2003 Santa Emails
Here is a FEW of the various Emails Santa gets from folks who enjoy his
christmas lights and his Christmas Webcam.
Please be sure to look in the Halloween & Christmas Lights/Webcam FAQ which should answer most questions. If you still have a
question, or just want to Email Santa with an "atta-boy", then
click here. Note that Santa does NOT like
Email spammers, and you will get NO TOYS if you spam him, but he does
respond to most "reasonable" questions.
Date: Wed Dec 3, 2003 6:12 pm
From mjmcdo@SOME.edu
Subject: electrical
hey and nice......
creative....
noticed sensors...read thru the list....shows house
electrical load ....noticed voltage....saw the value spike as
i shut off the two big strings...watch your home electronic
items....which are very suseptible to voltage spikes AND sags
(most damaging)...maybe have staging relays or heavy duty
dimmers to ramp loads up and down partially till full on or
full off....
ok catch ya later...
Good points - somewhere in the FAQ's I think I comment about how if you
actually hook a voltmeter up to your house power, you'll be surprised how
much it swings; just think what it did last year when I had 22,000 Xmas
lights - i.e. 80 amps! ;-)
I actually have my computer stuff on a UPS ... so that should dampen these out.
Thanx for the Email to Santa ... and happy light changing.
Date: Wed Dec 3, 2003 6:25 pm
From: fridayfishwrap.com - a decent Blog
Subject: Fantastic!
I hope your neighbors are of the forgiving sort. Cheers - MJ
I'm fortunate that I have pretty good neighbors - they think my lights
are a hoot.
Thanx for the Email to Santa.
Date: Fri Dec 12, 2003 4:24 pm
From: DanniR
Subject: The line
Hello Santa, I can't bear staring at the 2003 Christmas light pic
any longer. Will you please tell me where the line is????
Santa appreciates your efforts - your was the best note/request/plea
asked where the heck the merged/composite picture was joined.
so Santa gave you credit on the main christmas decorations page
where he has put a pointer showing where the pictures were merged.
Happy Holidays and thanx for the Email to Santa.
Date: Tue Dec 16, 2003 8:25 am
From: PatrickO
Subject: Hi
Dear Santa, My name is Patrick Olinger and I'm 22 years old and I want
Ashley Lyn Cafagna-Tesoro Lindsey Mckeon and Paris Hilton for
Christmas thanks. Sincerely, PMEO2@aol.com Patrick Olinger
Sorry ... Santa can't help you with those items! ;-)
Date: Sun Dec 21, 2003 12:12am
From: BenoitL
Subject: The lights
Hi,
I don't know if I send this email to the good mail account..
You're saying that the electricity counter is spinning really fast and that
you wife can't use the air dryer..
Why don't you try with leds instead of christmas lights ? I know, the
price may be bigger to buy them but on the other side, electricity bills will
be reduced.. Also, you won't have to replace 'burnt bulbs' too often, leds
life is superior to bulbs.
Thanks and good luck with your projects and 2004 year !
LED's are definately a technology I'd like to look at.
However, I typically buy my lights a week or two after
the holidays's when they are 50/75/90% off ... and LED's
are fairly recent, so I don't see the HUGE deals that I
have gotten on "regular" lights.
Thanx for the Email to Santa and Happy Holidays.
Date: Sun Dec 21, 2003 12:17am
From: Shane
Subject: Questions/Comments
First I would like to say I saw this from Slashdot.org.
Second, I would like to say this is about the coolest thing I have ever
seen with xmas and the web mixed.
I have spent almost an hour on your site, and its just pretty cool what
you have done and are still doing here.
I was hoping I could get some info from you about some of this stuff.
I noticed you said you are using X10 sensors for recording the
tempature, and turning on and off the lights.
I looked around real fast (did not spend too much time looking) for
somethings that would do this, but could not find anything (something
that will post info on the web with current weather recordings/etc.)
So my main question is where did you get and how did you do.
I would be interested in doing something similar, but for personal or
even for my little town (I live in iowa, population of 2000 in my town)
And it would be pretty cool, not to mention good for my network
administration degree I am working on, it could pass for public hours :D:D
Anyways, I just wanted to drop a line, I know you are probly getting
about a billion emails and stuff working on this now being slashdotted.
But if you get some time, I would just like to see how you do it, and
what software you use, and how you wired everything, to me, its fasniating.
Thanks for the time
And the light show :D
Most of the stuff is fairly off-the-shelf X10 stuff ... for instance,
it is regular old appliance modules and "outlet" modules that control
the lights. Some of the stuff is a bit more exotic that I can't talk a
lot about, but if you look at say, a Smarthome catalog, everything shown
can be done using stuff available there.
The software is Perl/CGI running on Apache/RedHat Linux (sorry, no plans
to publish it at this time) ... and when things calm down, I'll try to
add some stuff to the FAQ to answer this question and others that poured
in today.
Happy Holidays and thanx for the Email to Santa.
Date: Sun Dec 21, 2003 12:20am
From: SullivanF
Subject: Santa
Dear Santa,
I want 1.000000.000 million.
Santa will think about your request for 1,000,000 Xmas lights.
However, that would require on the order of 4,000 AMPS of power;
and therefore a major upgrade to my electrical feed - would you
be willing to pay the electric bill?!? ;-)
Date: Sun Dec 21, 2003 12:20am
From: RayL
Subject: web pan/tilt control?
Hi,
awesome site!
Quick question - how are you controlling the pan tilt control from the
web? I've been hoping to do a similar thing (aquariums), but was waiting
until someone figured out how to do the pan tilt control in a more
generally controlled fashion - it looks like you have done it. Would you
mind sharing?
Thanx for the compliment - the site held up pretty well.
Good question about the pan/tilt - I have a friend who
works for a major digital imaging company that has helped
me out with some stuff, so I can't talk a lot about it;
and I'm sorry I don't have a lot of experience with the
commercial webcam offerings from the various X10 vendors;
but you might try chatting with them.
Happy Holidays and thanx for your Email to Santa.
Date: Sun Dec 21, 2003 12:25am
From: ColinK
Subject: X10 and diode lights
Nice site, Santa!
Any suggestions for using X10 hardware with diode based Christmas lights
or ideas on where I can look? They cost more than twice as much but
use only 5% of the electricity. I tried hooking them up to a standard
X10 lamp module and they turn on okay, but don't turn off all the way.
Santa appreciates the compliment on his site.
LED's are an interesting technology and something I'd
be interested in ... but it is fairly new/expensive ...
and I typicaly buy my lights at 50/75/90% off at the
after-Xmas sales ... so I haven't seen great deals on 'em.
Interesting comment on the inability of lamp modules to
turn 'em on all the way - I don't have any LED's, so I'm
going to have to look out for this. BTW, I have found the
appliance modules seem to work more reliably than the lamp
modules ... and for this application, I have no need for the
dimming capability - i.e. just ON & OFF ... which is done
mechanically ... you oughts hear 'em CLICK-CLICK-CLICK when
the lights are going wild! ;-)
Happy Holidays and thanx for your Email to Santa.
Date: Sun Dec 21, 2003 12:27am
From: JohnK
Subject: suggestion for catacombs
Something I'm thinking of doing in my attic crawl space to create
storage (without have to crawl around in it!) is to put some tracks
(2x4) and storage crates on wheels. I've seen it done in under floor
storage before, and thought it might be nifty. In your case, perhaps two
circles of tracks to hold a bunch o boxes of christmas lights. Just push
em around the track to move to different boxes.
It's an idea.
Congrats on the newly updated web cam stuff. Good luck on your projects.
Interesting idea and one I had not thought of. I doubt I will
get that fancy with my crawl space (I still need to finish it! ;-),
but I appreciate the suggestion.
Thanx for the kudo's and Happy Holidays,
Santa