
Things I’ve Learned the Hard Way
tech/faith: tools for running an in-person conference
Within my church organization, I’ve been asked to help organize and run activities for the youth in our area. The biggest activity is what we call “stake youth conference”, which is basically 3 days with 250 youth, age 14-18. It’s not a small task. As we approached this year’s youth conference, one of our big…
life: the epic road trip (v2)
Gluttons for punishment, or doing all the fun over again from 9 years ago: I don’t know which. But had another wonderful 3 week road trip this summer. Stats: duration: 21 consecutive daysdriving distance: 6890 milestotal hours driving: 120average mpg: 25.5gas consumed: 270 gallons (generally around $4.50/gal) Monuments / Parks / Museums / highlights visited:…
faith: perfection and temples
Marcel is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This is an address he gave in a congregation on February 27th, 2022. Is it reasonable to expect to understand all things about the gospel right now? I don’t think so. We operate a lot on faith, which is less than a…
faith: death
Marcel is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This is an address he gave at a funeral of an elderly friend on June 18th, 2021. Personal information has been removed out of respect for the family. We met at church. There is a program at church where we are all…
faith: our foundation
Marcel is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This is an address to the congregation he gave in the local Young Single Adult branch on October 17th, 2021. In the recent General Conference, President Nelson started his remarks with a video about the foundation of the Salt Lake Temple. It…
tech: the [ultimate] home server on the cheap
After having a couple Raspberry Pi’s doing miscellaneous things, and working my way up to a Plex server where I needed real storage and video transcoding crunching power, it was time to do something real. But I didn’t want to spend a lot of money. Here’s what I did. Hardware I wanted a decent machine…
tech: software development principles
After working on a project for a while with Agile and analyzing why some things went wrong, I came up with the following guidelines for our team. I printed them out and posted it on my cube wall so I would see it multiple times daily. I see these as supplements to or applications of…
tech: Google Play store updates and Android foreground notifications
In the office we’re working on an Android app which isn’t your usual app: we work with a handset OEM to get it pre-loaded on their handsets in the system partition. At the time it required system permissions and had a foreground notification. The slow rate of ROM OTA updates from OEMs being what they…
life: the epic road trip
Stats: duration: 23 consecutive days driving distance: 6747 miles longest single day: 856 miles, 15 hours driving (not including breaks) total hours driving: 112 average mpg: 29.1 gas consumed: 321 gallons number of kids upon departure: 5 number of kids upon return: 3 (2 left at college) family groups visited: 9 Monuments / Parks /…
life: going to college with financial responsibility
Now that my second child is on their way to college, I think my wife and I have narrowed in on an approach to higher education that is sustainable. Here are the principles we’ve been teaching and doing with our children. Go to a school that is affordable. It would be great fun to drive…
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