So the question of the hour, after December 25 that is, is what did you get for Christmas? Well, let’s start off the discussion with me and my stuff, since that is really what I am getting after.
I got:
A Wenger AuqaGraph Chrono watch
A Montblanc Presence Cool Cologne and Aftershave set
A new Montblanc Meisterstuck Classique stainless steel fountain pen
A pair of pants
A singing penguin
The Fantasia CD by Pavlo
A USB cooling plate (to keep my sodas cool)
Loads of gift cards to please the big, nerdy geek in me
So I have to ask, what cool stuff did you get?
Ok, I know this is a little late, but it had to be done.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Notice I didn’t say happy holidays? Of course not, it is Christmas, so I say Merry Christmas. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, well, Merry Christmas to you, too anyways. Christmas is not just for those that celebrate it you know. 
Yes, you heard that right. Not potty training. Poopy training.
It seems as though my youngest daughter has complete and total control over her bowels. I don’t know how she does it, but she can literally tell herself when to go poops and when not to. As an example…
My wife and I have recently begun toilet training with my daughter. She picked up rather quickly on how to sit down and go pee on the toilet. No problem, she was an old pro at that in a matter of a few days. And when we started putting her in underwear instead of diapers, she would consistently remind us that she needed to go potty, then she’d run to the bathroom, set up her ‘ducky seat’ (a mini-toilet seat for toilet trainers), sit down and take care of business.
However, she would literally go for days without making poops. Three, perhaps four, days later, she would have a meltdown because she needed to go poops so bad but she would not go on the toilet. She would only go in a diaper. This was, to say the least, frustrating as she knows when she has to go, but she makes a concerted effort not to go. And for no other reason that she believes she cannot make poops into the toilet.
So my wife and I tried something. After researching a bit on the internet, we ran across a technique that seems to be moving us in a forward direction. We told our daughter that if she ever needs to go poops to tell us, so we can put a diaper on her and take her to the bathroom. The first time, we just had her stand in the bathroom. That went fine. The second time we had her actually sit on the toilet (still in her diaper) and make poops that way. That is also working out very well. We are also offering her treats and such for doing a good job.
So far we have been at this for a few days. I think with the progress I am seeing, there is a chance that this kid could kick the diaper habit very soon. And wouldn’t that be just the most awesome thing? One kid in diapers to go, and then we are done. After literally ten years of children in diapers (quite literally, with the exception of about four months between kid two and kid three) we are that close to being a diaper free household (unless I become incontinent and start needing diapers, but that is for another topic on another day).
Sometimes it is better to just stay in bed. Of course, when you have a family of seven to provide for, that option is almost never an option. So, I get up and get ready to go to work when I am supposed to.
Today was one of those mornings. Get up, take a shower, iron my shirt (and let the dryer iron my pants 
), make some coffee, yadda yadda. Today is also garbage pick up day, and me being the ever ‘too tired tonight but I’ll get to it in the morning’ kind of guy, I decided I’d go take the garbage cans to the street. No big thing really. Except that I noticed while outside that it was exceptionally cold. And that my car, like so many others, had ice on the windshield.
Just before getting ready to leave my wife asked me if I had started my car yet. I told her I hadn’t but it sounded like a good idea and that I might just go do that. So I filled up a pitcher of cold water (so as not to shatter my windshield) and headed out to the car. And this is where this ordinary morning took a turn for the worse.
As I got to my car I placed my pitcher of water on the hood. I opened my doors, started the car and noticed that the car was rolling slowly down my driveway. So I pulled the emergency brake to stop the rolling and in doing so manage to spill all of the water onto the hood of my car. “But I can live that” I thought to myself. “I’ll just go get some water from the garden hose.”
So I went to the water hose in the front yard, turned it on and watched as the beautiful color of rust came splashing out of my hose. Not to be daunted by this, I figured I’d let the funk of that water run off before I filled the pitcher. So as I let the water get clearer I noticed that my left shoe was wet. Looking over to my left side I realized that our hose decided to spring a leak and that it was leaking all over my left shoe. Again, I am cool as cucumber, so I just gracefully move my left foot away from the spraying water.
A few seconds later I began to feel cold. Not the cold of the 34 degree morning air but the cold of spraying water soaking the left side of my body. You see, that little leak in the hose was a bit bigger than I thought it was. It in fact was large enough to spray me from my left shoe to just under my left armpit. Excellent. What better to go with a cold morning chill than cold funky water embedded into my clothes.
After pulling myself from the chill of the cold morning outside shower I just took, I refocused and remembered that I had still not watered my car. So I went and poured the cold water onto my windshield and reached into the passenger side of my car to turn on the windshield wipers. For a brief second I thought something had went right as I watched the water and ice get splashed from one side of the glass to the other. Of course, I was hopefully, and naively, optimistic.
Looking across my car to the driver side door, I noticed that I had not closed my door all the way when I was rushing out of the car as my first pitcher of water had spilled. Thanks to that little oversight, the water and ice that was being wiped off of my windshield were now being wiped into my driver-side seat and door panel. So not only did I get to drench myself with cold water just minutes before leaving for work, I got to spend a 30 minute drive sitting on a wet seat as well.
But my windshield was clear. And I suppose that is what I was after to begin with, huh?
Ok, I thought this would be an easy post, but apparently not. WordPress seems to choke wholehartedly on PHP code posted inside the TinyMCE editor. That is kinda rank. But I guess you get what you pay for, huh?
I posted about this entry at the PHP Developer’s Network Forums. But I thought it was good enough to recall here.
So my 10 year old daughter asked me to teach her how to write programs ‘like you do at work daddy’. So I brought her into the room, opened up and editor, had a brief discussion on servers and server-side language scripts, then explained what PHP is and how it works on the server, then had her write her first program.
So my 10 year old daughter asked me to teach her how to write programs ‘like you do at work daddy’. So I brought her into the room, opened up and editor, had a brief discussion on servers and server-side language scripts, then explained what PHP is and how it works on the server, then had her write her first program.
< ?php
echo 'hello world this is sarah';
?>
This evolved into
< ?php
$text = 'hello world this is sarah';
echo $text;
?>
At about this point my nine year old came and asked to participate along with us. So we got to throwing some stuff out and this is what we ended up with after about 20 minutes:
< ?php
$text = 'hello world this is sarah';
$num = 10;
$joiner = ' and I am ';
if ($num == 10)
{
echo $text . $joiner . $num;
}
elseif ($num == 11)
{
echo 'I am 11';
}
else
{
echo 'I am totally not 10';
}
$counter = 0;
$limit = 100;
$inc = 10;
while ($counter < $limit)
{
if (!($counter % 10))
{
echo '10 is a modulator of ' . $counter . '!';
}
else
{
echo 'I am only ' . $counter . '!';
}
$counter += $inc;
}
$now = time();
echo date('l F jS, Y', $now);
?>My daughters, in about 20 minutes, now understand how to declare and assign a variable, how to tell PHP what a string is and what an integer is, how to write a conditional (if/elseif/else), how to write a while loop, how to increment a counter, how to use a function (and what a function is) and how to read the PHP manual. Frickin amazing.
Me: How does PHP know when it is the end of the line?
They: The semicolon.
Me: What do the quotation marks on a variable value mean?
They: That the value is a string.
Me: If we loop do a while loop where a var is less than 100, what is the maximum value we’ll see when echoing the increment value?
They: 99.
Me: And if we change the increment value to 10, what is the largest value we’ll see?
They: 90.
Unbelievable. Even a 9 and 10 year old can get this pretty quickly.
/ apologizes for the blog like post, but I just wanted to encourage those folks that think this is too hard to pick up on. Start slow and it can be learned. Just ask my kids.
EDIT | I should note that they are by no means pros at this. But they have a strong understanding of the concepts, as evidenced by their ability to tell me what would appear on the screen as they read the code line by line.
With a blog. Ok, I know that is not old-fashioned. In fact, it is quite new fashioned, but I figured I’d see if it amounted to anything. Hopefully it will make me richer than Bill Gates. But it probably won’t.
Of course, if it can help put the kids through school…
I have been thinking that there is probably a need for me to start writing something seeing as it has been a Thanksgiving since I last wrote. I know I have things to say, but I am just not sure which of those things deserves to be in my Blog.
HE said SHE said
HE: “If a barista makes coffee, I wonder what a …”
SHE: “I do not want to hear the end of that sentence.”
Now you know that was cute. So cute in fact that I am thinking of creating a category for HE said SHE said. But I need more content, so I might just have to go home and have a conversation with my wife tonight, eh?