iPhone Icon Alphabet

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I was bored last night and decided to create this. I got a lot of inspiration from Heidi Cody's American Alphabet.
Tagged My Side Projects iPhone-a-licious

Playing Dolls

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This past Christmas, like a lot of families, the cult of American Girl Doll hit our family.  Our daughter got one real doll and one fake doll, but who can tell the difference except the people in the stores and those weird people that dress their kids and dolls in matching outfits. Of course, with dolls comes accessories like clothing and beds and such.  Like with kids, two dolls means two times the clothing.  Where to store it? We pretty much blew our Christmas budget on the one doll.  Grandma kicked in for the other, other grandma kicked in for the bunk bed and yet other grand parents ponyed up for a lot of clothing.  Our daughter was in heaven for a few days until she realized that she needed a closet to put the clothing in.  Boy did she find one.  There is a great one in the catalog, but it is $300.  Not in our budget. What was in the budget was money for 1/4 inch x 10 pine.  A little bit of elbow grease and a Sunday afternoon in the garage with my wonderful little girl and we had a closet.  Over the next few nights, we sanded and painted and within a week, our new little bundles of joy had a nice new closet for all of their clothing.

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This was a really fun project for me as 1.) I got to spend a lot of time with my daughter teaching her to use power tools. And 2.) I've wanted to build an armoire for a long time, but we really don't have room or need for one.  This was essentially the same thing, just smaller with less detail work.
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Tagged My Side Projects Projects american girl dolls armoire closet

Marshmallow Trebuchet

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I've wanted to build a mini trebuchet for a long time. My dad is friends with one of the Pumpkin Chuckin guys and I've had a desire to play around with the concept for a number of years, but never really had the motivation to spend time actually building one. I actually built one out of Legos a couple of months ago, but I couldn't get it to stay together. Whenever I would launch something, the whole contraption would just fall apart and leave me building it all over again. I also couldn't get the sling to release properly and everything that I tried to launch just came back and hit me in the face. I suspect that this is how the original trebuchets were experimented with only instead of pennies hitting people, it was livestock. Last weekend, I noticed instructions on the Make Blog on how to build one out of paper clips. Perhaps this was the motiviation that I needed. I also noticed that in order to build this, you need a glue gun. Well, for all of the cool tools that I own, I've never owned a glue gun. Sad isn't it? So when I was in Longs today, I checked and lo and behold, they carry glue guns. $9.99 later and I have the motivation to build my paper clip trebuchet. Schweet! The Make project is actually just a rip from an Instructables on how to build an office supply trebuchet. And since I'm in the A-P-T, I don't have a lot of tools; needle nose pliers, scissors & my new glue gun are about the extent of it, this project seemed right up my alley. The instuctions on the instructable are absolutely perfect. A couple of my own comments:
  • Mine came out a little bit taller. Probably 5 inches. I used those big paperclips that you can find in most corporate supply cabinets. The biggest ones that are there.
  • I tried to use a padlock like in the Make video, but the weight of it caused serious structural issues. I ended up using a bunch of wrapped pennies from my Lego incident. It seemed to work fine in getting marshmallows to go about 8 - 9 feet.
  • I got to use a glue gun to glue down the legs. This is fun and I foresee many hot glue related projects in my future.
  • If you go to the comments section on the Instructables page, there is a great video of this in action (not mine). My treb was a bit off kilter and I didn't have time to build some side supports. This guy just took some electrical tape and centered it. Good & easy idea for this.
  • My trigger was a pull back slide mechanism baked into the cardboard base. In the same video, the trigger is a flip sideways version. Much nicer and, I suspect, more accurate.
  • My string attached to my marshmallow was only about 1 inch long. I didn't get the chance to experiment with this, but I'd imagine that a bit longer would give me more distance.
  • I didn't put mine on wheels like the Make guys did, but per my tools comment earlier, that will be on version 2.0.
  • Mini marshmallows are goooooood!
    • The next project like this probably won't be until we get into our house and I get my tools back. Thankfully, the framers are saving wood for me for just such a project. The goal will be to get water balloons at least across the street and 5 doors down. Probably 200 yards of watery hell down on the neighbors.
    Tagged My Side Projects

    Shoverboard

    This is awesome. I can't wait til my kids are old enough to build something like this with them.
    Tagged My Side Projects

    GEvil on TV

    Michael Arrington is awesome and I'm not just saying that because I want a great review of my company when I come up with an idea that I can get funding for or convince Justin to help me build it. No Michael Arrington is awesome because he did an interview recently on the Google acquisition of YouTube and prominently featured one of my GEvil mugs during the interview. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz22YpTpP8g] Thank you Michael. Between you and Dave McClure, I think that you've generated 50% of my business.
    Tagged Marketing & Management My Side Projects Sales

    What up, yo?

    I've been meaning to do a number of posts lately, but between a new job and building a house, I haven't quite been able to find the time to jot down my thoughts enough to come up with a full post. So here is a bunch of short ones for your reading enjoyment. - November is clearly 'Drive Like a Total Ass Clown' month. Between the rain and the Halloween sugar-high detox, people can't put the key in the ignition with out doing something so stupid that I question how we've advanced so far as a society. Somewhere Darwin is spinning. - My house site is getting over 200 hits a day. This is very cool. To put that in perspective, that is about 199 more a day than this site gets. If only I had the foresight to pick a free blogging service that allows me to put AdSense on it's pages, I'd be a Rockefeller. Oh, well. Doing it for the love anyway. Hopefully someone will introduce me to a service that let's me publish my blog to a coffee table book or something (business idea, perhaps). - The Democrats kicked ass in this past election. Seriously though, a collection of 4th graders should have been able to beat the republicans in this last election. It is interesting to watch how power shifts from one side to the next in this country. In the 90's, under Clinton, it was very left wing, the balance of power shifted and now it has shifted back. It is an interesting pendulum to watch. - My MG broke down again over the weekend. Sucks. I'm going to need to have a full brake job done. At least I wasn't hurt. - I was going to do a big rant on the death of customer service, but for the most part, I've had two really good experiences. One with Comcast (I know) and the other with Verizon (I know, I know). The Verizon one even netted me $300. Steve in their customer loyalty department is great and deserves a raise. If you have a problem with Verizon, ask for customer loyalty and they will dial you in.
    Tagged My Side Projects Politics & News Pop Culture Rants & Raves

    What's God?

    My four year old is starting to ask a lot of questions about God.  Since I have no idea how to answer that question, I am thinking about asking everyone for their thoughts and then writing an ebook.  Anyone that wants to contribute can. This morning she asked why we don't celebrate Haunakah?
    Tagged My Side Projects
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