Year: 2006

Today is Maxim’s 13th birthday.  He is a teenager now.  Monthly-wise.

I’ve been pretty busy in the last couple of days, and so didn’t manage to buy any special present for Maxim.  But I am not going to leave him without one though.  For his special birthday, he should get a special present.  A cool teenager present…

I’m starting up a separate blog for Maxim – parents.mamchenkov.net (just as it was planned and pre-announced).  From now on, all his newest pictures, stories and achievements will be posted there.  It will all be in Russian, as I still feel way more comfortable expressing myself in it.  Also, Russian is native for the rest of our family, who are the primary audience of all those stories.

I will sometimes do translations and cross-postings in here too, or share my thoughts on parenting.  But it won’t be the primary resource for parenting related issues no more.

Happy 13th month birthday, son!

I was a bit disappointed that I missed “Bewitched” in the theatres. Luckily, I managed to get my hands on the DVD.

Directed by: Nora Ephron

Genres: Comedy, Fantasy, Romance

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell, Shirley MacLaine, Michael Caine, Jason Schwartzman, Kristin Chenoweth, Heather Burns, Jim Turner, Stephen Colbert, David Alan Grier, Michael Badalucco, Carole Shelley, Steve Carell, Katie Finneran, James Lipton

IMDB raintg: 5.1

My rating: 5.0 [rate 5.0]
Continue reading Bewitched

There weren’t any reasons to wait any longer, so I hurried back to the bank and opened an account for Maxim. The whole procedure took less than 15 minutes and the only document that I had to show was Maxim’s birth certificate.  That time was even enough for me to make the first deposit.

I was promised that a booklet will be mailed to our home address with detailed information regarding this type of account and all involved benefits.  Apparently, there are plenty of discounts in shops all over town (clothes, books, medicine, etc) that are linked to this account.

Let this bank account be my present to Maxim for his tomorrow’s 1 year 1 month birthday.

This is a quick update on my notebook post.

Everything works great and smooth. In fact, I am typing this post on the notebook, which runs a fresh install of the brand new Fedora Linux 5 (it was released just a couple of days ago).

As promised, most of the hardware worked out of the box. Video adapter, soundcard, USB mouse – it all worked.

I had to work a tiny bit for the WiFi card, but that was pretty easy too. All I had to do was download Intel firmware from this website, unpack it into /lib/firmware, and reboot the machine. Charm! The wireless interface came up by itself, found our office network, got all the settings, and started to work immediately.

I also had to spend a couple of minutes downloading and installing kdebluetooth RPM in order to have working Bluetooth.

Now everything is done and it all looks good.  It’s amazing to see the progress Linux has made during the last few years.  It is very user-friendly and easy to use now.  Way to go!