Daley Ponderings

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)