We drove up on top of the rim near Sedona and gave Kirin her first taste of snow. We built quite a fine snowman that many people enjoyed. More pictures to come. You can see a qik video of us playing in the snow: http://qik.com/video/4908018

After nearly a year, I finally finished up putting LED ‘stars’ onto our bedroom ceiling. See this earlier post where I talk about getting it started.

After a lot of soldering and taping, I managed to tape 32 white LEDs to the ceiling of our bedroom, and get stars working.  I tried a bunch of different wiring ideas out before settling on simple bare buss wire.  I just put some white electrical tape to keep it in place, and tape over any place where the lines have to cross.  

The affect is really pretty awesome with the room dark.  There are just enough stars lit at any one time to barely light the room, but not so bright that you can’t fall asleep with them twinkling.

Nothing like blinking LEDs!

Code: View or Download 

There’s some really basic instructions out there on how to do it, but the documentation is somewhat lacking in specifics.  Fortunately there’s a great project out there called macports that was able to do 98% of the work for me.

The last 2% came down to two errors involving path info, or the lack there of.  The GUI parts are all written in Python, on top of Qt. Adding the following lines to my .profile file fixed several hours of frustration in terms of “Why won’t you work!”

export DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH=/opt/local/Library/Frameworks:${DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH}
export PYTHONPATH=/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/:${PYTHONPATH}

Gotta love free tools, but whew, they aren’t always the easiest things to install…

Kirin helps bake cookies.

Angela and Kirin paint some turkeys.

Climbing in the backyard trees.

We wandered through Idea today, and found this cute little girl who wanted us to take her home with us. So we did. Yay!