I don't have anywhere near the smarts to pull something like this off (maybe one day, one day), but I'm always so excited when people try these and they work.
Build something else. Whatever it is that you build you end up with that awesome "I built that" feeling. Last night I hacked to 0230 on turning a set of 50 GE Color Effects Christmas lights into a 7x7 color display. No one around me really understands why this was worth staying up half the night for, but when I finally got control of the serial bus protocol for programming the lights and saw my display work under my control it was awesome.
At Twin Cities Maker a few of our members are undergoing a project to turn these into a large color changing glass block wall. It's been a pretty cool project to watch.
We used shiftbrites in our 7x8 window at Hive13 adnd it worked out very nicely. Last week we got it working with OSC and Processing - http://www.hive13.org/?p=527 - which should make connecting to it with a wide variety of software pretty easy.
Yes, I will. When I've got it doing something useful I will post a full blog post with details and also with the source code etc.
Some more pictures to give you the idea:
1. All the LEDs removed from the cable and stuck into a specially drilled piece of thin plywood: http://yfrog.com/hwy2snj
2. Reverse of the plywood showing the bulb with all the cables cut. Had to cut, strip and solder all 288 cables back in place: http://yfrog.com/j2xp8gsj
3. Little shot of the rewiring on the back. The colored pieces are tiny bits of heatshrink that I put in place to insulate everything: http://yfrog.com/nzh3ngdj
What they looked like before I started hacking them: http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11630618
Short video of the first full glitch free run of the lights under my control: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9SOI9EnjTg