Notice the nice off-shoot I took at the east end of my run – I was hoping to cut across to the trails in the foothills – but got caught in a cul-de-sac and had to come back… at least it was downhill on the way back ;)   Thanks Claudia for motivating me to get back into better shape!  Wish me luck.

1 mile run — 6:40

100 m — 13.0

50m — 6.4

I haven’t timed myself in any of these events in years.  This is the benchmark anyhow, something for me to compete against now.  I think I first ran a sub 13 second 100 m as a freshman in high school… kind of what I feel like now, returning to my freshman year, with high hopes of improving in all these events in the coming months / years!

I hope to take some more initial benchmarks later tonight -perhaps doing my pushups and situps benchmark since they are easily done at home.  In the meantime — I’m off to a football game this afternoon, last of our flag football season before the playoffs.

http://seniorclie.wordpress.com/octathalon-parameters-defined/

Anyone else want to join in with us?  It is always better to have more people to motivate along when attempting to do something like this.  Let me know!

Well – when I was hosting things myself, I came to like qmail – more specifically I really liked one built-in feature of qmail.  When I setup email accounts, each account automatically received all emails sent to it, and to any email in the form username-anythinggoeshere@domain.com.  For example — if you sent an email to todd-bestbuy@gileszone.com — it would just go directly into my todd@gileszone.com account.  And yes, that was my main use for this, to give out new email addresses to various online stores, etc… so I could better filter, and know which ones gave my email addresses over to others w/out my permission.  Several of my siblings also enjoyed this feature, and used it widely… so when I switched over to sendmail on this new host — I had to figure out how to get this same functionality (or many emails would not be directed into their proper home).

Turns out that sendmail does a very similiar thing out of the box, but they decided that the + symbol is the one to use, not the -.  So todd+bestbuy@gileszone.com worked as I wanted it — problem is, that is not the email address that best buy has on record (and it also invalidated many other email addresses I’ve given out).  Well — after searching far and wide, and coming up to speed on sendmail, and the intricacies of its configuration file, rulsets, maps, etc… I came across a fairly straightforward addition to the sendmail.mc file to get the behavior that I wanted (thanks to google, and other geeks before me).  A simple addition of the following lines did the trick:

LOCAL_CONFIG
Kplus regex -s1,2 -d+ ^([0-9a-z]{1,64})-([0-9a-z]{1,64})$
LOCAL_RULE_0
R$+ <@$=w.> $*  $: $(plus $1 $: $1 $) <@$2.> $3

It turns out that what the above ends up doing is simply replaces the ‘-’ character in the part of the email address that comes before the ‘@’ with the ‘+’ character, and then sendmail default behavior takes care of the rest.  I won’t bore you with the gory details, but trust me ;)

Ok — so I also wanted to keep our email lists going that I had on the previous server, and I decided to use mailman for the mailing lists.  Everything was all working fine, except for one small detail — moderator and owner emails to the list where not being sent out.  I didn’t have time to look into at the time, but finally got back around to it this week.  It appeared that all the emails sent to the moderators or owners of the list just dissapeared, never reaching their intended destination.  Well — as luck would have it, my fix to make todd-bestbuy@gileszone.com work, broke mailman.

Mailman uses aliases such as listname-owner@domain.com, or listname-subscribe@domain.com to interact with the mailing list (there are others of similiar form as well).  Well — my earlier fix ended up making any email sent to listname-owner@domain.com to be sent to, yes listname@domain.com.  Ooops!  I had to figure out a fix, so I could start getting my moderator emails going again, and having subscribe emails and unsubscribe emails work (amongst other things).  So back to my good friend google…

… but google didn’t find the solution this time, although it did offer enough information for me to hack together a solution.  In the end, I modified my sendmail.mc file to only do the username-anytext@domain.com –> username@domain.com rewrite if the username was an actual user on my system (i.e. in the /etc/passwd file), otherwise — leave it alone.  It’s working great now, and I can finally go back to sleeping good at nights :)  Here is my final hack (as of now), in case this is helpful to others out there:

LOCAL_CONFIG
Kcheck regex -s1,2 ^(([0-9a-z]{1,64})-([0-9a-z]{1,64}))$
Kplus regex -s1,2 -d+ ^([0-9a-z]{1,64})-([0-9a-z]{1,64})$
LOCAL_RULE_0
R$+ <@$=w.> $*  $: $(check $1 $: $1 $) <@$2.> $3
R$+$|$=l <@$=w.> $*     $: $(plus $1 $: $1 $) <@$3.> $4
R$+$|$~l <@$=w.> $*     $: $1 <@$3.> $4

It’s fun being a geek sometimes ;)  Satisfying to finally bend sendmail and mailman’s will to my own…

Each of the 1st graders helped make and decorate the balloon, as well as helped me tape it together.  Once it was ready to go, we brought it outside, and filled it up with hot air:

It didn’t go very high, but at least it did go up for a little while:

We ended up “launching” two balloons, the one we made, and another slightly smaller one that was already made in the kit I used for this lesson.  Got the kit from work – cool stuff :)

The kids had fun chasing after this one after we let it loose.  This had to be one of the more exciting lessons this year:

Well, I took a path that has taken me to Sandia National Laboratories as a computer research scientist / engineer.  While I love working with computers, writing new algorithms, solving hard problems, I still find myself with a very strong motiviation to spend time helping and/or working with children and youth.  I’ve been fortunate this year, as I’ve been able to spend an hour or so each week teaching science in my daughter’s first grade class.  Sandia has a science and technology outreach program, where I can take time out of my work day each week to do this – its great!

I’ve been teaching since the start of the school year last September.  I’m known as “Mr. Todd” to the class, and I come in for one hour each Wednesday morning to teach a fun lesson in science ;)  The lessons are typically premade lessons provided by the school district, I just simply follow the syllabus (makes it nice and easy).  I really enjoy working with the kids, and it seems they enjoy my coming as well.  Here’s a class picture I took last week.

First Grade - Teaching Science - 2008-2009

Anyhow, check out some photos I’ve posted on facebook to see how Michael’s pencil car turned out

We had finished building our chicken coop – and winter was fast approaching.  Jill started worrying about how well the chickens would do if it dropped below freezing.  She also wondered how well we had done in insulating the coop itself.  Ah-ha!  My mind started churning… this sounded like a perfect opportunity to pull out some of my “geek” skills and have a little fun!  So that’s exactly what I did.  I started doing some research online, and found several sites that gave me the motivation to move forward with the idea that was forming in my mind.

One site that really caught my eye was Daniel Klein’s thermd site.  He had written an application (in perl) over the years to support monitoring, archiving, and display of temperature (and other weather) data taken from a whole variety of temperature sensors, data acquisition devices, etc…  I had heard a bit about one-wire devices in the past, and thought they would be perfect for what I wanted to do.  I also decided (mostly from reading the info Daniel provided), to purchase a HA7Net Ethernet 1-Wire adapter, and use it as my main communication device to interface with the one-wire temperature sensors that I also purchased.  It was a bit on the expensive side for what I was doing — but I still have plans to use the HA7Net device for many future projects as well, as it can support up to 100 sensors (or so its spec sheet states).

You are likely wondering what this geeky idea that I had was – or perhaps you’ve figured it out after looking through the above sites on the devices and software that I decided I’d use.  Well – for those that can’t read my mind – let me share with you my idea.  I decided I would place a temperature sensor just outside the chicken coop in the shade (to measure ambient temperature outside), and another one inside the coop itself.  I also wanted to have an automated system to turn on a heat-lamp that we’d placed inside the coop on and off dependant upon the temperature inside the coop itself.  Sound fun?  I agree :)

HA7Net / Ethernet Connections

The day the HA7Net arrived – I had to go out and purchase wire so I turn my vision into a reality.  I ended up purchasing some 4-lead twisted pair at a local shop (Electronic Parts Co).  I also ended up picking up a crimping tool, some RJ11 connectors to interface the HA7Net to the twisted pair wire, and some heat shrink tubing to make for a nice clean finish to where I connect the thermometers to the wire.  After some trial and error with a short 3′ section of cable I created for testing my one-wire devices, I was ready to solder the two thermometers to the wire, and mount them out in the coop.  Here’s a look at the HA7Net device as it sits today, mounted on the wall – with my “test” cable mounted on the wall with a one-wire thermometer in it — I decided to just keep this one connected so I could have a monitor of the temperature in my house as well, why not, right?

After I finished soldering the other thermometers together, shrink wrapped um, etc… I initially stapled the wire up the wall, across the roof, and out the window to our coop out back.  As you can imagine – Jill didn’t quite like the new home decor I had stapled to our ceiling (wish I had thought to take a pic), so I eventually (only 1 week or so later if memory serves me correct) cut some holes in the wall – purchased another tool (I love buying tools) to snake the wire through the wall and inside the space between our 1st and 2nd story, and directly out to our back yard.  It does look much nicer I must admit.

1-Wire into wall (instead of across the ceiling)

Ok, so at this point, what we now have is three thermometers that we can monitor and archive and plot over time.  I was pretty excited just to get to this point – yes, I’m easy to please ;)  Click here to see the first week of temperature data that my new set of thermometers recorded.

If you looked closely at the first week of data, you may have noticed that by Friday, Nov. 14th that the next stage of my project was in place.  After getting the initial temperature monitoring up, I started working on a solution to automatically control the heat lamp when things got too cold for our pampered chickens.  After doing a bit of research, I decided to use X10’s ActiveHome Pro for the heat lamp automation.  Again, a bit more than I would need to spend for just this single use — but it’s also expandable (i.e. more geek projects in the future).  I purchased a single 3-prong appliance module for this project for controlling the heat lamp, and simply plugged the heat-lamp (through an extension cord) into the module.

For those who don’t know what X10 is – basically, its a way to control devices by sending them signals directly on the power lines, pretty neat stuff.  So all I had to do was to connect the main unit into the wall by my computer and a usb cable from it to my computer, and then connect the module on the other side of the house (in the garage actually).

With this setup, I now have control via my computer to turn power to anything plugged into the module on and off (a heatlamp in my case).  So of course, I wrote a little program to automate the operation of the heat lamp dependant upon the temperature in the coop.  After a few tweaks — it works like a charm ;)  Heat lamp comes on when it drops below 36 degrees, and then turns back off after it warms up above 40 degrees.  Yes – we’re spoiling these chickens, but hey – its fun :)

For those interested in the current temperatures of our chicken coop – and whether or not the heat lamp is on – you can always see the latest here:

http://todd.gileszone.com/thermd/thermd

I’ll post some pictures of the coop, chickens, heat lamp, etc… soon.  I keep forgetting to take them until night, and want to get you something that is visible to see ;)  Plus, I’ve gone on for too long already – I’m pretty sure this is my longest blog post to date — long overdue I might add.  I initially planned on blogging each day as I worked on this project, better late than never, right?

Anyhow, I’d like to show you a few pictures from Christmas morning – mainly of the gifts I created, along with a few other pictures that just looked cute, exciting, fun, etc… and I didn’t want to leave out.

So, for Michael I made a marble maze.  This took quite a bit more time than I originally planned, and I have quite a bit of scraps of lumber to show for it (tries 1,2,3,…,10,… etc… all failed).  Not sure if you can make it out from the picture – but it’s a two sided maze and the marble drops between the two sides via holes in the center.  Object is to get it from one corner to the other.

I had originally planned on making them all mazes, but the time spent on Michael’s was soo long, that I modified my design for Trevin and Ian… their mazes are made from their names, with a hard plastic top to keep the marble in (rather than the way Michael’s is — with the marble still accessible to the touch.

For Kaylee Ann I made (with help — not enough time!) some socks with beads on them.  I actually just sewed the beads to some purchased socks.  Kaylee seems to like them though!

I ran out of time before I got to Spencer’s gift — but as you can see from the Christmas morning picture, a simple sticker is enough to keep him happy :)

Enjoy the pictures!

You’ve likely noticed the pictures of the lazer tag guns — they were a sure hit (thanks Grandma / mom!).  Michael was also (still is) very very excited about his skateboard Santa gave him… look at that grin!

After we got the kids to bed, I brought out an enormous supply of legos that I had acquired via freecycle (check it out if you don’t know what freecycle is). I washed them all – which took quite some time, but after I was done, we had a huge supply of legos that I’m sure will get much use out of them from the kids (and me) over the years to come.

Here’s a few shots from our activities:

The kids had a blast unwrapping hershey kisses for the cookies. I’m sure more than one got eaten ;)

Jill and Brianna making peanut brittle — turned out quite good!

Quite the process to clean tons and tons of legos ;)

Look at all those cookies — we made 340+ cookies when all was said and done. Most of which went to several families and friends that we know.