Daley Ponderings

I woke up this morning to find Taiwan's Yahoo server rejecting emails that were supposedly sent using my server.  I originally figured it was the regular old spammer trick of using invalid return addresses until I noticed that it was one of my servers who was reporting the failure, rather than an external machine. (More)

I don't know if it is only relevant to Allegheny County or if it is more universal, but a friend asked me to write a parcel id (parcel/block/lot) parser to help him out in his real estate searches.  It was kind of a fun project (3 hours) and it was neat to see how well it worked out in the end.

It takes stuff on the right, and turns it into the stuff on the left:

0318-C-00080-0000-00 <= 318 C 080
0387-S-00002-0000-00 <= 387-S-2  387-M-148
0160-K-00013-0000-00 <= 0160-K-00013-0000-00
0124-P-00095-000A-00 <= 0124-p-00095-000a-00
1213-F-00377-0000-00 <= 1213F00377
0180-B-00041-0000-00 <= 0180-B-00041-0000-00
0495-F-00201-0000-00 <= Lot & Block 495-F-201
0009-S-00305-0000-00 <= 9-S-305
0309-D-00100-0000-00 <= 0309D00100000000

Code follows below: (More)

I hadn't ever thought of putting motors on an etch-a-sketch.

I found a nifty application (watch the youtube video for an idea of how it works) for playing around, and Jonathan and spent at least a couple hours today playing with it.  It simulates gravity, friction, inertia and things like that.  Jonathan enjoyed it and asked about it when we got home today.

As some of you know, we have been looking for a house for the last couple of months, and we think we have found one!  I asked a couple guys from church to come look at it today, and give their thoughts, and they generally approved.  Someday, I'll probably make the kitchen nicer (ie. an addition out the back) but for now, Heather says it is okay, and we'll make what the realtor called the "master" bedroom an office, and we'll sleep upstairs, which solves a space crunch issue for our bedroom.

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2/9 - Jonathan: "What does special mean?" I say something about someone/thing that someone cares for. "How much do you care for me?" Well, I don't think I can really measure that. "Well, you may care for me abundantly." (More)

I had meant to post that the trial was going to be on March 17th, but I just found out that it has been postponed until September 22.  So, more waiting.  Crazy.

Shortly after I posted the first analysis of my time, I realized that my hours per day calculation were kind of off, since I was counting 7 day weeks, and I basically never work on Sundays.  As I am redoing the calculations, I see that I must have been doing something strange to try get the days to line up correctly - ie. I restart the worklog in the middle of a day usually, and so I must have tried to move some hours to the previous month, rather than reporting the same day twice, but as far as I can tell, I can't do arithmetic correctly.  So, here are the revised numbers: 

November: 7.6 hours/day
December: 6.6 hours/day
January: 6.6 hours/day
February: 6.9 hours/day

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I finally decided to buy a wireless card for my laptop that uses the cell phone network, as opposed to plain wi-fi.  This will allow me to have more/better access when I am not in range of a wifi access point (say, hypothetically, if one were to travel to Middleburg, Virginia to a house that only has dial-up access), and it will probably be useful in other places too.

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Last week (actually within the span of three days) four people asked me if I am pregnant.  Really, you ask?  Yes, really, they did.  One of them was Jonathan, whom you have read has been praying fervently for a little sister, and has not yet learned that you don't ask women that (unless, as Dave Barry says, you can actually see the baby coming out.)  My answer was "not that I know of."

I had bought a box with two tests at Christmas time to see if there was any Christmas present announcement to be made to the family (it was negative then.)  The second one was sitting there in the bathroom and Monday morning, I thought, well, I'll just take it so that I can tell people for sure that I'm not.  However, when I looked at the little window after two minutes, what should I see but a positive result!  I could hardly believe it.

So Noah and I rushed back upstairs to bring the news to Daddy and Jonathan, who of course were very excited.

Expected arrival is sometime in October.  This could potentially be a nice birthday present for Mommy, or even a very special 90th birthday present for Great Grandpa Daley.  Jonathan will be nearly five and Noah will be a couple of months shy of two and a half.

I really was not expecting this (cycles had not yet returned due to nursing) but it does explain some things over the last few weeks.  Noticeable drop in milk supply, slight aversion to pancakes, not feeling perfectly up to par (though I thought I just had what's going around), Jon beating me at Scrabble... 

We are all thrilled (well, Noah's rather clueless at the moment) and looking forward to meeting this new little one, boy or girl!

On Sunday after church, we were driving around the area and went to the lake we visited in the summer.  It was frozen over, people were ice fishing.  We walked on carefully, telling Jonathan to stay near us and of the dangers of weak ice.  We found an abandonded, yet fresh, ice fishing hole about three inches in diameter.  From this hole we were able to determine that the ice was about four inches thick.

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Whew... For some reason, taxes took longer than they have in other years.  Part of the time was spent trying to get out of a federal tax penalty for not calculating the estimated taxes correctly.  We spent 14.63 hours (courtesy of worklog), mostly together working on them.  I am finally mailing them in today.

We convinced them (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Federal) to only take 15% of our income...  I have wondered about MIT's/Huckabee's tax pseudo-flat sales tax and what that would look like for us.  We do get a bunch of credits and deductions, and under the prebate/sales tax model, I don't think any deductions would apply.  But on the other hand, we also probably spend less than a lot of people, so maybe whatever rate that would be picked wouldn't be that bad.  And of course, the cost of saving 27 hours for having a simpler tax code would be nice.

Noah likes to help set the table.  When I ask him to put forks at the places, he will run to the drawer and grab a fistfull, then put a fork on top of each plate.  I usually have to help him put away the extras, or they end up all over the place.

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Some people have asked where my time is spent, now that I am working from home.  I don't keep track of non-computer time, but I do keep track of when I am on my laptop, partially to see where I am spending my time, and partially for billing reasons. I found this handy software called worklog.  The author's site appears to be down, but since I get it from Debian, I never actually looked up the author's site until now. (More)

One of my customers gave me an Amazon gift certificate for Christmas, and so I bought a geeky toy for myself (One for All URC 8910 Universal Remote Control), and a book for Heather and I (Teach Them Diligently: How To Use The Scriptures In Child Training).

I haven't opened the book yet, but I have played around with the remote a bit and am quite happy with it. One of its neat features is that it is upgradeable over the phone.  When I first got it, it could only talk to my VCR, and none of the rest of the systems.  So, I called up tech support, and gave them the model numbers, and they said, "hold the remote up to the phone and we'll download the new commands."  Now my remote can talk to all of the devices, and I only had to do manual IR learning for a couple commands.  Lots of fun!