parenting

At the barber’s

Personalized phone call from Santa

Gmail team, as awesome as it is, has outdone itself. Here is a little tool they’ve created for the seasonal greetings – SendACallFromSanta.com . The idea is old but the application and execution is fresh and excellent. Basically, you just provide a bunch of information about the recipient and then gets either an audio or video message from Santa, very personalized and unique. Here is a video message that it created for my son Maxim after I answered all the questions.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lmbbO4XfQ8]

Try it yourself – it’s fun and cool!

Yes, no, is, is not

With Maxim’s recently discovered interest in kang fo, I thought we should watch Kung Fu Panda 2 together. But these days it’s tough – you can’t trust anyone. Movie makers can’t be trusted with making a 2D movie. Local movie distributors can’t be trusted to avoid dubbing into Greek or Russian or something else. Local movie theaters can’t be trusted with the sound setup. Local DVD shops can’t be trusted with selling legal copies and keeping sane prices. So, as always, I distrusted everyone and turned to piracy. Pirates can’t be trusted with torrent downloads, but downloads are the easiest to fix.

So I downloaded Kung Fu Panda 2. Before I even started it, Maxim told me that he didn’t see the first one. And Olga confirmed. So I said OK and started the download of the first part. When it was 90% complete, I realized that I already have it on another disk.

Three minutes into the first part of Kung Fu Panda Maxim announces that now he remembers that he saw it. All of it. At which time I gave up. “It’s a quality animation and it’s been a while since you saw it”, – I say. So we watched the first one anyway. Kung Fu Panda 2 awaits tomorrow.

Kang fo

Here is one of my proud parenting moments – Maxim’s exercise diary. While at school they do boring running, at home he lets his inner self to take control, and practice kang fo. Now, for those of you not versed in martial arts, kang fo is like kung fu, but more powerful, and with a tiny mix of robots’ and transformers’ fighting techniques.

Jeff Atwood on parenthood

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame is expecting two more kids – twin baby girls. When something like this – a baby or two on the way – happens, it doesn’t go by unnoticed. It consumes your whole mind and forces you to think and rethink everything. Jeff is an excellent writer with a trained technical brain. So it makes reading his thoughts on parenthood especially interesting – it’s a crazy mix of logic and emotions.

It’s also a history lesson. The first four years of your life. Do you remember them? What’s your earliest memory? It is fascinating watching your child claw their way up the developmental ladder from baby to toddler to child. All this stuff we take for granted, but your baby will painstakingly work their way through trial and error: eating, moving, walking, talking. Arms and legs, how the hell do they work? Turns out, we human beings are kind of amazing animals. There’s no better way to understand just how amazing humans are than the front row seat a child gives you to observe it all unfold from scratch each and every day, from literal square zero. Children give the first four years of your life back to you.

Congratulations, Jeff, and good luck with the pregnancy!