From Issue #2 , Page #82 | By Mindy Kauppinen

When it comes to solving tech problems, two minds are much better than one—especially when they live in the same house.

Smack dab in between Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, is a father-and-son high-tech tag team. Meet Rick (the father) and Dale (the son) Higgs. The Higgs guys are quite a pair.

Rick, a 43-year-old digital color copier technician, says he's always been mechanically inclined. Whether it was taking apart his mother's broken, discarded appliances or tinkering with a 1956 Seeburg jukebox he picked up for $10 when he was only 15, Rick has been fixing things since he was much younger than his own son is now. Mix Rick with one part technology and a hearty twist of Internet—shake well—and you have his son, Dale, a 17-year-old programmer and Web designer. Oh yeah—and he's a full-time student on the side.

Like Father, Like Son
Having lived with the powerline-based X10 and other home control technologies his entire life, it's no surprise that Dale took an early interest in all things electronic, and at age five took apart his Sesame Street Talk & Play to fix a jammed button.

"My father used to service VCRs and TVs from our home," recalls Dale. "I would literally stand right over him and watch him do his work." That explains how Dale adopted his father's interest in fixing things; or perhaps there's genetic code responsible for technical ability.

Friends as well as father and son, the two fall into an easy banter, complete with extremely friendly and good-humored competition. Dale is articulate and enthusiastic, with all the confidence but none of the cockiness often found in teenagers. A self-described computer junkie, who often pulls an eight-hour stretch in front of a monitor, Dale manages to find plenty of time to help his father with various projects around the house. In fact, the father-and-son team not only help each other, but also often pinch-hit for one another, with Dad towing the hardware line and son managing the software side.

"When I need his help, I ask him," explains Dale, who says he recently helped his father fix his home control system in exchange for his father's help fixing his car. "But when my Dad doesn't take things into his own hands, I do," he jokes, referring to the backyard greenhouse project Rick embarked upon by himself. After planning and starting the initial building phase, Rick realized there were a few serious design flaws, so he enlisted Dale's help. Dale spent four consecutive weekends building the greenhouse with his father. "I put my friends on hold to help out," he says.

Whiz Kid
While other nine-year-olds were out playing ball or making spaceships out of Lego blocks, Dale was busy playing with his first computer, custom-built for him by his father. A couple of years later he built his own computer. Then he got involved with software.

"I remember the summer he came home with a stack of books from the library—a stack so high, he could not see over it," recalls Rick. "Big, thick books on Java, HTML, Windows, Visual Basic and many more. I said to him, ‘You cannot possibly read all those, why would you check out so many books?' He replied, ‘I'm just going to reference them.'" And reference he did, all the way to teaching himself how to write software programs.

That was when Dale was 11 years old. He's now 17, and during the six years between then and now he hacked, instant-messaged and programmed his way to writing some software for HomeSeer Technologies, a company that creates home automation and control software. He landed this gig after a custom program he created for his father, WeatherPLUG, led to discussions with HomeSeer's chief technology officer and subsequently a personal request from the CTO for a program that would allow him to control his MP3 jukebox with HomeSeer.

The idea that led to WeatherPLUG was born when Rick wanted his "smart" home to be even smarter—he wanted the pool cleaner to automatically clean the pool immediately after a windy day, and for the automatic sprinkler system to know not to turn on after several inches of rain. To do all this, Rick needed to find a way for his home control program to be able to access real-time weather data from Web-based weather stations. He turned to Dale for help, and Dale created WeatherPLUG. WeatherPLUG allows the Higgses to remain cool and comfortable in their home on warm Texas days, by enabling the outdoor temperature to dictate the speed of the indoor ceiling fans. Dale's home control system checks the weather via the WeatherPLUG plug-in. On very hot days it turns the fans up to high speed, and on slightly cooler days it adjusts the fans to medium or low speed.

Making TechnologyReliable
With 385 devices (cameras, motion sensors, lights, appliances, TVs and virtual devices used to track the status of just about anything) plugged into his high-tech home, Rick needs to make sure all systems are "go" each and every day. For this he relies on what he describes as his most important tech gadget, the one thing he could not live without, the X10 PC Receiver (MR26a). It is a whole-house receiver that takes radio-frequency (RF) signals from all the various devices and relays them directly to the PC. "It's much faster and takes a lot of the load off the powerline carrier used by the X10 modules," explains Rick, "making the X10 stuff more reliable."

Dive-In Theater
Head to the Higgses' backyard for a wet-n-wild, action-packed adventure! This is where they installed a 12-by-eight-foot, 172-inch-diagonal movie screen right next to the swimming pool, creating what they fondly refer to as their "dive-in" theater. Rick simply hardwired the audio from his computer, so it runs through the sunroom on the far side of the house to four faux rock speakers—one at each corner of the pool—which are driven by an old stereo.

"I can switch audio inputs manually between the computer sound card, the computer TV tuner, or any TiVo/VCR/DVD device I want to add," explains Rick. "I use the X10 Entertainment Anywhere package (2.4-GHz transmitter and receiver) to transmit the video signal out to the projector, which I picked up on eBay."

There is no technology problem that these two can't handle. In fact, when they put their heads together, the Higgs boys are more than just a dynamic duo—they're technology titans.