Daley Ponderings

10/23 - Jon said, "Ask Jonathan an addition problem with two digit numbers that sum to a multiple of ten."  I asked him 53+17, and Jonathan figured out loud, "the seventeen goes to twenty, the fifty three goes to fifty...seventy!" I signed Jonathan up for the... (More)

I was searching for Noah's first word on our blog (I found his first signed word: please, but I couldn't find his first spoken word) because Faith has started talking a little, and I don't know exactly what her first word is, probably "hi".  But, today, she has repeatedly said,... (More)

I got an email last night from someone who was looking up contact information for one of my customers: Piexx Company . She was wondering if someone was trying to scam her.  The way the scam works is that someone says they are a hiring agency for some company and posts a job offer for a... (More)

I just learned about the Wissmann family , and that they are coming to Pittsburgh, to Ascension Lutheran Church on Peebles Road (near McKnight). We are planning on going. They have a couple sample songs on their web site, and it sounds like it will be a fun night. Brennan (paster... (More)

We are the happy recipients of two used swingsets - one from a family at church and one from the next door neighbors.  It is loads of fun and we're planning on building monkey bars between the two sets. Recently, when I was reading one of our storybooks about Noah and the flood,... (More)

4/23 and following - Noah sings a little song, waving his arms around and concludes with, "Amen."  He then says, "Me get mine Bible."  He has loved reading the Bible even from such a young age as I was not sure if he could distinguish it from other books, except... (More)

Would you send your nine-year-old on a New York City subway by himself?  Would you send him on a horse from Oklahoma to New Mexico and back by way of the deserts of Texas - taking his five-year-old brother along? It can be frustrating sifting through the chaff at the children's... (More)

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... (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... (More)

2/10 or earlier - Faith can transfer an item from one hand to the other. 2/10 - Jonathan, studying a penny, "This coin says 1 - 9 - 9 - 9.  That's super long ago!"  (I knew my kids would think anything before 2000 was ancient history.) Since coming home from... (More)

Some people have been talking about whether they think in blogging, as in: "this is so much fun, I should blog about it", or, "look how cute the kids are being, I should grab a camera so I can post it on flickr", etc. I didn't particularly relate to that, but this... (More)

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... (More)

The IRS hasn't published their calculator yet, and I have been reading about lots of people trying to figure out what to do with line 70 on their 1040 (ie. the famous RRC that is causing probably more time wasted than was worth the money that was sent out last year. So, I wrote a... (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... (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... (More)