Now that I have the obligatory pun out of the way, I'd like to share
my little shoes application that just went "live". It's a game of
sorts. In place of a joystick it uses a bicycle connected to an
arduino microcontroller. You get to race your friends indoors on a hot
night. It's a really great idea which I didn't invent -- I just cloned
it in ruby. I recently finished writing a basic interface with shoes:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3067/2673094338_5955345236.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3242/2673092646_9c70147d7d.jpg
(Photos used with permission: http://www.flickr.com/photos/neverdrownout/)

It's just two lines and a screen for managing matches and results. The
code is terrible. It's coding under duress. I wait way too long, then
I stay up way too late before race day, then I hack everything out in
the final minutes. But it's free:

http://github.com/evanfarrar/opensprints/tree/master

But the shoes part is great: I got features done in minutes that took
me days in older iterations. I have rewritten this app in just about
every ruby 2D graphics library and shoes really takes the cake. It's
succinct! I don't have to have a degree in typography to use it. I
don't have to worry about blits or pixels or image offsets or the
process for alpha rendering. Thanks _why! I really appreciate it.

Cheers, Evan

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