Bens Website

It recently came to my attention that I was exceeding the bandwidth limitations on my cable modem. My parents received a stern warning email from their ISP the first time they exceeded their limits, warning them of a $24/Gig charge for each G over 25G/month. 25G is not very much to use up in a month, its not like they use bittorrent every day, or even once a week.

Then I realized that the bandwidth stats are lost when the WRT looses power. A quick google search showed a schematic for a battery backup circuit to act as a simple UPS for the WRT. It gave me a chance to work on my poor soldering skils, and seems to work pretty well. The device uses 8AA batteries, and two diodes to switch over to battery power whenever main power is lost.

I am a bit of a perfectionist, and that being said, a perfectionist should never install a motion sensitive flood lamp. Why? Because you cannot ever get the settings 'perfect'. The first time I finished, every car that went down the street set off the lamp. I corrected that by turning down the sensitivity of the sensor, then it wouldn't pick up cars coming up the driveway. Then the wife says 'point the sensor down toward the ground', she is a frigin genius.

Now I dont know if I want the flood out in the yard for security purposes, or on the driveway so you can see inside the trunk...

We had Laina’s one year old birthday party today. She really had a blast, thanks to everyone who came. Also, thank you mom for making the Care Bear birthday cake!

We have an old gas furnace in our house, and it recently started acting up. After the heat would run for a while, the blower would stay on permanently. I did a few google searches and found out that a part called the ‘Fan Limit Controler’ is in charge of running the fan when using heat. It turns on/off the fan based on the temperature of the heat exchanger. It also works as an overheat cutoff, disabling the burner if the exchanger gets too hot.

The fan limit controller can fail after getting old, so I took a small gamble and bought one from a local heat/ac repair man. Dave and I installed it and so far it works great. The best part is that I didn’t have to pay the $70 for the repair guy to visit my house, and the $37 an hour to have him figure out the problem. Lets just hope it continues to work…

Hey everyone! I dont think anyone actually visits this page anymore. I sure know that I am tired of updating that old busted website. Since I have a few minutes to spare, I dumped the old site to backup, and installed wordpress. What do you think? So far, I think its outstanding…