Christmas Fun
1. The Incredible Hulk. The Big Green Guy will definitely be back ... although his twin brother may only be part of the halloween decorations.
2. More webcams. There was one webcam in 2005 and three for 2006 & 2007 - debating setting up another one for christmas 2008, but I don't have a "good" fourth spot.
3. More Christmas Lights. I always hit the stores after the holidays for the 50-75% off sales ... and while I already have wayyyyy too much Christmas stuff, I picked up a few new things for christmas 2008.
4. Possible new bells & whistles with Webcam and Webcontrol. The Webcam and WebControl (which allowed folks to not only view the lights in real-time, but also turn them ON and OFF) is a big hit, so I'm always curious to see what technologies come my way this year to see how they can be used.
5. Alternative home automation technology. X10 isn't bad, but it would be way cool if some sort of cheap, easy-to-use, home automation technology could be deployed in 2008 that had milli-second latencies, two way communication, and 99.99% reliability - hey, I'm not asking for much! ;-)
6. Streaming video on webcam. Related to point #2 above, I'd love to do streaming video rather than refreshed JPEG's. Streaming video didn't make it for christmas 2007 - maybe in 2008?!? ;-)
7. Misc. code fixing/polishing. As you can imagine, there is some fairly sophisticated hardware and code to run all this. Buzzword-Bingo includes Linux, Apache, Perl, Ajax, HTML, CSS, etc. While often not apparent to end-users, there are always a few bugs (usually behind the scenes) that have to be squashed.
8. More fund-raising. It was not only fun raising money for celiac disease but it made me feel "good" ... so I'll be doing that again - total at the beginning of 2008 was over $25,000 and consider donating now to the University of Maryland - every little bit helps.
9. Christmas 2009. Yep, I'm already thinking about that! ;-)
Be sure to check back here around Thanksgiving 2008 for the christmas decorations that you can view and control via the christmas webcam - christmas 2008 should be even better!