Michael Ashby | mashby

April 7, 2005

The Most Annoying RingTones EVER

Crazy Frog - the most annoying ringtone ever! The other day my good buddy Dan Westman was chatting with me via my mobile and every time he’d mouse over the ad space in MSN Messenger, there’d be a cacophony of silly noises. I couldn’t hear exactly what it was saying, but from 8000 miles away it sounded absolutely hilarious. I fired up MSN Messenger, but I couldn’t get the same ad to pull up.

Fast forward 5 days (today) and Dan tells me that he has a link for me. I click on it and I’m taken to Jamster! Crazyfrog RingTones. The source of the ad that I had so much enjoyment from. Unfortunately, when listening to the ring tones, the pleasure is all gone, because these ringtones have to be the most annoying ringtones EVER.

April 4, 2005

And The Winner Is…

Well, the little contest of “Guess What’s In My SysTray” is over. Didn’t get quite as much attention as I hoped it would, but for those that did participate, they sure gave it a good shot. Since no one guessed every item and not all items were guessed, I’ve decided to award the prize of a free Gmail account to the two people who contributed the most – Raena Armitage and Merlin. Congratulations you two!

April 1, 2005

Best April Fool’s 2005

Google Gulp - Google's 2005 April Fool's Joke Been buried in work for the past few weeks and I didn’t even really get to scan the web for any good April Fool’s Day gags, but thankfully my friend Renee Roberts, over at SacPUG brought one to my attention. Seem’s Goggle, did one on a fictitious drink for “surfing the web” called “Google Gulp“. Pretty funny if you take the time to read it. My favorite part is when they poke fun at themselves when they talk about “How To Get Gulped.”

How to get Gulped?
You can pick up your own supply of this “limited release” product simply by turning in a used Gulp Cap at your local grocery store. How to get a Gulp Cap? Well, if you know someone who’s already been “gulped,” they can give you one. And if you don’t know anyone who can give you one, don’t worry – that just means you aren’t cool. But very, very (very!) soon, you will be.

Although it’s funny at face value, what makes it so priceless is that they did a FAQ , a Product History, not to mention details regarding the 4 Great Flavors too. Kudos to Google for doing such a fantastic job. In the immortal words of the Visa commercials, “Priceless”.

Oh and in a final note, as of this posting, it’s still not to late to get your Magic Supersecret Anagram T-Shirt!

March 22, 2005

Last Chance At The Contest

There hasn’t been quite as much interest in the contest that I started last month, so I guess it’s time to bring it to a close. The contest will end this Sunday, so if you want to guess, NOW is the time to do it.

March 16, 2005

2005 BRAT Schedule Is Coming Together

Tennessee State Parks Logo As I was lamenting on how long it’s been since I updated my weblog, a thought occurred to me to go check and see if there were any updates on the 2005 schedule for the Bicycle Ride Across Tennessee (BRAT). I rode a portion of the course last year and my plan is to ride the entire course this year, so I’m trying to plan ahead well in advance. Looking over the site, it appears that they’ve made a lot of updates. Although everything is in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, they’ve posted the Release Form, the Daily Rider Registration, Route Description, details on the Accommodations, Food, and even a mini FAQ. The one item missing from the details is a decent map. Wanting to get some idea of the general route, I decided to make my own. Continue Reading

February 11, 2005

Broadcatching

From TV To Computer
There’s a new phenomenon happening on the Internet called Broadcatching, which is the act of downloading TV to be viewed on your computer. Some call it the poor man’s Tivo, but whatever you call it, it’s becoming more and more popular. After having discussed this topic with several of my clients and friends, I thought it might be helpful to give a brief overview of just what Broadcatching is and how you too can enjoy this new technology. The best part is that it’s all free!

Disclaimer: Make sure you check with your local, state and countrys laws–In some cases you may be downloading (and uploading) copyrighted material. So far, there hasn’t been a legal case that we know of where broadcast TV networks have stopped or wanted to stop BitTorrent downloads of their shows, but we have heard that pay networks like Showtime, HBO, etc. have sent letters to some individuals for sharing recorded TV. This is all new territory for the most part, and it will be interesting to see what happens and if the TV networks realize that this could be their future distribution chain.
Engadget

The disclaimer above came from an article from Engadget entitled How-To: Broadcatching using RSS + BitTorrent to automatically download TV shows. In the article, they go into great detail regarding using Azureus. Personally I find that client a bit too technical, so I’m going to discuss a much simpler method. That being said, I do recommend reading Engadget’s article because it is an excellent overview of Broadcatching as a whole.

February 10, 2005

Contest: Guess What’s In My Systray

Borrowing an idea from my friend Craig Frehole and since a snapshot of my systray was in the previous post, I thought it might be fun to have a little contest. My main workstation is running Windows XP Professional and in the image below, I have numbered all of the applications running in my System Tray (aka SysTray). The first person to come the closest to guessing all of the applications correctly will win their choice of either an XL Palm T-Shirt, or a free G-mail e-mail account.

February 9, 2005

iTunes Toolbar For Windows

I had some security updates to apply for Windows XP this morning and after a reboot, I saw this weird little iTunes like toolbar for all of 2 seconds before it disappeared. Doing a little digging, I found that for Windows users, iTunes 4.7 has a small toolbar to allow you to control iTunes without taking up any desk space. Here’s how you do it.

February 4, 2005

Upgrades Away!

A man giving the thumbs up sign I just upgraded the weblog software that I use for mashby.com, MovableType, to version 3.15. While I was at it, I also upgraded MT-Blacklist to the latest version and additionally installed MT-DBSL, which is a new plugin for this site.

Author / Michael Ashby