Adam Caudill

Dell Mini 9 Spacebar / Keyboard Issues

I recently wrote about some issues I’ve had with my Dell Mini 9. Since I received my Mini it’s had issues with the keyboard, primarily that the space bar wouldn’t respond. Something I’ve heard several other people say; leading me to believe it’s a flaw in the design.

A quick chat with Dell support and a new keyboard was on the way. Shipped FedEx Priority Overnight no less.

I ordered my Mini within hours of it being released, so it’s a fairly early unit. When I received the new keyboard I was rather disappointed to see the it was marked “A00” – which is Dell-speak for version 1.0. So obviously when I saw that, it was a bit frustrating. What’s the point in replacing a flawed keyboard with another flawed keyboard?

Working Late, Again

Ladies, do you know where your husband is? [N.B. I am leaving this line intact, though it bothers me. This line makes unfair and inappropriate assumptions, and I wish I could remember why I wrote it.] If he’s anything like me (or the rest of my team), he’s at the office. At 4AM. Again.

For the third week in a row I find myself at work at the wee hours of the morning preparing for a project launch. Though today more than ever I find myself asking questions; what takes priority, the needs of a company, or the needs of a relationship? What’s more important, the health of a project, or my own health? Should I be working to make this project a success, or sleeping to stay healthy?

Dell Mini Keyboard Issues

So far I love my Dell Mini 9; it’s a great laptop. Though from the day I received it there’s been a problem. The space bar.

It’s a simple but vital key, and very frustrating when it ignores you. There seems to be a common issue on the early Mini’s with the space bar sometimes ignoring input. Depending on just where you hit the key, it likely won’t register.

Today I was finally fed up and contacted Dell support. After chatting with a technician for about five minutes he agreed to send me a replacement keyboard. Simple, painless, fast.

Is this thing on?

Wow! It’s been over a year since this blog o’ mine has seen any activity, though I’ve certainly not forgot about it. A lot has happened in the last year, so I’ll use this post as a bit of an update (and a warm-up for my return to blogging).

I’m not going to promise you’ll see a new post daily as was once the case, though I’ll try to ensure something new is up at least once a week.

Switching to Gmail, Again

Once again, I’ve decided to switch email clients; this time from The Bat to Gmail, or more specifically, to Google Apps. After some recent issues with The Bat (mostly relating to a recent update), I decided to make another go at switching to Gmail; but this time trying the Google Apps version.

After my last attempt, I was informed that the Google Apps edition of Gmail doesn’t suffer the Sender issue that so plagued me before. After almost a full day of work, the transition is complete. And I couldn’t be happier.

Backups with JungleDisk

I recently heard about JungleDisk (hat tip: Ryan), and decided that might be the backup solution I’ve been looking for.

I’ve got thousands of pictures, hundreds of megabytes of source code, and documents dating back several years, all of which I’d like to ensure I never lose. So far I’ve shied away from all of the online backup solutions due to the expense. But JungleDisk uses Amazon’s S3 service for storage, complete with its rather inexpensive pricing model.

Well, looks like I was wrong…

Well, it was a while back that I said I would start writing again – that just never quite happened.

Much interesting has happened in these months, a few co-workers left the company, a few new faces came in; there was also a promotion and a number of new projects. Oh, and there’s a new relationship, and a fair bit of time now going to my old profession and now hobby of photography. Between all of these, spare time isn’t something I have much of – if any.

Another one bites the dust…

Later this week I’ll start the process of closing my start-up, aDeVIX Software. After months of planning and development, the decision has finally been made to call it a day. It was a great idea, but time and money conspired against us, with great effect.

We had a great product in mind, just not the resources to make it happen. I do believe that it would have been quite a success, but it takes a fair bit of time, and even more money to launch a commercial product aimed at mid-size businesses. It’s not a simple thing to sell software costing more than $10,000 per install; and being a company with no reputation, it’s almost impossible.

A bit behind…

Well, it was about a month ago that I wrote commenting on being sick, and letting you all know that I would be getting back to my normal writing schedule. That didn’t happen. Work happened.

All my time since then has been spent managing between 2 and 5 developers, and trying to get a project that would end up weighing in at almost 50,000 lines of code completed and to production. Seeing as we started without specs, and made the deadline, I’m quite happy about how it went. I learned some interesting things on this project, if I can find a way to write about it without breaking my confidentiality agreement; you may see more about it soon.