Last year for the Swirling Brain (2011):

I constructed a Raspberry Pi case on Shapeways. I keep thinking I'm finished but it seems like I keep having to adjust things or it gets rejected so I have to revise something. I hope to have it for sale soon. I decided to make this case after writing the Raspberry PI article for robots.net. It sounds like it will be a very popular board and I hope to use it for a robot perhaps.

My daughter Bethany went into the hospital a couple of times because of her CF. We got to spend Christmas in the hospital. We planned to have a vacation the week after Christmas, maybe even go to Disney World (that's more of a dream than reality) but I'm glad we hadn't committed since all of the plans were out the door when we got the news. Her CF hospital visits are increasing the older she gets. Her PFTs (pulmonary function test) were down to 32% which is super low. She got them to 52% and they let her out of the hospital. That's still pretty low and it's hard for her to breath anymore. They put her on 3 IV home antibiotics that she had to administer through her two picc lines. Now she's back on aerosol tobramycin (tobi). She doing better and she went back to work but she's still not doing that great. Pray for her.

I'm on the media team at First Baptist Garland. I've been running the sound board for the teens on Wednesday nights and helping with setup on Sunday Mornings. I've actually got to run the big board in the Sanctuary but just for band practice and not for a real live Sunday yet. It's sort of a big deal at a big church but perhaps someday.

My white car the Buick Rivera finally bit the dust. I was without a car for a while and my wife had to take me to work. We couldn't afford another car so I kept hounding my wife for a motorcycle or a scooter. She finally caved and let me buy a scooter. I got one off of craigslist. It's a chinese scooter so the odometer is apparently in kilometers so I have to convert to miles. I seem to get about 72 to 80 mpg! At the current gas price of about $3.50 a gallon that's about 5 cents a mile. It's about 7 miles to work so the cost to drive to work is about 70 cents a day. My dad let me borrow his truck for cold or bad weather days and it gets about 18 mpg which is about 19 cents a mile or about $2.72 a day. So I save about $2 a day or I save about $10 to $15 a week driving the scooter to work and church and other misc places. Just in gas that's a savings of about $500 to $700 a year. Everything else such as fees, insurance and taxes also seems to be cheaper for a scooter. Insurance was like $70 a year. I'm driving lesser driven streets to try to be safe.

I played with jpct (www.jpct.net) and wrote a 3d speedometer android app. It is pretty cool. I wrote some other cool things with jpct too. So then someone broke into our house, stole my laptop, stole my xbox 360 and kinect and stole a dvd player and some money we had at the house. They stole a few other items also. My biggest loss I still feel was the various software I had written on that laptop that I didn't have backed up anywhere else. I think I found an old backup of some of it but still it's a loss. So I've been down about that. Since then I've bought some IP cameras and installed them around the outside of my house. I feel like a theif may get away with it again but at least I might get a picture of them that I could give to the police.

I made some more rolling ball sculptures and sold them on ebay. Besides that I video recorded the building of some of them and listed them on youtube. Google invited me to be a part of their adsense and I agreed and wow I'm getting about $50 a month from that! That's like free money for doing practically nothing. I can now see why there are so many stupid videos of people making a complete fool of themselves because they are laughing all the way to the bank! Click on my videos and help me make some money! ;-)

I'm sure I did more in 2011 but that's all I can think of right now.