Michael Sprague

In Our Own House

michael — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 02:24:11 +0000

We got moved this weekend. We really appreciate all the help we have received from the congregation. Both this weekend for the move itself, and the past month as we were preparing the house to move in to. Now we can relax a little bit, but there are still more projects to do. So far we have been painting and working on the bathroom. I got the tub surround tiled and the shower plumbed. I am so grateful for the help from my dad and Mark on that project.

Fall Drive on the Parkway

michael — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 01:20:46 +0000

We decided to take a drive to see if there were any colors left. We got on the Blue Ridge Parkway at Brevard Rd. near Asheville and drove through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park ending up in Gatlinburg, TN. From Gatlinburg we took the most direct route home via I-40. We packed a lunch and stopped at a picnic area in the National Park. The short trip made for a relaxing day off.

View all the photos from our drive.

Deliverance at Hand! District Convention

michael — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 23:26:58 +0000

We had our Deliverance at Hand District Convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Johnson City, TN June 23 – 25, 2006.
The peak attendance was 4,313 and there were 17 baptized.

[Update] We didn’t take very many photos, but here they are.

Weekend at the Coast

michael — Mon, 08 May 2006 22:19:43 +0000

This past weekend we drove to the coast to explore Savannah, Hilton Head Island, and Charleston. We had never been to the area before and we wanted to get away for the weekend so we thought it would be a good time to go check out the coast. It was a cool and rainy weekend here in the mountains, and the weather proved to be excellent by the coast. It was mostly cloudy with some sun, but it rained only at night and was plenty warm. We are looking forward to returning to either Savannah or Charleston on another trip when we can spend more time. We thought we might like one place over the other, but it is a pretty even draw for us.

View all the photos from our trip.

Visit to Mount Mitchell

michael — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 01:44:15 +0000

There was an article in the newspaper recently about the observation tower at the peak of Mt Mitchell being torn down and a new one being built in its place. Well, since we had never seen the current one that is going to be destroyed, we though we better head out there and see it. This was not only my first time to Mt Mitchell State Park, but my first time on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Mount Mitchell is the highest point in the eastern United States at an elevation of 6,684 feet. It is interesting that air pollution and acid rain are contributing to the decline of the spruce-fir forests in the area.

View all the photos from this trip.

Nantahala National Forest Hike

michael — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 02:23:37 +0000

Some friends from the congregation and I, seven of us total, drove a little over two hours to hike in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest which is contained in the Nantahala National Forest. There are trees as old as 450 years there. It is one of the very few remaining tracts of virgin hardwood in the Appalachians. The large old trees are tulip-poplars, some with a circumference greater than 20 feet and over 100 feet tall.

View all my photos from the hike.

View information on the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest. (1.4 mb pdf file)

Asterisk Phone System

michael — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 22:47:58 +0000

These are the basics of my Asterisk PBX setup on Debian. I added an X10 interface so that motion sensors in the house could trigger Asterisk to make calls. It has the ability to automatically notify me when I walk in the door if there is new voicemail waiting. But, the reason I went down this road to begin with is that I can use my broadband Internet connection to make long distance phone calls anywhere in the continental US for 1.3 cents per minute.

Software

Debian 3.1 Network Install from a minimal CD
Asterisk 1.2 (SVN revision 7230)
Built and installed with the help of this guide.
Xtend 1.1
Application to execute shell commands based on activity from the CM11A X10 Interface through the COM port.
SJphone for Pocket PC
SIP softphone running on my Axim X50v

Hardware

Micron Transport XPE
Pentium 133MMX with 64MB RAM
This is my Asterisk box. My parents bought this laptop for me in 1997. It handles the calls fine as long as there isn’t transcoding necessary.
X10 Wireless Motion Sensor (MS13A)
X10 Transceiver (RR501)
Out of production but similar to TM751
X10 Computer Interface (CM11A)
Sipura SPA-3000
ATA and PSTN gateway to provide one FXS port and one FXO port to Asterisk.
Purchased from Voxilla.com
Interfaces standard phones and fax machine to Asterisk.
Interfaces Asterisk to PSTN local line.
I was having problems getting the SPA-3000 to do what I wanted until I found the Voxilla SPA-3000 Configuration Wizard for Asterisk. After running through that and uploading the config file to the SPA-3000 it did exactly what I wanted it to.

SJphone is running on my Dell Axim X50v which I can leave cradled in the living room more often now that I have a Nextel i930 Smartphone (Thanks Jon!). The Axim stays on the Wifi network connected to Asterisk with SJphone. I have SJphone set to auto-answer. When I walk in the front door the MS13A motion sensor detects me and sends a signal to the RR501 which relays it to the CM11A. Xtend then picks up that motion was detected and copies the call file to the Asterisk outgoing spool directory. The call file tells asterisk to connect two extensions together, one is the Axim and the other is the Asterisk voicemail already logged in to the correct voicemail box. So, I walk in and my X50v says, “You have 2 new messages, press 1…” It works pretty slick. Ideally the voicemail would go right into the mode of playing the first message automatically, but it doesn’t look like the option exists for that by default and I haven’t gotten around to adding it in yet.

The Network Operations Center

Pertinent config file excerpts:

#
#voicemail.call
#
Channel: Local/752@home

MaxRetries: 2
RetryTime: 60
WaitTime: 30

Context: home
Extension: 751
Priority: 1

;
; extensions.conf
;
; this is the extension that 752 gets connected to
exten => 751,1,GotoIf($[${VMCOUNT(17)} > 0]?102)
exten => 751,2,Hangup
exten => 751,102,Wait(5)
exten => 751,103,VoiceMailMain,s17

; this is the called extension for auto-dial out
exten => 752,1,GotoIf($[${VMCOUNT(17)} > 0]?102)
exten => 752,2,Answer
exten => 752,3,Wait(1)
exten => 752,4,Hangup
exten => 752,102,Dial(SIP/msprague)  ; X50v
exten => 752,103,Hangup

Settling In

michael — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 16:38:01 +0000

Well, we have been here in Asheville for almost three weeks now. Things are going very well. We love the area, we love the weather and we love our new congregation.

What we left behind.

Our first dusting of Asheville snow.

The Asheville West Kingdom Hall.

Streetscape panorama

Backyard panorama

Moving to Asheville, North Carolina

michael — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 23:45:09 +0000

Well, this is the big weekend. We closed on the sale of our house this afternoon, tomorrow we load up the trailers and Sunday we will make the 12+ hour drive to Asheville. June and I really, really appreciate the help of both of our families to make this big move. We will be renting a two bedroom house in the West Asheville area. We hope to soon have the second bedroom set up to accommodate guests comfortably so that family and friends that make the trek down for a visit will be able to stay with us and have a real bed to sleep on.

Get prints of my photos from flickr.com

michael — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 19:52:05 +0000

You have probably already noticed that I am now storing all of my digital photos on a website called flickr.com. As announced two weeks ago on the flickr blog, you can now order prints of photos from flickr. That means if there is one of my photos that you want a 4×6 print of you can get it either sent to you or for pick up at a Target store. The only catch is that you have to be a flickr user (requires a Yahoo! ID), and that’s not really a catch because you should be a flickr user anyway! I tried out the service and was real happy with the quality of the prints. There was not a Target near me available to pick-up so I did the mail order option.
So go sign up and enjoy flickr.