Daley Ponderings

Heather remarked at dinner tonight (at the Olive Garden - thanks Wightmans, we've got 7 more dinners at this rate to celebrate our anniversary) that we are a rich family: we now own two cars and two houses.  I did realize that some people spend more on their cars than we spent on our first house, but nevertheless, we have been blessed financially.

Our new vehicle is a 1997 Oldsmobile Silhouette van in near perfect condition - the seller is more meticulous and pays more attention to details than I do, if you can believe that. (More)

I keep forgetting to post this.  A friend who currently lives in China wrote:

It has been interesting to hear some of my former students express excitement and intrigue about the presidency of Barack Obama. The reason it has captured their attention is because it proves to them that the US truly is a democratic republic. The government of China often down plays American democracy, insisting that, in reality, only a few families have any power (Kennedys, Bushs, Clintons, etc.), and so the election of an ethnic minority, relatively unknown just five years ago, to President of the United State has proven to my students the US really is a democracy, contrary to what they are often taught.

 

Tom asked for some statistics for his blog, and I figured I might as well look them up for mine while I was at it.  I am not particularly surprised by the results, so perhaps not worth posting, but in case anyone thought the world was interested about our kids... (More)

I've noticed the "kids" at church (in quotes, since folks are quite sure where to place me, the "adults" say I'm a kid, and the "kids" say I'm adult (I think primarily since I'm married and have kids of my own)) hug more than I am used to, and I had internally wondered a couple times if it was a culture thing (e.g. confined to our church) or if it was a larger generational thing. (More)

I guess I fail the test, since I answered "no" to both questions, though I suppose Brad Andresen from college (the one who always said of me, "You're more liberal than you think you are.") would be happy to hear that I'd be more likely to think it alright to slap my dad in a skit than to worry about touching a faucet.

Would you send your nine-year-old on a New York City subway by himself?  Would you send him on a horse from Oklahoma to New Mexico and back by way of the deserts of Texas - taking his five-year-old brother along? (More)

If you start a pot boiling at 9:55PM (knowing that you will be up for a while) to hard boil eggs for the following day and don't set a timer, how long will it take before you go back to the kitchen to turn off the stove? (More)

Our printer finally died.  Or actually, it didn't really die, but required more money, so I decided (somewhat hesitantly, since the HP Laserjet 6L is the best printer ever made, according to most sources) to replace it.  The 6L lasted 13 years, so the longest lasting printer I've had since the Epson dot-matrix we had while growing up, which of course, still works.  We've only been able to have one page in the input feeder for years, and when I replaced the fuser a year or two ago, I didn't realize that I could have gotten some new gears to fix the feed issue at the same time.  I bought two toners the last time I bought toner, and it turns out that was a bad idea, as the "wiper" in the toner cartridge rotted out, since we use ink so slowly. (More)

I haven't looked at how much time it took us to do taxes this year - I thought we were doing pretty well, time-wise, until we blew 8 hours or so today finishing them off (or is it them finishing us off, I'm not sure which...)

I noticed a number of places where the strange, complicated math formulas to figure out different values seem to be kind of odd (ie. not just complicated, but don't calculate in the intuitive way for people at different incomes, etc.)  The child credit is biased against self-employed people for some reason, where you can hit a cap relatively quickly, where if you work at a regular company, the cap is much higher (and at least for one guy (with a relatively low salary as a teacher with lots of kids) I asked, impossible to hit - he actually didn't know there was a cap).  (More)

Most of you who know me realize that I don't hardly pay any attention to news, and particularly since I started working from home, I can't even get my daily news reports from conversations in the common area.  So, I generally figure I don't know most of what is "going on" in the world, and I guess I adopt the old Star Island tradition of, "if the world blows up, I'll see it coming on the horizon", and not worrying about any of it.

Now that Peter has me setup on facebook rss feeds, I have the oppportunity to actually see all of the status, notes and links of my friends, where previously, I'd only see a couple of them, when I logged in once every week or two. (More)

I guess we haven't written about Arizona yet, so that'll come later, but Heather posted the pictures today, but I hadn't gotten around to making the panoramic collection yet, so I just did that.  For those of you snappy readers/watchers, you'll probably want to check out the pictures again.  I'm not sure what the RSS feeds will do for the pictures - they might notice the new picture, I'm not sure.

We are missing a movie, and so went looking around the house for it (the boys had all the movies out the other day, lining them up to look at all of the covers (as well as taking all the Mancala marbles and throwing them around the house)) - see what happens when Mommy leaves for the morning??  In my defense, I hadn't realized they were Mancala pieces, I wouldn't have let them do it if I knew they were part of a set.

In the process of looking for things, we found a number of legos that had been missing a while, a couple things that had been missing for years, a cookie (not sure how old that is), and some various cancelled checks and a driver's license from the previous owner of this couch.

The license expired 1991.  Virginia Everard (who strangely enough, can be found in a couple references on the web, one of which being her mortgage, which will finish in 2027, complete with the total amount left, interest rate and monthly payment that she owed (when some bank bought or otherwise acquired her loan).  Kind of odd that is published information.

Since I am a lazy Debian user, I am not used to compiling things from source.  (sidenote: It is interesting to me how many people from other distributions are fairly used to mucking around in source code, spending hours working on getting a simple package installed)  But, clusterssh isn't available for cygwin as a package, and I think it might save me a lot of time, so wanted to try it out anyway on my laptop (rather than running it over X on my desktop - our desktop automatically goes to sleep so it seems silly to turn it on to run a program from the laptop - though arguably I could turn the laptop off and go sit on the desktop, but I prefer sitting on the couch with the laptop.  The obvious answer is to install Linux on my laptop, which I'll probably get to at some point).  Okay, enough with the sidenotes (I think). (More)

Cygwin is one of the packages that seems to often break when I upgrade it.  In their defense, it is a large collection of packages, so presumably hard to get everything right in all circumstances.  I run Debian (testing) on my Linux systems, and I rarely have any issues during upgrades.  I don't know if the Debian folks are just more paranoidstrict (probably) than most, so maybe that is why I can confidently upgrade things without expecting to have to jump into the newsgroups.

Today, I upgraded cygwin, since I was going to see if clusterssh exists for cygwin, and figured I might as well upgrade first. It turns out I must have upgraded relatively recently, since the setup.exe only needed to be upgraded one minor release. (More)

I figured I'd be getting some birthday money from someone, so I went ahead and spent it last week, by buying a handful of CDs from Sovereign Grace, which happens to be having a fairly big sale.  It will go for the rest of February, so you should probably check it out.  It seems to be becoming an annual event, so I'll need to remember that, though I don't know if I have bought anything from them recently.  (More)