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FINALLY!!!

After 3 days of hard work, the Cable Modem costume is complete. I wish I could say it went smooth, but if it did, this post would be timestamped about 2 hours earlier

After finishing assembling the back panel, I cut out the lights, only to realize that I cut em out with the damn thing upside down. I ran outside with an extra foam-board and sprayed it, praying it would be dry early enough for me to attach and cut it out. I then cut the bottom out (as a head-hole isn’t big enough for my feet!). The sucky part is the top is not as secured as the original top was. No wood supports or caulk this time.

Anyways, it came out great.

Note that I have attached the back panel to the costume and re-sprayed the parts that look faded.

Day 2 of the great costume build:

I finished assembling (for the most part) the modem box, and took the thing out to be sprayed! Despite my using the Garage as my paint room, the whole house stinks of Paint and Rubber Cement Funny thing is you don’t notice it until you go out and come back an hour later.

The thing you saw in yesterday’s picture is now black. I glued on the top panel and sprayed the whole thing. I picked up more paint and more foam board today bringing the project over budget. It started to win the Costume contest at work on Monday… Grand prize is $100. I don’t think I’ll even break even if I win, but it WAS fun to build and should be a good laugh on Monday.

Tomorrow, I’ll secure the top panel better, Caulk the entire innards of the thing. Glue the back together (It’s painted and complete, but just in sections now), Figure out what to do for a handle/shoulder straps, and cut out the lights and mount the actual lights (yes, this thing will have authentic working lights on the front of it!)

It looks awesome! I am excited. I need to get out more!

While on the subject of my creativity, I started my next Haloween costume…

As some of you know, I work for a company that provides Internet service via cable modem. (Yes, It rhymes with circumcision!). I decided to create a new costume from scratch this year. I decided to be a “Motorolla Cable Modem” ….

Using tons of Foam Board, Masking Tape, and Rubber Cement, I managed to put together the bulk of the unit. I only have a few days as there’s a costume contest on Monday. First prize is a $100 Gift Card (No, I don’t know where to). I even made a Coaxial connector for the back. Tomorrow I have to pick up more foam board, some paint (I’m paranoid I may run out) and finish assembling it.

Note that I have not attached the top or back yet, cut the holes for the lights (yes, they will be working just like on a real cable modem), nor painted it. Lots to do tomorrow.

At work today, I arrived at the location for our event early so I decided to take a few random shots by the Nautical Mile in Freeport. I got this great shot of the American Flag and with a bit of tweaking in Photoshop, I was able to come up with what I think is a pretty stunning shot of the american flag. Now, keep in mind the ONLY modifications I made were to adjust the coloring a bit and increase the sharpening quite a bit. I didn’t even need to crop the image. It came out just right (I just cropped the edges so it would fit in 640×480)

Picture behind cut…

This sucks!

I sneezed, and immediately felt a sharp pain behind my bottom left rib. I think I pulled a muscle….Grrr

My heart just stopped… for a good 30 minutes!

I take pictures for work (KJOY-FM) using my own camera and submit the pictures to the webmaster via email. I lost my Memory Card Reader so I tried to hook my camera direct to my computer. It worked for a bit then timed out after copying only about 5 pictures. I tried using my DELL Axim to move the pictures over and thats where it began.

I “Moved” the picture directory from the PDA to the harddrive. When it said a folder by the same name already existed, I canceled the operation. The PDA instantly erased the entire CF Card.. All the pictures from 3 events, GONE! Do I blame DELL for the hardware, or microsoft since I was using Active-Sync?

Thank god I’m a geek! I just happened to have file recovery software on my laptop, so after a half hour of franticly looking for my card reader, I finally found it and was able to recover most, if not all of the pictures. Whew!

Those of you know know Haze may or may not know by now that we had to get rid of him. He was originally my brother’s dog, Brought home somewhat as a joke (Surprise mom, we have a dog) but has really become a part of the family. We had to get rid of him because he was getting to be very dangerous. If he didn’t already absolutely love you, you couldn’t enter our house without him growling, or barking. He really was a smart dog, though stubborn and way-too overprotective over my brother mostly, but also me and my parents. As I said. Way-too overprotective, to the point we had to bring him to a shelter because of his attitude. By this time, he has been put to rest and only tonight when my brother sent me a video clip of haze doing some tricks that we both taught him, did I realize just how much I miss him.

This has been a long weekend. But a good one.. I got to check out DigitalLife at the Javits center in New York. For those of you who don’t know, DigitalLife is “The ultimate consumer technology & entertainment event”. The event was pretty cool. I got to check out a lot of cool new products, some (most) out now, others coming soon. The most interesting being a new web cam from Creative Labs (Which I should have bought at the show, but do I really need it? Probably not, but if I do I at least know that it has the quality and capabilities I want).

I got to go as a VIP which entitled me to free admission, as well as free admission for 5 others. Unfortunately we all *bought* discount tickets a few days before I got my confirmation. I got to check out the opening keynotes. Though it was mostly a commercial for Intel, there is some cool stuff coming out. PC systems with more processing power and multi-tasking capabilities are just on the horizon, though much of the new equipment is available now or will be very soon.

The unfortunate part is the lack of next-gen PC systems and absolutely no mention of Windows Vista. That and most of the vendors there were not that well versed in the products they were displaying. Zyxel, for example did not know the specs on one of the products that they had on display and one of my associates was informed of this hot new technology called Serial ATA (SATA), which I installed in my brother’s computer last year… So new!

What’s more exciting then new technology, is lots of great swag!