mashby | The personal blog of Michael Ashby

March 15, 2004

I Guess I Should Be Flattered

Robert Downey, Jr. surprised by a photographer SPAM is now just a daily part of my life. I get so much of it, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have piles of SPAM to wade through every day. Yes I have SPAM filters setup, yadda yadda, yadda, but you still have to sift through them for false positives. Anyway, one of the things that I’ve always been mindful of is that when a new site I’m involved in launches, I know it’s gaining in popularity when the level of SPAM increases. My assumption is that the spammers find me the same as regular users, so I’m now appearing on the radar. SPAM is just a part of the equation, a negative one to be sure, but I have to admit a little thrill when I see SPAM increasing on a new web site. 🙂

Recently, my weblog has been getting increasing numbers of SPAM and as is normally the case, I was a little bit happy to see it. However there’s a new type of SPAM that I’m having to deal with that I don’t care for at all. It’s called comment spam. If you run a MoveableType weblog then you’ve probably heard about this new type of SPAM, but for those of you that don’t allow me to explain.

March 14, 2004

As Close As I Can Get

As I’ve written in past entries, I have been pretty taken with the Macintosh OS X operating system. In fact, I’m anticipating making the move to having my main workstation and laptop become a Mac. The delay in making this change is that I have to purchase all new hardware and I’ll state it again, just in case anyone is listening – if Apple would release the Mac OS for PC based systems, they’d take over the world. Ok, I just had to get that off of my chest. So where was I? Oh yeah. With this desire to switch tugging at me and the fact that I don’t have the cash to make it happen yet, I decided to see what I could do to “Macify” my PC experience. It all started when I screwed up the partitions on my laptop. I was installing SuSE 9 on the Linux partition and something went horribly wrong and I lost my Windows partition in the process. Given the last time I tried to reformat, I was pretty ticked at myself that I had to start over from scratch. You see, the problem is that you have to install Windows XP, before you install Linux. Since I blew out my Windows partition, I had to start all over. I won’t go into all the details, because it would be long and boring, but suffice to say that I got Windows XP installed and then SuSE 9 and they are both working wonderfully. As the last of the Windows updates were being installed, I started dreaming of having a Mac laptop again and that’s when the idea hit me, “I wonder if I can skin my desktop so that it at least ‘acts’ like a mac?” I had seen plenty of screen shots on DeviantArt and other web sites that emulated a Mac, so it’s couldn’t be that hard. Lucky for me, it wasn’t. Continue Reading

March 13, 2004

Time Flies

A child about to touch his first birthday candle It’s hard to believe, but today marks the one year anniversary of my weblog. That’s right, it’s been one year to the day that I posted my first entry. Since that first short and timid post, I’ve really gone wild! I’ve created a moblog, a photo gallery, a workout log, and I’ve even taken a stab at writing travelogues. All that typing translates into 429 individual entries averaging 417 words per entry for a grand whopping total of over 179,000 words. It just blows my mind when I look at all these stats. :O

Speaking of stats, here’s a few others. Not only have there been three color changes over the past year, in the past 12 months, mashby.com has served up 171,829 individual pages and had approximately 28,576 unique visitors. It’s been steadily increasing since the launch of this site. Since the first of 2004, I’m currently averaging 1505 pages served per day (14,319 per month) and 132 unique visitors per day (2,381per month). Never in my wildest dreams did I think that people would actually read this silly thing!

March 12, 2004

Namaste For Noobies

I just finished reading Mike Rohde’s entry on his weblog about The Vital Luxury of Rest and Solitude and it dawned on me as I read it that I too have been focusing on slowing down and relaxing more. I didn’t have a succinct knowledge of what I was doing, it was more of a compulsion really, but I too was going after the same goal. I was looking to make better use of my time, but I was looking to make a transition to a calmer way of doing it.

It all started when I decided I would begin waking up earlier. My normal internal clock makes me a bit of a night owl. My normal clock would have be going to bed around 3am and waking up between 10am and Noon. That’s not a realistic time frame for running your own business, so I’m not able to indulge my internal clock much. That being said, it’s rare when I go to bed before Midnight, or 1am. I tried simply waking up earlier, but that wasn’t working. I was still going to bed at the same time, so waking up earlier wasn’t going to happen. I tried going to bed earlier, but I was just getting another boost of energy at 10pm and going to bed just wasn’t working. So I did the only thing a not-so-sane person would do. I stayed up all night.

March 10, 2004

One Small Step For My Wardrobe, One Giant Leap For Self Esteem

The Gap Television Commercial - Swing As I was digging in my closet this morning looking for something to wear, I noticed that I didn’t have any slacks that were clean. Of course I’ve only had 3 pairs of pants for about the last year. Those three pair are what I have labeled as my “fat pants.” They were my “line in the sand” when I went to go buy them. These three pants were the last in a series of expanding waistlines. “No more!” I screamed internally as tried them on, finally admitting that I did indeed require a larger size since the last time that I bought pants. I had to resign myself that the washing machine wasn’t shrinking my pants, my ass was just getting fatter.

My waist has been on a long slow climb since college. In fact, the first increase in my waistband happened in college, I moved up to a size 34 from a size 32. Since then, I’ve been going up and up, little by little, year after year. Each time I needed a larger size, I took another hit to my self esteem. Reading the label on a new pair of Dockers only validated my feeling of low self worth. As of January 1st of this year, I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been and I’ve grown to absolutely detest going shopping for clothes. Sure I would leave the mall with fancy new clothes, but each tag screamed that I was larger than last year and that’s all that I could hear.

March 9, 2004

IMAP – E-mail Made Easy And Flexible

Mailbox With E-mail On an average day, I’m usually working in at least 3 different operating systems and sometimes 4. Thus far today, I’ve been working in Windows XP, SuSE Linux, and Palm OS. I’ll be working in those 3 OSs off and on all day. Having such a varied work environment makes certain tasks, such as maintaining e-mail a pain in the butt. So a few month ago, I switched all of my e-mail accounts to something called IMAP. You may not be jumping OSs like I do, but if you use a desktop and a laptop, or want to check e-mail from home and work, you might want to consider using an IMAP account and here’s why.

A Tale Of Two Protocols
There are two main types of e-mail accounts that you can have: POP3 or IMAP. The difference between the two is how e-mail is transferred to the desktop. If you have an e-mail account, chances are it’s probably a POP3 type. With POP3, when your e-mail client retrieves your e-mail it downloads the mail to your desktop and then deletes the e-mails from the server. All of your e-mail is managed on the desktop. The folders you create to file e-mail for example are stored on your PC. For most people, this works just fine.

March 8, 2004

She Was Always Grandma To Me

A child eating an ice cream sandwich When I was in first grade, the LaFleur family moved in next door. Mary and Chris LaFleur quickly became fast friends and for the period of about a year we were inseparable. Then their family moved to Georgia, but we tried as best as we could to stay in touch. Throughout our childhood years they moved two more times, but we always kept in touch. One of the things that helped us keep our friendship so strong was the fact that they still had family back home in Baton Rouge.

Every summer Mary and Chris would come and stay with their Grandmother and Grandfather. Thinking back on it now, they may have only stayed for a few weeks, or even a month, but in my mind it was the entire summer, because that WAS my summer as far as I was concerned. Spending time at their Grandparents house was like a magical wonderland. We had more fun and did more stuff in that brief period of time than was humanly possible. I practically lived out there while Mary and Chris were in town.

One of the things that made is so special was Mary and Chris’ Grandparents. They gave us such a loving and safe environment in which to just be kids. I didn’t grow up with Grandparents, so this was a unique opportunity for me. My Mother’s parents died when I was too young to remember and my Father’s parents didn’t have much to do with me, especially after my parent’s divorce, but that’s a whole other story. Suffice to say that I loved going to visit Mary and Chris when they were in town.

March 5, 2004

My New Online RSS Reader – Bloglines

Webmonkey Over the past year, I’ve become a big fan of RSS Feeds. I find that it’s an easy way for me to stay up-to-date with all the many web sites I frequent. I currently keep up with approximately 50 weblogs, news sites, as well as software updates all via RSS. During this past year, I’ve tried a bevy of RSS Readers, such as Trillian, SharpReader, NewsDesk, klipfolio, FeedDemon, and most recently FeedReader. While each application had it’s own merits, I found that because I use so many different computers, I needed something more flexible. The only solution that seemed to make sense to me was to use an online RSS reader – enter Bloglines.

Bloglines is a simple and easy to use web based RSS system. You simply enter the URL of the RSS you’d like to subscribe to and the feed now appears in your “My Blogs” section. You can add folders to help organize your various subscriptions and for the most part, Bloglines is just like any other RSS reader you may have tried. The main difference is that it lives on the web, so you can view your subscriptions from any browser, on any computer.

March 4, 2004

You Never Forget Your First

Webmonkey I read in the news today where a favorite web site of mine is going away. Seems like a lot of sites that I used to visit are no longer with us. I know that times change and blah blah blah, but it’s sad when an old favorite from your early days on the web hangs up it’s hat and calls it a day. Since getting on “the net” back in 1995, there’s been a lot of sites come and go, but this most recent one will truly be missed. The web site I’m speaking of is Webmonkey.

Back when Wired Magazine was in it’s hey day, they ran a series of sites and it seemed that one of the more popular ones that they ran was Webmonkey. The main reason for its popularity was the fact that so often you wanted to know “how did they do that?” and Webmonkey showed you how. From their groundbreaking design skills to their off the cuff humor, Webmonkey was one of those sites that I “cut my teeth” on. I learned a lot about what I know regarding web design from this site. Their articles were detailed and full of information on how to get things done on the web. Even to this day, I visit Webmonkey on a regular basis, if for nothing else than to use their Special Characters cheat sheet.

March 3, 2004

Falling Off The Wagon With A Guilt-Free Cushion

Afraid To Step On The Scale I’ve been following the South Beach Diet for about a month and a half now and other than a little bit of candy, I’ve stayed strictly to the diet plan. My past experiences with diets haven’t been so successful. I usually start cheating after the first week because they are so strict. South Beach has been different because I’ve actually liked the food and the diet has been easy to follow. In fact, as you may recall, I was shocked that upon completing Phase One of the diet, all of my cravings disappeared. No longer do I have a craving for breads, or pasta, or sweets like I once did. Before starting the diet, I couldn’t think of going a day without one or more of those things. That’s not to say that I didn’t have some temptations, but they aren’t the cravings that once consumed me. Unfortunately, my temptations the other day got the best of me. 🙁

In my bucket of bad habits, there was one craving turned temptation that was the strongest. I guess you could say it was the “alpha temptation”, and that temptation’s name was… pizza. I used to love pizza and not having it for 6 weeks was really starting to wear on me, but that’s not what did me in. No it was something much more sinister and diabolical lurking in the dark.