Welcome Festivus!!!!

It's December 23rd. The Day of Festivus!!! Festivus, the Latin world for "festive." The December 23 observance calls for little more than the erection of an aluminum pole, the airing of grievances and the demonstration of feats of strength -- which preferably culminate in wrestling down to the ground and pinning the head of the household.

What a wonderful Holiday. Happy Festivus everyone!!!

The Computer Controls The Xmas Lights

The Christmas tree and lights have been up for a while now but for some reason I couldn't get my home automation software to control them. In years past this has been a pretty simple part of the Christmas preparations. This year it just didn't work. I control the Christmas lighting using the popular X10 automation hardware and some customized software. It's all available off the shelf at many electronics stores like Radio Shack and Frys.

X10 works by sending signals over your household electrical wiring to special modules. Simply plug what you want controlled into a module, then plug the module into any wall outlet. It sounds pretty simple and most of the time it is. X10 signal can however, be confused by some other electrical devices through out the house (motors, laptop power supplies etc...). So the introduction of something "new" (plugging in a new toy) could disrupt the X10 signals.

Back to this year's problem. It seems that sometime during the past year something new was plugged in, somewhere in the house, and it affected my seasonal lighting. After several days and some strong language I finally gave up trying to control the lights using my standard automation PC. I installed a separate automation platform using a different automation package on another PC in the house. Bingo!!! the lights are worked!!!

So for the Holidays, I am running separate automation PC's. No more going outside in the cold to plug/unplug the Christmas lights. No more fumbling with the cord behind the Christmas tree. The computer now controlls the Christmas lights......

All Quiet, PC Wise That Is.....

I'm not sure what has been happening here but over the past couple of months, one by one 3 PC's started to become louder and louder. Either their disk drives or fans were running almost constantly, even if nobody was using the PC. In each case I scanned for malware and viruses and came up with nothing. In each case I formatted the hard drives and re-installed the operating system and bingo, no more noise.

I don't know if these machines were infected with a rootkit type of bug (many are undetectable by virus scanners) or what exactly the problem was. All I know is a complete rebuilding solved the problem.

I also replaced the McAfee virus scanner on each machine with a different product. Maybe that will keep things quiet now.

Help! Auto PT Want's My Job

The management at the Planet Texas Studio want's to replace me with Auto PT to trim costs. This is terrible and must be stopped. Check out Auto PT on the Planet Texas website HERE.

Let management know you're against this evil plan. Send them an email to Studio@planettexas.net to let them know how you feel.

PT

PT's Joins Facebook

Well I finally did it. I signed up for Facebook. Not sure why I needed too, probably the last person on the planet to do this. So far I'm waiting on some friends to accept the invites I have sent them and I'm figuring out how to navigate around the site. More updates to follow....

http://facebook.com/planet.texas

Mobilize Your Website

wow, today I installed a plugin from www.osmobi.com that formats my web content so it works on a smartphone. This is one of those things I didn't even know I needed until I used it. Now I can easily browse my website while on the go. The plugin works with Joomla and Drupal powered websites and it was installed and configured in about 5 minutes. Not bad.

The cool part about this pluging is I didn't have to make any changes to the website. osmobi includes a template that does all the work.

Did I mention this is all free!!! Free is good.

Check out www.planettexas.net mobile

Time to update the site

The www.planettexas.net site has remained unchanged for a while now (the current platform is joomla 1.0) it's time to upgrade.
I will be performing a clean slate install of the server OS as well as the webserver platform.
this should only take a day or so (fingers crossed).
I will post the outage date as soon as I can.

I'm kind of excited about this.

Fearcasting vs. Forecasting Update

Well it seems the National Weather Service was correct. No snow in Dallas today. Up to last night local TV stations were still banging their drum talking about snow. It's all about ratings folks and Fearcasting draws people in.

Fearcasting

Here in North Texas we are having our first brush with winter. Yesterday we even had an unexpected dusting of snow. Checking the official NOAA forecast it looked like another slight (30%) chance for snow later in the week. The local TV stations put the chance for snow at 50%. Is this just Fearcasting? Could the local media outlets make these statements just to pull in more advertising revenue?
This morning NOAA has dropped the chance of snow to 20% but the local weather outlets are still banging their drums trying to pull in viewers with their tales of up coming snow.
This begs the question, what else is hyped in the media for the sake of bigger profits? The old thought of "don't believe everything you hear" comes to mind.
Let's. see how this turns out later this week.