Welcome to Stray Neutrino, my personal site for documenting my home automation setup. It’s primarily based upon Home Assistant with a big helping of Node-RED.

The origin of the domain Stray Neutrino dates back to the explosion of the Internet.  I worked for an ISP/telephone company who was trying to rapidly grow as people threw money at the internet.  While we started out running Red Hat Linux, we now had to be more “professional,” and that meant running Sun Servers.  So we begrudgingly started converting. We were also at the point in the management cycle where all the IT magazines said you needed to centralize all your resources instead of have them distributed.  This seemed to flip every year or so.  Anyway, after switching to virtually all Sun servers, mostly E420Rs and Netras (or “Nectars” as our CTO called them,) things started to crash.  And I don’t mean just  a process failing, but the servers, randomly, but mostly in the middle of the night, would grind to a halt with unrecoverable memory errors.  Our consultants, of which there was an endless supply of people who could barely spell IT, came to the only possible conclusion: Our data room was dirty with sub-atomic particles, specifically Neutrinos, which were flooding the room and causing the memory errors.  My suggestion was to ask CERN if maybe they wanted to swap locations, seeing as they were searching for neutrinos and we seemed to have a plethora, but the CTO didn’t take my suggestion seriously. I had really been looking forward to meeting Tim Berners-Lee, too.