Today, I’m taking a break from my usual talk of technology and the like, in favor of a parenting moment.  Hopefully some of you find it helpful.

For quite some time now, we faced an uphill battle to get our son potty trained.  Now that he’s over 4 years old, it was time and really needed to happen. Alex is a highly focused child, who sometimes gets so immersed in what he’s doing that he doesn’t stop what he’s doing to use the potty.  He’s physically capable of taking care of business, so it’s obviously a behavioral thing.

My wife first found this potty watch at One Step Ahead. Great concept, terrible implementation. You set an interval for how often the child is to be reminded to use the potty (30, 60 or 90 minutes).  When the interval comes up, the child hears a little song, reminding the child to head for the potty.  Unfortunately, it’s a piece of garbage.  Our first one lasted about 3 weeks before the batteries died.  Opening the watch to replace the battery, followed by careful reassembly resulted in a watch that just didn’t work.  We called them of course, to complain about the poor quality of the watch, and to their credit, they did replace the watch at no charge.  The second watch just stopped making music after about 3 weeks.  See a pattern here?

Our final solution has thus far proven to be much better.  My wife found a women’s Timex lap watch that was small enough for Alex’s wrist.  The cool thing about this watch?  The timer feature.  It’s essentially a countdown clock that can be set to automatically restart at the end of each interval.  You can set the interval for whatever you like, no limits like the 30/60/90 of the old potty watch.

Alex gets to wear a real watch, which is also bound to help us with teaching him to tell time, he’s getting a prompt to remind him to hit the bathroom, which is sure helping reduce the number of accidents he’s been having, and we’re all happier.  So far, so good.

We’re spending a quiet evening at home tonight, watching stuff on the Science Channel.  During a commercial break from a very interesting show about the ice hotel that gets built annually in Sweden, we saw a commercial for a new show coming to Animal Planet entitled “River Monsters”.  The gist?  It’s a guy who’s dubbed as “an extreme angler”, which I think roughly translates as “fishes with a harpoon gun nearby”, who goes after really big, nasty fish.  Sort of like Bassmasters, but with the chance of the host being ripped to shreds by some sort of ferocious water creature.

As time marches on, it seems that viewers require more & more shocking content in order to hold their interest.  What will be required in 5 or 10 years to draw in viewers?  How about ice hockey, but where the players have nitroglycerin strapped to their bodies?  How far are we away from The Running Man?

I dare you.

Explain this.

Last evening, several of us met at the home of friends to watch the big game.  We all agreed to go there, as they had the largest TV (57″ vs our 46″, or 40″ at the other couple’s house)..  Seemed like a great idea at the time.  Then Comcast intervened.

While all of their other HD chanels worked great, the local NBC and ABC HD versions were just showing a black screen without audio.  The SD channel versions worked fine, but it sort of negates the point of the big HDTV, right?  So, our hosts called up Comcast to see what was up.  After a few minutes, the guy on the phone determined that nothing was wrong, and they’d need to send someone out.  Of course, since we were 10 minutes from kickoff, it wasn’t going to help for the game.

While on the phone with Comcast, our friend mentioned that they were considering switching to FiOS TV and Internet, and this was Comcast’s opportunity to convince her to stick with them by fixing this, or providing some sort of nominal credit, as compensation for degraded service.  They told her there was nothing they could do to help her, have a nice day, buh bye.

She hung up and said, “Well, I was on the fence before, now we’re definitely going with FiOS.”  We’ve had FiOS Internet for about 2.5 years now, and FiOS TV for a bit more than 6 months now, and we’re thrilled with the quality of both services.  Much better than Comcast, who we typically referred to around the house as “Crapcast.”

Yes, you read that right.

It’s snowing on Mars.  Right now.

So, it’s snowing on Mars, but here in NJ, we just keep getting teased with tiny little bits of snow.  Anyone else see the irony in the fact that it’s snowing on Mars, but not so much in New Jersey?

This morning’s Lifehacker includes a post about a mashup of the supposed “Top 25″ songs of 2008.

I’m not entirely sure when it happened, but somewhere along the line, I must have grown old.  I’ve never heard a single one of those songs.

Oh yeah, and despite being only a few years older than he, Kanye West definitely does not speak for me either.  When I first read that, I had to ask someone who this supposed spokesman for me is…