World Vision and the Culture Wars

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I, for one, am tired of arguing. I’m tired of trying to defend evangelicalism when its leaders behave indefensibly. Is there a problem with hypocrisy in the modern church? Yes, just as there was in the ancient, medieval and renaissance churches. Fortunately, Christian doctrine and practice accounts for the fact that all of the churches … Read more

Analysis of The Boohers’ Energy Usage

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Using my Vera Lite and Z-wave home energy monitor I was able to record a week’s worth of electricity consumption at 30 second intervals. I was surprised how hard it was to use the data to do anything, but amazed with how my behavior changed when I knew our household consumption was being tracked. Again, if you want to improve something, I feel it needs a tracking system. Electricity usage is a nice case study for this, because it has a clean metric (wattage) over a time series.

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Home Energy Usage

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I decided to look at my home energy usage. Below are notes on how I’m approaching it. I wish I could get insight from the MIOS graphing plugin, but it is pretty basic and can’t throw out outliers and has terrible zoom capability. I also never figured out how to set the y-axis. In order … Read more

OFX for USAA via Ruby

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My wife and I have been through roughly 10-15 different budget/financial tracking systems. We started with every penny in MS Money, used several different spreadsheets, spent several years in Mint and have pretty much dropped all of that for a top-down strategy that has us budgeting savings, non-discretionary spending, and a rainy day buffer and … Read more

MiCasa Verde (MiOS) DataMine Logging

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For my home automation goals, I chose MiCasaVerde VeraLite due to my friend’s recommendation. The VeraLite is a small linux controller that runs the MIDIbox Operating System MiOS and gives a homeowner the ability to easily control lights, security cameras, door locks, alarm systems, and even the thermostat, among many other home systems. For example, … Read more

Review: Lone Survivor Movie

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Today, I watched the Lone Survivor with two friends and was once again reminded of the brevity of life, the importance of principle and the value of friendship. I found the movie to be a masterful combination of plot, emphasis and character development. It is tough to capture the breadth emotions present in Marcus Luttrell’s detailed book in two hours, but the movie does capture the heartbreak, the passion, the sacrifice of modern warfare — all juxtaposed with the rapid transition from the safety, comfort and contentedness of modern forward bases. Further contrast comes from American optimism (“Good things happen to good people, right?”) with middle-eastern determinism, but nothing hits you harder than the fierce determination of the seals contrasted with our comfortable armchair warrior lives.

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WordPress Automatic Updates

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If you want to get WordPress to accept automatic updates and are running your own server, you want the flexibility to not go through these steps every time an update arrives. You also want good security. I had to do this recently on several sites and thought I would share my notes.

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