Spent a little time with my Arduino and a breadboard last night testing the zero cross detection circuit.  I was a little skeptical as to whether this would work, even though I found out about it through an Atmel datasheet.  However, it works as advertised.  I do not have a local source to acquire a the necessary triac from, so I will have to wait till it shows up from Mouser before I can test the output side of the circuit.  That should give me time to get started on writing the code.  Once I have some code going to work with, I should be able to do some testing with a logic analyzer to verify that the triac trigger signal is happening when it is supposed to in relation to the AC phase.

**********WARNING*************

Also, as mentioned before, if you are not familiar and/or comfortable working with live household current, DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS PROJECT