In one of my moments of sheer eccentricity and boredom (amazing how they coincide), I invented - Mr.Blinky!
Its basically just an astable multivibrator (i.e. timer) built around the 555 IC, that you can see in the picture. So I was looking at the simple timing circuit (given below), and it hit me that if I could take the capacitor off the IC and wire everything else point-to-point, the whole thing might look like a man with a flashing head.
So, after hours of painstakingly soldering each wire to the legs of the IC (much harder than soldering them onto a protoboard, I should say), I was left with what you saw in the first picture (I added a little bit of masking tape so he looked more like a man). Luckily, nothing shorted out, although I had a few close calls.
Here's Mr.Blinky plugged into my laptop and happily blinking away:
I know, it's stupid. But hey, I'm not complaining, it was a good experience...
