OK I don’t know that I am going to pull off our regular Halloween setup this year. But if you want to set up a haunt in the neighborhood, well here is how I’d start. You can get crazy creative about the kind of scene you want to create – but nothing beats a graveyard. And to have a great graveyard you need to have tombstones.

You can buy tombstones from all kinds of retailers – Halloween specialty stores, Home Depot, garden stores, your drugstore will all carry some, mostly all with the message RIP. Some of these look good and there is nothing wrong with picking some up. The more elaborate ones can get spendy but they may be worth it.

But you can also make your own. Start with sheets of foamboard – use foamboard, not a styrofoam board which is crumbly and hard to glue together. This stuff is very carveable, you can cut out as simple or elaborate a form as you want. And you can carve designs in the face, you can bond pieces together to make pedestals (with the right glue), etc – here are some ideas, and some more. Personally I like to rough up the edges of mine a lot, and i even break some and reglue them for added ruggedness. BTW, wear a good mask when you do all this, fumes and particles come off the foamboard and it is probably a nasty biohazard.

For epitaphs, you can carve them in now prior to painting, or paint them on later, or mix the techniques. I do some of all. If you need ideas for epitaphs, well the web is full of them, just search for “epitaphs” or “funnny epitaphs”.

After you have shapes, you will need to paint. I use the cheapest paint I can find in the “Oops” bin at Home Depot as a base, and then finish with one of the various stone effect spray paints. Now, some of the stone effects don’t survive rain well, so experiment. And again, wear a mask, spray paint is nasty.

At this point you now have tombstones! Lean against walls, mount with stakes into the ground, whatever your surface allows. Note that they don’t weigh much, and if you are at a windy site, well, you are going to have a lot of movement.

In future posts I’ll layout simple lighting and sound plans.

Marginal Revolution: The Return of the Zombie: “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that there is only a 7% probability that someone born in 2000 will receive their Social Security benefits as promised today”

I don’t think anyone in the family is confused about this but in case you are…

The Flying Skull chomps like a flying Pac-man » Coolest Gadgets.  30 or 40 of these flying around the yard would be awesomely cheesy.

Eleven Warriors » Boom Rising. – for the opener.  Man there is a lot of defensive talent on this team.

• [Heathkit Virtual Museum

  A Tribute to Heathkits](http://www.heathkit-museum.com/).  Loved this stuff as a kid tho I was an incompetent welder/assembler.  But I drooled over the catalog.  via Make

• Shapeways.  Pretty cool personal 3D fab site.  The creator app is awesome

* “Watchmen”:amazon by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Wow, excellent. Better as a graphic novel than it could have been as a book, the use of text and font and images to intertwine multiple stories works very well. You have to think as you read. * “Where Are The Customer’s Yachts?”:amazon by Fred Schwed Jr. Timeless classic, its crtiticism of the financial services industry and customers’ foolishness is still dead on. * “Broken Angels”:amazon By Richard K Morgan. Another Kovacs novel, this one wasn’t a home run for me. With all the morally ambiguous factions, I could never quite get Kovacs’ motivations. And his drawn out death postponed by one miracle drug after another quit working for me. The whole thing felt a little choppy and unmotivated. * “Biomechanics of the Gastrointestinal Tract”:amazon by Hans Gregersen. Interesting reference on the GI tract, treating it as a mechanical device and analyzing behaviour from that view. Useful to help you build up a complete picture.

Nissan’s ECO Pedal pushes back during acceleration » Coolest Gadgets.  Love the idea of embedding behaviour into everyday objects.  I want my light switches to give me feedback about energy consumption.  My wallet to give me feedback about my spending.

Games Without Frontiers: Games Give Free Rein to the Douchebag Within:

• Every time I plunge into a game, I inevitably choose the most Cro-Magnon, “Hulk smash, Hulk destroy” strategy possible.
• But what happens if the second self you create inside videogames turns out to be a total dick?

I can relate.

Stuff Rich has posted that I find useful

• [Advertising Opt Out

  Tongfamily.com](http://www.tongfamily.com/2008/08/advertising-opt-out/).  Done, not sure it will really make a difference

• Attaching sigs to PDFs.  Good stuff.
• URL shortcuts on iphone – hugely helpful
• ANd more iphone tips – Sleep+Home to take a screen shot
• Adeona.  Installed

My buddy Tim runs a little pickem content and the first week slate is out:

* August 28 North Carolina State vs. South Carolina. I don’t think NC State is there yet * August 29 Temple vs. Army. ugh. Army i guess * August 30 Utah vs. Michigan. I think Michigan will have a lot of emotion and will win this * Syracuse vs. Northwestern. Northwestern. Never take Syracuse * Virginia Tech vs. East Carolina. VT * Michigan State vs. California. Hmm, MSU is the favorite darkhorse in the big10 this year. But hard to win on the west coast. * Hawaii vs. Florida. Florida * Alabama vs. Clemson. Oh damn, Clemson is a trendy pick, but I have never won picking Clemson * Missouri at Illinois. Mizzou. Illinois strugges to repeat last year’s breakthru * Washington vs. Oregon. Hmm, Oregon is confused at QB, UW is not. * August 31 Kentucky vs. Louisville. Ugh, no respect for these teams. Probably take Louisville * Sept 1 Fresno State vs. Rutgers. Take Rutgers at home * Tennessee vs. UCLA. UCLA not ready for primetime yet

* Pizza pizza. - Core77 - awesome looking pizza maker. I make pizzas at home about once a decade so probably not a smart buy, would end up in the countertop appliance graveyard along with the breadmaker etc. * pick chair folds flat and hangs on wall, looks awesome. Hopefully it actually works as a chair too. * ExpandOS packing material. Hate styrofoam peanuts, love recyclable packing materials * Miracle tablets turn sour tastes sweet. This just seems wrong * Robopong table tennis opponent. Kind of a sad statement. * Weight-sensitive floor lights up. Awesome, in the age of green awareness, now we can embed all kinds of computational power and lights into our flooring. * A $1200 moosehead wall lamp. I’m surprised I don’t have one already.

Via Strange Maps, dynamic map/timeline of Olympic Medals by country up at the NYT. Very nice.

Office 2007 for Windows has some really cool features. I love the table formatting in XL, a totally obvious and good feature. And the fact that it is only in the Windows version and not in the Mac version has driven me batty, and has pissed me off so much, that I have finally converted all my XLs into Google Docs spreadsheets and dumped them into the cloud. Yes I lost some cool features. But I never have to install office software again, I don’t need to worry if the latest version is installed on the machine that I happen to be using today, I don’t have to worry about the fact that the last version of that spreadsheet is in my home office machine and not here at work, etc. I am immediately happier. I will miss table formatting, but not that much.

CrunchGear » Archive » Canadian movie theaters rent screen time to gamers – not sure this will ever pencil out or how it would even work, but the idea of playing Halo or COD4 on a giant movie screen is pretty awesome.