Daley Ponderings

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. ... (More)

I have been quite behind in my magazine reading, and this morning I caught up to August (2008 - at some points, it has been necessary to specify the year when saying how far behind I am). There is an interesting article in Dr. Dobbs, by Scott Ambler , regarding methods of estimating... (More)

We signed up for a new phone number for dealing with rental stuff, and bought the numbers to go on the sign today.  Three hours later, we got our first call.  Crazy.  I haven't gotten around to getting it on Craig's List yet or anything. The guy is deciding between a house and a... (More)

Our family had been emailing around about the wind and rain from a recent storm, the power outages, and water in our basement, and a couple questions came up, and I thought I would post them here, that perhaps other people are interested in the goings on at our new house. 40% (18,000)... (More)

I have to say that the real baby is much more squashed in me than that little graphic baby is on the sidebar.  (S)he pokes up knees and heels all the time and increasingly presses on my bladder.  I am ready to go, but still have plenty of things I can do while waiting.  When Mom and Janet... (More)

Our new house has fairly long hot water lines to the kitchen and bathroom, so I was looking for different solutions to getting there to be hot water quicker.  I researched some tankless heaters, and for the kitchen and washing machine (on one trunk) a small heater (12 amps) would have... (More)

This started out as a reply to an email to Heather's parents, but I figured maybe other people are interested in the thought process about water quality.         After lots of hours looking at water things today, I think we will definitely get a " MetalMaster " which gets rid of... (More)

I had delayed posting this since I think people were getting tired of hearing about each house that we put an offer on.  But, now that this offer has been accepted, and I don't expect too much trouble with the inspections, I figure it is safe enough to post.I said to a friend the other day,... (More)

I woke up this morning to find Taiwan's Yahoo server rejecting emails that were supposedly sent using my server.  I originally figured it was the regular old spammer trick of using invalid return addresses until I noticed that it was one of my servers who was reporting the failure, rather... (More)

As some of you know, we have been looking for a house for the last couple of months, and we think we have found one!  I asked a couple guys from church to come look at it today, and give their thoughts, and they generally approved.  Someday, I'll probably make the kitchen nicer (ie.... (More)

Shortly after I posted the first analysis of my time , I realized that my hours per day calculation were kind of off, since I was counting 7 day weeks, and I basically never work on Sundays.  As I am redoing the calculations, I see that I must have been doing something strange to try get... (More)

I finally decided to buy a wireless card for my laptop that uses the cell phone network, as opposed to plain wi-fi.  This will allow me to have more/better access when I am not in range of a wifi access point (say, hypothetically, if one were to travel to Middleburg, Virginia to a house... (More)

Whew... For some reason, taxes took longer than they have in other years.  Part of the time was spent trying to get out of a federal tax penalty for not calculating the estimated taxes correctly.  We spent 14.63 hours (courtesy of worklog ), mostly together working on them.  I... (More)

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... (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... (More)