Bit by bit, I am turning my house into a fully-automated robot I can live inside. It’s sort of like how I planned to live inside Optimus Prime when I grew up, which didn’t happen for a variety of reasons (his insistence upon not being real chief among them). Still, as technology creeps ever closer to sentience, I find I am slowly able to outfit my place in gadgets I can control remotely for fun (mine) and profit (theirs). Sure, I can just turn the lights on manually, but this is the future: I have no time to do things analoggally. I demand an app to do everything; from turning on my fan at night to reminding me to wear a jacket when it’s balls-ass cold (hint: this is Vancouver; it never gets balls-ass cold). TECHNOLOGY! It’s making me lazier than ever!

Last week during my rage-spree I bought a Belkin WeMo switch and motion sensor. I have the switch attached to the fan in the bedroom, and with the IFTTT app it turns off at 1:30 am and back on again at 8 – just enough for me to fall asleep in breezy comfort, but not make it hard to get out of bed in the morning because I’m shivering under the covers/a layer of cats. This is fantastic, and I am very pleased with the setup.

I’m less certain about the motion sensor, though: I don’t know what to use it for. At the moment, I have it set up to send me an intruder alert if there is more than 30 seconds of activity by the kitchen counter between the hours of 10am and 5pm Monday to Friday, but it seems there should be way cooler things to do with it. When the days get stupid short, I’ll set up script to turn the lights on when I get home, but I don’t need that functionality right now on account of all the daylight ever. So, what should I do? I feel as though I should buy some sort of wacky machine that turns on when motion is detected. Maybe something with smoke and lasers. The cats/home invaders would probably enjoy a random light show.

More technology, please. I want my life to be needlessly (but awesomely) complicated!