mashby | The personal blog of Michael Ashby

September 11, 2003

Movable Type – Technology At Its Finest

A couple of day ago, I wrote about how technology is, more often than not, a pain in the ass. Of course not all technolgy is a pain. Every so often something comes along that just works and people fall in love with it. I think the PalmPilot was a shining example of that. In fact, Palm coined the term The Zen Of Palm to explain their design philosophy and the resulting popularity of the device. Although I agree with the Zen of Palm, the bottom line was that the device just worked – that’s why people bought them.

So there are exception to the “crap that doesn’t work” rule and recently I was reminded of that as I worked with Movable Type. Movable Type (aka MT) is what is called a “Content Management System.” In plain english, Movable Type is a program that manages the content on your website. This weblog is all managed by Movable Type. I installed the program on this web server, customized it to fit my needs and design and use it to post content to the website. Posting my little rants is all quite easy. I have a simple form that I type the days diatribe into, click the “Post” button and ta da, a post appears on the front page. After awhile, a post is then archived so that you can read it later. MT isn’t the only content management system out there, but it’s very popular. Why? Because is just works.

September 10, 2003

We Need A Bigger Bed

Gracie Sleeping It’s a miracle, but Gracie slept in the bed with us the whole night! This is the first time we’ve gone the entire night without Gracie starting a ruckus with the cats, so clearly we’re making progress. I ended up leaving her leash on her so that she couldn’t hop down and go cat chasing, so that may have been the ticket. I toss and turn a good bit throughout the night, but she stayed at my feet the whole time. Once my alarm went off the magic was broken and she was ready to play. If nothing else, Gracie is a snooze button killer. 😉

The only real downside to this momentus occassion is that with a dog and two cats sharing the bed it’s getting a little crowded. We have two other cats and if they were to join in, I don’t know where Holly and I would sleep. We have a queen now, but Holly says she’s been keeping her eye out on a king size. 🙂 Oh and it case you haven’t seen them yet, I put up a new gallery entitled Gracie’s First Bath EDIT: deleted.

September 9, 2003

Technology Defined

Technology Is A Pain In The Ass It’s a shame, but I think most people find technology to be a pain in the ass. In fact, if a piece of equipment is a pain in the ass, then I think it’s labeled with the moniker of technology. Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fame) was on Tech TV’s Big Thinkers television show awhile back and to paraphrase one of his comments, he said that if something works, then it becomes ubiquitous and transparent in our life. Take your toaster for example. Most of us wouldn’t consider a toaster a technological item. You simply put your bread in and in a few minutes you have toast. If the darn thing stops working, you simply go out and buy another one. However, if you have an item that you need, that isn’t easily replaceable and it doesn’t work all the time then it’s technology. So, if you really think about it, technology could be defined as “crap that doesn’t work.” The biggest problem is that many of us have too much technology in our lives and as a result end up having a negative perspective on it. How many people do you know that when you mention a computer, scoff or throw up their hands and claim to be illiterate? Are they truly illiterate, or do they simply have a low threshold for “crap that doesn’t work.”

I work with technology constantly and have created a business based on it, so you’d think that I just love it all and that everything just works for me. That, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. Often times it feels like nothing ever works for me, but I have a theory that a person’s career is based on the level of pain that person can endure for a respective field. I worked in a law office once and realized that my threshold for pain in regards to law was very low. If I had to work in a law firm, I’d go insane. Yet, I can take untold heaping piles of pain and frustration with technology, ergo I work as a technology consultant. Think about what you do for a living and consider the amount of grief involved in it. Am I wrong? 🙂

September 8, 2003

Fiat Lux

Fiat Lux A good friend of mine, Rachel Luxemburg, just launched her own weblog. Rachel is a member of the Palm OS User Council and has been involved in the Palm OS User Community almost since it’s inception. She was a founder of the New York Palm User’s Group and is currently the moderator for the Treo and GarminPDA Yahoo Groups.

All that being said, Rachel is sharp as a tack and her recent posts clearly illustrate that fact. So, if you’re in the mood for a good weblog, you should definitely check out Fiat Lux!

September 7, 2003

A Toast To Dr. Foster

Dr. Dave and Holly It seems that this week is all about BCC and Dr. Dave. 😛

On Friday night, Holly, Mom and I went to the Davis Kidd bookstore for a book signing. Dr. David Foster was signing his new book, The Power to Prevail – Turning Your Adversities into Advantages, so we decided to pop on over and grab us a copy. The place was packed, as we knew it would be, but we waited in line for about 30 minutes or so and got our signature and a little photograph.

Dr. Dave is very technologically savvy, but I was impressed that not only is his book in hardback, but he also has it published in Adobe E-Book format, Microsoft Reader format and Palm Digital Media E-book format as well! Clearly he has all the bases covered, which is pretty impressive. I just wish every author and/or publisher was this smart and would publish in e-book format when releasing a new hardcover. When they don’t they are simply missing out on sales. For example, even though we bought the hardcover, I’m going to have to purchase the Palm e-book as well. 🙂

After the book signing, we were all hungry so we decided to visit the Green Hills Grill. For appetizers, Holly and I each had a cup of the clam chowder and Mom got a cup of the Tortilla soup. Both were delicious, but I have to say that their clam chowder is the best I’ve had in Nashville and one of the best I’ve ever had. That includes my trips to the New England coast! For our main courses, Holly had the fresh Tilapia fish sandwich; Mom had the Crab Cake Florentine salad; and I had the Shrimp Penne Pasta with stuffed artichoke hearts and pine nuts. All of our dishes were excellent as usual. When the meal was over our sweet tooth got the better of us. Mom had the Creme Brulee and Holly and I split the Banana Bread Foster. It’s Banana’s Foster served over banana bread and it was a nice spin on the traditional favorite. We had to laugh though, as I proclaimed a toast to Dr. Foster with Banana Bread Foster!

September 6, 2003

Holly’s Rockin’ The HISzzzhouse

As mentioned in Wednesday’s post, my wife Holly performed for the first time at Bellevue Community Church for their yearly Vision Night. Vision night is similar to their mid-week service except that the topic is on the Church itself. Dr. David Foster talked about the vision of BCC, where they’ve come from and where they are going, that sort of thing. Even though he was referring to where BCC is headed, as usual he also gave me a lot to think about my life as well. 🙂

The music is always incredible there. Lionel Cartwright does an amazing job as the Creative Arts Director and some of the best music in Nashville is found at BCC every weekend. I know that Holly was truly honored to be asked to sing backup. BCC is chock full of top notch musicians and having the opportunity to perform with them is a big deal. Don’t believe me? Well keep this in mind, Lionel has 2 Top 20’s, 3 Top 10’s, and 3 Top 5 hits, one being a number one song, “Leap Of Faith“, to his credit and that’s just scratching the surface. 8)

September 5, 2003

Weblog Publishing Tools For Movable Type

Weblogging Application Icons Recently I did a review on Weblogging With Your Palm, however since I do the bulk of my publishing with programs on my laptop, I thought it might be good to do a quick run down of what’s available for Windows clients. This mini-review is focused on tools that work with Movable Type (MT). The listed apps may, or may not work with your chosen system if you’re not using MT. I’d suggest a Google search to see what other product are out there for your software.

Why Use A 3rd Party Client?

The MT interface is pretty straightforward and easy to use, so why use a 3rd party client? The short answer is spellchecking. 🙂 The long answer is that, depending on the client you’ve chosen, there’s a wealth of tools to help you with your post. For example having a WYSIWYG HTML editor, being able to compose offline, or being able to save your posts locally. You may not need these extra tools, but if you do one of these applications should fit the bill.

September 4, 2003

Floating On A Sea Of Forgetfulness

Back in college you could judge the quality of a weekend by how hungover, or how exhausted someone was. Today, one good clue is how many dishes I have to do in the morning. We had quite the time this weekend judging by the number of dishes I washed the other day. Of course, I don’t need a dish count to remember how much fun and relaxing this weekend was. 🙂

I had planned to get a lot of work done. I had been clueless of the fact that this past weekend was Labor Day weekend until a client reminded of the fact on Friday. My first thought was that I could use the extra day to catch up on a few things and I could spend the most of the weekend in my office. On Saturday, Holly and I got a few things done around the house, but we used a good part of the weekend just catching up and getting in sync with what each of us has been up to. We blocked aside Sunday as the day to relax and planned on Monday being a very busy day.

September 3, 2003

Hear Holly Live Tonight

Holly will be performing live tonight at Bellevue Community Church for Vision Night. This is Holly’s first time taking the stage at BCC. It’s quite an honor to be asked to perform with the likes of Lionel Cartwright, Jeff Wood and Cherill Long. If you’ve ever been to BCC, then you know how great the services are and how uplifting the music can be. If you haven’t checked it out, then now would be a good time! They are pulling out all the stops and have brought in a lot of talent for the music tonight. Plus you’ll get to hear the incomparable Holly Ashby! 😀

September 2, 2003

I’m Now A True Believer

On Sunday we went to Church at BCC. The praise and worship music was great, as it always is, but there was a special surprise. Phil Keaggy was playing lead guitar (yes, we rock out in Church) that day and he played a special song entitled ‘True Believers.’ Phil is a legend in the Christian music industry, yet I had never heard any of his music. I was totally unprepared for what I heard.

The song featured Phil by himself with an acoustic guitar. It began simple enough with a him strumming and singing. Then he stopped and began playing percussion on the face of the guitar. He had an effect pedal that allowed him to sample and playback in a loop what he had just played, so after playing percussion for 4 bars, he started strumming the guitar again. The percussion part he had played just before looped behind him. He kept adding more and more parts to the point where he was a one man band. On top of all this was a great song!