Being an IT Director and the stress/frustration that comes with that, I tend to let my creativity run wild at times. At any given point I will have several projects going at the same time, and listing them would just end up in a rather long laundry list of things. There are just too many to list, but my first “public” appearance was in 1998 when I got my name in the release notes for the popular Sendmail MTA. It still amuses me when I see it:
8.9.2/8.9.2 1998/12/30
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Portability:
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Avoid a clash with IRIX 6.2 getopt.h and the UserDatabase
option structure. Problem noted by Ashley M.
Kirchner of Photo Craft Laboratories, Inc.
After that it all went downhill for me. Created a small search engine for a start-up stock agency years ago (they’ve since been bought by another.) Wrote an entire front and back-end for an eCommerce web site at my office, none of that ‘off the shelf’ stuff, all custom programming in PHP & JS. Several, I mean, several little coding projects here and there.
I’ve always done a lot of photography (still do). That’s always part of me, wherever I go. Being able to see something and make it artistic is always fun.
Recent years though (like the last 7 or so), I’ve been doing a lot of LED electronics, as in building my own electronics and coding. One of the more fun ones is a POV “stick” that I made 3 years ago. Basically two acrylic tubes filled with LEDs, control unit, and power cell battery. The artist would spin them around and display colorful images. This is me spinning one of them during testing, standing in my living room at night:
And the “fun” part of creating that, the electrical design, hardware design, building electronics, and let’s not forget the coding too:
Created lighting units for the high school my daughter attended for various different performances. Added lights to color guard flags (and they went on to win 2nd place that year.)
I also do a lot of 3D design and printing with my 3D printer. Or even larger design “things” like these costumes for a little boy:
Created a bunch of different things for the local Ingress community, stuff that gets sold, or given away as prizes. I’ve also done some designs that were made in metal afterwards (earrings and necklace pendants.)
Then there’s the laser cutter which gets used almost daily for a variety of things:
Some with color airbrushed on:
There are many days i will simply sit down and think of the various things going on at the same time in my house and in my head and all I do is: