Daley Ponderings

Prayer

On Sunday we were singing "Forever God is Faithful, Forever God is strong, Forever God is with us, Forever." This is "Samuel's Song" for me - the song that rang through my head all day long when Sam K. was born. It reminded me of all the prayer that went up for his birth, and God's faithfulness in answering it. (More)

Posted by joyful on May 10, 2006, 11:44 am | Read 626 times | Comments (1)
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Robin Eggs Abandoned

We don't really know what happened, but we hadn't seen any robins at the nest for a while. Three weeks after Easter, I became suspicious, and now for sure these eggs won't hatch. We're going to clean up the whole window area and hopefully next year we will have successful robin hatching.

Posted by joyful on May 10, 2006, 11:39 am | Read 753 times | Comments (3)
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Dean Kamen Quote

I read an interview of Dean Kamen recently. I first heard of him when he was demoing his Segway invention around the mall in our very own Concord (I don't know if I will ever be a Pittsburgher - still feel like a New Hampshirite), or possibly for USFirst, but he has been around a while - I think he said something about inventing things for 30 years. (More)

Posted by jondaley on May 10, 2006, 11:35 am | Read 508 times | Comments (1)
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Microsoft Anti-Spyware / Defender

I guess Microsoft has decided they have cornered enough of the Anti-Spyware market to start charging for the tool to fix their insecure OS. Microsoft popped up a dialog offering to download the new version of the anti-spyware tools. Usually the upgrade doesn't pop-up a separate window, so I was suspicious. (More)

Posted by jondaley on May 6, 2006, 4:16 pm | Read 357 times | Comments (0)
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Exercise

Good advice: if you're tired, make yourself get some exercise, even (or especially) if you're pregnant! (More)

Posted by joyful on May 4, 2006, 2:40 pm | Read 644 times | Comments (1)
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The Christmas Tree Survives!

Our first attempt at keeping a live Christmas tree live was a dismal failure, for two main reasons. One, we didn't take it down until April or some other such long time. Two, I misunderstood the instructions about misting the tree. What you are supposed to do is mist the branches to keep them hydrated. However, I thought you were supposed to mist the rootball. So this poor tree never had enough water from the start. (More)

Posted by joyful on May 4, 2006, 2:32 pm | Read 383 times | Comments (1)
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Pouring, Questions and Answers

Jonathan can be very good at pouring things if he is careful. He can pour just the right amount of juice into a glass, he can pour just the right amount of cereal into a bowl. Sometimes he gets excited, especially to look around to make sure we're watching him, and that often leads to trouble. But if he concentrates, he does excellently! (More)

Posted by joyful on May 4, 2006, 2:21 pm | Read 379 times | Comments (0)
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Fruit and States

On our flight to Boston, I made sure we had plenty of snacks. Jonathan was eating a fruit leather when he held it up and exclaimed, "Looks like Nebraska!" It really did! (More)

Posted by joyful on May 3, 2006, 4:33 pm | Read 354 times | Comments (3)
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Family Bed

After two and a half years of sleeping in a family bed, it is surely ingrained in me. When our friends' daughter needed to spend the night with us when her baby brother was being born, I couldn't bear the thought of putting her in another room. (More)

Posted by joyful on May 2, 2006, 8:41 am | Read 454 times | Comments (1)
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USA Datanet

I don't think I have written about USA Datanet on this blog. They just reminded me to tell everyone how great they are, so I will gladly do so. (More)

Posted by jondaley on May 2, 2006, 6:04 am | Read 715 times | Comments (2)
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Search Engine Optimization

About a year ago I realized that the search results from search engines were returning different index pages from this blog, instead of the actual article that contained the term that the person was searching for. This is because the index pages only show the last 10 articles and are updated regularly, so the version the search engine has is often out-of-date. (More)

Posted by jondaley on April 29, 2006, 9:26 am | Read 515 times | Comments (1)
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Making Breakfast AKA Jonathan's First Post

Italics are what I (Jon) said during the dictation, though I missed a lot, and didn't type in some of Jonathan's repeated sentences.

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Posted by jondaley on April 29, 2006, 8:51 am | Read 413 times | Comments (2)
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Hardest Sudoku Puzzle?

This is the hardest one I have ever worked on. [Update 10/24/2006: thanks to you all reading this post and posting other links, I have since found more interesting ones -- look through the comments - the one posted on October 9th appears to be pretty hard, though maybe I just made a mistake on it] When we were with my parents last weekend, we found out that my parents are big Suduko fans, and do quite a number of them during the week, in different papers, page-a-day calendars, etc.

Dad was trying to find a hard one for me, and found a "six star" one, that turned out to be not that hard - reasonably difficult, but similar to what I had seen before. We had been trading secrets of how we figure out puzzles the fastest, and he liked one of my starting first-pass rules, but then found a puzzle that using his rule, and then my rule still did not find a single number during the first pass. After that, the only step I know is to start writing down all possibilities, and it is sort of interesting to see how fast you can narrow them down, it is a little too brute force for my taste, and so I am not interested in it as much.

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Posted by jondaley on April 28, 2006, 9:21 pm | Read 12027 times | Comments (80)
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Names

Don't ever name your child the same name as you. It confuses everyone, from doctors to insurance carriers to airlines. USAir and United won't let me check-in online any more, since it can't figure out what to do with Jonathan and me. We both have different frequent flyer numbers, but it is confused. USAir says to call United, and United says to call USAir. A "Pearl Smith" (there's a Indian name...) at United says though she won't take responsibility for what she says, and it is her real name, I should wait in line at USAirways. (More)

Posted by jondaley on April 20, 2006, 8:01 am | Read 1804 times | Comments (7)
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Counting Trampoline, Pumping Swings, Running

On Friday, we all had fun on the Kuhns' new indoor trampoline. I showed Will how we used to count while jumping, and he jumped and counted (by ones) all the way to 100. He did not make himself start over if he missed a jump, he just kept jumping until he remembered the next number. But Alissa thought it might have been the first time he counted all the way to 100 without skipping any numbers. Then he went by 100's to a thousand. He originally wanted to go to two thousand but he was tired and someone else wanted to jump. (More)

Posted by joyful on April 19, 2006, 9:35 am | Read 569 times | Comments (1)
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