For me a good monitor is an essential part of a good computer setup and for many years now I have always spent a good sum of money on the monitor for my systems. In the old days (I was born in 1977 so this may be relative) it was Iiyama Vision Master Pros and then more recently 21" IBM & Dell CRTs and for the last 2 years or so my monitor of choice has been the Dell 2405FPW 24" Widescreen TFT (superceded by the 2407WFP). Which is absolutely brilliant!

A while ago Dell then launched a 30" widescreen TFT the 3007WFP-HC and I was immediately tempted, however, the hefty £1,200 price tag plus the need for a new expensive graphics card put it out of reach, for now?!

Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP-HC 30-inch Widescreen LCD Flat Panel Monitor

And when I get to that point where I decide that my 24" monitor just isn't big enough, or more likely, can afford it, the 30" Dell is going to have a run for it's money... Why? Digital Tigers that's why!

Take a look at these...

  Digital Tigers...
Zenview PowerTrio Ultra HD (above top)
Zenview Powerscape Ultra HD (above bottom)

Digital Tigers are an American outfit that supply amazing multi-screen LCD displays in a truly bewildering array of configurations.

The first display configuration pictured above consists of 1 x 30" center panel and 2 x 20.1" rotated side panels giving a total resolution of 4960x1600 and costs $3,999. The second configuration is the same but with 4 rotated side panels giving a total screen real-estate of 7360x1200 pixels and costs a whopping $4,999!

Well, one of these is definitely on my Christmas wish list although with two babies to provide for I have a feeling nappies, clothes and toys will be of greater demand than such luxuries!

Well, after our web site was completely corrupted on my VPS server (corrupt virtual hard drive file) and foolishly no backups of the site content I have taken the opportunity to change my site from a custom-built site to a more mainstream blog engine based site of which you now see. Of course I'm sure I'll be adding some of my own tweaks to make it fit a little better for us!

Hopefully Rebecca and I will be more regular in posting news about what we are up to so those friends and family near and far who are interested can always drop by for an update?! There are a number of techie/geeky things I'd like to post about as well, although, I'm not sure who will be interested in that but we'll see?

Previous Site > New Site. Why? How?

I developed our previous site some time ago! The site consisted of a family blog, a geek blog (for me), a fairly large photo gallery, my CV and porfolio as a software architect/developer and this all supported with rather nifty content management features. The initial motivation for building the site was to have an opportunity to play with some, what was at the time, new technologies from Microsoft namely ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 which I was looking to utilise in various projects for my employer Cortexa.

The site was built on a Microsoft Starter Kit and I quickly tweaked the styling and added blogging features and enhanced the photo album/gallery functionality. I updated the site at the end of last year implementing ASP.NET AJAX and I was quite happy with it on the whole. The only important things that were missing were RSS feeds and Comments, but to add this functionality properly would take time that I haven't really got,  what with a fairly demanding job and now two kids in the family!

So I decided as I have now lost all the content for the old site (and it took two weeks to get a new VPS server setup - don't ask!) I may as well take the opportunity to move to a more mainstream blog product and have chosen BlogEngine.NET to do the honours. BlogEngine.NET is "an innovative open source blogging platform developed with ASP.NET 2.0" and should provide a good mix of core functionality for blogging and syndication and still give me the option to develop my own functionality on top if required. So far I really like BlogEngine.NET and after spending a few hours in Photoshop am pleased with the styling (although there's always room for improvement!), the site is lightweight in terms of it's footprint and uses XML instead of a SQL Server which I think has some advantages?!. As for photo albums/galleries I think I may just link to Flickr and then I can benefit from all the tools and utilities that are our there?! We'll see as I am a bit of a control freak and have always wanted this kind of stuff hosted on my own server.

Anyway, hopefully BlogEngine.NET will do the trick for me and I can get a little more regular with posting about life, family and geek!

For my own nostalgia here are some screen shots of the old site minus the live content...