Richard Harrison

Since I just moved into my new house, I needed to purchase a new bed to sleep on. Recently, I have been having a lot of back pain, which is probably due to the large amount of computer work I have been doing this past year. My girlfriend’s parents recently bought a mattress from the company Mattress Dr. They said good things about them, so I decided to try out one of their top of the line memory foam mattresses. This mattress weighs in at $1200 for a queen, which is EXTREMELY reasonable. Compared to other similar beds out there, this is very cheap.

I’m sure that you have heard of Tempur Pedic. They are the memory foam manufacturer that spends millions on advertising. Theyre beds rise all the way up to $7000, and their lowest one starts in the low thousands. The mattress that I recently bought from Mattress Dr compares to the celebrity and grand bed from tempur pedic, which are their top two brands. These two mattresses go for $3799 and $5999 respectively. Now, I have lied on all of these beds at many different stores, and the mattress I just received from Mattress Dr feels just as comfortable if not better than the Tempur Pedic models. I could not recommend Mattress Dr any higher.

I have gotten the best nights of sleep I have ever gotten in the past couple days thanks to the Ultra Pedic 12 from Mattress Dr. If you are in the market looking for a bed, I would highly recommend them. Their prices are absolutely amazing, and they have free delivery. What more can you ask for. I was wary about buying a bed online without lying on it first, but there is no reason to be with Mattress Dr.

Final Review: 10/10 - Absolutely Amazing

Go check out Mattress Dr now.

I’m going to keep this short and apologetic. I have had a crazy week, which has resulted in no blog posts of any value. I also apologize for having no posts of any technological value. Now that I am settling into my new place, I am getting into a work schedule, which will allow me to get some meaningful posts up here.

To keep the story short here is the gist of my past week. Our landlord called us and told us that we were going to be able to move in early. We go over to see the house, and it is an ABSOLUTE mess. The previous tenants left stuff everywhere, and the whole house had a very bad smell to it. The landlord wanted to charge us in order to clean it, since we were moving in early. This is pretty ridiculous, but we did it anyway so we had time to get our house ready. We have been cleaning for a week, and now its in pretty good shape. I bought a nice desk, bed, carpet, and dresser so I have a nice bedroom/office to spend my time in.

Over the course of the next couple weeks, I will begin writing some adobe air tutorials to help with the lacking documentation on the subject. I hope that it will be able to make things easier for some new developers to adobe air.

As any new home renter, I decided to sign up for cable and high speed internet. Unfortunately for me, Comcast is the only available option for the State College area. I am moving in Friday, so I went through the tiring ordeal of ordering from Comcast yesterday. The first thing I was surprised about when I went to their website was that they sell their internet in tiers. Since, I’m living with four other guys, I opted for the 16 mbps option, which is $52 a month. Anything slower than this would be like hell freezing over for the four IST students living in this house. Lets just say the geekness is just overflowing in my new place.

Then I proceeded to look at the cable, which appears to be not too bad until you look at the fine print. Our package starts at $50 a month, but we will soon find the bill at $126 a month. I know for a fact that I could have this for cheaper with DirecTV, but unfortunately for me my landlord has a thing against satellites. So I swallowed the price, and then this is where all the fun starts. I go through their surveys to find that I am automatically connected to a chat. It says that there was a problem with my order information. I wait ten minutes and no one speaks, and then a message comes up, “Mike has closed the chat.” Thanks Mike!

I give it a rest until the next day. I try three more times, and the same exact thing happens with various other people closing the chat on me. Finally the fourth time I get an actual person. They tell me that my information was lost in the order. Apparently the series of tubes that are the internet ate my order information. I then need to tell them what order I wanted. Then they ask for my information concluding with my social security number. I tell them there is absolutely no reason they need my social to sign up for television. If I don’t pay, just shut it off. They gave me some pre printed response about how other customers felt the same way, and they eventually realized that it was necessary. I still demanded no, and they allowed me to give my drivers license instead.

Well here is the story of my somewhat troubling experience with the oh so lovable computer named the macbook. I bought my first macbook in january of 2007. It was the first apple computer I had ever bought, and I instantly fell in love with the osx operating system. It served me well for a couple months, and then the first of many problems with the computer happening. To give it credit this problem was not the computers fault.

In march, my ex-girlfriends ex-boyfriend broke my computer. Its a long story, and all that you need to know is that the screen was spider webbed and unusable. Fortunately for me, I got the full price for the computer from him, and I bought a new macbook. I fixed the screen on the old macbook for $400, and now my Dad is using that computer.

The problems with this new macbook started in fall of 2007. During that time, I was using my computer as normal doing some development work for my job as TexasHoldem.com. Then all of a sudden my computer freezes. I hard restart my computer, and it boots into a command line. After this, I am sitting in my chair puzzled at why I am looking at a command line instead of my desktop. I try some things to fix it, but they all resulted in nothing. Then, one time when I restart it, absolutely nothing happens. Some of the details are fuzzy now, but I tried some maintenance disks, and they all came to one conclusion: my hard drive failed.

This has not been one of the better weeks of my life. It started out at the end of a great vacation weekend in New York City with my girlfriend, Keri. We had a great time in the city at Rent, the history museum, and just walking around. So I was already not excited to come back to a full working week. It started out tuesday morning when I was driving to AccuWeather for work. Every Tuesday, I have a long drive from Harrisburg to State College. Just as I was about to get to work, I get pulled over for going 61 in a 55. If you are familiar with 322, the cop got me right as 322 collapses into one lane. I thought it was pretty ridiculous for getting taken over for only going six over. It was the end of the month, and I guess he had to fill his “quota.”

Then my computer has been having problems again. As much as I love my mac, it does give me a lot of grief. Last year, the screen broke and I had to have it replaced. Then my hard drive crashed, and I lost everything. Next, my charger breaks, which is not cheap. Then lately, I’ve been having more problems. The right side of the screen now has a blue line going down the side of it. How much quality does apple actually put into these screens.

Then the ultimate problem. As a programmer, having your keyboard work is kind of an important thing. As I was programming this afternoon, all of a sudden my spacebar stops working. If I hit it really hard it will work for about a minute, and then go back to not working (So you can imagine how annoying typing out this post is). So I took it off to clean and then put it back on. It was good for about ten minutes and then back to the same old. Then the delete key was working, so I tried to clean that as well. And guess what, I broke the scissor mechanism under the key as I was taking it off. Then to fix it, I switched the delete key out with the caps lock key, since I never use it. This has just been a stressful day, as I just need this computer to make it until Apple comes out with the new laptops in a couple months. I just ordered a new space bar, and I hope that will fix the problem. I’ll post here when it comes, and let you know how it works out.

I posted something earlier about the .me domain and how I was frustrated with it. Well here is some more information that I found out. There were premium domain names that were reserved to be auctioned off. Apparently, GoDaddy forgot to make those “taken” and thats why I was able to pay $40 and “register” harrison.me. Then a few minutes ago I found an interesting article describing 212 premium names that were going on auction. Some of them were brief.me, ridewith.me, etc. “Clever” uses of the word me that would be in the domain name. Ironically enough, harrison.me is on that list. I guess my name is special that it requires an auction. Oh well, thats life and I now have rickharrison.me obviously.

You can read more here: http://buymedomains.com/2008/07/me-domain-auctions-open-today.html

UPDATE: harrison.me went for $75 with only one bid. I wish I would have known about this sooner.

I spent this past weekend in New York City, because I had some business meetings to attend. There are some big things coming up in the near future at TexasHoldem.com so stay tuned to see these new features. It was the first time I was in New York City for a substantial amount of time, and it was definitely a real experience. Riding around in a cab all weekend was stressful enough without having to plan out the future of the company.

While I was there I was able to explore chinatown, soho, and lower brooklyn. China town was a very fun place, and I plan to explore it more this next weekend, since my girlfriend, Keri, and I will be going back to new york city. I am excited to go back again and experience the city a little more. My gracious sister is letting us stay there this weekend, but she is moving in a few weeks. Thats why we are going before she gets out of the city.

Ill start off by apologizing for not posting in about a week. My life has been very hectic as of late and do to some issues I’m about to explain, I was losing interest in this blog. The first major issue was the domain name that I had. It was long, and I never go by richard so why have that be the name of my blog. Everywhere on the internet such as twitter my username is rickharrison so those fits into my internet persona much better.

I set out to find a new name for my blog. I went through a brainstorming phase in which most of the domain names were taken. I came up with a pretty good name, which I decided to use as the name for a future startup rather than for this blog. Then I heard about the new .me domain extension. You would think that this would allow you to get a great domain name, since none would be taken. A couple weeks ago I set an alarm for today, because they went on sale this morning at 11 AM eastern. I was looking forward to registering harrison.me. This would allow me to have a great short domain name and have a permanent email at rick@harrison.me.

In case your not a close friend of mine, you probably do not know that I recently made a deposit on a puppy. My whole life I have wanted an alaskan malamute and now I am finally getting one with my girlfriend, Keri. They are large working dogs that were originally bred to be companions to the inuits in the arctic region. I will be posting pictures here throughout the puppy lifes as she gets larger.

They were born yesterday, and I will be getting one of the girls seen in the picture. They were born in Tennessee as a child of the wayeh breeder. Keri and I are so very excited for 8 weeks from now when we get to take our puppy home. I will then be posting lots about her as we progress through the changes in both our lives.

I have been developing an adobe air application recently for my job at AccuWeather. It is a small widget full of features that crams a lot of information into a small space. It displays the basic current conditions along with an icon on the home page. It also has a small icon on the bottom left that will expand a menu showing the current weather alarms in the area. Regardless of all this, its a small air application that I will expand more on when its released. This post is more about my frustrations with the air platform.

Over the course of the development of this application, I ran into many problems. One is that this is a very new platform with not much guidance on development. I had to work through various problems such as figuring out how to make the system tray work, animation of the air windows, and managing the multiple windows from one another. I have created one of the first air applications, and therefore have worked through these problems, and I would like to share my knowledge with others so that they do not need to have the same frustration that I had.