mashby | The personal blog of Michael Ashby

October 17, 2003

I’m With The Band

The Velvet Rope Have you ever had that perverse little thrill when you find yourself on the inside of something you think is cool? Maybe it’s a clique, or a special event and you find yourself on the inside of what’s happening and you suddenly that you’re special. It’s a really cool feeling and that happened to me the other day.

I was at my favorite cigar store, for a relaxing smoke after my NPUG Meeting. Those meetings leave me a little drained, so I’ve taken the habit of visting the cigar store and just hanging out. It feels good to be the customer and let someone else take the lead as it were. Anyway, I was sitting back and enjoying a Heilos natural and talking it up with the owner. We were on the subject of cigars we’ve tried and began discussing Cuban cigars.

<Mr. Peabody and Sherman>
For those that don’t know, since the Kennedy Era, we’ve had a trade embargo with Cuba. That means that bringing Cuban cigars into the US is illegal. I’ve smoked my fair share of Cuban cigars before, but they aren’t easy to come by. Usually, I come across one after somone has gone abroad and snuck a few back to the states. If I had to count, I’d say I’ve had maybe 10 in my lifetime. That’s not to say that they were the best cigars I’ve ever had. Most, if not all, of the famous tobacco growers have left Cuba long ago and started new plantations in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, etc. Although Cuban cigars can be quite good, I tend to prefer other leaf. However, Cuban cigars are hard to come by, so I still keep my eye out in case I find one. 😉
</Mr. Peabody and Sherman>

October 16, 2003

Creating A Photo Weblog

Slides One of the things that has become very popular is something called a moblog. It’s like a weblog, but instead of posting text, you post images. This fad starting gaining in popularity earlier this year with the release of the camera phone. Since you have a mobile phone and the ability to take snapshots with it, it’s quite easy to simply e-mail the photo to your moblog and share it with the world. Although I don’t have a camera phone just yet, I created a moblog for this site anyway as a way to share snapshots that didn’t fit into my Photo Gallery. So even if you don’t have a camera phone, that’s no reason not to create a moblog.

My Mom recently returned from a trip to Seattle with two of her friends. I had loaned her my digital camera and she had taken 140 photos and wanted to share them with her buddies. Since she already has a weblog it seemed only natural that I add a photo feature to it. This sent me down the path of trying to find an easy to use solution for her website. I could create photo galleries like I have on my site, but she needs something easier to use. Something that didn’t require having to learn how to use FTP, or edit configuration files.

October 15, 2003

When Good Routines Go Bad

Tonya Harding - Her good routine went bad. 2003 has been a tough year for me. My consulting firm has been going through a lot of changes and looking back on it now, I also hit severe burnout from my overload of work during the summer. It was in July when I started climbing out of my quagmire of funk and thanks to a good friend of mine, was turned on to FlyLady.net. I began building new routines and slowly but surely began putting order and stability back into my life. I started with small baby steps and simple routines and gradually built up from there.

For example, my morning routine is to wake up and take Gracie for a quick pee. Then I put out her food and while she eats, I clean the kitchen, do the dishes and shine the sink. In the thirty minutes it takes for her food to digest, I write on my weblog and post an entry for the day as I eat my own breakfast. With an entry posted, I then take Gracie for walk in the backyard and down the hill so that she could do her business. After that, I do my “three S’s” and be in my office working by 8am.

October 14, 2003

A Strange Thing Happened On The Way To Reformat

My Windows XP CD Shattered After my post yesterday, I decided it was time to wipe out my hard drive and start fresh. Figuring it would only take a few hours, I thought I could steal a little time while I worked on a Linux server to rebuild my main PC. I put in my Windows XP CD and as usual I heard the drive spin up. I was closing a few applications before I shut down the PC to reboot and install when all of a sudden, I heard a “PUH” and something hit my leg hard. I looked down and saw the faceplate to the CD-ROM drive next to my leg along with several shards of what was my Windows XP Professional CD. The CD had exploded. :O

As I inspected the drive, I realized that the CD had disintegrated in the drive. There were pieces everywhere. Unable to open, or close the drive tray, I had to shut down the computer and remove the entire drive. Once disconnected, I disected the drive and tried to pull out all the pieces. They were everywhere! To make sure that I had them all, I began re-assembling the CD like a jigsaw puzzle. Slowly I began putting all the pieces back together. At one point, getting out the last piece reminded me of trying to get a guitar pick out of a guitar when it drops into the sound hole.

October 13, 2003

I’m Going To Drive My Friends Crazy

A few weeks ago I wrote how I had migrated Holly to the iMac, but that I had run into some hurdles running the 10.0.4 version of OS X and that I needed to upgrade to 10.2. My experience thus far had been mixed, but overall was positive. The OS X 10.2 CD that I purchased via eBay arrived and the following weekend I decided to make the upgrade.

Making A Backup
I hadn’t done all that much in the initial setup. I had Holly’s e-mail client setup and the St. Edwards Youth Choir in her address book. All of her main data is stored on a small windows server, but I had been unsuccessful in connecting to it. Even though she had very little data, I wanted to back it up and save from having to re-enter all of that information. Luckily I had a good friend who had my back. Mike Rohde is a long time Macphile and he had a contact with Apple that told him everything I needed to do to back up Holly’s data. I simply used an FTP client on my main Windows workstation and transferred the files to the server.

October 10, 2003

Web Video That Finally Works

sample I have been wanting to video conference as long as I can remember. Maybe it was the video phones from the Bond movies, but I’ve always thought that video connections were cool. I dreamed of the day that I could pick up a phone and actually see the person I was talking to. When broadband Internet finally landed a few years back, I was hoping that my fantasies of being able to talk to friends via the web would finally be realized. Unfortunately, I never found a solution that worked well, but a friend of mine may have found the holy grail of web video.

I have tried just about every video software out there. Microsoft’s NetMeeting, CUSeeMe, Yahoo’s SuperWebCam and everything in between. Could I see video? Sure, but the experience wasn’t great and adding audio to the mix didn’t make things any better. For my web site, I opted for a simple snapshot program that uploads a photos once every minute. You can see it on the webcam page.

October 7, 2003

Monkey Is Home!

Monkey In Profile On Saturday afternoon, Holly and I went to the vet and picked up Monkey from the hospital. He had been there since Monday, so we were quite happy when we heard the news that we could bring our baby home. However, just because he’s home doesn’t mean he’s out of the woods just yet. His liver is beginning to respond to the treatment and that’s great news, but we still have a long way to go.

With his feeding tube still in place, we have been feeding him every 4 hours by injecting his food directly into his stomach with a syringe. The food is called A/D and it’s a canned food that you can only get from your vet. We mix it with water and then draw it into the syringe. In the morning we have to add antibiotics and supplements into the food. At night, we add just the antibiotics. The vet originally said that we had to do the feedings 4 times a day, but given the amounts of food that we have to give him, it’s worked out to 6 times a day and sometimes as many as 8. It seems every time I turn around, it’s time to give Monkey more food. 😛

October 3, 2003

Matrix Overloaded

The Matrix Revolutions Movie Poster It’s hard to believe, but the third installment of The Matrix trilogy is almost upon us. It seems like just yesterday I was just frothing at the mouth to see The Matrix Reloaded and to be quite honest I thought my excitement for the final chapter to be somewhat waning. Of course that’s before I saw the Ultra Theatrical Trailer.

The Wachowski brothers never cease to amaze me. When the maximum quicktime preview that you can normally see is 640 x 480, they go and realease a better than DVD quality 1024 x 532 102MB file. Although I had seen the other three television trailers, I was totally unprepared for this ultra theatrial trailer. I’m not lying when I say this, after I watched it… I wept.

I may be the target demographic for these movies and simply acting out a pavolvian response, but I think Andy and Larry are cinematic geniuses. Regardless if you are a fan of their movies or not, they have done more to alter the future of visual arts than any other directors in history. Forget the fact that there hasn’t been an action scene in a movie that hasn’t been influenced by The Matrix, it seems that almost everything has been touched in some way. From advertising to eyeware, to even windsurfing. So I know that it can’t just be me that these movies resonate with can I?

October 2, 2003

SpamPal Saved My Life

SPAM This year has been the worst year for SPAM. I have been under a deluge of SPAM this year like you wouldn’t believe. I’m talking hundreds of e-mail a day pouring into my in boxes to the point that using my e-mail was next to impossible. You may be saying to yourself, “Just delete them, that’s what I do”, and believe me I tried. But when I’m getting 500 a day it’s just too much to handle. Even if you’re just deleting them, you still have to scan the title and address to see if it’s someone you know. When the Sobig virus hit this summer, I got so many virus e-mails and so many false positive replies from servers that I threw up my hands and said uncle! 😐

From everything I heard and read, SpamAssassin is the best server-side solution out there. Although it may be great, I haven’t yet figured out all there is to install and configure it. I’m working on it, but I’m just not there yet and I needed something NOW. I tried a couple of programs, including Ella for Microsoft Outlook, but none of them worked that well and most needed training. What I really wanted was SpamAssassin for the desktop and lucky for me I found it.

October 1, 2003

I Want My MythTV!

MythTV Logo I watch too much TV as it is, but I have been wanting a Tivo for well over a year now. Calvin Parker, of Calivn’s Palm FAQ, turned me onto them, but I’ve simply never taken the plunge and bought one. I like to think it’s the $12.95 monthly service fees that have kept me from buying one, but in reality I think it’s the fear that I’ll never get up from the couch. 🙂

Now that I’ve dipped my toe in the Linux pond, I’m now considering putting together my own Linux box and rolling my own Tivo. Thanks to a Wired article on the subject, I’m considering attempting to install MythTV, which is an OpenSource project that allows you to setup your own digital video recorder. I read this article back in June, but it wasn’t until I saw the Hush Silent Mini-ITX PC that I started giving it some serious thought. There’s a plethora of Mini-ITX cases out there, with all sorts of options and bells and whistles. What appealed to me about the Hush is that is already pre-configured and it’s super quiet, which is perfect if you’re going to have it in your living room.