Personal Projects & Interests is my sandbox for life outside the office—where spreadsheets, sensors, and code tackle real-world chores and passions. Here you’ll see data models guiding gear buys, DIY automations that make the house (and gate) smarter, endurance training logged like an experiment, and reflections that tie it all together.
Under Construction Chrissy and I listen to a lot of audio books and when we’re not doing that we like to have classical background piano music playing. Lately, we’ve been amazed by how nice it is to have our Bose wave radio playing soft and quiet Christian music using Pandora which is being streamed from […] read more
First I installed tim@Lincoln:~$ sudo apt-get install envyng-qt with all its crazy dependencies. Then I ran lspci | grep VGA to find my video driver. 00:0a.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200] (rev a1) With envyng, I took their recommendation of: 173.14.12-0ubuntu5.1 and installed, restarted. On restart I had access to the […] read more
In order to do more workouts at home, I decided to put a chin-up bar in my basement. I looked around at amazon and saw three real options: over the door mount, on the ceiling mount or wall mount. Three examples shown below: Chin-up bar examples Wall mount Wall Mount Ceiling Mount In a pull-up […] read more
The first thing we considered, was the different functions we wanted out of our lighting and how different layers combine in an overall lighting plan. First, we wanted general downlighting with the flexibility to be in full-clean/bible study/game mode (I want to see everything in the room), but also wanted a dimmer discussion mode and […] read more
From the initial guidebook from Patrick Allitt’s course: Conservatism is, above all, an attitude about the world, which sees the past as the best guide for navigating our way into the future. It assumes that all the really important questions confronting humanity have already been answered, and that it is generally safest to stick to […] read more
Played around today with digital drawing. I used five minutes to draw my hand. Lauren (age 4) drew a ‘happy person’. Then she drew a picture of her lifting weights. I drew a picture of ellie (this took about 40 minutes). read more
what is the fundamental anchor which helps us get up the mountain? read more
Well, we didn’t expect this to happen today (Chrissy was scheduled to be induced tomorrow), but we are proud to announce the birth of our baby boy. He was born this morning at 5:15 weighing 8 lb 10 oz. Some initial pictures below, if the link below doesn’t work, click the direct link here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23298466@N06/ […] read more
As you can see here, the room that David was going to move into had significant problems. There is no insulation inside our brick and block constructed walls, and there’s a thin layer of plaster on the surface that causes some excessive flaking when a nail pops out. When we tried to paint David’s room, […] read more
My Christian home provided a very fertile ground for my Christian life. I accepted Christ at vacation Bible school when I was eight years old and prayed nightly thereafter with my loving family. I distinctly remember telling my grandfather at an early age that I wanted to be a pastor when I grew up. And […] read more