The day after Christmas is called Boxing Day in England and Canada. (and probably other places with good tea and interesting accents). All the we lived in England I asked folks what ‘Boxing Day” meant.. and never got a satisfactory answer.. Some folks thought it had to do with the boxes presents came in.. .. Wikipedia tells me that that’s not far off the mark.. it’s traditionally a time when folks gave presents to the needy in the community. A nice tradition.. and maybe one that is coming back in some form. I’ve heard of so many folks toning down or forgoing gift giving all together this year due to the economy.. I’ve also heard many folks taking some of the money that they would have otherwise put towards gifts to charitable causes.. I think that’s a great new tradition to build !

Today was another quiet and sleepy day.. our big foray outside of the nest was to go and decorate a tree in the forest for the animals This year we chose a clump of small pines off the Rivershore trail where we run and walk the dogs. Last night we spent an hour or so stringing old bagels and donoughts on strings.. today, diane spread them with peanut butter and birdseed.. We pied them all in a  box then headed off to the trail  It was the four of us. Gabes friend Kristen and all three dogs.
The tree we always had decorated in the past was way to tall now for us to reach the higher branches. These were nice tress.. we could reach the tops of them all.

We each grabbed a handfull and started hanging our edible ornaments…

We also placed a SamStone in the tree in honor of Sam.. This was always one of the things we did together neassr christmas/solstice.. and he was much on our minds as we did it today

Kristen managed to catch us all smiling.. even the dogs !

The rest of the day was pretty low key.. we had a bunch of visitors dropping by.. One nice suprise was a Skype call from hannah and Matt from Peru… (they’ve posted some great pictures on their  blog recently)
They’re doing well down there. They’re workign in an orphanage filled with street kids. We’re goign to be dooign a clothign drive for them in the next week or so, so please beging collecting any kids clothes that oyu can spare…

One fun thing we did during the call wasto let the guys in Peru drive the very cool Rovio robotic camera that Billy and Shaun got us for Xmas.. It’s a camera and mike that you can steer over the web !..Here’s a picture of  Hannah driving it around the room looking at our dogs and the christmas tree.. it was cool and surreal ! 

Around 7 Avery came by to say hi with her bright and shiney new driver’s license. It’s so cool to see these kids get their wings.. !  It’s hard for me to beleive .. or think about.. the fact that Sam would be driving now…

It was great hanging out with Avery.. She’s so funny and cool…

The last couple of hours I’ve been ‘geekign out’ building soemthing.. which is what I’ve done wiht much of my time off. I can’t really explain it.. but it’s so satisfying to design and build things  these days.   Tonights project was pretty wierd.. I created a pretty complicated system that spins a small fan every time soemone reads this blog.. Why’d I do it ? dunno… guess because I could.. !… Though it keeps scaring me every time it spins…

It was fun to do simply because it wasn’t straightforward…Here’s how I had to do it..  (Warning .. geek speak approaching)..   

1. First, I needed to create a simple ‘hit counter’ that I could embed in and query from myspace.. Nomrally that would be a piece of cake in PHP.. but myspace blocks PHP .. and javascript.. and everything else marginally useful due to seccurity concerns.. I found a loophole though.. because they do allow you to call Flash (I guess to allow Youtube videos)..
2. So .. I wrote the counter in Flash..
3. Inside the flash it callls a PHP file which updates a file with a hit count that resides outside of Myspace (on the Samstones website, actually)..
4. I then embeded the SWF from the flash code in the header for my blog (You can now see the total hits counter under the scolling pictures at the top of my blog) . Every time soemone reads the blog , it updates the count in the file on Samstones.org.
5. Then…. I wrote soem code in Python that runs constantly on my PC that every so often (every 10 secs or so) goes out and queires that hit counter file on SamStoens.org..
6. If it’s been updated, it calculates the number of new reads since it’s last visit and sends them to the USB port.
7. At the other end of the USB port is an Arduino microcontroller board. It’s runnign a short AVR C++ program that poles the USB port looking for input.
8. When it sees a new hit counter come in it raises one of it’s control lines which drives a simple one transitor amp that drives the fan motor..
   
9. et voila !

Now that’s done.. I can finally go to sleep !.. Happy boxing day folks..
Gnite Sam
-me