Daley Ponderings

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!

Growl.  Arg, we're going to eat you up!

Dogs, Aloo-ki!  We're going to eat you up.

Growl. Growl.  Stomp. There's dogs [being] eating [eaten] up.

The bears have eaten one dog. (More)

Our photo album wouldn't publish on this last update, and it took quite a while to figure out what the problem was. (More)

Last night Jonathan was helping me set the table for dinner.  He said we should get five plates, but I said no, Noah has his tray so he doesn't need a plate.  But he could get five bowls for the chili, and five spoons.  Then I said, "Make two of them big spoons." "Why?"  "Because Daddy and Miss Sanda like big spoons for chili."  "So, then I should get three small spoons."  That was quick subtraction in his head without any prompting from me! (More)

I assume that the EETimes is paid by their advertisers based on how many active readers they have in certain categories, etc.  Hopefully, the advertisers know that those numbers are inflated, since I think it took me a year of calling and emailing them to get them to stop mailing me the magazine.  They finally figured that out, but continue to email me, and ignore the unsubscribe messages that I send back.

I suppose it would be nifty if our blog was popular enough for the advertisers to notice and tell EETimes to stop doing that, but that is pretty unlikely, I think.

Can I condense three weeks of activities into one post?  We'll see how it turns out.  One thing we discovered at Christmastime is that Noah loves cocktail sauce.  He just dipped his finger in and licked it off, licked the bowl clean and wanted more!

I found what I would call a bug in resolvconf today, though probably most people don't run a VPN server like I wanted to, so no one ever noticed before. (More)

Just when I thought I was a geek, the bar is raised...

I forgot to post this a while ago: Tim Hawkins and the "homeschool family".  Prairie Home Sausage is kind of funny - and has a picture of a really neat merry-go-round.

Lastly, being in NH during the presidential primary has been annoying.  Apparently, phone calls have gotten cheap enough that most of the candidates have been calling.  Some of them, most notable Obama and Clinton, like to call multiple times just to make sure that we have heard of them.  Obama's volunteers were surprised that they weren't the first to call, since they had printed out lists (and call from all over the country), so it is strange that they would have sent out duplicate lists.  Clinton's supporters said that the computer just calls every number in order, and each phone doesn't talk to each other, so it was quite likely that I would get called within five minutes from the same office.

I don't know if that should be filed under persistence or incompetence.

I thanked the Huckabee supporters at the polling place for not calling, I think only Huckabee and Paul didn't call us.  (as a side-note, that means I get to stick to my mom's statement that she gives the callers - that she won't vote for anyone who calls, particularly after 10PM (that was Obama).  Unfortunately for mom, McCain did call once, but she is going to vote for him even though he called.

One of the Clinton supporters that I talked to on the phone didn't apologize at all for calling three times in the same hour because, "what do you expect - if you're going to have the first primary, you should expect it".  I pointed out that we have always had the first primary, and it hasn't ever been this bad before.  The Concord Monitor had a number of letters to the editor about it this year.  I expect that NH (at least) will push for an expanded do-not-call list to include the politicians too, which would be really nice.