Daley Ponderings

I don't think I have written about USA Datanet on this blog.  They just reminded me to tell everyone how great they are, so I will gladly do so.

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This is the hardest one I have ever worked on. [Update 10/24/2006: thanks to you all reading this post and posting other links, I have since found more interesting ones -- look through the comments - the one posted on October 9th appears to be pretty hard, though maybe I just made a mistake on it]   When we were with my parents last weekend, we found out that my parents are big Suduko fans, and do quite a number of them during the week, in different papers, page-a-day calendars, etc.

Dad was trying to find a hard one for me, and found a "six star" one, that turned out to be not that hard - reasonably difficult, but similar to what I had seen before.  We had been trading secrets of how we figure out puzzles the fastest, and he liked one of my starting first-pass rules, but then found a puzzle that using his rule, and then my rule still did not find a single number during the first pass.  After that, the only step I know is to start writing down all possibilities, and it is sort of interesting to see how fast you can narrow them down, it is a little too brute force for my taste, and so I am not interested in it as much.

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Don't ever name your child the same name as you. It confuses everyone, from doctors to insurance carriers to airlines. USAir and United won't let me check-in online any more, since it can't figure out what to do with Jonathan and me. We both have different frequent flyer numbers, but it is confused. USAir says to call United, and United says to call USAir. A "Pearl Smith" (there's a Indian name...) at United says though she won't take responsibility for what she says, and it is her real name, I should wait in line at USAirways.

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Found an interesting spyware/virus/malware/etc at the Quinlisks yesterday. It was a "Browser Helper Object (BHO)", a method of getting your own code put inside of the windows explorer, and thus pretty hard to remove.

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I got a notification from a credit bureau today saying that a new account had been opened by: Verizon Pen, PO BOX 165018, COLUMBUS, OH 43216.
Since I haven't changed phone service since last year, it seemed odd that there would be a new account from Verizon.

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Colin Portnuff, a guy who uses an AAC (alternative augmentative communication) device to communicate, was recently at a conference that some guys from my company (DynaVox) also went to.
He has ALS, which is a degenerative disease of the brain. A number of our customers have ALS; I am not sure about percentages compared to other handicaps.

It is usually inspiring to hear AAC users speak about their lives, and how they have overcome various problems in an enthusiatic way and Colin is certainly not the exception to this rule. To clarify, I say, "usually", because I occasionally I do see our devices being used, or rather not being used, in people lives as well.

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Guess how hard it is to get phone numbers off of the federal do not call list? You just have to ask, and they will give it to you for no charge (up to five area codes). No verification of the registration information is required, so feel free to sign up as many times as you like with random information each time.

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Posting this, since it took me a long time to find this site today when I wanted to stop my home computer from annoying me with the reboot dialogs every couple of minutes.

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At our church's marriage retreat last weekend, we got a copy of "Innocent Pleasures" by David Powlinson, an article that was in the fall issue of The Journal of Biblical Counseling.

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I have used Efax for a long time. I have heard that their customer service is horrible, and there are a couple alternatives to them. I just use their free fax-receiving only, and it has come in handy a handful of times. Today someone needed to fax something to China, which who knows how much that would cost, but instead, they faxed it to me, and I emailed it to the Chinese tech support. I couldn't get the efax software to output more than the first page of the fax to .tif format, but using Acrobat PDFWriter software, I was able to "print" the proprietary efax document to another less proprietary, or at least more common format, that hopefully will satisfy them.

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I posted a bit of a review on this elf's blog, but after she saw the movie, her review is significantly better than mine.

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Well, I followed the directions on one of those "speed up firefox" pages, and found a setting that broke stuff, at least minimally, and it was hard to diagnose. The symptom was a red line through the padlock icon when viewing an ssl page that I wrote in PHP. If I reloaded the page, it would go back to normal.

I am also getting the 403 error from Google, that it says I have a virus. I think the problem is that I was searching too fast - I guess I need to slow down my reading. It appears to block you for some amount of time, and then let you back in. Or perhaps certain queries trigger it. It appears to happen more often with Firefox than with other browsers. I use a couple of proxy servers, and I think google doesn't like those either. But, I have used them for years, and today is the first time google complained, so I am not sure what is going on.

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ThinkGeek has lots of fun things for those ... uhh... those people like me. I just saw an advertisement for lightsabers, and I immediately thought of Brian, (Heather's cousin) though it says "Although the blade is very durable, it should never be used for fighting or dueling." One thing that is fun about the ThinkGeek site, is they encourage you to send in your Action Shots using the products.

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Just in case you were wondering whether I am critical of everything on the GirlTalk blog: they linked to a particularly good article (I think, though obviously, I don't have much experience with the topic), by Carolyn Mahaney, the mother of the other three women involved in writing on the blog.

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Since we paid for the professional license, we get OpenMake for "free", so I figured I would try it out. The conclusion is that it isn't worth anything.

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