In a cabinet in a corner of our basement sits a computer hosting our intranet. It’s running Windows XP and IIS 6. You might ask, what use could a family of four possibly have with its own intranet? Good question. And really, I’ve had to grasp at straws to come up with answers.

I could say it provides a quick way to check the weather or that it serves as a convenient repository for a page of frequently accessed links, but so do a hundred other sites. Let’s face it, for guys like me who can’t dribble a basketball, managing a home network and web earns a bit of geek street cred. I’m not saying my sense of manhood is tied to it, but, well … what if it is?!?

Aside from the aforementioned page of links, the intranet also hosts a few other internal applications like our NETFLIX Bouncer. Other features of the home page include a frame that displays current weather conditions locally and from points around the country where friends and family reside. It’s updated hourly from parsed XML feeds grabbed from NOAA. The data originates in METAR reports submitted by weather stations at airports across the nation. I’m afraid I can’t take credit for the slick weather icons. They were created by a fellow named Arlo Rose, and I … um … borrowed them from an early version of a program of his, Konfabulator, a later incarnation of which was snapped up by Yahoo! I suppose I’ll be in hot water as soon as Mr. Rose or a Yahoo! executive sees the screenshots.

The intranet home page also links to our contact manager, FullContact, and it nags us continually about upcoming birthdays and anniversaries.

Aficionados of British TV comedies may notice a theme in our server-naming scheme.