The device gives you real time feed back on energy consumption.  With this information it helps you manage your energy consumption.  My energy bill can get pretty high, it was $400 last summer, so I decided I needed to do something.  The device was $140 off their web site.  I ordered it and here is what I got:

* The internal unit
* The external transmitter
* The inductive couplers (clamp looking things)
* Instruction book
* Other stuff I don’t care about

I read though the booklet before the install.  I didn’t think I needed an electrician to do the install and I didn’t want to spend the money.   It actually wasn’t that bad.  I shut off my external circuit breaker and took the cover off.

I didn’t have room to hook up the couplers after the meter so I hooked them up before.  I may get grief about this from Edison, we will see.   I then hooked the neutral up to the grounding bar.  The hot end I put with another wire on a breaker.  A better picture of the breaker hookup is here:

After I turned the power on the LED on the transmitter started flashing.  I noted the transmitters house code and went inside.   I then plugged in the unit set the house code and it’s working fine.

I am consuming .38KW right now.  I need to do more setup and talk about my observations using it but that’s another blog post.

The launch was fun but the 4 hour drive back to the hotel was a killer.

• Samsung makes a good looking LCD. The 800×600 looks good on an 8inch LCD.
• Auto on/off times
• The time is auto set off the internet.
• Has a bunch of features like sound which I don’t care about now but might later.
• It works great and my parents love it.
• No monthly fee for service.
• Worked easily with a WAP protected router.

Cons:

• A motion sensor of some type would be nice.
• The frame border is a little glossy for my taste.
• The right/left navigation buttons are backwards but they are only used in setup.
• Don’t expect your parents to be able to set it up. It wasn’t intuitive and I actually know computers.
• I wouldn’t be offended if it were less expensive.

I decided to go with a third party RSS feed provider, Frame Channel (http://www.framechannel.com/),

They specialize in providing feeds to internet picture frames.
Pros:

• Easy to work with web interface
• Auto resizes picture you upload
• Has a email address attached to the account so you can send email with a picture attached and it will show it.
• The email have to come from approve sources. (I was worried about porn spam, that would have been awkward.)
• The have lots of channels like weather, sports, bible quotes, trivial and so on.

Cons:

• Their channels have a small ad strip on them. It’s not hideous but well close. I only left the weather and bible quotes on for my parents because they like those the most.

They’ve only had it one week but they are VERY happy with it. We were out on the lake on their boat and I snapped a shot of my boys with the iphone and mailed it to the picture frames address. When we got back to their house an hour later we saw the picture on the frame. It actually look pretty good for a camera phone photo.

If you want your own number click on the image. I am using virtualbox to run ubuntu under XP. I just don’t like developing under XP. I do all my pythoscope work there.

Here is the logo we had a Disney artist draw for it.

It’s of Michal using pythoscope on a legacy python. 

Last week we hit a milestone.   We released 0.3 that includes dynamic as well as static analysis of the code before creating unit tests.  Michal presented pythoscope to the SoCal Python Interest Group that I hosted at Disney.  To thank him Disney provided a cake with the pythoscope logo for dessert.

• Two able body assistants
• Chauvet B-550 Bubble King
• Generic Bubble solution (for bubble machine)
• Smoke machine
• Bubble wand
• Gazillion Bubble Solution (for big bubbles)

Here are my partners in crime.Our first test we tried to make smoke in bubbles with Dry Ice. It didn’t turn out very good. The smoke from Dry Ice dissipated too quickly. It was then we thought of trying the smoke machine. After I borrowed the smoke machine from Bruce I tried it out in my house. Sure enough my smoke detector works. No more testing inside. Hence you see our outdoor setup.I started testing by making sure the Bubble King would work with the new cheap bubble solution I am trying.It works but the bubbles are a little smaller than the last solution I tried. The video is of the smoke machine blowing into the bubble machine to make smoke bubbles.[See post to watch QuickTime movie]Later I tried to make large bubble with small bubbles inside them. Here is a picture of that.I then went on to try to feed the smoke though the bubble machine and make a large smoke bubble with bubbles inside of it.The large smoke bubbles are cool because when they pop you are left in a large cloud of smoke. As show by Jordan from next door. The smoke is vanilla scented so it’s not a bad thing to be in a cloud of it.I need to clean up how I am doing video links on the blog but all in all I am happy with the bubble experiment.

This picture is him sitting at the signing table after his talk.

He has an amazing amount of energy and makes fun of how popular he has become. He thought all the movies that people are making about the character he created are great. Basically a bunch of talented people make cool movies and he get credit and gets a cameo in the movie. He said it’s a lot of fun to go on set and be treated like a star.

I took the day off Tuesday and drove down to San Diego to see the exhibits at Siggraph 2007. It wasn’t as big as it has been in the past but still a decent size. The Disney Animation booth was very well done with a few demo stations out front so the people staffing the booth could show off the art and technology of Meet the Robinsons. They also had a small 3D theater in the booth to show off the nice job the MTR team did on the 3D look.

Laika had a nice booth there and I talked with them for a while. Coraline project looks good. I talked to Michael Kuehn and he said the studio just bought 30 aches to build on. We talked for while and he is really loving Portland. His house has a river on one side and a vineyard on the other. He said the quality of life was though the roof.

I also went though the Emerging Technologies area. The two high points for me were seeing the a water fountain that you could play like a piano. The neat thing is that it’s actually in production and they are selling it to water parks. The company is Funtain. Sure I want one for my backyard but they are not cheap. The guys said about the cost of a nice piano.

The other thing of note was the OLPC or I guess it’s called the XO now. Very little computer. I did stress little? Check out my hand next to the keyboard. I know it’s for kids but I thought that i might be able to use it too. The keys were soo close together it was very hard to type. Still though if they made it available I would buy one from my son.