Shouting Into Space

I was in Draeger's (an upscale supermarket) in early January and I ran across this little gem. It's about the size of a golf ball, sitting on a bed of dry rice. It looks like a dried up piece of poop and weighs barely anything (well about 1.25 ounces really). There were only a few of them and after looking at it for a while, I realized: "It's a white truffle!"

I'd never seen a real truffle before and I wasn't entirely sure that's what I'd found so I decided to investigate further. I turned over the nondescript clear plastic box to reveal the price tag...

My Treo 650 camera didn't take a really good close-up picture considering I was shaking in fear that I'd be in trouble for even touching the thing. So, if you can't read the price, it says: $272.00. Yes, two-hundred-seventy-two US dollars.

Truffles are sold by weight and at about 1.25 ounces that's a mere $3400.00 a pound. The produce clerk next to me proclaimed: "Oh, they've gone down in price considerably! They were over $4200.00 a pound before Christmas.

I tried to wipe my fingerprints from the box and get out of produce area as fast as I could. Some day I'll buy one just to say I did.

I just finished outfitting my apartment (yes - apartment, not house) with X-10 lighting. I use a combination of X-10 lamp modules and X-10 switches. It's really easy to swap out the regular light switches in an apartment for X-10 ones - I've done it in two apartments already.

Anyway, I just finished but I kept forgetting what buttons do what on my PalmPad Remote Control. I wanted to write them in on the little paper insert but I always feel that looks so cheesy. So I searched around the internet for a while looking for a template of the insert so I could print it out and make it look a little better. I never did find one.

Not to be beat, I decided to create my own. I also decided to make it available to everyone else looking for one too. So here is my X-10 PalmPad Remote Control insert card. It is a multi-layer Photoshop file created at 300dpi (so it looks nice printed out). Each line of text is it's own layer so it's pretty easy to edit the lines to your system's devices. It's set up so that buttons 1-8 and 9-16 are all on a single side since it's easy to use one remote for all 16 addresses. The little circle at the bottom is easily cutout using an exacto knife to cut it into pie pieces and the cut out the pieces.

Hope it helps you. Happy X-10 remoting!