Daley Ponderings

This morning, Mom, Jonathan and I drove up to the birth center where Jonathan was born for my first prenatal checkup with our midwife. She was so happy to see Jonathan, but he did not understand the part about this being where he was born. (What? He didn't recognize it?!) She said I'm looking... (More)

Jonathan is two years old today. Amazing! When we visited Florida, I found a couple of Bible storybooks (one in rhyme) that were true to the Bible and not boring or condescending. (There are some horrible products out there intended for children.) Jonathan enjoys listening as long as I will... (More)

Like so many other articles on this subject, I will start by saying that I looked at various documents, but none of them worked perfectly for me, so I will write up my own steps. Most of the regular readers of this blog will not care at all about SMTP authentication, TLS, SSL, port 25, 465, 587,... (More)

Mark Minasi, a guy who writes a Windows newsletter about various IT tricks and other things related to using a Windows system. This month, the majority of his newsletter was about spam, and I think he missed a couple points, so I wrote to him, and it ended up pretty long, so I figured I might... (More)

The amazing blessing of new life is upon us again! I am pregnant and we are all thanking God. The baby is due the end of June, 2006. It took me longer to suspect it this time around because my cycles were just returning. But by Monday I thought about my resuming afternoon naps and getting up... (More)

Based on an excruciating headache Wednesday afternoon, October 12, that did not go away, Jon and I headed to West Penn Hospital Emergency Room at 10:30pm. A friend came to the house to watch Jonathan while he slept. Here is an aside - it was so good for Jonathan that he did not come, he would... (More)

Thursday morning, we drove up to Jon's Aunt Janet's place in Hamilton, Ontario. We stopped at "our" Wal-Mart at the two hour mark for a bathroom break and to buy some snacks. (I think we've stopped there every time we go that way - it must just be at a good break point.) Going through customs... (More)

You can check Linda's blog for updates on Jonathan this week. (More)

We recently switched our automobile insurance to State Farm, because Amica doubled their rates on our homeowners policy, a bait-and-switch sort of thing - they told me the estimated rate, and I agreed, spent a month trying to get the inspector to come look at the house.The only thing he pointed... (More)

There have been a number of things we wanted to work better on the Flying Junior, but mostly because it is hard to find a sailboat store in Pittsburgh, we hadn't gotten around to it.The wind spinner is fairly old, and after the capsize, didn't spin as well as it used to, and in the process of... (More)

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)

Sunday after church Jon suggested we go sailing again since we did not make it the day before. After lunch, we headed out again, this time to North Park because it is closer. The wind was strong, the best we've had in Pittsburgh so far. However, it was also gusty and changed direction a lot in... (More)

It is a new month, and therefore, a new point on my email graph . A couple interesting things this month: one, you can tell I went on vacation, and probably also that I knew Heather was gone the week before, so I wasn't emailing her as much either. Two, spam has now hit the 30% mark (note: the... (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)

This morning when I went downstairs, I saw one of the baby robins out of the nest on the ledge! Later when I went by all three were in the nest. I knew it wouldn't be long. Just now I checked and the nest is empty! Now they will spend two weeks learning how to be grown up robins, and after... (More)