Thanks for taking the time to write that, you've saved me a huge headache.
UPDATE: I've never worked with threads in perl, could you point me towards some resources dealing with that?
UPDATE UPDATE: Reading Camel Book chapter now, nevermind. Thanks again!
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Okay, I'd really appreciate a walkthrough of how this works, and how you can prevent it from "missing" data. If I bump the timer up to 1 second it jumps over big swaths of numbers.