OTHER TECH

Cleanup Time

Satisfied that I met all the requirements, I sent my e-mail to S&V along with some pictures, and waited. On a Thursday night, while unpacking my new SVS cylinder subwoofer, I got a call from Rob Medich, a writer for S&V, who told me I'd been selected. Rob told me that S&V wanted to come to the house the following Monday to drop off a bunch of HomePlug equipment and take some pictures. I would then spend the week trying the equipment out, and then they would come back on Friday for a final photo shoot.

When I told my wife about the time schedule, she immediately reminded me that her one condition about entering the contest was that we had to get someone in to help clean the house. Well, let's just say that this was no small task in a house with two 2-year-olds and all their toys. We farmed the kids out to their grandparents and attacked the cleaning. After that, we ate out for every meal until Monday morning and lived in the house as if it were a museum ("Don't touch that; stop playing with your toys!").

Monday morning, I went to my job for a few hours, then returned home at 11 to meet the crew. When I pulled up to the house, there were five people on my lawn who looked like they had been dropped off by aliens: They were in a circle, all looking around, without a car in sight (they had taken a limo from New York City). It was pretty funny. Besides Rob were his editor, the art director, an assistant, and the photographer.

The next few hours were filled with the family opening boxes and looking surprised as hundreds of pictures were taken. The kids were pretty good at it, considering they had to stare at a box, look happy, and ignore the room full of strangers. After a few hours, we were done with the pictures, and I was left with a box full of equipment to test.

Whatever Werks

The first thing I worked on was installing the LukWerks security camera system software. (I'll spare you the details, since that is mostly covered in Home Sweet HomePlug.) What I quickly realized was that it would have been very nice if S&V had thrown in a new laptop to go with all this stuff (that's not too much to ask, is it??). The reason: I stopped working on our home computer a few years ago; all the computing I do is at work.

Well, when I fired that baby up, I had nothing but problems. It was slow as molasses, all these programs kept popping up, and then the thing would crash. So what should have taken me a few minutes to install took an hour and a half. I even took the LukWerks equipment to work and installed it on my computer there, where everything was up and running in 10 minutes.

The LukWerks start-up kit included one camera, the camera power supply, a signal receiver, and software. They also threw in an expansion pack that included the equipment for adding a second camera. Unfortunately, there seemed to be a problem with the second camera's power supply, so I was only able to get one camera working at a time. I spent the next two days moving the camera around to different rooms, testing for any signal problems and stuff. As I plugged the camera into different outlets of the house, the computer then had to find the signal from the camera and in some cases reinstall the camera on the computer. Sometimes I had to unplug the power supplies to reboot the camera; other times I would restart the computer itself. I have to attribute most of my problems to the computer. Eventually I was able to use the camera in each room, but sometimes it would take a while to set it up. (In real life, you would probably set each camera up in one location and leave it there, so you wouldn't have the problems I had when I was moving them around.)