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.
After listening to seven lectures from “The Conservative Tradition” I have a much better understanding of what a conservative is and how our present understanding of conservative philosophy developed. While in the first lecture, Prof Allit explained that those holding conservative philosophies hold different beliefs in different periods of history, I didn’t really understand this […] read more
This should perhaps be posted to the development side. But I put in a patio in the back yard today and wanted to share some of what I learned. Sub DrawVisio() Dim oVisio As New Visio.Application Dim oDoc As Visio.Document Dim oPage As Visio.Page Set oDoc = oVisio.Documents.Add("basic.vst") Set oPage = oDoc.Pages.Add 'Set oPage = […] read more
I often see parallels between interscholastic athletics and life – sometimes I win and sometimes I lose. And the losses are always more instructive than the wins (though the wins are more enjoyable.) Over the years I have won much – and lost much, but the basic love I have to compete has never changed. […] read more
Wir wohnen in einer Welt, die viele Religionen hat. Wir wohnen aber auch in einer Welt, die viele Kulturen hat. Natürlich gibt es viele andere Ansichten über die Beziehung zwischen Reli gion und Kultur. Sehr viele Leute denken, dass die Beziehung zwischen Religion und Kultur ganz ähnlich wie die Beziehung zwischen Kultur und Musik oder […] read more
In the political mire of our day, the word “truth” is slung around like a worn-out baseball. Every politician, religious leader, self-improvement author and educator seems to know what will solve all our problems. Truth is thrown at us from every direction. Why then does mankind face the same problems today that it has faced […] read more
Our world is large. Billions of others are living as you read these words. Each one of them, though from remarkably different backgrounds, is strangely similar. They all have hopes and dreams, fears and desires. They all live-and they all die. They all laugh-and they all suffer. Yet out of these experiences suffering is the […] read more
Some books I read are entertaining. Some books give me a new perspective on certain facets of the world. Some books give me the ability to brag to others that I read them. Open did all of this. (Except that bragging bit. By the way, did I mention I am reading Thomas Khun too?) In […] read more
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
Jon Krakauer uses 416 pages to make the audacious claim that he has found the Nietzschen Uebermensch in “Pat Tillman”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Tillman — and thus feeds the roaring literary fire of condemnation for the Bush administration in particular and religious conservatives in general. In a facile and sloppy argument that makes liberal use of argument by anecdote, […] 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