Quote Originally Posted by Ranger View Post
That's nice! When I bought the house I spent the first month before I moved in getting it wired and outfitted. I ran 3 CAT5e and 2 RG6 to each place I wanted to connect something. I'm glad I did, since then I've upgraded all my TV's to LCD wall mount, not a wire to be found .
Nice setup...

Quote Originally Posted by Ranger View Post
one a Windows server for SQL replication
Oh many Windows SQL brings back such bad memories of circa 1999 and the performance bottlenecks it brought us. Nearly brought a well known .com to it's knees after a superbowl ad.

I'm working on a system now that when a motion sensor is tripped, a camera will do facial recognition to identify who tripped it and set the lights and music to that persons preference (a long work in progress).
Cool idea. I've thought about designing a pyramid shaped device that would sit flush in the corner of a room up along the ceiling, and having smoke detector, emergency light, camera, thermal infra-red camera (to detect fire without smoke), passive infra-red motion detector all integrated into one unit, that could then be powered via Ethernet for a single-cat5 hookup. Could be prototyped using Arduino, or the new Microsoft .NET hardware hacker kits.

Also, now that the technology in the Kinect is open and available, adding those sensors (structured light, 3d (stero) color camera, and 3 microphones for sound triangulation and noise filtering), you could begin to build in limited speech and motion recognition. For example, it would be possible for the structured light to determine you are pointing at a lamp in the room, and the microphones to hear you say "Turn on" and to know that this sound came from the person who was pointing, and actually turn on that lamp -- would be pretty amazing.

You're far more in tune with the housing automation market, would a product like that sell? Perhaps something that's in kit form or modular so that components can be added or removed as time goes on.

The funny thing is that if you ever meet me I'll be the least geekiest guy you have met! Electronics and computers have always fascinated me.
You mean you fake not being a geek. It's OK, let you geek flag fly. Have some geek pride. The geeks shall inherit the earth. I bet you like knowing how everything works, from a DI bolt assembly to the protocol your servers are using to share files to the various media centers.

H.