Sunday, September 03, 2000
Yet another Labor Day BBQ
I was invited over to John the paper millionaire of a dotcom's house for a Labor Day BBQ. I wasn't there long enough to say hello before being forced to don a swim suit and join the festivities in the pool, where Mark, Kelly and JeffK were playing basketball (yes, in the pool—John has a net for the pool which is placed at the deep end).
After swimming and eating yet more hamburgers, hotdogs and other outdoor American holiday food we retired in the family room to watch a football game on the 72″ TV.
I wasn't all that interested in the game (at one point, nearly drifting off to sleep) so I wandered off with Kelly and John's wife where we talked about relationships. Way more interesting than the game.
Fun Geeky Stuff
After the game, we headed into John's office to play around with his home
control system. Throughout his house are several small keypads with an LCD
screen he uses to control the music and lights of the house. The primary
controller is a program that runs under Windows and John's idea is to
reverse engineer the protocol used to communicate between the two (which
runs under IPX).
We downloaded Ethereal to capture and display the network packets but since everyone was pretty tired we didn't far in the engineering aspects.
