Updates 2007
January 1st, 2008
Thanks again for everyone who stopped by to control the lights on my house! I have not received word from RMHC about how much money was raised, but I thank each and everyone of you who donated. The show is now offline and in the process of being packed away for another year.December 14, 2007
Last night SolidSpace.com hosted the first annual Rock the House Lights event at the home of Control the Show.com. If you missed it, we had a giant Ronald McDonald statue in the yard as well as a SolidSpace van with a ton of lights on it. I had to reconfigure the power feeds to the control box to handle all of the extra juice running to the lights. Thanks to everyone who made this happen and especially to those who donated!
December 10, 2007
The show is still up and running great! I'm a little tired today from getting up at 4:30am to do the morning TV show, but it's all for a good cause. Mindy Bloom of the Ronald McDonald House in Winston-Salem also showed up to film a segment for TV that ran today as well.
Be sure to drive by and control the show from your car! Point your web-enabled cell phone to wireless.controltheshow.com during the free for all hours (5-7pm) to control the lights right in front of your own eyes. Watch out - some cell phones cache the webpage and will not actually send a message to my server after you press one of the buttons. Find the refresh feature of your cell browser or click on a link that you haven't yet tried.
As always, have fun, donate to the Ronald McDonald House, and MERRY CHRISTMAS
December 4, 2007
Everything is set for the show tonight. Free for all mode will start at 5pm this evening, kicking off the show for 2007! The show has already been covered in print and TV media, and donations are already coming in for the charity! The cell phone interface will not be up this evening, but we'll let you know when it's ready for you to play with in your car.
December 3, 2007
The show is now setup and ready to go. The show will come online for all of you to control tomorrow (December 4th) evening. Please stop by then for the first night of Control the Show 2007!
November 28, 2007
Well the emails are already streaming in from all over the world. The show is coming online in the first week of Decemeber, so please visit us then to control the show! The lights are now up outside. This year we're running about 10,000 lights (25,000 less than last year). Many of those 25,000 lights that are not up this year could not be seen on the camera anyway. Work is now starting on the inside display to include a snow village. This is new for 2007, and I'm still trying to pull off two simultaneous shows. I'll post more info on this later. If you live in the area, stop by sometime in December to control the show from your web-connected cell phone! You can watch the show change right in front of your eyes.
This year I am working with SolidSpace.com to host the site and the webcams. They have donated all the necessary hardware and support time to get this show on the road. These guys have been great to work with and I'm excited to have their assistance with probably the hardest part of the show.
Updates 2006
December 11, 2006
We’ve now had 10 successful days for the show! The servers are still running well thanks to a decline in the volume of daily media coverage. The display is starting to show signs of wear and tear from the relentless on and off. The bulbs are beginning to blow. That makes me happy – it means you all are having fun. I had one unfortunate bulb-popping experience involving the local media destroying (and I mean destroying!) some of the yard lights after getting in the yard with a video camera a few days ago. Accidents happen when there are so many lights around, but I would have appreciated them at least letting me know. Lights were completely ripped off of the wire. I’ve never seen that. The yard pegs were destroyed as well. I’ve since fixed these lights since they had dangerous exposed wire.
Since the last update we’ve continued to receive media attention with one very notable spot on the ABC World News webcast/website with Charles Gibson. See the media page for a link to the video and the story. We were one of the featured stories on their homepage for a day. I’ve also been doing many radio interviews around the US and TV coverage has begun to spread into other countries via CNN International News and the itunes podcast of the ABC World News. Please remember the Ronald McDonald House this Christmas season!
December 4, 2006
Wow! Last night was a big night for the show. I hope you guys didn’t get too discouraged by the long lines. I received hundreds of emails from you all reporting nearly 20 local stations running stories on us throughout the USA/Canada as well as appearances on CNN, ABC World News, MSNBC, and FOX News (all national coverage). I thought something was up when I casually checked out the site last night around 7PM to find 100 people in line (the max of the queue). I allowed up to 150 people to get in line and for a long time we stayed 150 strong. I dozed off around midnight with 140+ people still in line. The servers didn’t have any problems keeping everything going during that blast of traffic.
Last night we did over 20GB in traffic (if you don’t know what that is, it’s a lot!). This must have been from the 1,000+ simultaneous webcam viewers in the heat of the media coverage. The free for all controller has now been used 42,000 times in 3 days. The big news is that we’re almost at the 1 million hits per day mark. 2,500+ people have lined up in the queue lines to control the show solo. Come back tonight for more action.
Don’t forget to sponsor a few lights for the Ronald McDonald House!
December 3, 2006
Thanks to everyone for checking out controltheshow.com! The media coverage is picking up each day, so I’ve had to make adjustments to the server to keep things going good for you. On Friday I launched an entirely new control/queue system that I wrote which manages the queue effectively. For those of you who are returning from last year, you may remember we had occasional problems with people not being able to move through the queue properly. That is fixed this year and things look good.
The free for all mode seems to be popular – up to one hundred people at once are trying to control the lights. Speaking of numbers, we’re up to nearly a quarter of a million hits each night and growing fast. Local news stations across the US are beginning to cover the story again, and it’s spreading quickly.
Last night around midnight the sever shut down and refused to work on the public port. The company I lease the servers through cited my server’s inability to run at 100mbps. Therefore, we’ve stepped up to 1,000mpbs uplink speed which should stabilize things from here on out. We also had these same problems a couple times on Friday night (the night of the release). We’ll see how things run tonight. Stop by after 5pm (EST)!
December 1, 2006
Today is the big day – time for the launch of Control the Show 2006. I’ve added “free for all” mode this year allowing anyone to control the lights all at the same time. I’ve added this only because people asked for it last year. I think it takes away from the show because it’s impossible to tell what’s being controlled by you since so many people will be doing it. Only one rule… 5 second delay on all channel changing. This mode runs from 5pm until 7pm each night.
The show kicks off tonight at 5pm. FOX will be out filming so you may see that through the webcam. Everything is ready to go so be sure to stop in and control the lights!
November 30, 2006
Tuesday night I officially finished the lights for the show. Over 35,000 lights are on the house/yard/plants this year! Last night I plugged everything in to the control box for testing. Everything worked great, so all that’s left is a little tweaking of the revamped web system for this year and we’ll be up and running. The camera will be put into position tonight as well.
The official launch of the show is Friday, December 1st. FOX News will be out covering the event starting from 4pm until after 10pm. I’ve also received word that NBC will be coming out Tuesday to film. If you’re on our site Friday, you’ll most likely see the news people (and us hanging out) through the webcam. Come back then!
This year the show is much more impressive than last year. My only complaint is that I’m trying to deliver such a huge number of lights through such a small camera. The show in person is so much different compared to what you can see. I wish the placement of the houses across the street allowed you to see the show from the reverse side that you can see now.
Changing and coordinating the colors is the best part of the show, and it better be – it’s reason for the large number of lights. We have to string 3 to 4 different sets on the house everywhere you see lights to bring you the color changing effects. Miles of extension cords deliver individual control of many different pieces of the show.
Thanks to a bit of optimization, I’ve measured the delay from your click to the lights changing in milliseconds. Last year it was taking a few hundred milliseconds. I’ve also decided to up the webcam update speed to one frame every 1.5 seconds. This is about as fast as I can go with the 640x480 images I’m planning on delivering to you all this year. It takes time to upload the image from here, process, and then copy over to the proper spot on the server. 1.5 seconds is about the best I can do without having fiber run to the cam.
November 21, 2006
Control the Show will be featured this evening on the local CBS affiliate, WFMY News 2. Be sure to watch us working hard to get the show ready. We'll keep you up to date on upcoming media events. Thanks to the people from NC State Magazine who dedicated an entire page to Control the Show in their winter 2006 edition.
I have exciting news - today we acquired a sponsorship for 2006! The Virginia Tech / Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences (SBES) has agreed to sponsor the show in full for 2006. I can't say enough about the people there; I'm in my 3rd year pursuing my Ph.D. and have nothing but praise for the program. It's an honor to be supported in this way by people who believe in me. Thank you to everyone from both Virginia Tech and Wake Forest!
Because of the generosity of these great people, we'll have a monster server running the show as well as additional processing servers for all of the moving parts in the show including the webcam images and more. I've also been able to begin work on a second set of switches that will eventually expand the show to nearly 50 different pieces that you can independently control! We may be able to add a second webcam view as well. We'll have to see how cooperative the neighbors are.
We've added some new photos for 2006. The lawn was mowed one last time today clearing the way for the final phase of the show. Get ready, we're about to take off!
November 19, 2006
Currently we are working to resurrect the show for 2006. We tried to add powerful C7 bulbs everywhere but were unable to handle the power needs for these lights. Our plans were to string over 3,000 of these bulbs this year requiring somewhere around 120 amps or nearly 15,000 watts! When we got everything together (and half up!) we found that we couldn't milk the extra power from the house due to the grade of the circuit breakers. We've now gone back and replaced the bulbs with the mini lights from last year on the house. The work on the house is about 95% done. We saved the last 5% to give CBS something to film tomorrow (Monday). Once the yard is mowed one last time, we'll be adding new surprises to the yard this year. I won't spoil it for you yet, but you can bet it's going to light up the camera! In other news, we've setup a massive snow village inside that we plan to someday connect to controltheshow.com.
I hope to have the show online sometime around December 1st. Visit again for updates!