Back home (whew!)

There is something very soothing about sleeping in your own bed, with your own pillow, after three weeks on 'vacation.'

It's also quite nice to choose clothes from the closet instead of a suitcase. I could go on, but you get the idea. I love to travel, but I also love to come home.

I'll talk about the trip & show pictures from the Billund Airport another time, but for now I need to tell you about Bluetooth.

The Martian gave me a new keyboard/mouse for Christmas, and it's all bluetooth. While I was in Denmark, I was using it on the Mac without most of its fun special features because it doesn't come with mac drivers. Now it's home & installed on the PC with full functionality, and wow! There are almost enough buttons on the mouse that I can do without a keyboard ;)

But the keyboard has its own functionality, including little preset buttons for common tasks and a nice zoom/volume control bar, and an LCD screen that shows what song is playing on iTunes, current time/temperature (how do it know?) and whether someone is trying to reach me via MSN Messenger.

Plus, now that I have 'Bluetooth' on the PC, I thought it would be fun to see what other gadgets I could attach to my already-too-big geek network. [Oh yes, the geek-meter is always pegged at this house. Where else can you find a house networked with three Windows PCs, a Mac, three printers, and the assorted stuff -- including the CNC sewing machine -- that attaches to each of these things.... and only one person living there?]

Your basic Bluetooth geek probably has a Bluetooth phone so they can sync their address books with their PC (?), maybe a Bluetooth headset so they can talk hands-free on their Bluetooth phone in their Bluetooth-enabled car (e.g., Mom's Lexus!); and maybe a Bluetooth handheld thingie to sync whatever one puts on such a device.

An Internet search turns up ever more entertaining things, however. For example, Toshiba expands the Bluetooth geekdom into the home with a Bluetooth microwave oven, refrigerator and washer/dryer. Yes, really!

A geek like me can appreciate the concept of syncing my grocery shopping list from the empty fridge to the PC or a PDA to carry to the store. But the microwave and washer/dryer?

"OK, I'm leaving work now, so start cooking that frozen food I left in the microwave all day"? I don't think so. Now, if the microwave can talk to the fridge & automatically grab the food out of the freezer, we might be talking about a useful device.

And unless the washing machine can flip clothes from washer to dryer and then fold them & pick up another load, I don't see the point of that one, either.

Anyway, I'm having a great time with this new toy and getting used to all the fun new buttons on the new mouse. And now I have a spare keyboard, which means (of course) that I have to buy another PC, right? hehehehehehe