Daley Ponderings

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)

I also have been doing some work on our new house.  This morning we installed new downspouts on the west side of the house - (we previously had done some work on the east side).  They aren't the prettiest pipes in the world, but the take the water from the two corners and pipe it over down towards the street between our house and the neighbors.  At some point, I'll have to glue at least some of the joints, but for now, they are working nicely just loosely fit together.  (More)

Heather and I spent several days over the last week at our old house, cleaning and fixing various things that our previous tenants broke.

It is pretty annoying to have people totally not care about your property, and live in pretty disgusting conditions, presumably to get back at me for asking them to leave.  They hadn't cleaned in a month or two, and it is hard to believe that they were actually eating food off the counters and table, etc. (More)

We've gotten two calls in the last couple days from people claiming that we called them, and quite irate about it.  What they didn't realize is that you can't really trust the caller-id values displayed on your phone - they are trivially forgeable by anyone, and I think relatively hard to trace even for phone companies and police, etc. (More)

Mydad had mentioned a news article story a month ago about some company charging a whole bunch of people $.01 each on their credit cards; presumably with the thought that no one would complain about a $.01 charge, and since they charged a million people or something, they made a bunch of money.

It seems to me that the credit card companies should simply remove those charges automatically, once the fraud is discovered, but Citibank Business (AKA worse service than Citibank Personal) didn't, and I had to call to get it removed. (More)

Very early in the morning, we got up, had breakfast and said goodbye to Sarah (all the other Dutlers said goodbye the night before.) Janet and Stephan came to pick us up and we crammed all ourselves and stuff into the mini-minivan. They took us to the Basel airport where we spent quite some time trying to figure out our seating arrangements. The week before when Jon called, they said he'd better call within 24 hours of the flight. When he called then, they said he should have called earlier. Finally they worked out something but Jon would still have to talk to the boarding desk people in Frankfurt.  (More)

I thought I had written about this before, but I can't find it, so maybe we just talked about it over email.

We purchased health insurance through Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield when I first started working for myself. It was the same plan as we had when workingfor Dynavox, though since there wasn't a co-pay any more, it was actual cheaper for regular visits, because some things are covered at 100% and some at 90%, and the 10% is cheaper than the $20 co-pay, which I hadn't realized would happen. (More)

And we just discovered that there is yet another Pittsburgh tax we didn't know about, and maybe even a couple different taxes we may or may not owe.  I called Pittsburgh to cancel our estimated tax forms that they have continued to mail to us, even though we now live outside of Pittsburgh.  In the course of the conversation, he said that we would probably still have to pay the payroll expense tax.  I asked what that was, and he said, oh, that's the new tax that replaced the mercantile tax.  I said I hadn't heard of either of those before... (More)