Today marks 6 months! We’ve been homeowners and residents of Colorado for six months now, having closed on the house on 7/31/2009. It’s been fun so far, though we haven’t seen near as much snow as I had hoped!

Five years ago today (1/29) I met my beautiful wife Natalie. We went out on our first date to Applebee’s in Ballwin Missouri. It was a Saturday, we had talked online a time or two, and on the phone this particular evening. We met up for a late dinner and ended up staying until they kicked us out.

Shortly there after we both took our Match.com profiles down (yes, we met thru Match.com).

I love you beautiful!

So this won’t be the final post here on Project240z.com, but we are likely coming close to the end. This weekend the car sold, an airman from the local Air Force base in Denver came by and gave me a deposit for the car. I’m going to try to get the title cleaned up this week and hopefully get it to him this weekend if he comes up with the rest of the money.

I’ll post again when the car is gone. Thanks for all the interest in the car lately, unfortunately 99% of the interest came after I sold the car, not before, but oh well. For now check out my new toy, http://www.project350z.com/

So I’m finished up with the training for the week. It’s been a long week, standing all day doing training can really take it out of you! I went out to dinner tonight with another friend of mine here in town. We had a great time sitting down and talking about all things DotNetNuke.

I’m going to be here in California for another 36 hours or so, heading to the DotNetNuke Corp offices tomorrow, and then up towards Vacaville tomorrow night. I’m looking forward to catchin up with friends from High School that I haven’t seen in 5 years (we’re getting old), and others even longer than that!

So I really am looking to sell the 240z this time around. Though, the more time I spend on it, the less I want to sell it, so perhaps I’ll continue working on it while I wait to see if it sells, and then who knows what will happen after that. At this point in time I’m not looking to part the car out, that might change in the future, but for now I’ll keep from parting it out. Basics: Price: $1750 with all the spare parts (storage bins full), $1250 with the car as it currently sits. (add $250 to clean up title) Year:1973 Make: Datsun Model: 240z Title: None (can be acquired at additional cost) Mileage: Unknown Location: Parker, Colorado (delivery available at $1.25.mile up to 500 miles from Parker, CO)

 For any of you who follow the website regularly you'll notice that I haven't "put" the car and website up for a sale in a while. Well, it's your lucky day.

So it’s been a year since I really did anything with my home automation projects. In that time we’ve moved, from Missouri to Colorado, and purchased our first home.

It is time to begin again! I recently ordered a Smarthome kit, INSTEON Lamp Scene Lighting Starter Kit. I ended up finding it on a special deal a day website that Best Buy has for its Rewardzone members. The kit was priced at $60, a pretty good deal considering Smarthome sells it for $99. I expected it to show up in a few days and I would hook it up and get a few things running. To my surprise however I didn’t receive the kit in the mail, I got a decent sized box from the deal website, labeled as a smarthome box. I though there must be a lot of packing material in the box, only to open it and find a plethora of Insteon hardware, nothing like the kit I ordered, but WAY better.

I ended up getting around $800 worth of parts, here’s a photo of the score.  So what did I do? I went out to the deal a day company’s website and started trying to buy more! They had them listed on their own auctions, and on Ebay. I ended up bidding on 15 different auctions on ebay over about a week or two. I was sniped by automated tools on every darn auction. The auctions started off finishing around $65 each, but towards the end of the run they were ending at $105 each, still a bargain if what they were really selling was what I received in the box. My guess is that they didn’t know what they actually had, and were selling it far cheaper than it was actually worth. Unfortunately I think someone else figured that out too, thus the run on the product on Ebay. I really wish I had been able to purchase another kit, but they appear to be all sold out now as they aren’t listing them anymore as they were there for the past couple of weeks.

This weekend I decided it was time to move my office around, I didn’t care for the layout I had setup when we moved into the house. In order to move things though I wanted to put my two bookshelves on the wall near the door, the problem with that was the light switches for the office are there. I took this as the opportunity to start wiring up some of my newly acquired, and previously acquired, insteon hardware. I setup a dimmer switch for the overhead light, and just an on off switch for the fan, leaving the original switch in place for the switched outlet. I figured I would just leave that one on all the time for now and not worry about it, if I wanted another lamp in the room I will just hook up a lamplinc module to control it.

Wiring up the switches took me far longer than it has in the past. The switches had three separate neutral wires in the box, unfortunately I tried splitting them up, only to figure out (a few hours later) that they had to all be tied together, otherwise the lights in the office bathroom, and the outlets in the family room didn’t work. After getting the switches in place I moved the bookshelves and got the office situated. Mistake! I should have written down the Codes for the switches before I put the plate back on and moved the bookshelves, so this morning I unloaded a bookshelf and got access to the switches again for the proper info.

I spent a good couple of hours today trying to get the switches controllable. I was using the Insteon Powerlinc Controller (2414U) that came with the recent stash of new Smarthome equipment. I also downloaded a trial version of the Homeseer Software HS2. After a couple hours trying to get that to work I went to the basement to try and locate my other Insteon hardware that hadn’t been unpacked from the move. I knew I had two other controllers in there, one was the developer modem, and the other a INSTEON PowerLinc Modem, USB 2412U.

First I tried the developer modem, but I couldn’t get Homeseer to see the device. Then I hooked up the 2412u, but I also made a few other changes. I hooked up the FilterLinc 10-Amp Plug-In Noise Filter that came with the stash. I also moved the power source for my Windows Home Server (the machine I was hooking the modems up to) to a different power strip that was fed from the filter. Once I made these changes and connected the 2412U up Homeseer was able to see my devices here in the office (2 switches) and was even able to control them.

So at this point I have a trial version of Homeseer that will run for the next 30 days, controlling two switches, both in my office. I have quite a few other switches however and I hope to start wiring those up in the house, possible this week, or after the holidays. Be sure to come back later to see more on my home automation adventures!

Well the SDN event here in The Netherlands was a blast, I must say I had another great time visiting the Dutch DotNetNuke users once again. I am excited for the Day of DotNetNuke (possibly named something else) that is being planned for Paris in May of 2010. I’m going to start booking my travel for that very soon, I just need to check out Bing Travel to see what the prices are, and if they are expected to go up or down!

I hope to see more of the European DotNetNuke users at this event, I’ll post a link when there is one available, but so you can start planning for it, I hear it will be on 5/28/2010 in Paris.

Thanks again to Stefan, Erik, Joop and Remi for everything at SDN this weekend, I’m headed back to the United States now, regretting leaving, but also ready to get home to my lovely wife (she’ll be going to Paris as well)