Sure, what the hell.

I had a lot of fun with the RRoD pumpkin, but as I said in that post I really wanted to make the middle green like it was supposed to be. Some empty Sprite bottles, a plastic cup, and some tape later… problem solved:

There’s some video of it blinking here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rd8pvUZAfg.

Also, I wanted something vaguely scary/Halloween related, so I made one with a Gears of War logo. GoW2 next week!

I said I had big plans for another Halloween pumpkin, and those weren’t it. I now present the Rick-ro-lantern. Hm, I may need to work on that name.

Video was shot with my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX37.

I initially wanted to have the whole thing self-contained, but didn’t come up with the idea in time to do that by Halloween. Instead, I decided to put it in front of the window, with a speaker and webcam inside. I used Motion to detect movement with the camera, and then start the song playing. The camera didn’t see anything at all at night (even with the outdoor light on), so I went with the light you can see at the beginning of the video. It’s the only thing the camera can see, so when someone walks between it and the camera, the software sees it as movement.

My carving skills are fairly lacking, but it came out well enough, I guess. Need practice.

Here’s some more pictures of the process and setup:

You can see all the pictures, with a little bit of explanation on some of them, in the flickr set: http://flickr.com/photos/penner42/sets/72157608232548269/.

It’s almost election day. Most people in this country tend to vote for their wallets. Personally, I think there are more important things to base the decision on, but I’m pretty sure I’m in the minority there. Regardless, a lot of people who are going to vote for McCain are going to do it because “OMG Obama will tax me more!” That’s very likely not true, unless you’re in the top 2% of the country in income, or so. And if you are, shut the fuck up, no one wants to hear you complain. Check out http://www.electiontaxes.com to see an estimate of what your taxes will actually be like under their proposed plans. Note: It’s likely neither candidate will implement these plans exactly as President, but there’s only so much you can do to try to figure it out.

I took one economics class in college, and don’t remember most of it. I’m clearly not qualified to figure out which tax plan, or what method in general, would be appropriate for a strong economy. You know who just might be, though? Economists. From the Wikipedia link:

A study in the Southern Economic Journal found that “71 percent of American economists believe the distribution of income in the US should be more equal, and 81 percent feel that the redistribution of income is a legitimate role for government.” In terms of political orientation 63% identified as progressive and less than 20% as conservative/libertarian. with registered Democrats outnumbering registered Republicans 2.5:1.

Now, I know many Republicans want to elect “regular folk” who are “just like they are” (note: John McCain owns 7 or 8 houses, Sarah Palin just spent $150k on clothes and makeup [funded by your campaign donations, and then being given to charity... spread the wealth!]), but I personally prefer to look to people who are smarter and more qualified than I am to make these sorts of decisions. And if 63% of economists support a progressive tax policy, who am I to argue?

Limited to 250,000!

Because I was bored.

April was here on vacation this week, and (inspired by bloodyp), we decided to carve some pumpkins. I’ve never really done it before, but the hardest part ended up being deciding what to do. We ended up going with these:

The Red Ring of Death pumpkin has been getting a lot of attention. It was linked on DVICE, and then picked up by Gizmodo. It’s got a blinking red light inside. I want to fix it to make the middle part of it green, like it’s supposed to be, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it. I think the funniest part of this whole thing is that a few people on Giz think they’re not real, that they’re photoshopped images. The others are an emoticon (“Bob!”), the Obama logo, and yes, the Ubuntu logo.

I also got an email from a reporter at a news service who wanted to write an article about them. I wonder if anything will ever happen with that.

I don’t think they’ll last quite until Halloween. I will have to make more. I have big plans in store for that, but I’m not sure I can pull it off. Stay tuned…*

*this is not a guarantee that I will ever write any more about this