mashby | The personal blog of Michael Ashby

June 11, 2003

My God, It’s Full Of Stars

Paparazzi I was sitting in a cafe late this afternoon in between West End and Vanderbilt University called Bean Central. I was waiting for Holly to get off work and I was catching up on some work with my AlphaSmart Dana. I was sipping on a Bass pale ale looking out the window when I saw Matraca Berg and her husband Jeff Hanna.

For those of you that may not be familiar with the Country Music market, Matraca Berg has a solo career, but is most noted for her songwriting. She’s penned such hits as Back In The Saddle, Wrong Side Of Memphis (Trisha Yearwood), and Strawberry Wine (Dena Carter). Her husband, Jeff is in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which is where Jackson Browne launched his solo career from. Not quite on the level of Garth Brooks, or Faith Hill, but definitely big stars in the own right. They were leaving the Essential Therapy Store and Spa and drove away in their gold Volvo station wagon.

Just goes to show you what living in Nashville is like. You never know who you’re going to run into when you just stand still for a few moments.

Oh, and since we’re on the subject of country music stars, Holly will be performing on June 26th at the Gibson Bluegrass Showcase. She’s performing in the Nashville Country Show talent contest. This is the first of many performances that we’re lining up in promotion of her new demo CD. If you’re in the area, we look forward to seeing you there.

June 9, 2003

Punk’d

The Matrix Reloaded - In IMAX Format The Matrix Reloaded was finally released in IMAX format, so yesterday after church, we headed over to Opry Mills to the Regal Cinema Opry Mills 20 IMAX theatre. It happened on a bit of a lark, I just happened to notice that there was a 2:15 showing while glancing at the Nashville Scene as I rode in the back seat of my Mother’s car. We got out of Church at 1:00pm, so it seemed like a perfect fit. Go to church and then go see the movie.

We arrived at Opry Mills at about 1:15pm, so we had about 30 minutes before they began seating. We took the opportunity to browse Barnes & Nobel. Going in I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted. I had purchased all my magazines for the month and I’m already reading 3 books, so I didn’t need another. That’s before I found out that they sold DVDs as well. :). I ended up purchasing the The Animatrix Boxed Set, which includes the Animatrix DVD and the Animatrix soundtrack. It was turning into a Matrix day.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen an IMAX movie. The last one I saw was “The Alamo” when Holly and I were celebrating our 2nd Anniversary in San Antonio. I’ve certainly never seen a feature film released in the format, so I was VERY excited and intrigued in what the differences would be between the 35mm experience and the IMAX Experience.

June 8, 2003

$@#*ing Commercials

Bachelor Chow - Now With Flavor! If there is one thing that has reared its ugly head in American cinema in the past year that just sticks in my craw are movie theatres showing commercials. Don’t get me wrong, I love commercials and dearly miss AdCritic and wish it would come back to its “Internet Bubble” heyday. But I don’t mind commercials on TV because they are subsidizing what I’m watching. I don’t pay for network TV so I understand the role that commercials play. However when I go to a movie and pay $8.50 a person the last thing that I expect to see is a freakin’ commercial. I paid a fee to watch commercials? I don’t think so. Yet with each movie that I go to see, more and more commercials are appearing prior to the previews. I saw the Italian Job today and was subjected to no less than 7 commercials.

Some people might argue that previews are really just commercials for movies. Well, that’s true, but its part of the movie experience, ads for Degree antiperspirant are not. Or you might argue that commercials are defraying the cost of movies. Bollocks. When was the last time you saw a movie theatre go out of business? Besides, movie attendance is higher than ever and when the Matrix Reloaded can pull in over 200 million in one weekend I don’t think theatres are hurting. Also, don’t forget that the gross movie sales do not include the cost of popcorn and other snacks. By my own rough estimation, I’d say that for every two tickets at $8.50 there’s at least $8.50 spent at the concession stand. So, when a movie pulls in $200 million, there’s roughly $100 million that goes straight to the movie theatre. That’s not counting the money made from the Coca-Cola ads, etc.

June 5, 2003

Starbucks Millionaires Club

Starbucks All this week I have been on a bit of a coffee binge. You see, I pretty much gave up coffee a few months back and switched to tea. I did it because tea is supposed to be healthier for you than coffee. It wasn’t that I felt I was drinking too much, or had health problems; I just thought it would be a healthier choice and help me to maintain my “relaxed state” after my morning yoga. I love the taste of coffee though, so even when I wasn’t drinking it as my morning beverage, I would still have a cup every now and then.

Anyway, this week I got the hankering for the taste of coffee, so I was stopping by my local Starbucks every morning on my way to my client site visits. I would order a doppio (aka double) espresso and a Venti (aka large) Coffee Of The Day. I joked one day with the Barista that I was ordering the coffee equivalent of a shot of tequila with a beer chaser. 😛 I would drink the espresso immediately and then sip the drip coffee the rest of the day after it cooled off for about 20 minutes. I find their drip coffee too freaking hot when it’s first handed to me, but that’s another story.

June 4, 2003

The Prodigal Son Returns

Palm gobbles up Handspring like PacMan It doesn’t happen often, but every now and then a piece of news comes along that just rocks your world. Today my world was rocked by the announcement that Palm is acquiring Handspring. No one saw this coming and even with all the contacts that I have in the Palm OS community, I didn’t hear a peep about it until this morning, when I read Craig’s Gearbits. In the event you’re not familiar with the Palm Handheld – this is HUGE news.

May 29, 2003

Day One Is Complete

Sunset Day one of my first Travelogue (Edit: deleted) is complete. Hopefully this weekend I’ll get the remaining 6 days posted. There’s also over 100 photos that we’ve taken and that doesn’t include the 3 underwater cameras that we have still have to develop. So there’s plenty of stuff to tell you about!

May 26, 2003

Weather’s Great, Wish You Were Here

Postcard I posted two more entries to the Travelogue (Edit: deleted) today. I’m still on Day One, and there is SO much left for me to post. We have just been having the best time, but because of that, I haven’t had much time for writing.

I also hooked up the web cam and took a quick snapshot. You can find it in the Webcam Section (Edit: deleted).

May 23, 2003

Travelogues

I’ve just added a new section to the site – Travelogues (Edit: deleted). The purpose of this section is to give me a place to post my travel notes from my trips. I’m currently on vacation with my wife Holly in Freeport, Bahamas and you can follow along with us as I have time to make a post here and there. This is a new type of writing for me, so I’m still trying to “find my voice.” Hopefully you’ll find it funny and a good read. As always, feel free to post comments and let me know what you think.

May 20, 2003

9 Years Of The Good Life

Bearitage This past Saturday, May 17th, was my 9th wedding anniversary. As I sit here and type this entry, I find it incredulous that we’ve been married 9 years already. The time has just flown by and I have a hard time fathoming that we’ve been together that long. Well, to be honest, if you count when we started dating, we’ve been together 15 years. We dated for 6 years and were engaged for 2 of those years. I guess time really does fly when you’re having fun. 🙂

My Mom put me through “Being A Husband 101” after she divorced my father and some of the tips that she gave me have stuck. One of her tips was to “always make your Anniversary special” and Holly and I agreed from the start to take a little trip for each anniversary. It doesn’t have to be big. It can be only for a weekend to the next county as long as it’s just the two of us. Over the years we’ve been to quite a few places.

May 19, 2003

When CSS Attacks

CSS Book I’ve been feeling the urge to change the color scheme of my weblog for some time now. Although the maroon and tan style works for the most part, it’s a little washed out for my tastes. Since the site has been designed around Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), it’s fairly easy to change things around. So, I played around a little yesterday and came up with a new stylesheet, which you should be viewing now.

I’m not 100% happy with it, but I figured I’d throw it up for now just for the heck of it. I like the colors, but the dark background does make it hard to read and since this is a weblog, that’s not a good thing. 🙂 I’ve flipped the colors around, but I still haven’t found a happy medium yet that balances the colors with readability.

This CSS file is far from done. I’m still working on it and tweaking it, I simply wanted to share it and change things up a bit for a few days. If you have any suggestions, or if you have a favorite web site and you like the colors used there, please post a link in the comments. Also, while I was at it, I cleaned up the navigation bar by breaking out some of the content into its own dedicated page. It was simply getting too crowded. So, you can now find all the stuff that was moved under links (Edit: discontinued).