors with headstone fronts for snapshot previews
1 air compressor for all the pneumatics
7 of my friends

I’d like to thank all my friends who came and helped out. We all had a good time and it went rather smooth I thought.
See you all next year. Pictures below.

I have created an updated halloween Cam page. It is now online and ready to go for Halloween, Monday evening. To view it, just go to Tiger CAM and you will be redirected.
Be sure to check out all the fun on halloween!

I rebuilt the mounting base for my SpeedDome Ultra V dome camera. The old one was too dificult to move around and clamp to things. The new one allows for easy connection and disconnection of cables. The camera can be clamped to just about anything.

Yesterday UPS delivered my other router. This was also purchased on ebay for only $200. That’s damn good for a router that still retails today for $1500 to $2000. plus mine came with the extra ISDN BRI and Dual Async/Sync Serial WIC cards.
I stayed up late messing with the routers. I had a network setup and the routers were exchanging routing information using RIP routing protocol. I copied files from my file server through both routers to my test computer. I wanted to be sure the serial interfaces worked.

Because mark posted that manly / girly survey. I thought a nerd survey would be more appropreate.

I called Prax Air about getting some dry ice for Halloween. They sell it at 85 cents per pound! The place we used to get it from charged $1 a pound but they are gone now. The only thing is Prax Air sells it in nugget form, not block form. So we’ll see how it works out. It’s probably a lot safer than chipping away at a 10Lb block of dry ice with tongs.

I took this long exposure of the rack just now in near total darkness and I thought it looked neat. You know, with a few decorations it would look like a Christmas tree. And when I google it twinkles too!

Photoshop contest: decorate the rack tree and mail it to me. LOL

Good golly mis molly; Mark blogged after a LONG 2 Month and 11 day dry spell! Lets hope it keeps on coming.
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