GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

Well, it's reached the point where I finally had enough of computers and everything I was doing on them for just a bit, so I closed the lid of my laptop on Tuesday right at 5 PM and sat outside in the lawn chair, doing absolutely nothing for about 30 minutes until my dog started panting up a storm.  I let her back inside and she gulped down tons of water quickly.  Still not knowing what to do with myself while trying to stay away from the computer, I just about dozed off on the couch when inspiration struck me: I needed to do something physical to stay awake. Now I'm a huge fan of sitting, but sitting still in one position at a desk for a long time leads to unhappy muscles.  Plus, I find tedious or uninteresting work to be soporific, especially if I just had a heavy lunch or didn't get much sleep the night before.  However, taking a nap usually leads to undesirable outcomes: I wake up about 2 or 3 hours later, still feeling groggy, and often incapable of accomplish...

Back in high school, marching band took up even more time than I spent on homework in any given week. Being a member of the drumline added yet another level of demands and responsibility -- but that's all part of what it takes to play on a line that, if memory serves me correctly, would have beaten the University of North Texas' drumline at PASIC's drumline competition in 2002 had we not been penalized for crossing the physical boundary lines of the competition at some point.  (Nevertheless, we still won among high schools.)  Even though it has been almost 10 years since I graduated high school, their drumline is still kicking butt and constantly taking top honors at every contest they enter. In middle school, I discovered I had the ability to play along with songs by ear as long as I heard them emough times and knew how they went.  In 9th grade, the realization that I had perfect (or really darn good relative) pitch always fascinated the other band members; I was often...

Maybe you've figured out by now that I like to make blog posts on Thursdays.  I'll skip a week or two here & there if I don't have new content or anything prepared, but last Thursday, I simply forgot to post some of my "canned content" due to sheer exhaustion from a week culminating with teaching Arduino to a group of fourth-graders! Making a Difference You never know what opportunities will knock on your doorstep from demonstrating at various events around town, and of course, simply showing up to meet people could lead to that million-dollar introduction.  As such, we were invited to present LEDgoes at the Frisco Mini Maker Faire back in April, and were busy showing off this: The maximum-length LEDgoes marquee, 64 panels, 8 feet long! Area educators were on the prowl looking for fun things to engage their students, and one of them just happened to wander by our booth and inquire into the details of our project.  We mentioned the boards are base...

The physics of sound in our house lend well to Stacy being able to shout up to me from downstairs, but not so well for me shouting back downstairs.  It makes communication inefficient, and often times she's not exactly watching for messages on GChat either.  I don't like going halfway downstairs when I'm trying to hold very skinny wires in a special arrangement when poking around for defects in LEDgoes, much less just to get a Yes/No answer on a simple question. Recently, we picked up a Yamaha HTR-4065 stereo receiver for our living room.  Stacy was not happy with the sound quality of the original receiver, and hearing how the Yamaha can fill up the room while not vibrating every tiny appendage on your body with obnoxious bass, it was definitely money well-spent.  Hopefully it will add some more years to our natural hearing capability before we have to get hearing aids or whatever magical, mystical implant they develop by the time we're that old.  However, th...

The one-dollar.us Options Scalper was another project that had a lot of potential during its time, but would have required some startup capital (VC attention) and more care and nurturing in order to really get off the ground.  Now I feel like the guys at Quantopian are quite on the right track, but they too have recognized that designing an intuitive interface for stock options analysis will be difficult... plus there's just so much data!!!  Nevertheless, Dan Dunn at Quantopian seemed to like the interface I provided, but they're designing the interface I ultimately wanted to provide so I'm just going to let them finish it up. ;)  (Plus, they know a little more Python than I do, which seems a great programming language choice for this task.) The scalper was designed as a means to learn and study option decay in a graphical manner.  As weekly options were relatively new back in 2011, I decided those would be a great target because there's not a lot of data you nee...

Everyone has their favorite pricing game on The Price Is Right, whether it be Plinko, Lucky $even, Hole In One, Clock Game, or whatever the case may be.  Some may fancy retired games such as Hurdles (1976-83) or Super Ball!!! (1981-98).  Long-time producer Roger Dobkowitz once said "every pricing game is somebody's favorite," and with over 100 pricing games played over the show's long history, it's been sufficient to keep millions of viewers still watching loyally every morning. For as many memorable games as the show has, they have certainly had some, shall we say, "experiments" that did not go so well.  Some games were dull; others simply did not mesh well with the spirit of Price is Right (like Professor Price or Double Bullseye).  Still others have grown old (like Barker's Bargain Bar), were killed off due to inflation (like Walk of Fame), were plagued with mechanical issues (like Hurdles), or became too confusing for today's contestants to...

Does anyone care to venture a guess? To state the obvious, there are many LEDs, an ATmega chip, and there are the beginnings of a charlieplexed arrangement... It still has a long way to go, though!