Hello, I am your host Dover Williams and I’d like to tell you a little bit about myself. I took my first programming class as a junior in high school and built my first computer (a Timex Sinclair clone) from a kit shortly after. In the 1980s I started working as Typographer where I was able to start developing my programming skills by creating powerful macros to streamline publishing functions. In the 1990s I begin working with multimedia authoring tools which allowed me to further develop my skills while I was pursuing an AAS degree in computer programming.
I have been developing software professionally for over twenty years. Most of that time I was developing custom applications to support the production computer based training for a company working under a contract with the United States Air Force. At the end of 2016 the Air Force took maintenance of the courseware that I had been working on in-house and our contract was not renewed. This change has afforded me an opportunity to try my hand at bringing to life some projects that I have long thought about.
I have always been a huge fan of technology, and as a devoted follower of science fiction, I have been frustrated by the slow pace of progress towards the future that I was promised in the pages of Popular Science and shown when visiting Tomorrowland at Walt Disney World in Florida.
Much of this future is out of my reach because it requires businesses and governments to cooperate on infrastructure and spending. In the current environment where the status quo is favored by special interests with deep pockets, progress will remain unnecessarily slow.
One area that is starting to move quite rapidly is “Home Automation”, or the so called “Smarthome”. I’ve always wanted to live in a home like that of the “The Jetsons”.
This type of automation has been available for a while for those with the money to pay for an expensive custom installation. But recently the technology for a relatively inexpensive do-it-yourself systems has become available. This technology is not particularly complicated, but is often poorly documented. My first project is site where I plan to use my experience in computer based training to develop step-by-step tutorials on implementing your own smarthome. As I bring this project online, I will be posting updates in the blog, so I hope you will follow along.