Oh no, my holiday light won't light!

Ah the mysteries of X10! Last week my wife and I began putting up the holiday lights round the house. No, I have nothing as fancy as this. That would drive me nuts! ;-) Though it's pretty cool and yes it's real (the compression used produces the artifacts)! And as luck would have it I began to have problems with the X10. First the normal lights would work sometimes but the holiday lights wouldn't work at all. I had a nice mini-console so I gave that to my wife to use if the X10 failed. Well last night I came home late from work and asked my wife if the X10 came on by itself and she said it had. A flicker of hope that the X10 problem had gone away had sprung up in me but was soon dashed as the holiday lights didn't turn off at the appropriate time. I began to analyze the problem to figure out what was different. Well the first thing I remembered was that I wasn't there. And that I had my new laptop with me then but had it plugged in later that night. I did some tests this morning and found that my Insteon controller (sending X10 not Insteon commands) worked fine when the laptop was not on and failed to turn on the holiday lights when the laptop was plugged in. So I'll need to get my hands on a filter to plug my laptop into and all will be well again. I really wish I had time to add Insteon commands to Misterhouse, but that will have to wait a few more months.