Elijah just rolled past 32 months a week or two ago. This kid is a bundle of energy! We took him to the park the other day to let him blow off some steam and I snapped a few photos.
Play Table
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed Elijah playing on his own a lot more than he did before. The coffee table is one of his favorite play spots right now. I want to support these activities, but it’s hard to watch him smashing his cars around on the table. I’ve put plenty of my own scratches into the table, but if he keeps at this for a couple months, we’re going to have sawdust on top. I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to build him some sort of bigger play table anyway, and one day it dawned on me that I could solve both problems with one project.
I had a scrap piece of plywood that was big enough to cover the coffee table so I cut it to about the same size and trimmed it with some simple 1×4 pine. Using pine takes a little extra time because it pays to fill all the knots with wood filler, but it’s so cheap that it’s worth it for a project like this.
It only took a night or two to complete the build and then the painting began. Thankfully we had a semi-sunny weekend so I set up the saw horses in the driveway and started painting. I covered everything with a coat of Kilz primer. The rim was painted white and then, after taping, the inside was painted with four or five coats of green. I did all of it with spray paint and kept it smooth with some fine sanding every once in a while. I finished it off with a few coats of spray lacquer.
I had thought about painting a road onto the board and even laser cut some paper to use as a stencil. I didn’t use them though because I wasn’t confident that I could get a clean enough line using the templates.
The end product works perfectly. We already had some soft foam around the edges of the table. This slides over the top of that foam so nothing is touching the actual wood of the table.
Elijah spent a lot of time playing at that table the first day. I spent less than $4 on the project (not including leftover spray paint and lacquer) and used up some scraps. He can beat this up all he wants, and it’s really nice to be able to spread out his Legos without watching them spill off the edge of the table.
Accountability
Changing a bad habit on your own is tough. Lots of rehab programs use the concept of an “accountability partner.” You are in it together with someone else and you confide in each other about how it’s going. Whether you do it in person or just tweet it every day online, simply knowing that you have to check in with somebody else can be a big motivation.
Tyla and I have both been trying unsuccessfully to shed a few pounds so I geeked it up and used the accountability concept. Our digital scale logs our weight every morning. I grab that data and put it in my own database. Then I made a very quick little website that shows how much combined weight we have lost since the date we agreed to do this. It intentionally does not show how much each person has contributed. We set a shared goal and now we’re both working toward it.
We’ll see how well this works in the long run, but so far it’s adding some fun to the boring task of watching what we eat.
Calvary Web Page
If you went to our church’s web page in the past, you probably shook your head and chuckled about the ancient design. It looked like something from the 90s… probably because it was.
I tracked down all our domain, email and web hosting information and got everything migrated to a combination of eNom (domain and email hosting) and SquareSpace (web hosting.) I threw up a quick site and then turned it over BethH who really made some awesome changes. She gets all the credit for the current beautiful site! I don’t get paid for saying this, but if you need a site, make sure you consider SquareSpace. I don’t think Beth has any coding experience but she was able to design an awesome site. And if you are a coder, you can still customize it to your heart’s content. It’s a pretty impressive package for a low price.
Along this journey, we’ve also stepped up our social media presence. I started an Instagram account and we’re also giving our Facebook page some more love. Beth has a good plan for four of us at church to start posting to Facebook and Instagram on a more regular basis.
I used to be embarrassed to point people to our website but now it’s fun! Go check it out at http://www.calvarylutheranbellevue.org. Maybe my next project should be finding a shorter domain name…
Pollo A La Crema
Most of my Spanish was learned by reading delicious menus so I’m pretty sure that “pollo a la crema” means “chicken in cream”. I see it on the menus when I go there and think “I should make that at home”, but I’ve never followed through. I can’t say that anymore. Tyla’s verdict was that it was delicious, but the sauce wasn’t the same flavor as what you usually get in a restaurant. I think this will be a regular in our rotation.
The recipe comes from allrecipes.com but we modified it to include mushrooms and onions.
Ingredients
- 4 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves – cut into cubes
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
- 1 cup chicken broth
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 2 tablespoons ketchup
- Mushrooms
- Onion
- 6 (6 inch) flour tortillas
Directions
- In a large skillet over medium heat, melt butter.
- In a separate skillet, cook mushrooms and onions
- Add chicken and cook, stirring frequently until juices run clear.
- Stir in the flour and ketchup, then whisk in the broth.
- When sauce begins to thicken, reduce heat and stir in the cream.
- Simmer covered for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Most Dangerous Jobs
If you read through the Bureau of Labor and Satistics list of dangerous jobs, you’ll learn that being a truck driver or working on a farm are two of the most dangerous jobs you can have. They run roughly a 0.01% risk of dying on the job.
These lists all miss the most dangerous job in America. It’s a job that we watch people compete heavily for. People want the job so badly that they’ll spend millions of dollars trying to get it. Some people ruin their lives and their reputations to get the job. Of course I’m talking about the presidency. Eight of our 44 presidents have died in office which means you have an 18% chance of dying in office! Half of those were natural causes but still, a 9% chance of death when taking a job would probably deter me from it.
Thankfully we haven’t had one for 50 years and that’s probably due to a much stronger Secret Service, but there are still plenty of attempts.
Vizio Soundbar
Upstairs in the theater room, we have a full receiver and 5.1 speaker setup that provides nice sound. It’s not anywhere near audiophile quality, but it’s more than enough to provide enjoyment. On the downstairs TV, we are just using the built-in TV speakers. I’ve never heard a TV speaker that does a very good job of producing sound and this TV is no exception. However, we don’t need to have a full receiver and surround sound system down there.
Thankfully there is a happy middle and it’s called a soundbar. It’s a long rectangular speaker that fits nicely underneath your TV. Tim and Chelsea just upgraded theirs and sold us their old one. So now we have a Vizio SB3821 installed in our house. It not only has the soundbar but there is a subwoofer that only needs power to operate. It connects wirelessly to the soundbar so that you don’t have to run an audio cable to it. The soundbar connects to the audio output on the TV so whatever plays on the TV gets played through the soundbar.
Is it as good has having 6 discrete speakers spread around your room? Nope. But it’s way better than the standard TV output. As an added bonus, this soundbar supports Bluetooth so I can play music from my phone to it while I’m cooking or playing with Elijah.
It took a little bit of work on our Harmony universal remote to make it all operate seemlessly, but I think we’re there now and the experience is great! Thanks to Tim and Chelsea for selling us their hand-me-downs. Now I’ll probably start drooling of their new setup and want that instead.
You Can’t Screw It Up
The other day at work we were talking about our biggest mistakes in a work environment. It reminded me of an epic failure at my first computer job…
My Dad was a contracter and his boss (the owner) got me a job during high school at a company that processes payroll for thousands of companies across the United States. I worked in the computer room processing the jobs. We had big laser printers that would print 150 checks per minute and it kept you pretty busy just feeding it paper, not to mention pulling 12 sheets out of it whenever it jammed or pouring a gallon of toner into it. it took a while to get the hang of it, but after a while it was fairly mechanical. I enjoyed the job though because the people were fun and sometimes I’d flip through the checks and hold one worth a million dollars. If I had changed my name to “Illinois Department of Revenue”, do you think I could have cashed it?
When I started learning the old mainframe system that ran the whole operation, I specifically remember hearing them say “Don’t worry, you can’t really screw anything up.” Challenge accepted.
The computer system had a bunch of “partitions” and each one could run an individual payroll job. One of our main tasks was to look at all the incoming requests and figure out how to organize them to get maximum throughput through the system. If I remember correctly, there was a background partition and then eight job partitions. The background partition was how you interacted with the system and submitted jobs to the either other partitions. When things went wrong with a job, you’d pause a partition by typing “P F3” where 3 is the number of the partition running the job.
On some very busy days, we’d squeeze a little more juice out of the system by running jobs in the background partition. It was a little risky because it would block user interactions while it was running, but if you had a really quick, high priority job to get through, it wasn’t a huge deal.
It was one of those busy days and I had submitted a job to the background partition. There was a mistake so to stop it from getting worse, I quickly typed “P BG”. Those characters will always be burned into my brain because basically it felt like when I hit Enter, the entire building ground to a halt. I had just paused the partition that the computer was using to listen to input from the users. So effectively the computer was happily chugging along with it’s ears plugged and there was no way to tell it to start listening again because it wasn’t listening to us.
Oops.
We all just kind of stared at each other with this “uh oh” look on our faces. People around the building started coming to the window of the computer room with quizzical looks on their faces. The president and the mainframe guru came storming in. I made myself tiny in the corner. It was a doozy of a problem. They were on the phone with IBM for THREE HOURS trying to figure out how to fix it. I still don’t know what they did but eventually it came back online and somehow I got a pass because I was the stupid intern.
So please, don’t tell me that I can’t do anything bad that you haven’t done before. I have a knack for it. Maybe that’s why I ended up geting a job as a tester for 8 years.
What Is Lent?
This is the next installment of my “What does that religious celebration mean?” series. The first was Advent. We made it through Christmas. I forgot to write about Epiphany and now we’re onto Lent. So what is Lent?
Lent covers the six weeks before Easter and kicks off with Ash Wednesday. Many churches will have extra Wednesday night services so you end up going to church twice each week. The extra services are there to giive you even more time to reflect on the meaning of Lent. The whole point is to show us our need for a Savior and what’s about to happen at the end of Lent (Jesus’s death and His resurrection at Easter.) Lent reminds us WHY Jesus had to come to suffer, die and rise again. He did all that because we are sinners. The law that God sets forth in the Bible is very clear. He demands 100% aboslute perfection. If you can pull that off, you get into heaven. But as you probably guessed, that’s impossible .From the moment we are conceived, we’re sinful. If that’s all we covered in Lent services, it would be extremely depressing because we’d leave knowing that we’re heading straight to hell when we die. But the story doesn’t end there. After each reminder of our failures, we are presented with the reminder that Jesus came to pay the penalty for sin in our place. Through him, we are guaranteed spots in heaven and all that’s required is faith.
You may have heard people talk about Lent in terms of giving something up for the season. The idea has lost a lot of its good intentions. Many people now do it because they think they’re going to gain points with God if they choose to not eat Skittles or drink coffee during Lent. Nope. But giving up something for Lent can be a good thing if you use it as a constant daily reminder of the meaning behind the season for Lent.
So if you step into a Lent service, it might seem like a somber occasion. There’s black on the altar and there’s a lot of talk about all the suffering that Jesus had to endure because we are screwups. But stay for the end and you’ll hear the wonderful message of what that Jesus’s death and resurrection mean for us if we believe. We get eternal life in heaven. It’s the ultimate gift.
405 HOT Lanes
I have really mixed emotions about this project. On the one hand, it’s an awesome mix of data and social behavior. They know exactly how traffic is flowing and they can make mathematical adjustments, but those changes will have different effects on different people. So the same change might not work in two similar traffic situations because of other social or physical factors. I’d love to get access to that data feed. In fact, that’s one big way they could improve it. At least give me a data feed showing when my car used the lanes, which entry and exit points I used, etc. You can get your last 10 transactions from their poor website but it’s basically unusable as a data feed. Give me JSON with OAuth please. Even better, consider opening up all the data after removing the personally identifiable information.
On the other hand, this whole thing bothers me a lot. In this extremely liberal part of the country, I don’t understand how the general population approved a system that lets rich people get to work on time while poor people have to sit in traffic and be late. Doesn’t that seem unjust especially when lower paying jobs are more likely to be sticklers for showing up on time? I guess they justify it as “taxing the rich” which is heroic. Personally, I almost always refuse to use those lanes unless I’m qualified to use them for free. I want to be that data point that just mooches from the system. It’s my nerdy, tiny protest.
It’s hard to know if this has improved traffic flow or not. WSDOT has been very vocal in saying that it takes six months or so for the system to settle down. Some days there isn’t anyone on 405 and other days it’s a complete standstill. Eventually, people will settle into new traffic patterns, and then we can decide if it has improved traffic. My gut feeling is that yes, it has. I use Waze to help me figure out if I should take 405 or two different backroad routes home. Before this project, 90% of the time the answer would be backroads. Now I’m frequently using 405. Traffic still slows down around the entry/exit points into the HOT lanes, but otherwise it flows pretty well.
And there-in lies my biggest beef: it seems pretty obvious that this system was not optimized purely for better traffic flow. That drives me nuts. We have a very limited resource and instead of using it as efficiently as possible, the politicians have their money grubbing hands in it. The traffic engineers have all the data, and I bet if you told them to dream up the best solution, this would not have been it.
I have no data to back this up, but I think the two biggest improvements are:
A lot of my opinions on this could potentially be changed if they’d release real data and models showing that this is the most efficient way to move people along the road. Instead we get tiny little stats and soundbites that they think “prove” their approach.
I’d love to see what would happen if we had the current layout but removed the carpool and monetary restrictions on the express lanes. Sure, the rich people would lose their speedy route, but on average, it seems like everyone would have a faster trip because we’d be closer to 100% utilization of 5 lanes instead of 3 booked lanes and 2 sparse ones. And since those two express lanes have limited entry/exit points, they would be more immune from lane changing. This isn’t a ground breaking idea. This is how express lanes are implemented in a lot of other cities.
The HOV/money part feels like politicians tacking on rules to make themselves feel like they are saving the environment and taxing the rich. Is that worth reducing the efficiency of the highway? Not in my book. With election season approaching, I have another chance to spit into the hurricane and vote for a different makeup of our state government.