May | 2005 | mashby

May 21, 2005

Off To PalmSource!

PalmSource Mobile Summit And DevCon In a few hours, I’m off to board a Southwest flight to San Jose for the PalmSource Mobile Summit & DevCon. It doesn’t start until Monday evening, but Holly and I are going to take a couple of days before and after the show for some quality time for ourselves. So I won’t be back in Nashville until the 31st.

Normally we take our vacation around our anniversary, but with the way the conference, as well as the date of our anniversary, fell this year it just didn’t work out. So we figured we’d delay it a few days and combine it with the DevCon.

I have to admit, Holly’s being a real sport about it because I don’t think a developer’s conference is all that romantic. Her allowing me to enjoy the conference in the middle of our “vacation” shows just what a great sport she is. I’ll try and include her in everything I can, but there’s just so much geek talk one person can take.

May 20, 2005

A Little Something I’ve Been Working On

A screenshot of Bonsai I’ve been a huge fan of Natara Software’s award winning program Bonsai. It’s an outliner program that runs on your Palm OS device, but it also sports an excellent Windows desktop application as well. For the vast majority of clients that I consult with that say that they want to learn Microsoft Project, do much better with Bonsai. It’s much easier to learn and to use and for most projects it’s all you really need.

That’s really how I stumbled on to Bonsai years ago. I had tried MS Project, but found that I spent most of my time fiddling with the software and not doing the work. There were just too many options and variables to deal with and it made the overall experience cumbersome. In looking for a Palm OS based solution, I came across Project @ Hand, Natara’s other project application that allows you to work with MS Project files on your Palm. I saw Bonsai and thought, “Maybe that’s all I need?”, and sure enough it was! So for several years I’ve been using Bonsai to keep track of tasks and projects. It’s a wonderful tool and syncs like a dream with my desktop.

As I began working with more and more distributed teams, I found that I needed to find an online solution. Sure Bonsai was great for me, but there wasn’t any way that I could share the data with anyone else easily. You can beam outlines back-and-forth, but there’s no way to “sync” them should either of you make changes to the file. Bonsai is simply not designed to work in a collaborative environment.

May 16, 2005

Innovate, Don’t Litigate

Looking at the numbers. Awhile back, I wrote a pretty in depth article on the subject of BroadCATCHING, which is basically downloading television content to your computer via BitTorrent. At the time I wrote it, the MPAA was focusing on BitTorrent sites that offered movies. Since that was patently illegal, I stayed clear of that kind of activity, but since television is broadcast over the airwaves for free, downloading television shows seemed perfectly legal. Unfortunately, if the MPAA has their way, downloading television programs are no different than downloading movies.
The RIAA versus Napster was the precursor to what the MPAA is going through now. Although Nicolas Negroponte made it perfectly clear in his 1995 book, “Being Digital“, not everyone have been listening. Mr. Negroponte basically said that any product, or service that could be distributed digitally, would be. If the current distribution channel doesn’t provide it, then someone else will. That was the case with Napster. First it was illegal and then Apple figured out a way to make it legitimate with iTunes. Since then, Apple’s little side business has all but taken over their primary business (making computers).

Unfortunately, governing organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA don’t understand market demands and how to adapt. Their only course of action seems to be lawsuits. When Napster was all the rage, the RIAA issued a flurry of lawsuits, citing that they were going after “thieves”. Regardless of where you stood on the issue, hearing about Grandmothers getting sued for supposedly downloading hard core rap music by Ol’ Dirty Bastard made you question the entire process. There was a lot of hype and speculation, but when it was all said and done, the lawsuits didn’t amount to much.

May 15, 2005

Got Meth?

Yesterday I started coming down with something. My throat was kind of sore and there seemed to be something in the middle of my chest with the added bonus of some coughing. My Mom had just gone through something similar, so I gave her a call to see what she recommended to combat it. She gave me a long list of stuff to take including NyQuil, DayQuil, Vicks VapoRub, Robitussin CF Syrup, and Mucinex.

May 12, 2005

Comments Should Be Fixed

It was brought to my attention that some of you may have been having difficulty posting comments to the site. It seems the culprit was a plugin I installed to help throttle comment spammers called MT-DBSL. If you tried to post a comment you may have gotten a message something like the following: Your comment […]

May 11, 2005

You Can’t Get There From Here

Thunderbird logo with The Bat logo as a stamp Working in the technology industry can be very frustrating. Every day it seems that I’m wading through a quagmire of information to find the “needle in the haystack” that will solve the problem at hand. If it’s an obscure glitch, or a quirky solution, I expect that there will be some pain and suffering in trying to find a solution. However, often times it seems that I do nothing more than beat my head against a wall for even the most basic of needs. My current “pain du jour” is e-mail. You’d think that given it’s popularity that anything you’d like to do with e-mail could be done with a number of software applications, but unfortunately I’m finding that it’s not. I feel like after asking for directions, I’m being told, “you can’t get there from here.” >(

I’ve been using Thunderbird for well over a year now and have been quite happy for the most part. All of my e-mail accounts are IMAP based, as discussed here, and Thunderbird is one of the best IMAP e-mail clients I’ve found. The SPAM filters are top-notch, the program runs quickly and handles large amounts of e-mail with aplomb, yet there are two features that I’m looking for that simply don’t exist. These two features have sent me on a quest to find a new e-mail client and I simply can’t find a proper solution.

May 10, 2005

The Wing Basket

A basket of buffalo wings The other night Holly and I were feeling like “being bad” and getting something not on our South Beach diet. As we sat there on the couch, I threw out the idea of going to a new place that opened up near us called “The Wing Basket”. Much to my surprise, Holly took me up on my suggestion and we headed off in hopes of finding a place that “does wings right.” Although buffalo wings are now fairly common, most places don’t prepare them “right” in my book. Sure I can order wings from Dominos, but that doesn’t mean that they are any good and in Domino’s case, they aren’t. Usually there’s something wrong with the sauce, or they’ve prepared the chicken itself poorly – this is especially true when the wings are breaded. I’m sure there are others who prefer their wings breaded, and to each his own, but when I go out for wings I want a nice spicy experience with nothing between me and my chicken. 😛

As Holly and I walked into the restaurant, I could instantly tell that Wing Basket was a chain. Growing up in Louisiana, I’ve been spoiled by family owned restaurants and I try and steer away from chains whenever possible. Having someone local cook up a nice dinner will always be head and shoulders above what a restaurant chain can offer 9 times out of 10. Preferences aside, Holly and I stepped up to the counter to see what was on the menu. Other than a couple of side dishes, the only item on the menu were buffalo wings. That was fine by me and I was rather pleased to see that they were so specialized. Yet wings aren’t the focus on the menu. According to their slogan, “It’s all about the sauce”.

The Sauces
With a slogan like that, I figured it’d be best to sample as many of them as I could. Typically the wings are served coated with sauce, but we asked them to put it on the side so that we could try the whole range of the menu. We started with just two sauces, but we kept going back for more to try different ones. Here’s a run down on the ones that we tried:

Month / May 2005