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About NEPA309.COM

TRENDnet Cameras...
the cameras from the back end
  The concept for nepa309.com began germinating in my brain back in 2005. It was a snowy winter night, and I was working in Plains, PA. I very vividly remember looking up at the sky and thinking, Wow... I wonder what Mountain Top is like right now. I wonder how the roads are. I wonder if they've shut down Route 309 because of the snow. I wish I could just get a glimpse of the highway from my kitchen window right now...

  When I got back to my desk, I searched out webcams on Route 309 using Google, but the nearest camera I could find was in Philadelphia. It wasn't very helpful.

  Six months or so later, I was laid off from that job, with oodles of time on my hands. I began the project that eventually built damnage networks. I picked up on a couple of refurbished Compaq Deskpro EN's from TigerDirect, and began tinkering with Linux in the form (or flavor, if you prefer) of Fedora. After a lot of trial and error, I finally got it right, and the network came alive.

  I puttered around with it for a year or so, messing with different scripts and ideas using damnage.com, a domain I've owned since 1999.

  As I eluded to, I love working on computers. I put one together a while ago for my friend Chris's daughter. I gave her an old webcam I had to go with it. Christmas of 2006 rolls around, she got a new and better one, and gave me my old one back. I had a computer sitting on my kitchen table next to a window during this time, and when I got home I tossed the webcam on top of the monitor, and thought, Great... More computer junk I don't really need. What am I going to do with THIS now?

  I looked at the window, I looked at the computer, I looked at the webcam, I put it all together in my head, and what would become nepa309.com began.

  Web-wise, this all started on damnage.com using Windows 2000 and a free webcam server called Webcam 2000. There were two cheap webcams mounted in my kitchen window, one with a day time view, the other for night time images. The server produced still images only, but it was a workable solution. The machine ran through a wireless connection, and given what Windows 2000 is, could get finicky when it came to reliable up time. I bought the domain name and integrated it into the network's scheme of things, and I ran it for a year or so like this, then pretty much gave up on maintaining it properly.
damnage networks
damnage networks from the outside

  I'm very much a "set it and forget it" kind of person when it comes to this stuff, I guess.

  TRENDnet cameras have always interested me, and life had changed dramatically for me during the time I was putting all this together. I met Mallery, and she and I became virtually inseparable. Mallery is a wonderful woman, and one thing she loves to do is cook - and one thing she's always despised about my kitchen was the huge, obnoxious computer sitting on the table. I was getting sick of it myself, and I had other, more useful things I wanted to do with it. It was enough motivation to put together the domain as it is now. The wonderful thing about TRENDnet cameras are their onboard Debian web servers.

  Long story short, the computer that used to run Windows 2000 is now serving as another server on the network, Mallery has her kitchen table back, you can see the highway from another window in my apartment, and everybody's happy.

  I'm planning a lot of great things for this domain, but I'm taking it slowly. I'd like to see where it all goes before I start re-coding and re-tooling a bunch of bulky scripts that people may or may not get use out of. If there's something that you'd like to see nepa309.com do that it's not doing now, let me know...


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