My Dell XPS M1710 has arrived...

Posted by Kyle Heon Thu, 04 May 2006 20:25:00 GMT

When I ordered my laptop a week ago (last Thursday) it wasn’t scheduled to ship until Monday, May 8th. When I checked on Tuesday night I saw that it had been shipped on Monday.

It came in yesterday around 10AM. I’m simply playing around with it at the moment, just getting comfortable with the laptop (I’m a desktop junkie, the small keyboard and touchpad are going to take a bit of time getting used to).

I’m considering wiping the drive and reinstalling just what I need. Dell installs all sorts of stuff, mostly crap I don’t care about. I want a clean, lean machine.

When I get a chance I’ll try and take some photos of the new rig, the kids love the fact that it glows and especially love that I can change the colors too.

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Dude! Your getting a Dell...

Posted by Kyle Heon Thu, 27 Apr 2006 21:28:00 GMT

So today is my 29th birthday and my wife gave me the green light to finally order a laptop. I’ve been researching them for about a week now having a tough time deciding on what I wanted/needed and what I was willing to spend and could afford.

I can’t afford one outright so I had to find a deal where I could finance the purchase. Dell offered 6 months at 0% but that would have made my monthly payments around $500 which is just way too much. For their XPS systems however they were offering 18 months at 0% so I configured one of the entry level XPS M1710 systems, only upgraded to XP Pro and added 2 year hardware and CompleteCare protection, the rest is standard.

Here are the full specs:

  • XPS M1710, Intel Core Duo Processor T2400 (1.83GHz/667MHz FSB)
  • 17 inch UltraSharp TrueLife Wide-screen WUXGA with Black LCD Cover
  • 1GB, DDR2, 667MHz 2 Dimm
  • 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900
  • 60GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional w/SP2
  • Integrated 10/100 Network Cardand Modem
  • 8X DVD+/-RW Drive
  • Integrated High Definition Audio
  • Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/g Mini Card (54Mbps)
  • 80 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery

It’s pricey and I hope that I don’t regret this purchase but from the reviews I’ve read, the XPS M1710 doesn’t disappoint.

I haven’t had a system powerful enough to play games in years. This system should handle all of the current gen games with ease which is cool because there are plenty I’ve wanted to try out.

Now I need to pick up some supplies, like a carry case, maybe an optical mouse, some headphones (ear buds), an adapter to power the laptop in the vehicle, etc.

The reason I went with such a powerful system is that I want to be able to make this my primary system and that means I need to be able to develop on it and also run Photoshop for on-site photo manipulation.

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Got bugs? Try this.

Posted by Kyle Heon Tue, 18 Apr 2006 22:35:00 GMT

I just had to post this. Today on Lifehacker was a MacGyver Tip for exterminating bugs. Be sure to read the comments, some of them are pretty funny. Here is a snippet:

The gecko family of lizards, when not making insurance commercials, spend their time eating bugs. Cockroaches are a particular favorite, I’m told. When you get home, release the little guys under the sink or anywhere else they can find their way into the walls. The next sound you hear should be contented chomping.

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Campaign for a Cure statistics

Posted by Kyle Heon Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:07:00 GMT

Well a few weeks back I blogged about collecting funds for this years Campaign for a Cure diabetes drive.

Tonight I sent out the donations that I’d collected. Surprisingly I think we did pretty good, with donations from 9 people total (including myself) we raised $180.

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Support diabetes research

Posted by Kyle Heon Mon, 20 Mar 2006 23:16:00 GMT

Just noticed that Scott Hanselman is also a diabetic (also because so am I). He’s raising funds for a cure, swing on over here if you are interested in donating.

I’ve been listening to Hanselminutes for awhile now and I was surprised to find out he was diabetic.

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Ugh, blew out a tire the other day

Posted by Kyle Heon Fri, 17 Mar 2006 02:55:44 GMT

I was on my way in to work a bit early the other day, swung by the gas station (BJ’s) which has a couple speed bumps in place to keep the speed down and over the second one I blew out my left front tire.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you are going to say: I was going to fast. You’d be wrong though, I wasn’t. I’m pretty sure there was something in the puddle immediately after it and I hit it just right.

Back when I bought the tires, I paid about $102 per tire, this time they ran me $135 per tire w/the road hazard. Good thing I’d bought road hazard before as that saved me about $56 per tire (bringing thing down to around $80). You’d think that after 4-5 years, the same tire would be easier to manufacture and therefore cheaper to buy but apparently not.

I drive an GMC Jimmy and opted to go with a pretty aggressive treaded tire which pays off in the winter. I use the BF Goodrich All Terrain T/A. I love them in the winter only for their traction in snow. They are loud, very loud at highway speed and especially in the cold.

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Minor site design update

Posted by Kyle Heon Sun, 12 Mar 2006 20:31:00 GMT

I just finished posting a small site design update. These changes are mostly visible on the front page and the individual detail pages.

I have another set of updates that I’m starting on next but wanted to get these changes posted.

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Another quick site update

Posted by Kyle Heon Fri, 03 Mar 2006 02:55:00 GMT

Just posted another small update to the website that includes the latest from Typo’s trunk (with an issue free migration, yippee!).

The big (well big in terms of what is being posted) thing tonight is a new randomizing header image. Currently it should cycle through two, but over time I’m going to add more. The tricky part with that is in getting Typo to NOT cache things so that the image will actually randomize.

Thanks to this tip from Scott Laird I’ve modified the way article caching works. Going to keep an eye on this and see if there are ways to find tune things so that I can improve performance while still allowing for the image randomization.

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Upgraded to Typo r865

Posted by Kyle Heon Wed, 22 Feb 2006 21:08:00 GMT

It had been awhile since I last updated my installed version of Typo so I finally took the plunge and did so tonight. It didn’t quite go as well as I’d hoped but in the end I think I actually learned a few things.

Update: Still working through issues. Noticed that Textile markup is no longer being interpretted. I’m working to get this issue resolved.

Fixed: After many nights of troubleshooting and repeated pleas on the Typo mailing list I have finally fixed the issues with Textile markup not being rendered properly.

I’m not sure on the exact issue but it seems to have been tied to a couple things. One might have been a banged up migration (probably my fault). Somehow the body_html column’s content lost all html formatting.

To fix this I opened up a script/console session and did the following:

articles = Article.find(:all)
  articles.each do |a|
    a.body_html = nil
    a.save
  end

What this did was reset the body_html columns. I then was able to hard refresh the site (running via Webrick in development mode). What this seems to do is force Typo to regenerate the body_html data, this time correctly formatted.

This was the first time I’d played with script/console. Very cool tool, nice to have for debugging and quick (and not so quick) hotfixes.

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Wow! It's been awhile since I updated

Posted by Kyle Heon Sat, 11 Feb 2006 00:41:00 GMT

I know, I know; it’s been an awfully long time since I last updated this site. I apologize, it has been a very chaotic 2006 for the Heon family. Here is a very quick summary of things that have gone on:

  • My “little” brother had a sty in his eye, torqued his back, and totalled his car (all in the month of January).
  • My daughter busted herself up real bad falling on the jungle gym at school. She was out of school for over two weeks.
  • My son took a pencil in the eye at school. Thankfully that was just a scare, nothing was actually damaged.
  • My wife has been in and out of the hospital and doctors for various tests and procedures to find and stop some internal bleeding. Things have been found that had to be dealt with but thankfully, as of today everything is looking pretty good. We had quite the scare there as doctors tossed the word cancer around.
  • Then just the other day my grandmother was admitted to the hospital and is still there under observation. She is being treated for a slew of things but from what I have been told tonight she is feeling much better and is in much better spirits. My wife and I went over to the hospital last night to see her but she was asleep so we let her rest.

All that in under a month and a half.

In addition to all of that, the team I work with is 110% allocated for at least the next 6 weeks so I’ve been putting in some long hours to just stay afloat. If you live in the Southern New Hampshire area and happen to be looking for a development job please swing over here and submit an application. Tell them I sent you.

I sadly have not spent much time working on any Ruby on Rails development (a bit to my dismay too) and my camera has sat in the camera bag now for a few weeks. After we can get past all of the recently accrued medical bills I hope to pick up a copy of Photoshop CS2 so that I can begin shooting my pics in RAW format (at least I plan on trying it out).

At some point I hope to get back into development on this site. I’ve been promising for way to long to get a photography section up and running and sooner or later I will actually do so. Here’s hoping that time is soon.

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