Daley Ponderings

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)

Noah likes to help set the table.  When I ask him to put forks at the places, he will run to the drawer and grab a fistfull, then put a fork on top of each plate.  I usually have to help him put away the extras, or they end up all over the place. He's also been copying words... (More)

One of my customers gave me an Amazon gift certificate for Christmas, and so I bought a geeky toy for myself ( One for All URC 8910 Universal Remote Control ), and a book for Heather and I ( Teach Them Diligently: How To Use The Scriptures In Child Trainin g). I haven't opened the... (More)

Our photo album wouldn't publish on this last update, and it took quite a while to figure out what the problem was.Originally, the error had to do with the library Encode not being compiled correctly, and I had to run enc2xs on the Encode module.  I am not sure whose "fault"... (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)

I somehow missed when Street View (and for that matter - Terrain ) showed up on Google Maps.  I am not sure when that happened.  Actually, now that I look at the demo video, I did see the demo before, but I hadn't seen when it came to our house.  You can't quite see how ripe our... (More)

We have been getting more and more sales calls lately.  I try to take the time to report them to the do not call lists, both for our state and for the country.  We are supposed to get $100 for each violation (where the caller pays $1000).  But, I haven't ever gotten any money.... (More)

This is what the HP technical support person said to me when I called about our printer.  Our faithful HP LaserJet 6L, which was manufactured 10.5 years ago, and given to us 6(7?) years ago.  It printed Mom's boarding pass just fine, and then one day later, all three indicator lights... (More)

My friends Bonnie and Liz participated in the last Challenge, and quite intimidated me by doing so.  But I put OrgJunkie's blog in my reader (one of only three strangers' blogs I read) and have slowly been gaining confidence.  The real enouragement I give myself is to note what... (More)

Jon asked me to post this essay written by our friend. Life as an Immigrant By Marc Brands From 1993 to 1996 I did an apprenticeship in Electronics Engineering at Siemens. In Switzerland apprenticeships are very common, students attend about 16 hours of classes... (More)

We headed out Friday morning, listening to The Nutmeg of Consolation by Patrick O'Brian on the way.  At our first stop, for gas, Jon realized that he hadn't brought his wallet.  One of our stops was at our "usual" rest area, the one with the pedestrian walkways over the... (More)

pure-ftpd isn't designed to work with TCP wrappers, which is unfortunate, because then I can't simply add an ip address to /etc/hosts.deny to block the hackers when they guess passwords.  But, since the hackers have tried to login to my servers thirty thousand times this month, and... (More)

Everyone always says how user-friendly Windows is, and as I sit here waiting for my Windows computer to endlessly update itself, I am struck by how much harder it is to update my Windows laptop than all of my Linux (Debian) servers put together. On Debian: Type "aptitude",... (More)

Yesterday, Noah poked a coat hanger into his eye.  All is well now, but I wanted to post the adventure.  My mom wrote up the story after my phone conversation with her, so I'm going to paste that here to save typing.  I'll interject where I want to add details or... (More)

In college, our friend Volus used to say that it was always sunny on Sunday.  Even if it was gray in the morning, the sun was out by the time church was over.  I found that he was right for the vast majority of the time.  This weekend was no exception.  Saturday was rainy,... (More)