For whatever reason I've had AC/DC on the brain for the last few days. Old AC/DC, not the new stuff. It's probably a message from my brain that I've been listening to too much jazz and stuff recently and I should probably lock the doors, pull the blinds and crank up the volume.

Haven't yet read the article but the Mercury is supposedly reporting this morning that there's a huge exodus from the valley. I coulda' told you that just from the number of for sale signs I pass coming and going from work. A lot of folks are just cashing out at the top and moving off to someplace cheaper with a nice gain. The dot-com wannabees are going back home disillusioned that they didn't strike gold with online toothpaste sales or whatever. All I can say is thank you. The valley was getting pretty ugly and it's gotten considerably less so over the past year. This will in turn ease traffic congestion, reduce the rotating outages, make it possible to check out of Home Depot in under twenty minutes. Works for me.

Gee, what timing. No sooner had I written the previous paragraph but I read in the biz news that Home Depot is adopting a new technology to speed up checkout. Basically, a second salesperson walks through the line and scans everything while you're waiting. Great idea but we'll see... First they have to hire the second tier sales associates - for instance the Sunnyvale store usually only has three cashiers for 200-300 shoppers; and then you're still screwed if the guy ahead of you grabbed an item without a SKU.

Ordered a little black box last night which combined with some software I found yesterday will allow me to control home appliances from the web via X-10. Note that shower-cam is X-10 and I've got a second camera and more cameras cost about twenty bucks. So I can let you decide which camera you want to look at. And I can (eventually) go to a special URL and set the lights and music or even turn the spa on before I get home. Geek toys...