Halloween Hulks!!!
Halloween comes to the Front Yard
The Halloween Haunted Office - YIKES!
Grim Reaper - new for Halloween 2008!
1. Big Green Guys. The The Incredible Hulk Brothers will definitely be back.
2. More webcams. There was one webcam in 2005 and three for 2006 & 2007 - debating setting up another one for Halloween 2008, but I don't have a "good" fourth spot.
3. More Halloween Decorations. I always hit the stores after the holidays for the 50-75% off sales ... and picked up some ghoulish items for 2008 - most notably the giant inflatable Grim Reaper on a motorcycle seen below!
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. In 2005, a meta-refresh was used which caused a "blink" in the image. In 2006, Javascript was used to make for smoother updates. Streaming video didn't make it for halloween 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. Halloween 2009. Yep, I'm already thinking about that! ;-)
I'll be putting up my halloween decorations in late September/2008, so check back then to where you can view and control 'em via the halloween webcam - halloween 2008 will be even better!