What do I see? Maybe the car I will be driving in 2010?

The Signalinc is now installed in the breaker box downstairs, and now X-10 signals in my house work from my testing no matter what outlet the devices are plugged into.

Well it’s now officially the day after Thanksgiving, that means Christmas Lights need to go up over the next few days. With that in mind, and following my blog post from earlier, I decide it was time to get the Insteon and X-10 equipment I do own working together. I ran across the mControl Software on Smarthomeand then decided I would look into it more. I found a trial copy and have that up and running on my Windows Home Server. I must say, it is pretty sweet that I can control the lights from nearly any computer in the world now. Over the next few days I’ll go through and hookup all the hardware I have boxed up currently. It is mostly X-10 controls, but I do have a few Insteon controls as well.

Here’s a screenshot of my test setup running in the Windows Home Server console.

I am sure most people today have a lot to be thankful for, it is a much celebrated holiday here in the United States, Thanksgiving is a time spent with family being thankful for what we have, and remembering what we’ve lost. Unfortunately earlier this week a family friend of ours passed away.

Jack Foley was a retired Colonel in the United States Air Force, we lived next door to the Foleys in 1985/1986 while we lived on Seymour Johnson AFB in North Carolina. My parents always remained close to the Foleys throughout the years, and Natalie and I had dinner with his son Mason and his wife a few years back when we were in Atlanta for a race. My parents had dinner with Jack within the past couple of years as they were travelling around the country in the RV.

When we were neighbors he got our family into computers, we bought our Commodore 128 while in NC and he got me programming for the first time on that computer. I didn’t do much, but I do remember being amazed at the things he showed me how to do on that computer. From then on we had a computer in the Hammond household. In 1993 when we were moving from California to Indiana we stopped in Nebraska to visit the Foleys, I distinctly remember Jack talking about the ability to send images from one computer to another, remotely over a service called Compuserv. We were Prodigy subscribers, but it wouldn’t be till a few years later that I sent photos over email, at the time Jack told me about it I thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever heard of. Now, 15 years later, here I sit, computers and the internet are what I do for a living.

Thank you Jack Otis Foley for getting me into computers and helping me become what I am today. To your family, I am sorry for your great loss, I am proud of the fact that we were your neighbors in North Carolina and family friends for life.

So I made some more changes to ChrisHammond.com today. I updated the URL structure of the site to use the URL Master module from http://www.iFinity.com.au. So far it’s working great. The urls should be shorter and cleaner now, hopefully more SEO friendly as well. Take a look around, if you see anything wrong let me know.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!!

So when we started this website a few months ago it was planned to track our move to Colorado in 2009. Well, 2009 is getting closer, and more and more we talk about the move, so it is probably time to fill you in on who “we” are.

This is run by Christopher and Natalie Hammond, currently residing in St. Louis, Missouri. You can click on either of our names to get to our individual sites, or you can visit our family site at www.horsesandcars.com.

Natalie and I have been married for just about two years now (in just over a week actually). We met online, Match.com (yeah yeah, we’re geeks, well I am), we’ve been in St. Louis the whole time we’ve been dating. I’ve actually lived here in St. Louis since 2000, prior to that I spent 4 years in Rolla, MO, about 100 miles west of St. Louis. Natalie has been in the area since 2004 this time around, spending a few years in Germany training in dressage.

We’ve both been to Colorado a few times and are looking forward to taking a few trips out there over the next months as we decide where we want to live.

A year ago (yesterday actually) I ordered a pair of shoes from Zappos. AT first I really didn’t care for them, I almost sent them back. But now, a year later, I love them! I think they are the best shoes I’ve ever owned, and I’ll be damned if I can find another pair of them! Here they are

http://zeta.zappos.com/product/7323632/color/102737

I need a men’s size 13, if you see them somewhere available, buy a pair, send them my way! There are some look alikes on Zappos but not of the real thing in my size. The difference between the look alikes and these is the gore-tex. The pair I have are waterproof and I love them, please help me find them, please!

So Greg and I were headed downstairs tonight to meet up with some guys for dinner. We passed Cole Hauser as we were leaving the elevator in THEHotel, he was heading in, we were heading out.

I recognized him, but Greg yells out, you know who that guy was, and recalls his name off the top of his head.