Daley Ponderings

People at work have finally gotten sick of the lack of support from our IT department. Their FTP site was not operable the other day, and a sales guy needed to get some files for a meeting, so R&D purchased its own FTP site so we would be able to manage it, rather than depend on IT to get it working again. We just purchased it for a month, so then we could evaluate it after the month is over. The month has now run out, and so R&D decided to instead pay for my internet connection, and then I can run the server for them. Pretty nifty.

Read more »

I went to a dermatologist this morning to have a mole removed and a small skin lump checked out. My referring doctor said this dermatology practice is the best in Pittsburgh. However, I really am getting more and more disillusioned with medical practice as we know it.

Read more »

I just noticed on SpamCop that since August I have received 1.5 bytes/second of spam. And I get significantly less spam than most people I know. What a waste of time.

Read more »

I have been evaluating different version control programs for my company for the last month or two. My current evaluation is that all of them are broken, although I hope to discover a good solution someday soon.

Read more »

There is a spot of wall on the landing of our basement stairs that has been getting soggier as the summer progresses. We've had lots of rain, and every time it rained hard enough, the spot would be damp. I finally called someone who advertised in the Pennysaver and he came this afternoon.

Read more »

Jonathan likes to watch me "take the diapers out of the washer and put them into the dryer." This evening, he closed the dryer door before I had finished transferring the diapers. So I asked him to please open the door, and he did! Then, when I had finished, I said, "ok, now it is time to close the door. Will you please close the door?" And he did!
One educational opportunity missed if we had a diaper service. (:

Read more »

Jonathan and I now have this fun game where we sit on the bed and fall back. He will do this by himself now, and he thinks it's very funny. Also, the other day, he did several practice trials of getting off the bed feet first. It's still a little high for him to comfortably get all the way on his own, so we're going to take the bed off the frame soon. He likes to walk on the uneven and unsteady surface of the bed, and he is quite aware and careful of the edge now.

Read more »

At some point in the middle of the night, Jonathan, in a sing-song quiet voice, said, "Hi-eye, oh, bdoy" It was cute.

Read more »

That's Jonathan's favorite phrase nowadays. He says it while walking, while looking at lights, and at other random times. Somtimes it's "ooh yeah" sometimes "ho yeah" but it sure sounds like any teenager to me. (:

Read more »

Jack Ganssle is a conference speaker and has a monthly newsletter that I have been subscribed to for a couple years. He wrote an article called, A Boss's Guide to Software Process Improvement that I found myself agreeing with the majority of it.

Read more »

Jonathan can now flip the light switches in both directions. He also continues to enjoy pulling the chain switches.

Read more »

The last of our four gospel fish was so weak on Monday that he got stuck in a plant. Then when I freed him, he got stuck on the filter intake. So it was time to put him out of his misery. I can't do the most humane way - that is, one quick slice to cut the head off - so I did the next, a cup of poison. I used rubbing alcohol, but in the future, I'm going to try to find a more toxic poison, because it seemed to take longer than was really humane. I did apologize to him.

Read more »

A couple guys here at work have been working on some puzzles. They didn't like my solution to the 3rd puzzle, as they wanted it to be more math base and not like programming. Here are the puzzles:
Assume: a and b are positive integers. (I think this condition only matters for the third puzzle)
1. Given a and b, how do you swap the values without using a third temporary variable?
2. Given a, what is the function to make b = a+1 if a is odd, and b=a-1 if a is even? You are not allowed to use conditional statements.
3. Given a and b, what is the function to make c=max(a,b) without using conditional statements?

Read more »

On all the windows machine I use, I have auto-completion turned on for the dos prompt. Apparently, I must have gotten that behavior from TweakUI, and since I always install it on a new machine, I thought it was on by default, but apparently not.

Read more »

Speakeasy is my DSL provider. Snurgle.org also uses them, so that is how I heard about them. We have been using them for a year or so, and the ten times or so that I had to open a customer support ticket, it has gone quite well, and fairly fast response time (within a couple of days at the most).

Read more »