My Chauvet Hurricane 1300 arrived today. First thing’s first–immediately unpack it, add some fog juice, and play!

Hurricane 1300

For more size reference, I put a cheap Toys R’ Us fog machine on top of it. This thing is a beast!

Hurricane 1300 vs. Lil Foggy

This fogger has a 5 minute pre-heat time. Understandable considering it’s size. After warm-up, I grabbed the remote and hit the manual fog button for about 5 seconds.

First burst of fog

Now, I’m not going to want to stand outside on Halloween night hitting the manual fog button all the time. Thankfully the Hurricane 1300 comes standard with a Timer remote. I set the interval and duration and activated the timer. The result was nothing short of amazing. After 3 10 second bursts of fog output (spaced about 30-45 seconds apart) I could barely see across the room. I have a webcam sitting on a shelf in this room and it captured this wonderful shot

Webcam View of the Fog

Since you can’t tell, normally you can see through two doorways, into the living room (on the left) and my room (on the right). Lights were on in each room, although you can’t tell.

Needless to say I’m happy with my new toy

…I’ve also had all the windows open for about 30 minutes and a fan in one blowing fog outside and it still hasn’t completely cleared out…

UPDATE: I set some lights up outside real quick to see how it looked. Not ad for a quick setup! A friend of mine said some of the fog was lingering around a block away.

Outdoor Night Test with Lights

I’ve been doing Christmas Light displays animated to music  for the past 4 years now. This year I decided to add a Halloween display to the mix.

This display runs a bit differently than a Christmas Light display. I’m not going all out with lights wrapped around everything and he lights aren’t going to be “dancing” to the music.  I’m going to have about 6-8 colored flood lights (maybe more–will decide after I get them set up) positioned around the yard and front porch.

Now, floodlights alone would be pretty boring wouldn’t they? They will all be hooked up to my light controllers and programmed to pulse on and off and flicker.

I have a 7 minute repeating thunder and lightning track. 2 150 watt halogen floodlights will be mounted up high in the big tree in my front yard.  They will be used to simulate lightning. Mounting them in the tree should give them the ability to cast shadows of the tree limbs on my yard and house for an added eerie effect.

Finally, I wanted to have fog. Lots and lots of fog. I have a small cheap Toys R’ Us fog machine, but its not even going to come close to working well. So, I bought this monsterThat is the Chauvet Hurricane 1300 fog machine. It puts out 20,000 cubic feet of fog per minute according to its spec sheet. The little Toys R’ Us fogger is lucky to put out 2000 cfm if that. This fogger uses 11 amps of power when running, so I’m going to have to find more ways to get power outside this year.

To spread the fog around my yard more, I’m going to get an irrigation hose and run the fog through it. This hose will have small holes drilled in it the entire length of the hose. If I run it around my porch in a circle, the fog should come out of the hose all the way around my porch.

The fog machine is supposed to arrive Wednesday. I’ll probably start putting lights and stuff out next week. Look for more posts as I start setting up outside. It’s going to look cool

Since Real Estate Manager 2.0 is now almost ready for release, I figured I would share the differences between the current version (1.1) and 2.0.

To start things off, the Admin control panel home page has been completely revamped. The old one might as well have been a blank page. The new version provides links to the the most important tasks, and also includes software update notifications. (click for full-size images)

Version 1.1

Version 2.0

Up next, the Listings index page has been revamped. In version 1.1 all of the listings in each category was displayed under the category heading. This was problematic since listings could be in multiple categories, which led to the same listing being shown multiple times on the index page. In version 2.0 there is a dropdown menu so you can either select which category to view or view all of the listings.

Version 1.1

Version 2.0

The next biggest improvement is in the area of photos. In version 2.0, the photo ordering (numbering) system has been improved, and we have removed the ‘default’ checkbox. The image with the lowest order will now be considered the ‘default’ image for a listing. You can also change the order of every photo for a single listing at the same time.

Version 1.1

Version 2.0

The photo uploader has also been improved. You can now queue up over 25 separate images to upload for a listing at a time. Descriptions can be entered for each image. Once you have all the photos added to the queue, simply click on the “Upload Queue” button and watch as it uploads all of the photos.

2.0 Photo Uploader

The deleting of items (listings, categories, photos, etc) has also been improved. Deleting items now uses javascript-based dialog boxes to ask you to confirm if you want to delete an item. Upon confirmation the item will be removed from the page right before your very eyes.

Version 1.1

Version 2.0

The last new feature I’m going to show today is the new static page manager. Now you can edit your static pages from directly inside of Real Estate Manager. A WYSIWYG editor allows you to create pages with controls that will be familiar to anyone who has used a word processor such as Microsoft Word.

Version 2.0 Page Editor

Version 2.0 is now complete as far as new features go. The next few weeks will be spent testing the software and fixing bugs. After the testing process is complete we will try to get a live demo available and release the software.

If you are currently using version 1.1and would like to spend some time familiarizing yourself with the new version before your site is upgraded send an email to support@newdealmultimedia.com and we will get a test environment set up for you.