©2026 The Daleys
Last night Jonathan was helping me set the table for dinner. He said we should get five plates, but I said no, Noah has his tray so he doesn't need a plate. But he could get five bowls for the chili, and five spoons. Then I said, "Make two of them big spoons." "Why?" "Because Daddy and Miss Sanda like big spoons for chili." "So, then I should get three small spoons." That was quick subtraction in his head without any prompting from me!
I assume that the EETimes is paid by their advertisers based on how many active readers they have in certain categories, etc. Hopefully, the advertisers know that those numbers are inflated, since I think it took me a year of calling and emailing them to get them to stop mailing me the magazine. They finally figured that out, but continue to email me, and ignore the unsubscribe messages that I send back.
I suppose it would be nifty if our blog was popular enough for the advertisers to notice and tell EETimes to stop doing that, but that is pretty unlikely, I think.
Can I condense three weeks of activities into one post? We'll see how it turns out. One thing we discovered at Christmastime is that Noah loves cocktail sauce. He just dipped his finger in and licked it off, licked the bowl clean and wanted more!
I found what I would call a bug in resolvconf today, though probably most people don't run a VPN server like I wanted to, so no one ever noticed before.
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 in NH during the presidential primary has been annoying. Apparently, phone calls have gotten cheap enough that most of the candidates have been calling. Some of them, most notable Obama and Clinton, like to call multiple times just to make sure that we have heard of them. Obama's volunteers were surprised that they weren't the first to call, since they had printed out lists (and call from all over the country), so it is strange that they would have sent out duplicate lists. Clinton's supporters said that the computer just calls every number in order, and each phone doesn't talk to each other, so it was quite likely that I would get called within five minutes from the same office.
I don't know if that should be filed under persistence or incompetence.
I thanked the Huckabee supporters at the polling place for not calling, I think only Huckabee and Paul didn't call us. (as a side-note, that means I get to stick to my mom's statement that she gives the callers - that she won't vote for anyone who calls, particularly after 10PM (that was Obama). Unfortunately for mom, McCain did call once, but she is going to vote for him even though he called.
One of the Clinton supporters that I talked to on the phone didn't apologize at all for calling three times in the same hour because, "what do you expect - if you're going to have the first primary, you should expect it". I pointed out that we have always had the first primary, and it hasn't ever been this bad before. The Concord Monitor had a number of letters to the editor about it this year. I expect that NH (at least) will push for an expanded do-not-call list to include the politicians too, which would be really nice.
Someone on the postgrey list (Matthew, who apparently likes drinking coffee, as that is part of his email address) sent a script that he uses to report on his mail/spam.
I modified it to work on my systems (and included it below), and here is the output for the last five days:
Rejected by RBL: 21147
Rejected by greylisting: 9917
Rejected by bad sender/receiver information: 959
Tagged as spam: 1457
Real email: 6278
So, ~4000 (50%) are rejected every day simply by being on a known blacklist, ~2000 (25%) are slowed down by greylisting (maybe are retried, maybe aren't), ~200 (2%) due to the spammers faking from or to addresses (or real people mistyping addresses), ~300 (4%) ending up in spam folders, and ~1200 (16%) actually ending up in inboxes.
Taking the inverse of the inbox mail, that means that 84% of email coming into my server is being thrown away one way or another. I'm glad I have lots of filters to block almost all of it.
For some reason, Verizon thought it would be a good idea to reconfigure their network early morning Christmas Eve (or late the night before, I am not sure which). Unfortunately, they transferred me to a broken gateway, which has 3 minutes outages every fifteen minutes or so.
Noah has added a fourth word to his consistent spoken vocabulary: "Uh-oh!" Sometimes it sounds like "uh-uh" and sometimes "oh-oh" but it's always in the right context.
He also knows how to tell you to be quiet: He puts his index finger to his lips, and blows out silently.
Yesterday, Jonathan did and said several things of note.
I felt like going for a walk today, so Jonathan and I headed out, and I let Jonathan decide where we would go at each turn. We talked some about compass directions, and where the sun was, and sometimes he had an idea which way home was (and then would immediately turn so as to avoid going home). He seemed to think that if we were on a road that was in the direction of home, that would mean we would have to go home right then.
Most of the detailed turns on the map are intentional trying to remember how we crossed the streets. We stopped by the Shursave to get some food for tonight, and Jonathan also needed a bathroom stop despite saying that he didn't need to go when we left the house.
I have been looking through my web access logs trying to track down a pesky LifeType bug. And I came across someone who had used my Krypto solver one day and then tried to come back a couple days, but mistyped the URL as kyrpto, which of course didn't work. So, then he went to root of the site and ended up at the blog, searched again (using the same bad spelling) and went away for a while, and then remembered how to spell it and found the correct page.
Since I wrote the solver years ago, I looked up how many people still use it... Last month, 279 people used it to solve 2633 puzzles. I think that is pretty neat.
Now that I am working on Facebook applications, we'll see if any take off - it is pretty crazy looking at the statistics for some Facebook applications: a million people using a different applications every day.
I have been getting a bunch of spam through my contact form over the last couple of days, so I thought I would check out what they are trying to do. The domain's contact information is protected by privacyprotect.org, so we can't know who they are, though I filled out a form showing them their customer is a spammer, we'll see if they actually do give me the contact information or not.
11/28 - Sanda has been teaching us Romanian, and one day Jonathan was asking what various random words were. We thought he said, "walk" and Sanda hesitated because it's a verb, so when she asked him to clarify (I walk, you walk, she walks?) he said, "No! Not 'walk' with a w, 'lock' with an l."