FergyTech

What a day! Today we had a small birthday party for Alexander, our 4-year-old son. His birthday was during the week, so we threw something together and invited some friends over. It was a good event, but very tiring. At the end of it, my wife and I were on our last leg.  Alex is really maturing and I’ve been enjoying him more for the past two weeks or so. He still has a temper, but when he’s not in “Hulk-smash” mode, he’s a great kid! My wife works really hard with him on rationalizing things so that forces me to do the same – it’s hard work thinking things out!

Right now, he’s into Star Wars (clone wars era) and Spiderman. So; we got him those kind of toys. I have some pictures posted on Flickr, but I have more to upload. Happy Birthday, son!

There are a lot of things happening in my life, but it’s not time to broadcast them yet. The kids are fine (all 3 of them) and me and the wife are happy. My full-time job at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is becoming more stable since I made a very hard decision about my freelance work with Digital · Alias. One can surely guess what I mean based on that sentence, but since everything isn’t final – I’ll keep it vague.

In the world of Linux, I’m getting very tired of Firefox not working out the way I’d like it to. It’s always ran very slow on my desktop (Fedora x86_64). I’ve switched to Epiphany (a GNOME project) and boy does that web browser need some work. Good thing is, it’s fast, bad thing is it’s very immature and I miss ALL the convenient features Firefox has. I’ll stick with it because I need speed more than convenience.

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I wanted to make it known to the world, that I have officially given in to the “World of Responsibility” and no longer into the World of Warcraft.   Yes, sad to say – my three young kids (ages 3, 2, and newborn), wife, full-time job, and Internet consulting business has caught up with me – backing me into a corner and yelling into my face saying, “WE TAKE PRECEDENCE OVER VIDEO GAMES AND YOU WILL NO LONGER RUN YOURSELF INTO THE GROUND TO PLAY!”  This is the milestone in my life when I have completely converted from a hardcore video game player to a casual gamer (aka Old Man).

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How do I start this off?  My son and I are having a Star Wars weekend.  He’s grown very fond of Star Wars: Battlefront II for the Xbox and at the age of three I’m watching anything Star Wars related.  He seems to like it, especially the clone army and/or Stormtroopers.  So; Friday night I watched Star Wars: Clone Wars the movie.  I bought it from Columbia House.  Saturday morning, after breakfast he watched SW:CW too.  Then we all watched some cartoons and Seaseme Street, then it was on to Battlefront II.

Besides that, my wife purchased the two pack DVD set of Star Wars — episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 from Walmart online.  We also got Alex a Clone Trooper outfit (helmet and blaster rifle).  It’s a Star Wars weekend, no doubt!

Our daughter, Leeanne Victoria Ferguson is 1 1/2 years old in this video. She’ll be 2 in another 2 months and she is reading “I Like to Share!”  I don’t mean to pimp these videos, but she is a product of the “Your Baby Can Read” video series.  They are excellent for the kids; bad, redundant, mind-numbing for fathers!  If you can stand the routine of playing it ALL the time, you will get very positive results from your kids.  Oh and don’t just leave it to the videos, you should engage them to read and visit the library, etc.  Seriously; all that stuff works.

“How can this be done!?” one may ask! Well; this is not our idea, but my wife did take a principle and build on it.  The book my wife got (when Alex was potty training; about a y) was called “Potty Train in Three Days!“.  My wife noticed that most folks buy pull-ups and other diaper-like underwear and try and potty train their kids within a month or so and end up going much much longer.  This method is intense and stressful, but it’ll get the job done.

• Buy padded underwear, not pull-ups or anything that more resembles a diaper.  The child needs to feel themselves getting wet.
• Buy very simple potty products. The more gadgets their toilet has the more they’ll play with it and not really use it.
• Make plans to NOT go anywhere for at least a week. This process will require that you monitor the baby strictly for three days, but it could possibly leak over into five or seven days.  Depending on the child or the training.
• Be very patient and find ways to keep your sanity for the first three days. It can and it will be very nerve-wraking to monitor your baby and letting them have accidents.

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