Daley Ponderings

Cygwin is one of the packages that seems to often break when I upgrade it.  In their defense, it is a large collection of packages, so presumably hard to get everything right in all circumstances.  I run Debian (testing) on my Linux systems, and I rarely have any issues during... (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)

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)

Mydad had mentioned a news article story a month ago about some company charging a whole bunch of people $.01 each on their credit cards; presumably with the thought that no one would complain about a $.01 charge, and since they charged a million people or something, they made a bunch of... (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 thought I had written about this before, but I can't find it, so maybe we just talked about it over email. We purchased health insurance through Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield when I first started working for myself. It was the same plan as we had when workingfor Dynavox, though... (More)

Once again we took an early tram to thetrain station, meeting Janet and Stephan there. Then we rode to Zurich and the first thing we did was walk to the historical museum. We saw ancient gold, medieval and more modern weapons, and costumes, elaborately panelled rooms, banners and medals from... (More)

The Swiss prefer to drink their water with carbonation and it's hard to find bottled water without it.  The tap water in most places (including the public outdoor fountains) is perfcetly drinkable but you have to ask for it.  At the castle, they served us the "with gas" kind most of the... (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)

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)

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)

As I wrote earlier , I use worklog to keep track of my time.  I use some other scripts to help manage worklog's output, and now that I made one of the scripts work even nicer today, I figured I should post them. I use get-time to see where I spent time on a particular day. It... (More)

I have heard people debate about whether not being able to hear a child playing is worse than hearing one that is really loud.  I can tell you that I would take either one over waking up to sounds of water splashing around. We were out late last night at the Moore's Art Party, and... (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)