Q: What do you get from a retailer who makes tens of millions of dollars each year in unredeemed gift cards?
A: Some really cool gift cards!

Ames saw a Fatwallet thread yesterday titled “Moving LED message banner on Gift Card = FREE from BB”. At the very minimum, this sounded like a good gift idea, so we decided to go to Best Buy last night and check them out. Sure enough, they had a BUNCH of them on the gift card display at the front of the store. We grabbed 5. One for each of us to keep and three to give out as gifts. When we got to the cashier I asked what the minimum amount was that I could put on each gift card. The answer: One Penny. He rung up all 5 gift cards, Ames dug a quarter out of her purse, and he gave us 20 cents back. SWEET!

Each Roboshop gift card can store up to 6 different messages. The first one can be a whopping 512 characters and the others can each be up to 256 characters. The back of the card has 3 buttons to operate and program messages for the display. You can adjust the speed and luminosity of each message to a value from 1-9. All the instructions you need to program the gift card are written on the back of the packaging. You can read more about the technical circuitry/LED/battery details from the über nerds in the Fatwallet thread, but for a penny each, I could think of hundreds of cool uses for these little scrolling LED message banners.

1. Cover the top and bottom of the gift card with duct tape and wear it as a scrolling LED Belt Buckle (That doesn’t cost $13.99).
2. Save “Occupied”, “Empty”, and “Do NOT go in there!” as three of your messages and use it outside the bathroom as a status message.
3. Program the same message into several LED units laid end to end and try to turn them on sequentially so that the message appears to scroll seamlessly across all of them.
4. Dissasemble (Johnny 5) and try to find a way to input messages into it through a computer.
5. Set up a scavenger hunt, hiding several units around a city and save the clue for the next stage of the hunt as a message on the LED.

I could go on for a while, but I’m curious - what would you do with a super-cheap scrolling LED display unit?

PS: I feel no remorse about paying a penny for these things as it’s Best Buy’s own policy and because they make millions each year from unredeemed gift cards. I do not however, advocate buying a bunch of these things for a penny each. The fun wouldn’t last very long if very few people horded all of them. Have fun!

A while ago, I wrote a post considering the idea of switching to VoIP phone service. At the time I wasn’t too keen on Vonage since they were one of the more expensive options, but when my wife and I moved and decision time arrived, we went with them. We got the equipment for free, they had some of the best features, and had better ratings and reviews than most of the other providers. That was over 6 months ago and I have to say I’m very happy with their service.

Anyway, enough background info…I have Vonage and I came across this forum thread titled: fun things to do with your Vonage line. The first post is pretty fun. Apparently there are a couple of easter egg numbers in the Vonage system. You can dial:

• 867-5309 - To listen to a clip from the Jenny song.
• 555-2368 - To listen to the theme from Ghostbusters.

There’s also the Dashboard Dialer widget for OSX users. The idea is simple. You type in and submit a phone number, your Vonage line rings, and when you pick up, it automatically dials the number for you.

Looking into the source of this handy widget, I discovered that it simply passes a few variables over a query string to: https://secure.click2callu.com/. That url is actually a Vonage-sponsored beta test of web-initiated calls, and the best part is that all the instructions for interacting with it are right there on the homepage with code examples in html, php, and java. SWEET!

Reading down to the bottom of the page, they even have development ideas and examples of how it has been used. One particular idea caught my attention:

Business web page where customers can enter their phone number to initiate a call from your customer service department to them.

When I thought about this a little more I realized that by giving the customer a way to initiate a call with you online, you are giving them a toll free method of talking to you. That’s pretty big! Rather than offering an 800 number for customers to dial, you could simply put a form on your website where they submit their phone number, which causes you to call THEM. As a Vonage customer with unlimited long distance, the call is free for you, and since this interface causes you to call them, it’s free for them too.

I took the php code they had posted at click2callu and made an example:
Call Me Toll Free

I disabled the actual dialing on that example, so you can’t really call me with it, but you can download the working sourcefile here if you want to play with it:
vonagedialer.zip (4kb)

Use this example at your own risk! The php code actually limits the input to 10 digits, and checks for a few of the typical area codes that you wouldn’t want people to make you call (900, 976, 809…), but it obviously wouldn’t prevent somebody from trying to make you call a number in the bahamas at ten cents a minute, or an impotency clinic, or The White House, or…well you get the picture.

On Saturday, my brother Jered got married to his longtime sweetheart Aimee Gouge. …and I didn’t take a single picture. Being the digital-picture-holic that I am, this was pretty difficult. Why didn’t I take any pictures on the wedding day? Because I ran over my camera at the bachelor party. That’s right, I ran it over.

The Last Picture:

For the bachelor party, we went out for a couple “house” size pizzas at Bizzaro and then on to Andretti Thrill Park for some Go Kart racing. I probably should have heeded the “keep both hands on the wheel” rule and kept my camera in my pocket, but I decided to take some pictures. At some point during the run, my camera fell down under my seat and I felt a bump as my rear tire ran it over.

The Damage:

It’s actually surprisingly intact having been run over, but the LCD is shattered, the camera body is scratched up, and it won’t stay on. Sometimes the status light just blinks red when you try to turn it on, and every once in a while I can get it to turn green and the LCD tries to light up, but it dies after a few seconds. I managed to keep it on long enough to get my pictures off the SD card, but now I think it’s time to say farewell.

The Bright Side:

It’s about time for a new camera anyway. If I hadn’t totally destroyed this one I might have hoped to make due with it for at least another year or so. It seems there are a lot more options on the market since I last looked seriously at digital cameras though, so I’m open to suggestions. Amy and I talked about it a little on the way home and here’s what we’re thinking so far: 1c57de86099a1c5ac7ce9324bf724154

That’s about all we need. I would say that’s all I want, but Ames knows how much of a tech-head I can be so I think this is a good list of requirements. After talking to my boss about his latest camera purchase, I was leaning toward the Canon Powershot, but after looking at the Ultracompact reviews over at dpreview.com I saw that the Casio Exilim series is pretty highly rated as well. I remembered that Mike Davidson had posted a while back about his latest camera purchase, and sure enough, he too is raving about an Exilim, the Casio EX-Z750. I guess we just need to take a stroll through Best Buy and try a few out.

I’m using VNC to remote into the PC from the iMac so I can Remote Desktop into a server to change some css in a .Net project. I then have to email a copy of the css file to the project owner so he can check it into his source control repository from which he publishes the project…to the server.

OK Ryan, here’s your flowchart:

As you can see, things get a little hairy once we get past the windows server. I’m a little confused myself. Would anyone care to explain this to me?

When Ames and I got married we had two of a lot of things you should really only have one of. Two beds, two can-openers, two toothbrush holders…you get the idea. Within the first 6 months of marriage we had eliminated a lot of that extra clutter, but even after 2 years we still had our two old deskjet printers from our undergrad days. We always had (at least) two computers around, so having two printers was no big deal, except when they ran out of ink. Fortunately, we never had to buy both new ink cartridges for both printers at the same time. For the last few months, one has been low on color, and one has been low on black ink, but now they’re both low on everything. Actually, I take that back. One printer still has some magenta, and the other still has some cyan. Still, that doesn’t work when Ames needs to print out homework; and if we have to print out a Google Map, magenta roads are hard on the eyes.

We were all prepared to go to Sams Club and plop down a whole lot of money for new ink when I got the idea that I could probably buy a shiny new printer with ink for what I was going to pay for 4 cartridges. After talking to Amy about it, we began our search. We scoured the Internet and the Sunday advertisements to find the best bang for our buck and we discovered that we could do a lot better than just a network printer. We decided on the Brother MFC-5440CN from Staples.

For $99 after rebate, it’s obviously not the top of the line model, but it is a huge upgrade from our previous printing, scanning, and faxing solutions. Rather than having to get a USB hub, it connects directly to the router, which means if I set up some port forwarding, I could even print things from outside the home network. It would be amazing to me if Amy could print something out at home from her iBook at school. On the iMac, I followed some advice I read online and didn’t use the CD at all since there have been some changes since Tiger came out. I just downloaded the drivers directly from Brother which allow the iMac to communicate with the unit via Bonjour. They even have a handy dashboard widget that displays the ink levels. On the PC, I’m having some trouble communicating with scanner. Everything else is working great though, and I just got a fax this morning from the eye doctor with Amy’s contact prescription…so I know that works too.

Little did we know when we decided not to buy ink cartridges that we would be getting rid of such a huge pile of electronics. It all works…but it’s all old. The scanner takes up a lot of desk space and doesn’t play well with Windows XP, the fax machine works great, but was kicked out of it’s perch by the all-in-one, and the printers of course are out of ink. I was initially going to sell it all on ebay, but a friend suggested that I donate it to the Salvation Army, which I think is a great idea.

I forgot to mention that I bought a new desk toy while I was at Staples. I tried pressing it a couple times yesterday while I was working on some complicated database code, but nothing happened. Oh well…at least my printer works again.

Right now, Ames and I are living in an apartment where basic BellSouth phone service is included in the rent. In June though, I’ll be starting a remote job, which is sure to include quite a bit of long distance calling. Then, at the end of July, Ames and I will be packing up and moving to South Carolina. I could take all incoming calls on our landline and place all long-distance from my cell phone, but I don’t have enough minutes in my cell plan for that. As a result, I’m thinking it might be a good time to jump on the broadband phone bandwagon. This would allow me to go ahead and get my Carolina phone number now to give out to friends before the move. It would also allow me to have phone service as soon as the internet is hooked up at the new place…which we all know is priority number one for moving.

I know a couple people who have switched over to IP phone service, one uses Vonage, and the other has BroadVoice. Both are happy with their service, but the problem is that there are a whole lot more reputable IP telephony companies out there. They all seem to be around the same price, include a boatload of features, and promise the moon. Here are the biggest contenders:

• BroadVoice - $19.95 and my friend gives them a thumbs up for value and for being a “neat little company”.
• Vonage - $24.99 makes them a pricey option…and to me, they seem like the AOL of VoIP right now. That just doesn’t appeal to me so much.
• AT&T CallVantage - $29.99!?! OK, now that I’m over the price, I’ve seen a lot of positive comments about their customer service and QOS.
• Packet8 - $19.95 sounds about right, and although they seem to have mixed reviews, I’ve read a lot of positive news about them.
• SunRocket - $199…yea, right. Like I’m going to prepay for a year of VoIP service? That’s only about $17/mo, and in my book, they stack up to the $19.95 companies, but I don’t think I’ll pay them by the month at $24.95.
• Lingo - $19.95, but check out the negative reviews. I think that a lot of the content at voipreview.org is grassroots marketing (AKA - mostly BS), but it seems that most of the Lingo reviews are authentic. I’ve seen good reviews elsewhere though, so they stay on the list - perhaps because I like repeating their name: Lingo, leeengo, Lin Gho!

Ok, I think it’s time for bed, but if you have any experience with these or other residential VoIP providers, please let me know:

1. How long you’ve been with them?
2. How long have you been doing the VoIP thing overall?
3. What is the best and worst thing about the companies service?
4. If regular phone service ranks 98% for clarity and cellphone service ranks 72%, How clear is your VoIP serivce?
5. Are you strangely delighted by saying the word “Lingo”?

Inspired yet again by Russ’s ingenuity, I have a contest for you all to participate in. The winner gets bragging rights. I’d offer a gmail account, but I heard they’ve gone public, so who cares. The other day, I posted about the possibility that Russ could have actually created an app to convert an mp3 file to a viewable image which could in turn be converted back into an mp3. Well, he’s already on version 2 of that app and has added the ability to use a jpeg to “hide the file in” when converting to a bmp. Confused? So was Amy when I tried to explain it to her this morning when we woke up. I’ll try to break it down:

• You have a secret digital file (movie, audio, etc.) you want to send someone, but are worried about that file getting intercepted.
• You want to convert that file into a bitmap image to confuse anyone who might intercept your file.
• You choose a jpeg or gif that you would like to make the file look like.
• You use the conversion utility to turn your secret file into a bitmap, using your jpeg or gif image so that the image doesn’t just look like static.
• You transfer your secret file to your friend.
• Your friend (who has the conversion utility) can then “unhide” your file from the bitmap image.

Now for the contest. Click the image above to download a zip file called mysterysong.zip. Inside that zip file will be two files: mysterysong.bmp and bmp.exe. Your goal is to get an mp3 file from the bitmap and tell me what song it is. You will have to run bmp.exe from within a command window followed by a question mark to get the help text. Then you will want to convert file.mp3 using the “unhidefrom” command. Using the “mysterysong.bmp to file.mp3” command will create an mp3 file of the right size, but it will not play - so be sure to use the “unhidefrom” command. The jpeg above is what the bmp in your zip file should look like. Acceleration programmers are prohibited from giving away the answer. :) Good Luck!

I feel like I'm much to old to be raving about a random toy I received for Christmas, but I'm really excited about the Blade Runner remote control helicopter that my parents got me. I remember last year around Christmas time, we got a lot of spam here at work advertising The Sky Pioneer RC helicopter, but I believe my mom bought this one at QVC.

My brother got the green 49 MHz model, and mine was the blue 27 MHz one. I say was because I cut the blue and white plastic body off of it this morning exposing the circuitry, battery, gears and motors. This also served to lighten it up a bit and make it more maneuverable. It's so much fun to fly it around the office. Sadly, my helicopter is temporarily grounded as I just broke one of it's rotors on a bad landing. I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to fix it with a little scotch tape. If not...it seems that someone on ebay is already offering Replacement Rotors for a better "buy it now" price than the manufacturer's. Although I haven't posted to it yet, I can see myself getting involved with the Bladerunner RCGroups Discussion Forum on the little gadgets. It seems there are some decent modification ideas for the rear rotor to improve the forward-reverse motion. This is definitely a toy for me.

It's been a while since I've mentioned anything about my little media server so I guess I should start by explaining that "The Box" is a puny 400MHz machine with a humongous hard drive. It is hooked into our home entertainment system, and although it isn't very fast, it's great for playing music, movies, and of course, Nintendo games.

Since this picture was taken, it has been spray painted black, but it's still the same die-hard trooper on the inside. The Nintendo looking panel on the front actually has the controller ports and buttons from an actual NES mounted on it. The buttons don't really do anything yet, but the controller ports are wired to power and a parallel port so that my old Nintendo pads can be used as joysticks for NES emulator games. It's just like having the old Nintendo working again, without blowing on cartridges and having the picture quality randomly go all pixelated.

The only wires connected to "The Box" are power, network, sound, and SVideo. I don't have a monitor, keyboard, or a mouse hooked up to it, so the only display is the TV, and the only way to control it is remotely. I have the storage drive (aka The Monster) mapped on our 2 other computers, so accessing files is a snap. I also have Winamp set to run on startup and have Wawi setup to make playing music on the box easy as well.

Accessing "The Box" from remote desktop works great for using it like a server. I can login to it from the home computers or even at work to check on torrents and grab documents and pictures. Problems come in however, when we want to watch movies or play Nintendo from it. Because Remote Desktop logs the local user out when you log in remotely, there was no way to see the display on the TV when you are logged in from another computer.

Every time we wanted to watch a movie, or play Nintendo, I had to steal the keyboard and mouse from another computer. That got old really fast, and I've been looking for a solution to this problem for a while now. Last week, I found the option I was looking for. Enter Virtual Network Computing. VNC is a cross-platform software app developed by AT&T Labs that's been around since 1998. It works very much like Remote Desktop, but with a lot more options. One of those options being the ability to leave the local user logged in when you log in remotely. That means I can login to the computer wirelessly from our laptop, and see my mouse move around on the laptop screen, as well as the TV.

Genius!

I really enjoy reading Mike Davidson's blog. He tends to make time for things that most people wouldn't think worthy to tinker with and comes out with a post that will knock your socks off. Moreover, he tends to do this in such a way that avoids the criticism that he's omnipotent of all things web development or has too much time on his hands. In short, he comes across as a real human being who enjoys taking time to make the world (wide web) a better place - something everyone should aspire to be.

For his latest project, Mike has taken a technology I've been considering implementing for a while now, and of course, made it better. Shaun Inman's Inman Flash Replacement (IFR) has been widely acclaimed since it's first appearance in April of this year. Before IFR, font use was limited to only the fonts that the visitor had installed on their computer. Mike describes the attempts and failures of others to invent a cross-browser method of displaying fonts in an entry that reads like a good history book.

IFR has been revisited and rewritten several times since then, but Mike's revisions have made it completely scalable, hence the spiffy new acronym: sIFR and my new founded enthusiasm for it.

Personal Note: I shouldn't keep my wife awake at night describing the possible implications of this new technology. Especially not during the 2nd week of her last semester at UF in Chemical Engineering.
Sorry Ames. :)

My highly impressionable and impulsive co-worker Russ just preordered one of these things. After watching the typing demo video, I'm fighting off the urge to make an impulse buy myself. I've armed myself with the virtue that what's mine is also my wife's, and that I need get approval before spending money - especially when it involves electronic devices, and probably more so since it could alse be contrived as a gaming device.

Some of you may not understand the usefulness of this at all. For those of you who develop websites, I think you will. I was considering installing Virtual PC or some other shell type program so that I could run Windows 98 on my Windows XP machine here at work so that I could in turn test websites in IE 5.5. You cannot run an older version of IE on a computer with IE6, and we have no computers in the office running anything less than XP. This would have been a horrendous waste of time, but I figured having the ability to test websites in the browser with the 3rd largest market share would make it worthwhile.

After a little bit of research however, I found standalone versions of IE 3.0, 4.01, 5.01 SP2, and 5.5 SP2 at skyzyx.com. Now I can surf the web with the worst broser of all time - Internet Explorer 3! Yay.

I keep looking over at the cell phone on my desk and laughing. "HA! 3 BARS!!!" and then a few minutes later, I look over again out of curiosity. "HAHA! Still 3 Bars!" Although, I think my workmates may be getting a little worried about my mental stability, I know that Russ understands what I'm so happy about - he has Sprint too.

Overall, I have been very happy with my Sprint cellular plan. Sure, Gainesville has fairly patchy coverage, but having a $30/mo. plan that allows me enough minutes, free nights and weekends, and the ability to talk to my wife for free with the PCS to PCS make it worthwhile. Even despite the patchy coverage, I've been able to use my phone almost everywhere - except at work.

Whenever I got within 200 yards of work, my service dropped to 1 bar, and once in the parking lot I could barely carry a conversation without dropping a call. Service in the building? Forget it!

As of today however, it seems that Sprint must have set up a new tower nearby, because... "HA! 3 Bars! YEAAAA!" No more missed calls, no more dead phone, no more leaving it attached to my car charger all day!

Amy and I decided to chill out and play some Nintendo on the NES PC after dinner last night. We had fun playing crazy classic games like Othello, Family Fued, and Super Dodge Ball. However, mixed in among the list of .nes files was a game called "P***y City Pimps". After playing the game for about 3 minutes, we decided that it was way to offensive to continue.

Still curious about it though, I googled the game title and found a great review site of Hacked Roms at i-mockery.com. Here you will find all the details (including screenshots) of games like: Evil Dead!, Baby Dodge Ball, Beeralaga, and Knife Boy!

I've left out a lot of the details as many of the games are just to ranchy to discuss here. But to quote Lemar Burton on Reading Rainbow, "Don't take MY word for it!"

Do do do - doo deet do doot. Do, do, do, do, do, do DEE doodoo. Do do do - doo deet do doot. Last weekend, Amy and I sorted out the issues we were having with the wiring and the drivers for our NESDrive. We actually played 2 player Dr. Mario as a test on Sunday and then dismantled the entire thing. Last night Amy went to bed early and I decided to stay up and put some time into the faceplate. Well, 2½ hours later at 1:15 this morning, I completely finished it!

I managed to detail out the holes in the faceplate for the power/reset/led, sand off the rough edges, and cut off the bit of aluminum on the power/reset/led panel that stuck out too far. Then I painted the faceplate (3 coats of Nintendo gray), and glued in the controller ports. I almost went to bed then, but I was so close to being done. So I re-stripped the wires, twisted-soldered-electrical taped all of the connections to the parallel port and my molex (power) adapter, wrapped all the wires together, and mounted the whole thing in the drive bay.

Again, I almost went to bed...but I was done and had to enjoy my work. So I started up the emulator, plugged an NES controller into the front of my computer, and played some kung-fu! Woo-hoo!

I feel like a new dad! This project has been my baby for so long and now it's finally here. Speaking of babies, I'd like to wish a preemptive congratulations to ALMOST parents - Kevin & Kristy Currier!

"The Box" is the name I gave to our media center computer at home. It is a little 400MHz computer with a ginormous hard drive that we have hooked up to our entertainment center to share files, and play music, movies, and NES Roms. A few weeks ago, I got the bright idea that I should format its operating system drive and install fresh copy of XP Server 2003.

After several driver issues, over tightened security annoyances, and impromptu shut-downs, I have realized that my poor lil box isn't destined to be an XP Server. It is much more happy, now that it has it's old XP Pro OS back again. Hopefully the ntpadxp drivers will work now and my NESDrive will soon be operational.

I've been kinda short on time this week - see amesnjas. As far as the project goes, I got the video card installed and I'm waiting on ram which is now driving from Nevada (when it was supposed to be air mailed). Amy and I broke out the Sears "lil' crafty" rotary tool last night that I borrowed from my parents and started routing the holes in the CD drive cover for the controller ports. It was going pretty good, but the crafty is LOUD so we figured we should probably stop at 10:30 so our neighbors didn't think we'd opened a night-time cabinet shop. So things are going very slow, but VERY LOUDLY! - and yes Brian, I will have pictures up...eventually.

Ok, so I'm lazy, but I think I said everything in my conversation with Brian this morning that I wanted to post here. So here's the chat log:

When I bought the RAM, it seems I forgot how old my old computer was. The motherboard is an Asus P5A, which I just found out last night, has a bus speed of 100 MHz - not 133. So I'll be taking my ram back to Circuit City for a refund and probably ordering it online. I said before that I had picked up my video card, but what I really meant was that I had merely picked out my video card. I think I'll buy it tonight if Amy and I get to Circuit City. I'm getting a PNY Verto 64MB AGP Video Card. Right now it's only $89.99 with a $40 rebate…so it's cheap AND it has TV-out at 1024x768 resolution.

Back on to the NESdrive project - I found something very useful this morning at Radio Shack. It's a DB25 connector with a phone jack in the back! According to junkmachine, I only need 4 wires coming from the NES controller to the parallel port. Basically that means I'll have a phone cord running from the NES ports that I can just plug in to the parallel port adapter. Fun Fun.

Well it looks like I'm going to be doing some updates to the box before I get started on my NESdrive. I got some RAM for my birthday, which I exchanged for some cheaper RAM and a video card that has S-Video out. I knew I needed the RAM (at least 128MB in order to swap XP Home for XP server) but I decided it had to be attached to the TV if it was really going to feel like a Nintendo.

While I was at home I ripped an appropriate power cord out of the old case I had sitting at home, and borrowed some project essentials from the rents: a soldering iron, some acid-core solder, and a Dremel tool. I also went to Wal-Mart late at night (a popular thing to do in Vero Beach) and picked up some primer-gray spray paint and model glue. So… it looks like the only thing I need to buy will be the DB25 adapter and plastic shield.

I'm off to a slow, but steady start to my NESdrive construction plan. I spent some free time on Thursday morning checking out the emulators that would work with the NES Controller drivers I got from junkmachine.com. After doing some reading, and playing with a few different emulators, I have decided to use NEStron. It seems to work nicely with XP, and since our MP3 jukebox is running XP Server, it should be the best fit.

I've found most every NES Game I knew existed while poking around Google, but at work, Russ said he had a CD full at home he'd bring me. With software issues figured out, it's time to move on to construction. Last night I dismantled my poor, defenseless Nintendo to remove it's button panel (w/ LED) and controller ports (pictures coming soon).

I'm going to try to pick up a DB25 Crimp-Type connector and tear a female power connector out of my OLD case in Vero when I go home for the birthday this weekend. I need to get some more info before I know how I'm going to use the power/reset buttons, but Amy and I agree that having them start and shut down the emulator would be AWESOME!

My secondhand Nintendo just decided to take a dump a couple weeks back. Amy and I were pretty bummed because Tetris on Xbox just doesn't compare to Dr. Mario, and I was starting to miss playing my occasional game of Sky Shark. So we spent a while trying to diagnose it. She picked up a compatible power supply from work to see if the old one with two electrical tape lumps was the culprit, but we had no luck.

Now this may seem like a mundane waste of time to some of you, but to those who grew up in the age of Mario, MegaMan, and Mike Tyson I present to you my latest project: I want to construct a NESDrive! I've built a few computers in my life, but I'm not much of a custom hardware kind of guy. I don't get too excited about casemods and overclocking, but the thought of plugging Nintendo controllers into my MP3 server box at home (which is located conveniently next to our entertainment center), and pressing the Nintendo Power button to start up an emulator really got me excited.

This may be a slow-burner as I've been pretty swamped at work. Amy and I have our weekends booked for the next month or so, but I will post any progress I make on this new project right here. If anybody happens to read this that has done this before, or has any suggestions, please post your comments.