Category: General

Lucas is growing up

Today we rode our bikes to school. This was the first time this (calendar) year, and the weather made riding irresistible.

Lucas decided he was going to ride his new big bike (16″ wheels) instead of the Trail-A-Bike with me. We left a little early, just in case. We didn’t need to. Not only did Lucas keep up just fine, but Kayla couldn’t catch him. One whiff of her catching up and off he zoomed. After riding back home (2 mile round trip), we had to travel 8 blocks out of our way, because it has been too long since we biked past the church.

Two weeks ago, he picked out his own books from the library, and is able to read half of them. He starts kindergarten in the fall. He is more than ready.

ZFS: Z pretty File System

This week I had two disks fail. The first was the cheapest to fix, as it was in my 27″ iMac. I took the entire machine to the Apple Store and picked it up the next day. The failed disk was covered under AppleCare, restoring my data from Time Machine backups was effortless, and my total cost was $4 in gas and 1 hour of time.

The other failed disk was in my file server. The server had a mirrored pair of 1.5TB disks and a mirrored pair of 1.0TB disks. One of the latter exhibited pre-fail symptoms so I ordered a pair of 3TB disks to replace both pairs.

I removed one disk from each existing pair, inserted my new disks, created the new zpool, and then remembered why I like ZFS so much. Here are the commands required to initialize the new disks and copy everything to the new array:

zpool create zmirror3 mirror ada1 ada2
zfs snapshot -r tank@now
zfs send -Rv tank@now | zfs receive -Fvu zmirror3

That’s it. There’s a little housekeeping, like setting ‘zfs set mountpoint=none’ to prevent conflicts and cleaning up the snapshots, but that’s really it. By using ‘zfs send -R’, all the zfs pool and volume meta data gets transferred too. It seems too good to be true. Below are the verbose messages that are enabled with the -v flags included above.


receiving full stream of tank@now into zmirror3@now
receiving full stream of tank/root@now into zmirror3/root@now
received 1.31GB stream in 20 seconds (67.2MB/sec)
receiving full stream of tank/usr@now into zmirror3/usr@now
received 1007GB stream in 8625 seconds (120MB/sec)
receiving full stream of tank/snapshots@now into zmirror3/snapshots@now
received 456GB stream in 7487 seconds (62.4MB/sec)
receiving full stream of tank/swap@now into zmirror3/swap@now
received 34.6MB stream in 4 seconds (8.66MB/sec)
receiving full stream of tank/var@now into zmirror3/var@now
received 1.10GB stream in 34 seconds (33.2MB/sec)
storage#

How much do you need to retire?

Here is a simple paradigm (from a comment BenE posted) for quantifying how much a person needs to retire successfully*:

Divide your life into three thirty year periods. During our first 30 years, we have limited means for savings. During the next 30 years, we work and save. We spend the last 30 years retired, spending our savings.

To spend as much in retirement as we did during our working years, we must save half of our income during our 30 working years so that we may spend that half during our 30 years of retirement.

Read that again. Pause and reflect on that.

Afterword

There’s plenty of factors that influence how much one must save. This paradigm excludes them so that the raw scale of savings can be easily grasped. Some of the most notable factors that can influence how much it is necessary to save include:

  • Start saving early
  • Postpone retirement
  • Social Security income
  • drastic reductions in living standards
  • Be born to rich parents/win lottery
  • Die early
  • Retire at the beginning of a long bull market.

* Successful retirement is defined as not outliving ones nest egg, or as not having to eat Alpo in ones golden years (William Bernstein).

Green built houses

With house prices and interest rates low, we are considering homeownership again. We have looked at hundreds of houses in the past year and found a half dozen that we really liked. What we haven’t found is a house we like at a price we like.

In 2011 we learned about three standards in the green building industry:

  • Passive House: limits household energy consumption to 120 kWh per cubic meter. A Passive House is very efficient and there are tens of thousands of houses built to this standard in Germany, Scandanavia, and Canada.
  • Net Zero: consume zero energy and zero carbon emissions annually.
  • Energy Plus: produce more energy annually than is consumed.

In 2011 we attended several green energy festivals. We toured a couple Passive Houses and the only Net Zero homes in the Puget Sound area. The cost of getting to net-zero is 15% more than building a traditional home. Our goal is to get as far as we can towards net-zero. A net-zero home has a monthly gas and electric bill of $0. Getting to net-zero requires reducing energy consumption through:

  • an efficient building envelope (super insulated, tightly sealed, oriented for beneficial solar gain)
  • highly efficient fixtures and appliances (LED lights, induction cooktops, solar water heaters, heat pumps)
  • a heat recovery ventilator (recover heat from ventilation air before exhausting it)

The other ingredient required to achieve net-zero is energy production. Solar has long (at least since the Chinese & Greeks oriented their buildings to face the winter sun 2,500 years ago) been the first answer for harvesting energy. Until the 1970s, the best available technology was exposing internal masonry to the sun. The thermal mass of masonry would warm up in the day and then give off the stored heat at night.

Using solar exposed masonry is still an excellent and highly efficient way to collect heat. The obvious limitation is availability of sunshine, which is often meager in Seattle’s heating season.

Retrofitting an existing house to achieve green building standards is more complex than building the house well initially. This has made choosing a house more challenging. I desire the ability to retrofit a house up to at least the Passive House standards. Some house designs make this more challenging than others. For example, I can’t easily change the orientation of a house to capture beneficial solar gain. Generally, houses are sited for the convenience of the builder rather than the long term benefit of the occupants.

In the meantime, we aren’t waiting for a new house to be more environmentally aware. We have reduced our household waste to less than one kitchen bag per week. The majority of food waste is diverted to my compost pile and the rest is recycled. I have replaced all our household lights with LED bulbs. In areas where lights were typically left on, I installed motion sensors with timers. We have a hybrid Ford Fusion and a Nissan Leaf, greatly reducing our gasoline consumption.

Recipe Management

On Sunday afternoons (with the family) and wrapping up on Monday, I plan our meals for the week. Once completed, I post the menu on the fridge. With the menu established, it’s easy to update our shopping list and always get exactly what we need.

What I lacked was a good method for keeping track of recipes. How would I find that amazing recipe for Brazilian Black Beans? Which strawberry cake recipe did I use for Kayla’s last birthday? Which of the 3 blueberry pie recipes from the summer of 2011 did we like the most?

I created a spreadsheet to help me answer those questions. After cooking each recipe, I record our family rating of the recipe in the cookbook margin and/or on the menu. As part of meal planning, I update our spreadsheet with the previous weeks recipe names, sources, dates of preparation, and ratings. Now I have a list with every recipe we’ve eaten. I can sort by date, source, or rating, as well as searching.

The Joy of Cooking – redux

After a multi-year hiatus, I have resumed my quest to to cook my way through every recipe in Joy of Cooking. Notable things I’ve learned in the past few weeks:

  • I like tomato sauce. This greatly surprised me, as I’ve had no special affinity towards foods with tomato sauce. What I learned is that I don’t dislike tomato sauce, I dislike Prego, Ragu, and other ‘canned’ tomato sauces. When made fresh from raw ingredients, I like tomato sauce. I really like it.
  • I learned how to make a good puffed pastry. The secret is persistence. Just like with making bread, accept that the first few times will end in disappointment. So start with something like an apple turnover, so even a disappointing result is good.
  • (My) kids don’t like soups. It don’t recall liking them much as a kid either, so I shouldn’t be surprised. But I’ve found a greater affinity towards them in my middle years.
  • Kids love, love, love familiarity. I’ve made a dozen types of pancakes and several were excellent. But they still prefer “my” whole wheat banana buttermilk pancakes.

 

My solution for robocall bill collector

This morning at 5:05 AM I got my third call from 877-384-0290, “If you are not Evelyn ____, please call 877-384-0290 and have your number removed from our list. If you are…”

At 9:34AM, when the call came in again, I hung up and called the 877 number to inform them I have no idea whom that person is/was. Not surprisingly, I was placed on hold immediately. While I was holding, my level of annoyance rose as I was repeatedly informed their call volume was “unusually high.”  And I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell them.

So I logged into my BroadVoice control panel, and configured “Call Forwarding Selective.”  Now, when they call me, their calls go directly into their own switchboard. I doubt it will make any difference to them, but at least they won’t wake me up at 5AM.