mashby | The personal blog of Michael Ashby

August 22, 2005

Holly Live Tonight At Dan McGuiness

A microphone Holly will be performing live at Dan McGuiness Irish Pub tonight at 8pm. She’s part of a ladies’ night with an organization called the Women in Music Business Association (WMBA) of which she is a member.

Holly will be performing both originals and covers. Her set will include:
Lost In America – Holly Ashby
I Wanna Live Like That – Holly Ashby
If I’m Not In Love With You – Dawn Thomas
I Wanna Man – Trisha Yearwood

So if you’re free tonight, please stop by Dan McGuiness Irish Pub. We’ll be out on the patio enjoying a pint and some fish and chips, or shepherds’s pie. And as if the great food and beer isn’t enough, you never know who might show up there. Keith Urban has been known to make and appearance on a Monday night with his good buddy John Corbett.

August 17, 2005

Upgrade Complete

A man giving the thumbs up sign I just upgraded the software which I use to manage the content on this weblog. I use MovableType and they recently released version 3.2 in beta, so I installed it. There’s a ton of changes with this version and so far I really like it.

However, you never know if something has gone wonky after an upgrade, so if you run across anything that doesn’t work, or is just a little off, please contact me and let me know about it.

Thanks in advance!

August 11, 2005

Dennis Smith Shot In The Line Of Duty

Baton Rouge Police vehicle in front of the Mississippi River bridge This morning I woke up with a disturbing message on my mobile from one of my best friends, Ken Duffy. He left me a message to let me know that a friend of mine, Dennis Smith, had been shot during an undercover arrest. Dennis is an undercover police officer with the Baton Rouge Police Department and during a undercover drug bust, he was shot in the line of duty and rushed to the hospital.

As of this writing he is in stable condition and from the last phone call I received he’s responsive and appears to be getting better by the hour which is fantastic news. I know that many readers of this weblog are friends of mine who may know Dennis, so I thought it best to post something here and I’ll try and update this page as I receive news of his improvement. If anyone needs hospital information, please contact me.

I know this is a very stressful and tragic time for Dennis and his family. My thoughts and prayers go out to them and I hope that readers of this weblog would include them in their prayers as well.

August 2, 2005

TV.Com

Screenshot of TV.com Do you like TV? I mean really like TV. If you do, then if you haven’t checked out TV.com already, you really should. In my opinion, it’s one of the best examples of a community web site I’ve ever seen and it’s so chock full of content that if the idea of a “web community” makes you want to change the channel, there’s still no reason NOT to check it out. TV.com has everything there is to know about your favorite shows in a easy to use format that will have you quickly bookmarking it for future reference.

Before TV.com, there was a site called TVTome.com and it was a great resource for finding out everything there is to know about your favorite shows. Well, it seems that C|Net purchased the company behind TVTome awhile back and on June 1st of this year they relaunched the site as TV.com. At first, I was pretty apprehensive given the fact that some “big corporate entity” took over my once beloved site, but after playing with it a few months, I have to say that it’s better than ever.

July 26, 2005

Let’s Get It On!

Another quick post to get me back into the swing of things. 🙂

Two people arm wrestling on top of a monitor After being out of the office for most of last week, I had a lot of catching up to do one of which was to go through all of my RSS feeds. I’m currently subscribed to 131 feeds and after 7 days, you can imagine the hundreds of items waiting for me. As I was going the feeds, I came across an article on Anil Dash’s weblog regarding something called AIMFight!, so I decided to give it a whirl.

AIMFight is the geek equivalent of arm wrestling your friends to see which one was stronger. You simply enter your AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) screen name along with the person that you want to “fight”. AIMFight calculates your buddy list using some sort of algorithm to determine just how popular you are at that moment. The higher the score, the more popular you are.

Your score is factored on a lot of things. AIMFight says it best:

Your score is the sum of the current number of people online who have you listed as a buddy, out to three degrees. This means the score is constantly changing, and the winner of the battle will constantly change with it.

And if that’s not enough detail for you this link should.

So I spent the end of the day beating up all of friends on AIMFight. I was unbeatable until I got a little cocky and decided to go up against Anil Dash. I was thrown to the mat so fast, I didn’t know what hit me. 😉 I’ve heard it works better when more of your buddies are online, so later in the day, when the east coast and the west coast are both in full swing will probably work better.

If you want to give it a go, feel free to enter my AIM screen name npugdotorg and let me know how you did. Let’s get it on!

July 25, 2005

Which OS Are You?

I’ve been really, really busy as of late, so I haven’t been posting to the weblog much. Most of the articles that I’ve started have been really long so trying to get back in the saddle has, more often than not, left me with my bum in the dirt. So in the effort to at least get something posted, I thought I’d do a quick little post.

I came across a poll that asks “What OS Are You?” on Mary LaFleur’s weblog and figured I’d give it a go just for fun. I wasn’t trying to be smart ass or anything and I actually tried to answer the questions, silly as they were, as honestly as possible. I didn’t even know it was an option, but it seems that I’m Palm OS! How perfect is that?

You are Palm OS
Punctual, straightforward and very useful. Your mother wants you to do more with your life like your cousin Wince, but you’re happy with who you are.

So which OS are you? take the quiz yourself and find out!

June 21, 2005

If Beggars Could Be Choosers

Two people beaming between their Palm OS devices There are days where I SO wish that I was a programmer and today is one of those days. However, I’m not a programmer, so all I can do is make a wish and hope that some smart programmer will come to my rescue, or some other user will know of a program that will solve my problem. So this entry to a desperate cry for help for a solution. Can you help me?

I need two programs that basically do the same thing – beam text to a Palm OS device. One program would be for the PC and the other would be for a Palm OS device. All this program would do is push text to a Palm OS device via InfraRed. It would really just simulate an IR keyboard and retype the text via IR. Sound simple enough right? 🙂 Well, to make things clearer, here’s a user story.

I was writing up an entry for posting today and I ran out of time, so I had to save it for later. Pretty usual stuff for me. I have tons of entries saved on my Dana Wireless because I tend to run out of time, so they’re there for finishing at a later date. What’s great is that I can instantly turn on the device and pick up where I left off. Unfortunately, I didn’t compose the entry on my Dana, I composed it on my laptop.

June 13, 2005

The Frothy Monkey

The Frothy Monkey Logo Since getting back home from the PalmSource Mobile Summit & DevCon 2005, I’ve been busier than I’ve ever been, this morning being no exception. I had an appointment first thing this morning, but after taking care of a couple of small items, I ran into a snag. For me to finish up the work my client needed, I had to wait for a return phone call. Since my office isn’t all that close to where I was working, I opted to do a little nomad computing and setup shop in a nearby coffee house.

My usual haunt is at Caffeine. It’s a fantastic coffee house and I was sorely tempted to go there since I know what to expect. However, I spotted a new coffee house last week when I was driving down 12th avenue one evening. Feeling a little bit adventurous and up for something new, I headed to The Frothy Monkey instead.

The Frothy Monkey is located at 2509 12th Avenue South in an area that’s just south of Belmont University. The building is a converted house, typical of the businesses in the area. And like most businesses in this area, parking is a challenge as well. There are only a couple of spots out front, so more than likely you’ll have to find the alley that runs parallel to 12th street and make your way to the back of the building. If you’re familiar with doing this it’s no big deal, but if you’re not it can be a bit confusing.

Once inside you’ll find a nice open layout with a hodge podge of seating to choose from, ranging from high tops, booths, tables and even a sofa. If the weather is nice, there’s always the porch beckoning. If you’ve ever been to Bongo Java, the setup is very similar, but the clientele is a little bit different. It’s a mix between business and students and as such gives off a hip, professional vibe.

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.