[LAU] Silence detection/automation

Hi - I recently found out about JACK through SilentJack no less and realize I may have found a good tool to do silence detection for my audio streams. I've got Jack setup and running along with JackMeter and SilentJack. This is running on an OpenSuse box (11.3) running Gnome and qJackCTL. I am running VLC to open my audio streams (mix of Real, Windows, MP3, Quicktime). Does anyone have any tutorials for automating Jack though? It seems cumbersome to have to recreate the various audio connections (say after rebooting). I don't see a way to statically assign output ports using VLC. Ideally, I'd like to automate as much as possible upon logging into the machine. Last question - Does anyone have any examples of scripts to run after SilentJack has detected silence? Obviously, I was thinking about an email alert. I wasn't sure about the syntax needed though. Thanks for any help or pointers. Tim