Daley Ponderings

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)

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)

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... (More)

I am now on vacation and so can spare a few minutes to type up the notes that have been hanging in my pocket for a while.  I will apologize to my readers for making them wait so long, but I will not feel guilty.  Blogging is something most mothers in the history of the world did not have on... (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. ... (More)

I have been working on an interesting project for a customer of mine - and as is with lots of his projects, end up seeing lots of internet headlines while working on the projects.  This particular project involves tracking what things people are talking about and searching for.  One source... (More)

Noah loves to help Daddy with the plumbing in the new house.  In fact, he had a hard time making the decision about whether he should stay home and plumb with Daddy or come to the zoo with the rest of us.  (After Jonathan exclaimed about the baby elephants, Noah eventually decided to come to... (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)

Yes, we have a new house!  The closing was a little hectic because the seller left a van in the driveway and we had to work out an escrow agreement for them to get rid of it (which still had not been done by last night.) Right after closing, we headed up to do work.  We have had... (More)

I think I have written before about DenyHosts , but this evening, it prevented somewhere around twenty thousand individual hosts trying to login to one of my servers. The hackers have gotten smarter - that they used to just try from one host, which was trivially blockable, even manually.... (More)

On Wednesday, we walked to the Shursave for a regular shopping trip. The only difference in this trip was the lack of milk in the bottom of the cart, since I had just gotten some at Trader Joe's. But it made a big difference for Jonathan! He pulled the cart the whole way home by himself,... (More)

Home stretch, here we are!  This will be the first time my third trimester is entirely in the summer, so I was glad for that stretch of cold, rainy May. I went for my glucose tolerance test yesterday, and Jonathan was jealous that I got to drink the "orange soda."  Too bad he couldn't... (More)

Saturday, May 17 was a big day for both sides of the extended family.  In the morning, we got a cell phone call from Switzerland announcing my sister's engagement . Soon we also got an email that Jon's sister was in labor, and that night Ryan Robert Philibert was... (More)

I just updated Usermin, and so wanted to make sure that my custom modules didn't break.  And in the process, poked around through my webalizer module, which shows the things that people type into search engines to end up at our blog as well as the number of hits for certain pages. ... (More)

It took some amount of work to get Linux up and running on my laptop , but I just got a new computer ($50 from Peter's workplace - let me or him know if you are interested, there might be some more left) and installed Linux in an hour two, including copying all the old data from the old... (More)