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mashby

The personal blog of Michael Ashby

What I Have To Offer

I came across the video “What I Have To Offer” this morning. Don’t remember how I found it because it completely stopped my morning routine, but I just had to share it.

Charlie Kaufman is most known for his incredible screenplays Being John Malkovich, Adaptation (among others), and his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York. I’m a huge fan of his work and last year he gave a closing lecture to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in their Screenwriters’ Lecture Series.

Eliot Rausch took an excerpt from Kaufman’s talk and created a short film around it and, well, blew me away.

If you’d like to listen to the full speech you can find it on the BAFTA web site at this link. There is a highlight video at the top of the page, but the audio player below is what you’re looking for.

The Phone Stack

I’ve been buried with work and don’t have much of a social life at the moment, but still like the idea behind The Phone Stack.

It works like this: as you arrive, each person places their phone facedown in the center of the table… As the meal goes on, you’ll hear various texts and emails arriving… and you’ll do absolutely nothing. You’ll face temptation—maybe even a few involuntary reaches toward the middle of the table—but you’ll be bound by the single, all-important rule of the phone stack.

Whoever picks up their phone is footing the bill.

I don’t know that I’d do this for every meal with friends, but there are a couple of people that come to mind where I’d find this game rather handy.

via Marco

I Still Miss Notify.app

Notify 2.1

I’m a big fan of Inbox Zero and I wish I didn’t have to give e-mail so much of my attention, but since I’m in charge of support for my company it’s a priority for me. That may make me a bit of an “E-Mail Monkey“, but so be it. It’s a point of pride that I, and the rest of our team, respond so quickly to customer feedback.

That’s not to say that I’m not envious of people who can process their e-mail just twice a day. If support wasn’t one of my roles, I would jump at the opportunity to do the same. Since I’ve chosen not to, there are a few steps that I take to minimize the interruptions. One of the techniques I was a big fan of was to use an app called Notify.

Nofity.app would sit in your menu bar and would check my e-mail accounts and notify me when I had mail via Growl. Of course leaving my e-mail client open would obviously do the same thing, but I liked the fact that I could keep it closed. A simple notification would let me know if the e-mail was urgent, but I didn’t have the constant reminder of a badge notification that I had X number of unread messages.

If the message was urgent, then I could launch Mail.app and address it, but if it wasn’t then I could leave well enough alone until I was ready to process my mail. Again, it was a small thing, but I found it very handy to help me stay focused throughout my day.

Unfortunately, the developer abandoned the software on May 11, 2011 and it no longer functions since I upgraded to Mac OS Lion.

The other day I was lamenting the fact that I still miss not having this little utility. I did a few Google searches to see if I could find an alternative, but came up empty. That was certainly a disappointment, but I was happy to find that I wasn’t alone.

Another Plug For OpenDNS

I did a post last week entitled “I Hope This Isn’t A Trend” and in it, I mentioned how one way to protect yourself from phishing attacks was to use OpenDNS on your computer, or router. The other day I found another reason to recommend the service — malware protection.

Mac Trojan Outbreak

Last week, news come out that approximately 1% of all Mac OS computers were infected with something called the “Flashback trojan”. If this is news to you, then I strongly urge you to go read this MacWorld article from Rich Mogull. It gives you all the information you need to know regarding the outbreak, how to test to see if your Mac is infected and how to prevent becoming infected.

Apple was a little slow to release a fix, which is what led to the outbreak, but OpenDNS was quick to respond in 3 days with news that if you were using their service, you are protected. Color me impressed!

But Isn’t DNS Super Nerdy?

Yes and no. If you dig into the subject, it’s of course pretty nerdy; however, OpenDNS has made it super easy and you don’t have to be a geek to use it. You simply change two fields in the network settings on your computer, or on your router. That’s it!

For home use, I highly recommend creating a free account and setting your router to use OpenDNS. If you’re mobile, then adding the same settings to your laptop is a good idea too.

To help walk you through the process, Katie Floyd, of the MacPowerUsers podcast, did a wonderful screencast on the subject, which I’ve posted below. If that’s too much detail for you, OpenDNS has excellent tutorials as well.

A Great Read – “Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out”

I love great writing.

Paul Ford has written an article for NYMag that definitely qualifies as great writing (like just about everything he writes). In Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out, Paul eloquently clarifies how most Instagram users feel about the Facebook acquisition and provides a great deal of clarity in the process.

There are so many gems in the piece, but here’s a little sample.

So if you’re an Instagram user, you’ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you are, how valuable you are to Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square — which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very-rich dudes. You can’t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole. It’s like the monolith in the movie 2001 appeared filled with candy and a sign on the front that said “NO CANDY FOR YOU.”

A great read. [via Ftrain]

Oh, and if you like this article, be sure to check out The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which I’ve linked to in the past.

Oh… Please Don’t Go In There

I’m in the process of Dumping Google and one of the steps I’ve taken is to replace Google Analytics with Mint from Shaun Inman. Brilliant analytics app from a brilliant guy. Anyway, while I was in the FTP client and looking at the file structure of the site, I couldn’t help but notice some cruft.

For example, there was a scripts directory that contained who knows what in there. Unfortunately I couldn’t leave well enough alone and did a quick search to see if there were any posts that referenced one of the scripts that I recognized. There were about 5 and as I edited each one it quickly became apparent I should have left well enough alone.

I started this blog back in 2002 and there’s been a ton of updates over the years. I’ve also moved hosts more times than I can count and moved from MovableType to WordPress. Looking back over a 10 year span there’s a ton of bits-and-pieces to this blog that no longer work as they were originally intended.

It’s fun to go back and read old posts, but for anyone that runs their own blog, I don’t recommend that you do any editing — it’s not pretty *shudder*.

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