Mark J Cox blog/20040906151012.html

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06 Sep 2004: Chocolate Alarm

I'm standing in the middle of Target when my phone vibrates to tell me there is an incoming SMS message, the message is from my home automation system and tells me that the alarm has been triggered. Then a second text to show it's a confirmed alarm. There's really not much I can do about it being a few thousand miles from home apart from try calling my partner or the neighbours. If I was in the UK I'd be able to bring up a little picture from the house cameras to see what was going on, but GPRS wasn't enabled for whatever roaming partner we have in New Hampshire. Anyway it turns out my partner had triggered it without noticing and she had left the house. The mobile conversation went along the lines of "oops - how do you cancel this thing?" "Sorry, Can't hear you, all the sirens in the background" "What?" "Hello?" "helloooo?" Anyway I'd forgotten that even after turning it off you had to reset the alarm to clear the events, and until then the HA system continued to shreak, wail, and flash the lights, probably to the delight of everyone in the chocolate isle of Target.

Mapopolis is working really well once you get used to it, it's managed to get me out of a number of sticky situations and it doesn't endlessly complain like TomTom if I decide to take an alternative route, it just makes a happy "ching" sound and gets on with rerouting you.

Created: 06 Sep 2004
Tagged as: alarm, ha

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Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

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