mashby | The personal blog of Michael Ashby

July 14, 2006

Nashville Is Talking Meetup

Nashville from Wolfy's Den courtesy of Kerry Woo and his handy camera Last week, on Thursday night, I went with Kerry Woo to an event WKRN News 2 was throwing for Nashville Is Talking. I wrote a little bit about it before hand, but I didn’t write much because I didn’t really didn’t know what to expect.

Kerry picked me up at the house and we drove to Wolfy’s Den together, arriving at the perfect time, 15 minutes after the start of the party. As we arrived on the 3rd floor, I scanned the room and confirmed my expectations — I didn’t know a single person there. Of course that didn’t stop me. 😛 I made my way to the bar, ordered up a Yazoo Hefeweizen and started making the rounds.

As I introduced myself, I found that there was a pretty diverse group there. It wasn’t just “geeks”, but professional writers, WKRN video journalists, mobile content distributors, and bloggers of every type. Kerry was a huge help, because if I found myself in a lull, I could make my way to where Kerry was standing and he’d make an introduction to get me jump started again.

July 6, 2006

“Nashville Is Talking” Shindig At Wolfy’s Tonight

Tonight I’ll be heading downtown to Wolfy’s for a shindig that WRKN’s Nashville Is Talking is putting together. I’ll be going with Kerry Woo, so I know I’ll have a good time because he and I never have a shortage of things to talk about.

I’ve just been doing my own thing and not really paying attention to what’s been happening with “Nashville Is Talking”, so I’m a bit clueless about the whole “scene”. According to Kerry, “this will be the first all-encompassing blog meet-up sponsored by News 2 in over a year.” He’s been pretty plugged in to the blogging scene here in Nashville, so I’m interested to see what it’s all about. From the sound of things, it appears that there’s a fairly vast community that’s connected to one another.

Wolfy’s bar is not open to the public, so it will be open just for this private affair. News 2 will be picking up the tab for appetizers, and there will be a full bar, albeit not an open bar, but that’s probably for the best. Nothing pretty about a pack of tipsy bloggers. 😉

Anyway, if you’re downtown tonight, be sure to stop by Wolfy’s and say “hey!”

July 5, 2006

Interview With Alexis Hinds Posted

Computer Outlook Radio Show with John Iasiuolo

The podcast from June 21^st with Blue Nomad’s founder Alexis Hinds has been posted on the Computer Outlook web site.

I’ve been a big fan of just about every one of Blue Nomad’s products, such as WordSmith and BackupBuddy. Alexis was a great guest and blended technical skills with plain talk that made it easy to learn what each of her products do. I was really surprised at how BackupBuddy.net worked — especially the trickle backup feature.

You can download the podcast at this link. Show notes can be found at this link.

July 4, 2006

My Favorite “Superman Returns” Review

We saw Superman Returns at the Stardust Drive-in last night and I loved it. Instead of waxing poetic on the whys and what nots, I think the following review sums it up perfectly — PVP Online.

July 3, 2006

DeepQuote Is Deeply Cool

Every now and then I come across a little utility application or web site that blows me away and makes me wonder how I lived without this new handy tool. The latest of these little gems is the web site DeepQuote and oh me oh my, does it rock.

Often times when I send links to people via e-mail, or when I include them in an article such as this, all I can do is take the person to the page. Beyond that, it’s up to the individual to find the information that is included in the page. Links to a product page are pretty simple and easy, but sometimes the information that you what your recipient to read may be buried in copy and hard to find. I found it frustrating to send those types of links to people, but it never dawned on me that there could be a better way — enter DeepQuote.

DeepQuote allows you to build a unique URL or link that includes not only the link to the page that you want, but also highlighted text on the specific information you wanted to convey with the link. Here’s how it works.

July 1, 2006

Can I Choose Purple?

ABC News Special - State Of The Union: A Country Divided Last night, Holly and I were watching TV and there wasn’t much on, so when we came across the 20/20 Special “State Of The Union: A Country Divided“, we watched the introduction to the show. As George Stephanopoulos gave an overview of what was to come and showed clips of what we would be seeing, I was startled to see one of my clients being interviewed! Nothing else had our attention, so we stayed tuned to watch more.

The basic premise of the show was that the United States is more divided than ever, polarized if you will, between liberal (blue state) and conservative (red state). So George showed the small town of Montclair, New Jersey to illustrate a blue state community and then Franklin, Tennessee as a red state community. That’s where my client came in. H. Leonard Issacs is a reverend for a church in Franklin, among other faith based endeavors, and he leads a mens prayer group in Darryl Waltrip’s home.

June 30, 2006

The Power Of Focus

Out of focus picture Like I said in a previous article, I was fortunate enough to attend the GTD | Roadmap seminar last week, and I have to say that I had a bit of an epiphany. There were a ton of “ah ha” moments, but one of the things that stood out is that focus is important. Granted you have to be able to shift focus quickly in today’s fast-paced-information flood that we’re all living in, but regardless of how fast we have to shift our focus, we still have to focus nonetheless.

As I’m beginning to implement the various aspects of GTD, I’m noticing that since my brain has been set free of having to remember everything, I’m able to focus better. For example, when I’m working on a project, I’m able to stay on task… or when Holly comes home, I can really listen to what she has to say. In the past, my mind was running on all the other things I needed to be doing. So while Holly’s talking, I’m thinking about 100 other things left on my mental to-do list.

June 29, 2006

Palm TV Ads Online

I’m a HUGE fan of the Palm OS operating system, aka Palm Pilots. Have been since 1997 when I bought a used Pilot 1000. As a rabid fan, I’ve collected as much Palm stuff as possible. One of the things that I dug up many years ago were some television ads that Palm did. Not being a huge company with a huge marketing budget, television advertising is not something that Palm has done a lot of. Many of their ads never made it to TV, but were used for trade shows and the like.

This morning, I was reading Mike Mace’s article “We need a new mobile platform. Sort of.” and he made reference to the Palm Ad “A Perfect Day” and the fact that he couldn’t find the video online. I decided to do my ~~civic~~ geeky duty and upload the video to YouTube.com. Not wanting to stop there, I decided to upload all the videos I’ve collected over the years. 8)

The playlist and the embedded player below, have the videos in date order as best as I can tell. There are 6 videos in all — enjoy.

June 28, 2006

Turbo Charging My E-mail With GTD

A man pumping a GTD dumbbell with a thunderbird tattoo on his bicep Yesterday I wrote about the process I went through to migrate from multiple e-mail accounts to just one übur inbox. The new system is definitely an improvement, but there were a few snags that kept me from reaching a true state of e-mail bliss. The chief snag has been my archive and after attending GTD|The RoadMap seminar, I got fired up to do something about it.

The Problem
Part of migrating all of my accounts to one account was also migrating my archives as well. Being a big fan of hierarchies, I continued my old habit of nesting folders within folders. It’s just the way my brain works and it just makes sense to keep all of my NPUG e-mail in one folder and all of my Clients e-mail in another.

Of course sub folders have problems too. Thunderbird doesn’t allow you to search globally across all folders and it also makes it tedious to archive mail, as you can see in this image (opens into a new window). In addition, I read the 43Folders series Inbox Zero. Those series of articles, as well as my own frustration, led me to believe that there had to be a better way.

June 27, 2006

Approaching E-mail Nirvana

Meditation with Thunderbird Back in April, I wrote about how I was going to migrate to one über inbox. Instead of having multiple IMAP inboxes, I would consolidate to just one. One inbox, one e-mail archive, one set of filters. Well, in the space of about a week, I successfully completed the project and this is an update of how I did it and what it’s been like since.

Step 1: Setup E-Mail Forwarding
The first step in my journey was to setup all of my accounts to forward to one primary account. This is a fairly straightforward step, but it did force me to clean up the number of e-mail accounts I had. Over the years, I had built up a number of addresses I no longer needed. I had accounts for one-time use, and many more that were simply no longer being used.

So I deleted the ones I no longer needed and then I set the ones that I wanted to keep to forward to the über inbox. For example, michael@npug.org forwards to my main account michael@ashbygroup.com.

Step 2: Setup Filters
Now that I had all my e-mail forwarding to one account, I next set about creating filters for all the e-mail that was coming in. The first set of filters that I created were contextual, all e-mail from me@mashby.com label as personal for example. Next, I created filters to file certain e-mails to particular folders. E-mails from mailing lists would go to their respective folders, etc.