Well I thought I'd post a video of my project to date as it has been helped along from the start as a direct result of the members of this forum. Basically in a nut shell I'm going to soup up the number and brightness of the LEDs and put this on the back of my motorcycle. Like many who get a Arduino it was my first experience with coding programs, let alone C++. And I started with less than ideal knowledge of how electronics actually work, so needless to say I've learned alot in the past 2 months! So I thank those who have helped, directly or indirectly (via old posts I read and learned from), and without any further here's the video....hope you like it.
Oh yeah...I'm running 16 LEDs from two 74HC595's, very similar to the shiftOut() tutorial.