Its been a little while since I wrote something into this place. Things are really busy right now. With Christmas and end-of-the-year stuff, things are winding down, with people trying to finish stuff before the break.

I have been really looking at getting back into the home automation hobby. I have tried a few things over the past few years, but nothing organized. I have been trying to use X10 to control the devices, but in our house, it doesn't want to work properly. In all honestly it is probably my problem. There is probably noise on the line that is swamping the X10 signals.

I have one thing I seem to stay with. I alway have used a program called "MisterHouse" (http://misterhouse.net). The program is written in Perl and since I have used Perl extensively it makes a natural fit. Stay tuned for more details.

Good News...?

Well I heard some good news today. In October I submitted an abstract to a conference in May. This is really good news since it means that I can give a presentation in front of my peers and it make a good statement on my resume. It will mean a lot of hard work in the next couple of months. We will see.

CD's for christmas

Well, I've think I've got a good idea for sending eveyone a CD of pictures from vacation along with their christmas presents.

You see, at the end of October we went to Disneyland with a large family group for vacation. There were 21 of us, so it was more of a mob. We spend a week enjoying DL and DCA and even took some time to head out and see the Peterson Car Museum in LA. Everything was a blast and everyone said that they had a great time. However, I promised to make a CD of our digital pictures for everyone. I haven't had a chance yet to do it, but probably the best time will be to put them in the gifts. We will see...

its a start...

Well I've finially decided to try my own hand at a blog. I've been looking around for awhile and feel that this is as good a place to start as any. I really just wanted somewhere I can write some generic ramblings about what intersts me. I know that these posts won't be of much use to anyone else, but hey it gives me something else to do with my time.