Merry Christmas! (says acedanger a day late…)

Christmas at our house was very fun, and very busy, as most parents can probably say. Aaron had a ton of presents. He had so many presents that he actually got bored opening them! We took a five hour break and saved some presents for him to open later that night.

He got too many things to name. Our big present to him was his own digital camera (which is kiddie-proof). The resolution of the pictures resembles that of a cell phone, around 640×480 pixels if I remember correctly. He loves it though.

We got him a couple of board games, Candyland, Don’t break the ice, Cootie, and Memory. We played all of them. He won the Candyland game, didn’t have a clue of the objective of Don’t break the ice, he and I tied in Memory, and he lost at Cootie while showing us his very competitive nature which Meri says he gets that from me.

Christmas this year was a ton of fun since Aaron was so excited about it.

Eli even got a present; he got a blanket from his Auntie Annette.

Tags: Christmas, Aaron, Eli, family

That’s right, I’m a dork.

The current ringer on my phone (link is to an mp3) is a sound from the World Of Warcraft game and can be found on WoWWiki. You gotta love those Murlocs! My wife hates it, I laugh every time my phone rings.

If that isn’t enough, I registered emails for both of my son’s, which was inspired by an idea that I saw on the official Gmail blog. Maybe I’ll use it, maybe I won’t. My intentions are good.

Tags: gmail, aaron, eli, email, dork

I’ve been trying to make use of the Shared Items in Google Reader and show them on my blog. I’ve tried a couple of different RSS widgets without success, until this morning.

I found a widget that will display the feed correctly. It is called Google Reader widget and was written by James Wilson.

The problem with using the pre-installed RSS feed widget from Wordpress was that the URL linked is malformed and if clicked, would take the user to a page that did not exist, resulting in an error page. For example, one of my shared items is a post that I wrote when we found out the gender of our new baby (which is a boy ). From the pre-installed RSS widget, the following URL is linked: “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/acedanger/~3/173558267/http://www.acedanger.com”; from  the new widget, the URL linked is “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/acedanger/~3/173558267/”.

The reason for the malformed URL is because of the formatting of the XML produced. The pre-installed widget is expecting the XML to be formatted according to the RSS 2.0 standard but  the XML produced by the Google Reader Shared Items feed is in the Atom standard.

That’s about as technical as I get. I know there is a difference but don’t care to be bothered with the details (not right now anyway).

Tags: googlereader, widget, wordpress plugin

Aaron had another ophthalmologist appointment yesterday. This was his second opinion that I talked about getting after our not so fun first doctors appointment.

This doctor’s office was much more kid-friendly. When they had to dilate Aaron’s eyes, rather than have my wife and an office tech hold him down (like the first ophthalmologist did), the office secretary, who is the doctor’s wife, sang to him and told him what was going to happen. At the first appointment, Aaron fought against having his eyes dilate because of the way it was done. After he came home, he told me how the lady and the doctor hurt his eyes. After this appointment, he didn’t say anything about any pain in his eyes.

Aside from that part of the appointment, I was put off by this doctor’s demeanor. I walked into the exam room about a minute after the doc began to explain treatment methods to Meri (according to her). As soon as I sat down, the doctor looked at me and said “I don’t have time to re-explain everything I just told your wife” and then continued where he left off.

WTF is with the pediatricians being total dickheads? Kiss my ass and take an extra minute out of your busy schedule to explain my son’s affliction because it’s kind of important to me. I know his eye isn’t hanging out of the socket or he’s not actively going blind but give me just one more minute. I’m sure my insurance will be charged like $300 or something ridiculous so quit bitching about how you can’t tell me what you just said and say it again. Hm, after reading that, I guess  bothered me a bit…

So the prognosis was good. We are doing eye exercises twice a day and wearing a patch on the stronger eye for two hours a day for the next three months. I hate to see him in the patch and he doesn’t like it but it’s better than the alternative. The idea is to make Aaron utilize the weak eye more so as to strengthen it. The eye exercises reinforce this idea as well. The doc said that Aaron had 20-20 vision despite this condition.

Tags: aaron, exotropia

So I told a couple of stories to Rich yesterday via IM and this morning he told me that those stories needed to be remembered so here I am, actively remembering the stories for all to read.

[12:23] acedanger49: and Aaron has discovered his testicles!
[12:23] Rich: okay…….TMI
[12:23] acedanger49: “what’s in my testicles daddy?”
[12:23] acedanger49: “balls son. BALLS! can i play with them?!!??!!!!!!!”
[12:23] acedanger49: LOL
[12:23] acedanger49: i said “not yet”
[12:24] acedanger49: meri hit my arm
[12:24] acedanger49: lolol
[12:24] Rich: omg
[12:24] Rich: thats funny
[12:24] acedanger49: hell yeah, i laughed a lot

…

[12:24] acedanger49: so meri too Aaron Christmas shopping for presents for me
[12:24] acedanger49: she asked him what he wanted to get me
[12:24] acedanger49: so they were at the store, looking at what he wanted to get me
[12:24] acedanger49: so fast forward to later that night
[12:24] acedanger49: we’re eating dinner
[12:25] acedanger49: Aaron says “Daddy, do you want to see the popcorn machine I got you for Christmas?”
[12:25] acedanger49: LOL
[12:25] Rich: hahah
[12:25] Rich: om
[12:25] Rich: merry xmas
[12:25] acedanger49: I said “sure, can you go get it?” he said “Mommy, can you get the popcorn machine out of your truck for daddy?”
[12:25] acedanger49: LMAO
[12:26] acedanger49: the look on her face was AWESOME
[12:26] acedanger49: it was great
[12:26] Rich: pictures or it didnt happen
[12:26] acedanger49: haha

Tags: aaron, stories, funny

I don’t think I’ve written about it on here yet so here goes. Meri and I are about 80% sure that we are going to name our new son Eli. Aaron seems to like the name, he talks about baby Eli all the time. Meri and I frequently talk to Aaron about Eli and how Eli will be different when he finally comes.

Aaron understands that it is his job as a big brother to teach Eli several things: how to walk, how to talk, how to eat (candy), how to play video games (Feeding Frenzy 2 and on twitter) , how to sing and play the guitar, and tons of others that he brings up all the time (that I can’t think of right now).

I can’t wait to have this baby! Babysitting Aidan Sunday wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. If anything, it made me more excited to have another baby in the house. I think I’m already looking forward to baby number 3 (which is TBD still but SHOULD be a girl, for Meri’s sake)!

This post is an update to my earlier post.

The DocSyncer  website is showing document from both my work laptop (XP Pro) and my home PC (Vista something).  I never got a response from DocSyncer though. I wasn’t whole-heartedly expecting a response from them, given that I replied to a newsletter email address.

I don’t know what made the service suddenly start showing the documents on both computers that I have the client installed on; it just worked.

Now that I’ve been using the service for a few days, I can say that it is VERY nice to have my documents available no matter what PC/internet connection I’m using.  I hope they don’t start charging for this service because I really like it now.

Meri is pregnant.  We are having another boy. Today, we are babysitting an 18 month old. We just fed Aaron and Aidan and reality is hitting me on how the next year or two is going to kick my ass! Good thing I stopped doing the small company thing and started back with the corporate stuff!

I got an invitation to DocSyncer four days ago. Two days ago, I finally got around to setting it all up. The setup includes downloading an application onto your desktop, logging into your DocSyncer account and giving the DocSyncer application access to your Google Docs account. I really like the idea of the service and was excited that I got an invitation.

My initial impressions of the service aren’t good. I have downloaded the desktop application on a computer with Vista installed and also one with XP installed. So far, I don’t see any documents on my DocSyncer homepage.

I’ve searched for a place to let DocSyncer know about the issues that I’m having but I have not been able to find a support forum at all. I sent a reply to the newsletter_at_docsyner_dot_com email address that notified me about my invitation to the beta service but I don’t think that was the correct place.I’m hoping that my issue is that I’m a moron and missed a key step.

Well, Aaron has intermittent exotropia. Meri called me from the ophthalmologists office while I was at work and I quickly GTFO of (left) work; I don’t even think I said much more to my project manager other than “can I leave!” (which was more of a statement than a question).

So the doctor said that Aaron definitely has this condition and that he wanted us to observe Aaron over the next four months. He also mentioned that he would NOT be aggressively treating condition. I got to the office right as Meri and Aaron were checking out so I wasn’t able to ask questions (and violently shake his shoulders and scream WHY THE FUCK NOT?!). We came home and found three other pediatric ophthalmologists in the Orlando area.