Driving a nuclear submarine and how my wife crawled in a torpedo tube

As the holiday season was coming upon us, my wife and I were invited to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Our son, Mitch, is in the US Navy stationed on-board the submarine USS Topeka, and their commanding officer decided it was time to offer a Dependents Cruise to the families, so that they could see what the crew did. Yes, you read that correct, we had the opportunity to see what our son did while he was operating a nuclear submarine. The problem was, at the end of the year, we had pretty much used all our vacation time, but who would ever want to miss an opportunity like this? I used a program at work to take the time off without pay — and it was worth it.

(photos I took at the event are here to avoid uploading them here)

You can share using http://tinyurl.com/submarineRide

Tl;dr – Grandparents (again), submarine driver, recycled air breather, torpedo tube shooter and crawler — best experience ever! Continue reading →

Did I leave the doors open?

“Did you close the garage door?” was a common question asked on our way to work in the morning. If I wasn’t 100% sure, I would turn around and head home. I’ve even been woken in the middle of the night by our neighbor who asked me if I knew my garage door was open. This was mostly done because I know of statistics, such as those published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, stating that a burglary occurs every 14.3 seconds in the United States, with 9% of those through an open garage door. Continue reading →

The Internet as a lightswitch

At our household, we like lights, and in the dark, there is no warmer feeling than seeing the driveway and front porch lit up when you come home at night. To achieve this, we would manually flip two switches that controlled seven lights (fig 1). And if our schedule dictated a late arrival, we would just leave them on all day.

I hate to waste things, and this switch-flipping was a wasteful activity.

Falling into my old habits, I decided to to price out what it would cost to put three different photocells in light with the circuits that ran the outdoor lights. This would require me to modify the lighting units, and hack something together for the recessed lighting that was under the porch. At a combined cost of about $45 in materials and two hours of time, I put the estimate at a conservative $120 for this task.

For about two years I had been on the fence regarding home automation and decided to use this cost savings venture as a way to save some money, and reduce the complexity of our daily routines. So with a $120 price point in mind, I set out to figure out what would be necessary to automate the switches (instead of at each individual lights).

Continue reading →