©2026 The Daleys
Whenever Daddy opens a bottle of Blenheim ginger ale, Noah takes several sips, too.
Tuesday (4/2) Noah thoroughly inspected the dishwasher handle. You can tell he's in a family of engineers!
He can say "mommy" now, though not consistently. He also says "me." He said "cashew" unprompted once, but we're out of cashews now, so he has not had another opportunity. He says "nana" unprompted for banana. He also says diaper, which sounds like "dai-doo" or "ba-boo" or some combination depending on how he's feeling. His new unprompted signs are help and apple.
I feel that on the talking front, it's like he took a year break and now he's making progress the way he "should have."
He can open doors pretty well, and he knows how to open our fence gate.
He can do the small knob puzzles, though sometimes he still gets frustrated if the piece is completely upside down (turned 180, that is.) I guess he doesn't feel he should have to turn it that far for it to fit.
He loves playing whatever Jonathan is playing, copying him precisely.
Speaking of precise, Noah likes for things to go in their places. When he stirs a soup, he taps the spoon on the side of the pot, and then places it on the spoon rest. He complains if the spoon rest is not there. He likes putting away, but since Jonathan doesn't we are still working on cleaning up before moving on to the next thing.
I'm working on a slow night weaing process. At this point, I don't want to do anything abrupt, and this is what has been working: letting him nurse when he asks but limiting it to ten minutes, giving him a one minute warning. Often he would stop and turn over at the warning. If he does get upset, we help him calm down and he's been doing better at that. Now I'm down to five minutes with a one minute warning. He will often ask for more, holding up one finger for "one more minute" (which is very cute!) If he asks nicely with no complaining, I usually say yes. I will offer to hold his hand when we're done with nursing but he's still awake, and he usually accepts. I change his diaper whenever it's wet and sometimes he'll just go back to sleep without nursing once he's dry. Nights have been so much better recently, and I'm thankful.
It seems to be the idea this year to release the April Fool's day jokes early, perhaps to give them more credibility, or maybe simply to join with the Australians.
I hadn't heard of the spaghetti tree joke before, but that is a pretty good one. I showed Jonathan and Noah the picture, and they both said that couldn't happen, though Noah thought it was pretty funny. Wikipedia also mentioned the left-handed whoppers and Taco Bell purchasing (and renaming) the Liberty Bell.
Perhaps Google's reason for releasing their joke early was due to the content of the joke. I thought the comment about it being old news was pretty good.
And famous people have it so rough.
For those of you with more time than I, you can read the top 100 jokes. I think its pretty funny when the TV and radio stations report stuff, and get more calls than for any of their regular news.
After a slightly hectic day yesterday, when I noticed some strange behavior on one of my servers, we released a new version of LifeType. While I am not impressed that the bug existed in the first place, I think it is pretty neat that a development fixed was released within 4 hours of the bug being discovered, and an official release within 36 hours. The last time we had a security issue, we released the fix in less than 24 hours, but it is harder on a Sunday.
The security issue itself wasn't all that interesting - we were checking a blacklist in a case-sensitive manner, and so filename.PHP was incorrectly allowed to be uploaded, and filename.php was correctly blocked.
My friend Bonnie has this neat baby ticker on her blog, so I thought I'd look up mine. Since I'm still getting used to the baby being as old as he is, it was surprising to me to see how big he looks. I couldn't get the application to imbed in the post, so it's on our sidebar at the bottom under "miscellaneous."
Copying the rest of you cool bloggers, I installed feedjit a while back. I originally thought it wasn't going to be very useful, since I assumed that all of the international hits were the many search engines that like crawl the blog all day long, or worse, spammers trying to post comments.
But, as I looked into it more, they look to be valid individuals finding the blog via search engines, mostly on the technical posts, particularly on the Test Director post. Humorously enough, I gave up on Test Director a long time ago - too much work to keep it running for what it gives you. Perhaps I should erase the post to help people not waste their time on it, as my information is most likely out of date. It is unfortunate that Mercury doesn't support their own product, and so people have to find places like my blog for technical support. It probably needs to be open-sourced in order to get better support.
I am sure this will excite many of our normal readers, but I have finally (after four years) switched my laptop to Linux. Now that I am using it everyday, it is much nicer to be in this environment, instead of having putty windows all over the place. Perhaps if I had a better window manager for windows, I would have been alright, but anyway...
I have a Sony PCG-V505DC2 for those search engines to help other folks trying to figure out any issues with installing Linux, and Debian specifically.
"Oh, why are we not more holy!", he would exclaim with loving insistence. "Why do we not live in eternity, walk with God all the day long? Why are we not all-devoted to God, breathing the whole spirit of missionaries?
"Alas, we are too much enthusiasts, looking for the end without faithfully using the means. Do we rise at four or even five in the morning to be alone with God? Do we fast once a week, once a month? Do we even know the obligation or benefit of it? Do we recommend the five o'clock hour for private prayer, at the close of the day? Do we observe it? Do we not find that 'any time' is no time?
"Oh let us stir up the gift of God that is in us. Let us no more sleep as do others. Let us take heed to the ministry that we have received in the Lord, that we fulfil it. 'Whatsoever thy findeth to do, do it with thy might.'"
-- John Wesley, as quoted in Hudson Taylor's biography, "In the Early Years".
We had Easter dinner at the Venables with four families (total.) It was a fun time and we got home after it was fully dark. As I was getting Noah out of the car I noticed that the sky was perfectly clear and the stars were shining as much as you can expect in a city. I saw Orion and the Big Dipper and the North Star. I told Jon and Jonathan they should go look for a few minutes, so they sat on the hood of the car for quite a while. It was fun to watch them out there and it will be fun to hear the report of their conversation.
When a customer says that he has a smaller project than the one I just did, don't pay attention, and think about the quote, rather than simply estimating the time as less than the previous project.
Yesterday, I did a project for a friend (one who let me have better access than average to the real estate listings) and it took an hour and a half and was 107 lines of code. He wanted to pay for that one, but I thought it was a fair exchange for getting the real estate listing access.
Today, I did a "smaller" project, that was 367 lines of code, and it took 3.5 hours. Hrm.
Last week, Noah opened the childproofed cabinets in the kitchen. It was no fluke - he closed it after the first time, and then deliberately repeated his action. So we have disabled those and instructed him not to open those cabinets (he is obeying so far.) These are the "glass" cabinets, whose contents are breakable. The "lock" is still on the under-sink cabinet, which Noah has not yet tried to explore.
Last week I felt the baby moving. This is always a fun thing for a mom, to feel that physical connection to the baby.
I woke up this morning to find Taiwan's Yahoo server rejecting emails that were supposedly sent using my server. I originally figured it was the regular old spammer trick of using invalid return addresses until I noticed that it was one of my servers who was reporting the failure, rather than an external machine.
I don't know if it is only relevant to Allegheny County or if it is more universal, but a friend asked me to write a parcel id (parcel/block/lot) parser to help him out in his real estate searches. It was kind of a fun project (3 hours) and it was neat to see how well it worked out in the end.
It takes stuff on the right, and turns it into the stuff on the left:
0318-C-00080-0000-00 <= 318 C 080Code follows below: