kyleheon.com: Category Family & Friends

Wings of Hope Air Show

Kyle Heon — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 23:39:00 +0000

This past Sunday a bunch of us, including my son, spent the day at an air show not far from where I work (or live for that matter). It was a long tiring day but I was able to get lots of good shots. I filled 3gb of CF cards (363 photos total).

I then spent the last couple of days culling out the non-keepers and tweaking the rest. In the end I kept 81, some better then others.

Here are a few of my favorites. To view the entire set, swing over to my Flickr account.

Here the F-18 and classic Corsair do a fly by.

Here the F-16 and F-86 fly-by in what is known as the Heritage Formation.

I hope you enjoy this small glimpse and I really encourage you to swing over here to check out the rest of the photos.

More Then Meets The Eye

Kyle Heon — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 20:26:00 +0000

As part of a mini-vacation I took Thursday and Friday (July 5th and 6th) off to create an extra long weekend.

I’ve been saying for about 6 months now that when the Transformers movie hit the theaters that I’d be going. At first I was going to just take my son because I didn’t think my daughter would care to see it. Turns out she wanted to go too so the wife and I took them both on Thursday morning (a 9:30 showing—nice).

I went into this with pretty high expectations and I wasn’t disappointed. Typically I’m let down when I get this excited about a movie but not this time, this was a typical, blow everything up Michael Bay film. I think the team behind the transformations did an absolutely amazing job. There was only one scene in the entire film that I felt oozed “CGI” and I quickly dismissed it.

I personally feel this did my childhood favorite justice on the big screen. My daughter wanted us to go buy it on DVD, I had to explain to her (and my son) that it wasn’t on DVD yet and they were going to have to wait. I suspect it’ll be on DVD by the end of the summer, and you can bet we’ll be owning it the day it hits shelves.

This is definitely the summer blockbuster to run out and see. “We” give this one 4.5 stars.

Diabetes Fundraiser Results

Kyle Heon — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:15:00 +0000

Well this morning I dropped an envelope in the mailbox with checks totaling $300! I’m very pleased with the results of this years fundraising drive. I received a very large number of donations from ex-PixelMEDIA, Inc. employees. Thanks everyone.

I want to also give a big shout-out to my very talented friends (also past co-workers) over at Lightfin Studios for their generous donation. Thanks guys!

Community Campaign for Diabetes

Kyle Heon — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:44:00 +0000

It’s that time again. The American Diabetes Association (ADA) Community Campaign for Diabetes. Last year I participated in this and raised about $150-200 (can’t remember exact figure). That number was doubled by LifeScan (I think). This year Splenda is lined up to double all proceeds, up to $50,000.

The ADA does amazing things each and every year. I have been diabetic since I was 11 (turning 30 in about 2 months). I live a considerably better life today largely due to research made possible by the ADA. About two years ago I was finally in a position to begin using an insulin pump (from Animas). It was the best move I ever made. My A1c went from an insanely high 8.9 down to around 6.2 in about 3 months. Ever since I have been able to keep up that sort of consistency, thankfully.

If anyone is interested in donating, I have setup my PayPal account to accept credit card and debit card payments. You can get started by heading over here and send money to kyleheon @ gmail dot com. I promise you that any and all donations received will be sent to the ADA.

Anniversary Bouquet

Kyle Heon — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 00:16:00 +0000

On February 27th my wife and I celebrated our 8th anniversary. On the way home from work I picked up a bouquet of flowers for her, of which I took roughly 75 photos of. Here are some of the better one (via my flickr account).

If you like these (and I hope you do), you can find more flower photography here.

On the road again...

Kyle Heon — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 21:53:00 +0000

On Friday we’ll be leaving early in the morning on vacation. Heading out to Madison, Ohio to visit my wife’s sister and her family for Friday evening and Saturday, then off on Sunday to Wilmington, North Carolina to stay with my wifes mother and grandmother. We’ll be there all week and then make the trip back in reverse.

All told there is about 20 hours of travel one way (New Hampshire > Ohio > North Carolina). We do the trip this way because it’s considerably less stressful, and only adds about 4 hours to the trip. As an added bonus our kids get to see their aunt and cousins.

There aren’t any plans to do anything wild and crazy. We always hit the beach at least once while in Wilmington and we love the food down there. You can’t get barbeque up here like they make up it down south. Another treat is that we can get some Krispy Kreme donuts, hot off the conveyor—there are no Krispy Kremes up this way (probably a good thing otherwise I’d be 300+ pounds).

I’ll be bringing my camera and laptop (hoping to steal some free wireless while down there, we aren’t far from the college). If I’m lucky I’ll be able to get some good photos and post them to Flickr (I’ll link to them here if I do so).

It's been a bit too long...

Kyle Heon — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 02:05:00 +0000

It’s been super chaotic here in the Heon household with end of school celebrations, father’s day, and multiple family birthdays (father-in-law, my daughter, and my wife) all falling within the same two-week period. Finally we can come up for some air as we are all done with my daughters sixth birthday party. It’s amazing how loud and crazy things get when you add three girls to the mix. I almost think it’s easier with the boys.

So what else have I been up to? Plenty. We bought a new vehicle about a week ago. We’d outgrown our Ford Focus wagon and decided that the time was right to upgrade to a minivan. Thankfully we had a cousin that sells vehicles at a Dodge dealership in the area so we headed over there and he took care of us. We picked up a fully loaded 2006 Dodge Grand Caravan SXT with 11,700 miles on it. Not new but pretty close. When I say fully loaded I do mean it, all it’s missing is heated leather seats (has cloth seats) and the kitchen sink (smirk). Automatic doors, dvd player, 3.8L V6, stow-n-go seating (really sweet), 6-disc dvd/cd changer, 6 (or 8, not really sure) speaker system. We take an annual trip to the family down south (North Carolina) and this will make it much more comfortable.

Other then that it’s been mostly business as usual. I have been listening avidly on the Radiant CMS mailing list and have been exploring this as a replacement for Typo as it seems to be becoming a bit bloated. Everytime I go to upgrade it I inevitably run into issues, be them migration issues or textile/filter related. Additionally my blog seems to be going down on a weekly basis lately. Not sure if that is TextDrive going up/down or Typo simply consuming too much memory and the process being shutdown. I’m also monitoring Mephisto as a possible replacement. Ideally what I want to do is make it possible to continue to have something that makes it easy to post but also flexible enough to let me create a place to post my photography, something that I’m not really finding easy/possible with the current setup.

Speaking of Rails, I picked up a copy of Rails Recipes (for Father’s Day) and I just ordered a copy of Ruby for Rails which recieved a very good review on one of the blogs I subscribe to. It seems to fit well for me simply because I’m trying to learn both Ruby and Rails at the same time and really struggling to grasp either of them (this is probably due to the fact that I only get to spend a few hours a day, sometimes a week, exploring it).

Dude! Your getting a Dell...

Kyle Heon — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 21:28:00 +0000

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.

Introducing....Fidget and Loki!

Kyle Heon — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 02:09:00 +0000

Although we are still very much saddened by the loss of our beloved Molasses we are also very excited about two new additions to our family.

These are by no means replacements for Molasses. They were purchased as companions to Coffee (although, admittedly we are also comforted by their arrival).

On Sunday we picked up Fidget, my wife and daughter picked her out and she was named by my wife. Her name, while funny is very fitting because she fidgets constantly while sleeping, it’s quite cute.

Today on the way home I knew that the local pet store was expecting more ferrets so I swung in to see if they had anything interesting. While they didn’t quite have what I was hoping for (either an albino with blue eyes, which is very rare, or an all or nearly all black male) they did have a remarkable dark chocolate male. He is very quiet yet very inquisitive.

I snapped off a bunch of photos but none of them came out all that good but I’ll post one of each anyways. Hopefully over time I’ll get some good shots of these active creatures.

Fidget	Loki

They are so tiny. Coffee, our five year old is huge compared to these ones and she was always the tiny one.

On dying pets and the dilemmas of "replacing" them...

Kyle Heon — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 20:16:00 +0000

For the past five years my wife and I have had two ferrets. For the past two years a cat.

The two ferrets were purchased on the same day, we were told they came from the same litter, brother (Molasses) and sister (Coffee). The cat, my wife adopted from the local SPCA, a baby girl (Tigerlily).

Last spring (about this time in fact) we took the ferrets in for their annual checkup and vacinations. Molasses had been loosing significant patches of hair and we had done some research into what the cause might be. He was also getting more aggressive with his sister, biting her and not letting go. These animals are fixed before you can purchase them but these were acts of sexual agression for certain.

Our research landed us on the belief that he had come down with Adrenal Disease. The vet, with one look at Molasses, confirmed this diagnosis. We could have attempted treatment but that wasn’t necessarily guarenteed and expensive. The vet said that as long as he was still eating, drinking and going to the bathroom he was not in any pain. We were told that he would have good and bad days and that at most it would feel like he had a fever.

The time has come to accept the reality that he isn’t going to be with us much longer. He is completely bald short of a little hair on his arms. He is in the final stages of adrenal disease and can barely move around. He barely does anything but sleep. Maybe twice a day I see him come down for some water, pees and heads back to bed.

My wife, being the overly emotional one does not want to take him to the vets to have him put down. She insists that he will be better off dying with family. I’m not sure I agree but I’ll go along with those wishes. We suspect that he has maybe one to two weeks left. I am, however, not sure he will make it through the weekend.

We’ve been discussing the idea of getting another ferret, more for Coffee because we’ve read that once a companion dies the other one needs something to keep them active otherwise they go into a downward spiral themselves.

We typically haven’t been as good as we should be about letting them out for enough time during the day. They are little bandits, getting into trouble everywhere. We just had too much going on and too much in the way to keep track of the two of them. For the past couple of weeks though my wife has been letting them out to roam nearly the entire house (we shut the bedroom doors but the rest is theres). Coffee comes out and does her thing, even plays with Tigerlily. We had to monitor this for awhile because Tigerlily is much bigger and stronger but she has come around and is really good with her. We haven’t heard Coffee squeal yet (but Tigerlily did the other night and now keeps her distance as she realizes Coffee isn’t just a play thing anymore).

Coffee has even started using Tigerlily’s litter box instead of doing her business in one of the corners. This is great because it was my biggest complaint about letting them roam the house. So far she hasn’t gotten into trouble and my wife says that she barely has to distract Coffee from doing something she shouldn’t.

I’m hopeful that this continues as it would be nice to allow them more freedom. Ferrets are very high maintenance pets and they need to be allowed to roam, explore, and play outside of their cage. There are many ferret owners who don’t keep their ferrets in cages at all, some do. We always have but have also wanted to be able to allow them to run. My goal would be to let them roam as long as we are home and not sleeping. This would certainly give them plenty of outdoor time.

Today we were at the local pet store checking out the ferrets. They have five, all really tiny. We managed to get a really helpful associate, someone who has five ferrets himself and we explained the situation. Our fear was that if we got a new one would they be aggressive to Molasses and/or Coffee. He said that typically new additions, while much more active, fit nicely into the family.

They had two that we feel in love with. Another boy and girl. The boy is nearly all black, the girl a cream/coffee color, looking much like Coffee did when we got her. We left to think about it but I think we knew before we left that we’d be heading back, and this time being the proud owners of four ferrets.

My wife was, at first, very apprehensive about getting another one. She doesn’t want to “replace” Molasses. I don’t quite see it the same way.

The sales clerk said that they’d be going on sale (a markdown of $30 per ferret) tomorrow first thing so if we do it we’ll be there when they open to hopefully snatch them up before they are gone.

Update 3.26.2006 @ 9:30: Molasses passed away in his sleep sometime yesterday afternoon.

Update 3.26.2006 @ 16:44: We headed to the pet store for when they opened this morning and one of the two we liked had been sold, one of the managers bought him. We ended up leaving with the girl who my wife has named Fidget. My son and I really wanted the black ferret (a boy) who was incredibly cute and looked like a tiny little bear (of which we were going to call him Bear). I’ll keep checking the pet store(s) in this area looking for another one to add to the clan.