Hey God, it’s me. Five years ago on this day, Tyla and I stood before you and promised our lives to each other. Just checking in to say that it’s all going well! Thank you for bringing us together!
March Madness Wrap Up
Congrats to Jim for pulling out the win with 121 total points! He correctly picked Duke as the winner of it all. Not too shabby. Three people had more correct picks than Jim, but getting those final games right is critical to winning the bracket challenge.
I used Bing predictions to create my bracket. I’ve been impressed with all the things they have picked correctly (elections, football games, etc.) I think the tournament was a bit too many unknowns because all the errors get compounded.
| Rank | Owner | Correct Picks | Points |
| 1 | JimM | 40 | 121 |
| 2 | LoganB | 44 | 100 |
| 3 | TimS | 38 | 88 |
| 4 | AndyB | 44 | 87 |
| 5 | JayA | 41 | 85 |
| 6 | BenM | 38 | 75 |
| 7 | AndyD | 34 | 60 |
The NCAA won’t let me embed the One Shining Moment video. So instead, maybe you’d be interested in John Oliver’s excellent monologue about how much money the NCAA makes while players go hungry.
Debit Card Scam
I feel like I’m pretty immune to online attempts to scam me out of my bank information. The routine is well-defined: if I get an email from my bank, PayPal, etc, I never click the links in the email. Instead I open a browser and manually go to their site and try to verify what they told me I needed to do in the email.
But for some reason, phone calls can be a bit trickier. Yesterday I got a call saying that my debit card had been locked and I needed to unlock it. We had a little goofiness going on with our bank account yesterday anyway so this was completely plausible. “Press 1 to talk to someone about this.” Ok, I did that. “Please enter your 16 digit debit card number so we can look up your account.” Umm… red flag. It was getting weird. So I hung up, turned my card over, and I called the number on the back. I asked if my card was locked and if they had just called me. Nope.
Don’t ever believe someone coming to you acting in a position of authority and asking you for information. ALWAYS verify their identity independently first by contacting them through the officially documented channels. If it is legit, you’ll be able to do it. And if they try to push you into just believing them, that’s even more reason to be wary. If they’re legit then they will almost certainly comply. For example, I had a call from Visa telling me that my card was stolen and they started asking for personal information. I stopped the guy, asked for his extension and told him I’d call him back. I called the number on the back of the card, punched in his extension, and got right back to him. Identify verified (and he was impressed with the extra check.)
You only have to screw up once to get in a mess.
Goodbye Oskar
Goodbye to our dear Oskar
Your cancer had spread too far
It happened so fast
This day was your last
Now you’re a bright doggie star
I met you seven years ago
With my future wife in tow
You warmed all our hearts
But not with your farts
And you loved us too I know
You came with us on our dates
And sometimes you licked our plates
To stop any crime
You barked all the time
And tried to run through the gates
You weren’t always the smartest one
But you filled our days with fun
Your life was worthwhile
You made us all smile
And now your time here is done
Open Sprinkler Review
When Tim installed my irrigation system, he was kind enough to throw in a free irrigation clock that he had sitting around. It’s a standard Hunter model (probably $75-100) and it worked great, but every time I looked at it, I thought about how simple the device really was and that I should be able to control it from my computer. Standard industry offerings are hundreds or thousands of dollars with monthly fees. They’re mostly intended for commercial use.
After a little searching, I found opensprinkler.com. Somebody else had the same idea and made such a nice package that he is able to sell it. The basic model is Arduino based but there are Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone versions too. I chose the standard model for $155.
Installation was a snap. I labeled all the wires from the existing clock and transferred them over to the Open Sprinkler unit. I also ran an Ethernet cord from the clock in the corner of my garage up into the network closet. (It is SO convenient having the network closet share a wall with the garage!) I turned the unit on and very quickly was turning the sprinklers on and off from my computer. With a little extra configuration I was able to do it from my phone.
Why? Well yes, it’s a toy, but it also makes it very easy to walk around the yard testing zones or turning them on to blow out the line. Also, last summer I’d wake up to hear the rain and realize that my irrigation was scheduled to run in the morning. To avoid wasting water, I had to turn off the house alarm, go out in the garage, turn the program off, come back in, turn the alarm back on, and go back to bed. Now I can just reach for my phone and adjust it… if I even need to (more on that below.)
Aside form the convenience factor, here are some other features that I love:
- I can completely manage the system from the comfort of my couch instead of standing in the garage.
- Programs can be set to start based on sunrise or sunset. General recommendations for lawn watering are to do it a little bit before the sun comes up to avoid the hot sun burning off the water but also not let give moss a wet, dark place to thrive. This setting makes that super easy.
- By checking the weather online, the system can automatically adjust the programs based on the humidity, temperature and precipitation from the previous days. This either means skipping an entire program or just running it for fewer minutes.
- Programs can be set to run every N days instead of on specific days of the week.
- You can view a log of when each zone was on. This will be nice when I try to track water usage and also to evaluate how well the Open Sprinkler system is performing.
- As the software gets updated and perfected, I can update my unit with the click of a button.
All in all, I highly recommend this product so far. As long as it actually does the job of controlling the irrigation system without ever crashing, I’ll be very happy!
Tool Safety
A wood shop can be a dangerous place. There are blades spinning and cutting all over the place. One key part of staying safe is knowing what can be dangerous. A 2011 study from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System lists these as the top injuries:
- Table Saw: 39,750 annual injuries
- Jointers, planers, shapers, and sanders: 10,930 annual injuries
- Miter Saw: 6800 annual injuries
- Band Saw: 3550 annual injuries
- Radial Arm Saw: 350 annual injuries
Now obviously these numbers are a bit skewed by which tools people use the most often. For example, the radial arm saw isn’t very popular anymore as people are using table saws with sleds for many of the same purposes.
Whenever I get a new tool, I like to do a bit of reading about common injuries and tips for staying safe. One thing I learned with this new sliding miter saw is that after making the cut, you should let the blade stop spinning before lifting it out of the wood. Otherwise you run the risk the cutoff piece catching the blade and flying around the room. It can also give you a cleaner cut since the spinning teeth only touch the wood once.
It’s also important to keep the wood clamped down when possible. When the blade in a miter saw goes through the wood, it pulls up on the back side. It’s not uncommon for it to catch on the wood and rip it up in the air. If the wood isn’t firmly held in place, this can be pretty bad news.
As someone who makes money with his fingers, these kinds of tips are extra important!
Epson 8350 Projector Repair
After 3.5 years of faithful service and 1100 of operation, my Epson 8350 suddenly decided that it had an internal fault. The symptom was a red flashing temperature light. A quick call to Epson verified that I was way out of my warranty period. The closest official repair place was down in Vancouver, WA. I chatted with a local (unofficial) place too but didn’t get a warm and fuzzy so I shipped my projector down to Compass Micro down in Vancouver. Thankfully I had stored the original box and foam up in the rafters in the garage so I wasn’t too concerned about damage in transit.
Shipping only took a day and was about $20 (each way.) The gang at Compass Micro diagnosed it the same day it arrived. The lamp fan was dead and the part was $29. Tack on their $60 minimum labor charge for the first hour and I was back in action. The part took a few days to arrive and then they quickly shipped it back to me.
So while it would have been nice to not have this problem at all, I was very happy with the service and the total bill was a lot less than buying a new projector. If I have something like this happen again, I might be inclined to open up the projector myself and see if I can tell that a fan obviously isn’t spinning.
Bark
Last weekend I spread seven cubic yards of bark around my house. Thanks to Logan for helping! It took a lot of wheelbarrow loads, but it looks great now. The bark lays nicely over the drip irrigation that I put in place (under Tim’s tutelage) to water each plant. It will help hold in the moisture from the drip irrigation, and, in conjunction with the pre-emergent I put down, it should keep weeds from growing. And oh yeah, it looks really nice too!
Bracket Update
Here’s an update on our little bracket challenge. AndyB, LoganB, JimM, and TimS are still in the running. The rest of us are down for the count.
| Winner | Loser | Bracket King |
| Kentucky | Michigan St | AndyB |
| Michigan St | Kentucky | AndyB |
| Kentucky | Duke | LoganB |
| Duke | Kentucky | JimM |
| Wisconsin | Michigan St | TimS |
| Michigan St | Wisconsin | TimS |
| Wisconsin | Duke | TimS |
| Duke | Wisconsin | JimM |
Easter vs. Christmas
As a Christian, it’s hard to decide whether Easter or Christmas is a bigger holiday. Both are critical to my future. I suspect that a lot more people understand the importance of Christmas than Easter. A couple years ago, I wrote an explanation of what Christmas means for the Christian. Today I’ll do the same thing for Easter. If you’ve ever been a little curious why we get excited about this holiday, here’s your chance to find out.
At Christmas we celebrate the almighty God coming to earth as a human. That in itself is pretty impressive, but if that’s all it was, we’d all still be in a bad spot. That’s because every one of us is sinful. We’ve all broken God’s law at least once (more like millions of times) and God demands perfection to enter heaven. So on our own, the only fate for us at death is eternal damnation in hell. But that’s where Easter comes into play.
Jesus didn’t just hang around on the earth for a while to sight see. He was here to live a perfect life and take the punishment for ALL of us. His death, which we remember on Good Friday, wasn’t just one man dying. It was God punishing His only Son for our sin. But it doesn’t end there. On Easter morning, Jesus rose from the dead proclaiming his power over death and the devil.
Without the death and resurrection of Jesus and without our faith that it happened, when we die, we would be judged by our own track record. We’re all sinful so we’d all be condemned to hell. But because Jesus did die and rise. Those who believe will not be judged on their own record. Instead, Jesus steps in and points out that he paid the price for our sins so God the Father counts us as blameless and we enter heaven for eternity.
So THAT is why Christians are so excited about Easter. We should be this excited every day of the year, but Easter is an extra special reminder of the incredible gift that we have been given.
P.S. I’m turning off comments on this post because I’m not looking to start a public discussion, but if you want to know more about what I believe, you can of course ask me or check out this website from our church group. I also left out specific Bible references to keep this short and approachable, but I’m happy to provide passages to back up everything written here.
P.P.S. If you want to hear Pastor talk about this more in his sermon from this past Easter service, you can view it on YouTube.