LAFAYETTE — There are light displays that are , and than Alek Komarnitsky’s, but none that drew like his annual layout, which is this year for the final time.
The Komarnitsky display first caught the in 2002. There were , articles in Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, . Word spread about the guy whose interactive webcam allowed virtual visitors to control his lights.
“Not only (can) web surfers pan and zoom the webcam, but there also are controls to allow you to turn the thousands of holiday lights on and off via the web, and see the results,” Komarnitsky wrote on his blog.
Except, .
“Wellllll, the truth can finally be told,” he confessed in 2005, after alert surfers .
“While the lights are real, nobody was really turning the lights on and off. The only thing you were changing was the picture on your computer screen. There was never any malicious intent. The webcam started out as a technology puzzle to see if I could do it. Geeks will understand the desire of working on that.”
Exposed, Komarnitsky tackled the technological puzzle with new will — and he succeeded in in 2005.
Interviewed again by live webcam in 2007, Komarnitsky proved beyond a doubt that he had finally enabled web visitors to actually manipulate the lights and inflatable figures. (The secret? and .)
” might not want to visit the site,” he observed then.
He liked hanging out in his garage after dusk to hear the clicks when unseen visitors made the lights toggle on and off, or deflated and re-inflated the Hulk (his sons’ favorite) or Homer Simpson (Komarnitsky’s choice).
He even coerced his mother, who lives in Seattle, to fly to Denver for Thanksgiving each year so she could help set up the display. She also cobbled together an Elmo Santa from salvaged Goodwill finds.
The show lasted for five hours a night between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. And the neighbors did not complain. In fact, the neighbor across the street let Komarnitsky install a webcam on his property.
Komarnitsky estimates that his famous show cost about $3 a day, and considered it money well spent. He encouraged website visitors to donate to celiac disease research, a cause close to home because both Komarnitsky sons Dirk and Kyle, now teenagers, were diagnosed as celiac when they were young. He’s .
But come this New Year’s Day, it’ll be time to unplug the interactive display for good. (Komarnitsky, who lives in Boulder County, has never followed the Denver custom of leaving up the lights until the National Western Stock Show ends.)
“Yep — Alek ‘Griswold’ is hanging up the Santa Hat after over a decade of providing an for millions of Internet users world-wide,” Komarnitsky recently .
He’s not kidding about the Griswold reference: Like ‘s character in Komarnitsky’s display features 25,000 lights.
What he won’t miss: replacing dead light bulbs (” ); squirrels gnawing through wires; repairing the leak-prone inflatable Hulk; water leaking into ground fault circuit indicators; coping with wind gusts up to 70 miles per hour; fighting the crowds at post-Christmas holiday sales to buy lights; and dealing with the media and “the occasional knucklehead on the Internet.”
He and his wife, Wendy are also looking forward to that’s stuffed with lights and figures for 11 months out of the year.
“It’s been a fun run,” he said.
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@denverpost.com or twitter.com/byclairemartin
