Daley Ponderings

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)

While looking at a dollar coin, Jonathan said, "I think it has a picture of Obama or something", (really, it's Andrew Jackson). "Switzerland laughs and American laughs are the same; only the language is different.  I made my silly face at people in Switzerland, and they laughed like a... (More)

I woke up around 6am (with alarm) and got ready to go to Valda's to get my hair done.  I got myself some yummy muesli with yogurt and sat down in the living room to eat, only to see the clock and note that I needed to leave in only a few minutes.   I gulped a few more mouthfuls as I put my... (More)

Waking up at the above mentioned 2pm left us just enough time to get ready to go to the Renaissance Dance Rehearsal at 3:00.  Janet wanted us to dance to medieval music at the wedding reception and thought it would be a good idea for us to practice ahead of time.  About 20 of us were there,... (More)

It has been annoying me that the "tagcloud" on the side panel has the largest word "water", (it sizes the words based on the count the frequency of word usage in our most recent posts), but here I go again, adding to the count. We had a bunch of water in our basement again, this time... (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 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)

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 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)

I had turned down some work the other day, and as I thought about it more, realized that I was ready to hire someone to work for me.  I talked to a dad at church, and he thought it was a good idea, and his son was interested as well.  It turns out that he has less programming... (More)