Daley Ponderings

I happened to check my logs this evening and discovered that a spammer had tried to send one of my clients a few emails over the weekend. Only 100,000 or so. He was being blocked via an RBL, but that still takes up resources, so I manually blocked his IP address, as well as ran a ping -f -s... (More)

Since I always need to go back to my email to find out the instructions of how to set up the server, here are the settings we need at DynaVox to make Tracker work properly.We no longer need to install Oracle locally (yay!) Simply run tracker setup (can be over the network). You only need... (More)

We already know that Jonathan can match shapes, since he is successful at playing with shape sorters. Now I know that Jonathan can match colors if he wants to. We were playing with his sheet of alphabet stickers, and he took four I's off to put on his hands. Later, he wanted to put them back,... (More)

I wrote a random signature generator for Pine, my email client. It worked great for a number of years, but with a recent upgrade of Pine, it started having trouble a couple of times a day, where the signature would be correctly rotated, but Pine would hang prior to sending the message, and would... (More)

On April 27, we went to the Zoo with Alissa, Will, Nate, and Sam. I sang to Jonathan the "We're going to the zoo" song and he repeated, "zoo, zoo, zoo!" He also repeated "cheetah" but he growled at the bears on his own. The elephants were much larger in real life than he expected and he didn't... (More)

April 20 - Completely screwed on the parmesean cheese lid (empty jar.) April 22 - "chalk" April 25 - Tripped while dancing on the couch and landed on the coffee table - nasty bruise by his eye. But thank God, his eye is fine. It looks like he was in a fight... April 26 - "basket" , "dark",... (More)

We went in to see Dr. Anderson yesterday because Jonathan has had a recurrence of the coughing and throwing up routine, and this morning started a fever. He says it is most likely a virus that is causing postnasal drip, which is irritating his throat to make his cough, which is causing his... (More)

He seems to have at least one new word a day now. Sometime before March 24, he said "boots." On March 24 he signed "cheese" and drank some water from a small bathroom cup by himself without crushing the cup to a pulp and without spilling very much. He says water that sounds like "why." Other... (More)

Rhythm is such a funny word I had to look it up to double check the spelling. Anyway, Jonathan has shown advancement in doing puzzles, having patience to turn the piece more than in the past. Today, he successfully put the triangle and square pieces in his shape sorter, where before he only... (More)

As we were cleaning up from my birthday party, Heather noticed a police car in our back alley. It turns out there were two brothers (one is a self-proclaimed starving musician) who live in Pittsburgh, but were driving a New York plated car, without headlights, circling our neighborhood at... (More)

Jonathan got this toy for Christmas. He and the other kids who come over like it a lot. This review will have positives, negatives, and funnies. As a toy, it's fun for kids; as an educational toy, it's not really any good. The box claims all sorts of things, but here are my complaints: The... (More)

It had always annoyed me that you couldn't use smarty commands in the stylesheet files in plog. It turns out it wasn't that hard to figure out, and the original authors had it basically done, but if you believe the comments, didn't think it worked yet. It is helpful to change... (More)

Grammy and Auntie E are in Pittsburgh for the weekend, and an early one year birthday for Jonathan. His accomplishments while they were here: Is tall enough to hit his head on the changing table Can go up the stairs without wanting someone behind him Said "hello" to everyone... (More)

I have been evaluating different version control programs for my company for the last month or two. My current evaluation is that all of them are broken, although I hope to discover a good solution someday soon. Serena's Version Manager (PVCS) I have spent a lot of time with Version... (More)

I signed up with Citibank/Mastercard my freshman year in college. I used to sign up for stuff on campus quite often, as they would give me various free things, t-shirts, radios, $100 gift certificates, etc. I also felt somewhat sorry for the vendors, as their income was $1 every time they got... (More)