Daley Ponderings

A bunch of people made a neat video of a lot of kids using augmentative communication devices.  My guess is that most of the devices are made by DynaVox, the company where I currently (for a little while longer) work.  It is neat to see our technology making a difference in people's lives.

I got a couple spams through my Lime Daley contact form the last couple days, so I took another look at the script that I was using.  I wrote it a year or two ago, and was my first attempt at writing an anti-spam tool that was designed to have a 0% false negative rate (ie. humans can't possibly fail - as opposed to the image recognizer thing, which I fail about 20% of the time, so I imagine less technical people people must fail and/or give up more often than that).

The one on the Lime Daley page isn't as good as the one I wrote for this blog, but I took a look at the statistics this morning, and it blocked 544 spams last month, only allowing three through. (More)

Sunday morning, after playing outside before church, Jonathan came to me complaining that his eye hurt.  It was red and watering, but I could not see any foreign object.  It continued to be irritated, so I wondered if it might be pinkeye.

The pain would come in waves, hurting the most when he closed his eyes, as for naps and bedtime.  This made me wonder if there was something under his eyelid.

It was not better by yesterday, so we had Dr.Anderson check it out while we were there for Noah.  He did the glow-in-the-dark eye thing and we definitely saw scratches.  It was obvious to me the difference between what his eye looked like and what Jon's and Noah's eyes looked like when they had the same dye test but no abrasions.

Jonathan did appreciate the mirror (which dear nurse Theresa found after much searching) so he could see his own glowing eye.

And guess what?  All those ducts and passages are connected!  What did we see a minute later but a drip of glowing liquid seeping out of his nose... 

Dr.Anderson looked as best he could under both eyelids but could not find any particle.  He prescribed an antibiotic ointment (like the stuff you put on your cuts before you put the bandaid on) and referred us to an eye specialist. 

So Jonathan has an appointment for tomorrow morning.  His eye looks horrible (he has a hard time restraining himself from rubbing so the outside is red too) and we have to put the medicine in four times a day.  That stings, so it has not been a pleasant experience, but this morning he handled it better than the two times yesterday.

I'm hoping tomorrow will bring a definitive answer and a move towards healing.  Please pray for my dear little boy!  It is hard to see him in pain. 

Noah is 30lb 12 oz, 34 1/2" tall.  He's getting over a cold, so the doctor could see fluid in both ears, but it's mild and Noah doesn't even care about it. (More)

Both boys like to help me with the laundry.  Jonathan can unload the washer completely independently (standing on a stool and leaning nearly all the way in!)  Then he tosses the wet clothes on the dryer door (opens downward to form a shelf of sorts) and Noah pushes or throws the clothes into the dryer.  All while I do something else useful! (More)

I got a security notice that I should upgrade from version 5.32 of Winamp to 5.35, so I downloaded the upgrade (and noticed that it supports my Creative Labs portable MP3 player - I'll have to check that out at some point), and once the install was mostly finished, got this message: 

I'd say the "I'm smart" status message is proving that the programmer wasn't all that smart, since I am seeing his debug messages... 

Peter was nice enough to loan me a Kill-A-Watt for a couple weeks to investigate power usage around our home.  I have thought about buying one before, but borrowing one is certainly better, though it is quite a bit of fun to test out devices to see how much power they use.

I first tried it on our dental water pik, and it is 30 watts when it is being used, and 0 when it is not.  In Pittsburgh (at 11.3 cents per kWh), a 50 watt device running for a minute costs just under a penny.  Our chest freezer runs at 83 watts when it is cooling, and 0 watts when it is not (pretty good, I think).  I let it run for a day and the grand total is 9.4 cents ($3/month). (More)

I am sorry to report that I am below average, when compared to college and high school seniors in the United States with regard to knowledge of history.

Here is a quiz to see how you do. 

Here is a brief review of Organizing for your Brain Type by Lanna Nakone.  This is a neat book that gives some explanation about why some people have trouble keeping things organized and why some have trouble understanding those others. (More)

As has already been observed, I haven't been so diligent at writing down the doings and sayings of my sons.  Here's what I did write down and what other stuff I can remember. (More)

pure-ftpd isn't designed to work with TCP wrappers, which is unfortunate, because then I can't simply add an ip address to /etc/hosts.deny to block the hackers when they guess passwords.  But, since the hackers have tried to login to my servers thirty thousand times this month, and occasionally get good usernames, and theoretically might guess a right password eventually, I needed to figure out a solution. (More)

Mom wrote recently about thinking the best, and Janet just got back in touch with a lost friend whose email was misbehaving.  Now it is my turn to be on the receiving end of a gracious friend thinking the best of me. (More)

I was recently asked to speak at IVCF at CMU on the topic of Christian view of success and vocation.  I am supposed to talk for 15 minutes, which will probably go very fast, so I need to be more concise than I usually would be. (More)

I hadn't checked my log file in a while for my Lime Daley contact page, but happened to check it today.  There have been 438 spams sent in the last two months, and 2 legitimate emails.  The spam filter (I wrote it - which is probably why it works - that my site isn't big enough for the spammers to work on getting around it, it is rather trivial, the spam filter for this blog site is better than that one, and somewhat more difficult to get around automatically) did its job 100% of the time.  The two emails went through without delay, and the 438 emails were saved in a log. (More)

Someone at snurgle pointed this out to me.  I understand that things like this can happen, but when I type "cal 9 1752", it seems strange to see this output:

  September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       1  2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30