Michael Ashby | mashby

March 25, 2004

Comcast Took My TV And I Can’t Complain

Coaxial cable - the lifeblood of my TV viewing habits On Monday a nondescript van pulled up in front of my house. What alerted me to its presence was that I heard the sound of a ladder being extended. As I looked out the window I noticed that there was a man climbing the ladder up the pole that houses my Internet connection. I’m connected via a cable modem through Comcast, so my initial opinion was that the next door neighbor was getting high-speed Internet installed at her house. As I made my way back to my desk the thought occurred to me that he could be up to something more “sinister.”

I’ve been very lucky. I haven’t had to pay for basic cable TV for the past 5, or so years. Did I purchase one of the descrambler boxes you read about in your SPAM? No, I acquired my television signal through much more benign methods – I sweet talked the installer. If you don’t have cable TV and you order high speed Internet, they put on a governor that blocks the TV signal and only allows the Internet data to pass. When the installer came to my house close to 4 years ago, and to my apartment 2 years prior to that, I chatted him up and nonchalantly asked if he HAD to install the governor. In both installations, the installer left the governor off. As a result I’ve enjoyed basic cable free of charge. 🙂

March 23, 2004

Riding The Rails Of My Mind

The Viper - Six Flags America I’m really opening up my mind to a lot of new ideas and concepts here recently. I’m awash with new prospects and ways of thinking about things. Seeing “The Passion Of The Christ” was a large part of that, but there were things moving in my life shortly before that as well. For some reason I opened myself up to thinking parts of my life differently and because of that new energy is coming in directly related to that. I know this sounds esoteric and somewhat verbose, but my mind is still gelling on these thoughts and I haven’t formed a concrete thought process yet. So I can’t write about it in a clear concise manner. These actions and ideas are still “swirling around the bowl” as it were and I haven’t been able to flush out an easy explanation of what’s going on with me right now. I’m undergoing a change of sorts and I don’t know that I can share with anyone what the change is exactly until I’m done changing.

So right now my mind is just jumping from subject to subject and none of my thoughts this morning can really get around one concrete idea to write about. So, if you’ll permit me, I’ll just sort of do a stream of consciousness entry today and share with you everything that’s running through my mind.

March 22, 2004

What’s All The Fuss About “The Passion Of The Christ”?

I never really understood just what “The Passion” meant until just a few years ago. I’m not a “cradle Catholic” and the Protestant churches I went to never performed Passion plays, so the term was a little lost on me. I knew the story about Jesus being crucified, but I just didn’t know that there was a term for it that encompassed that period of time. It wasn’t until we moved to Nashville and began attending St. Edwards that I was even exposed to it. For me it was like an ambush. It was Palm Sunday and as I sat in the pew, ready to participate in the Mass, a drama unfolded right before my eyes. In this little play, Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem and his eventual crucifixion was played out. It was shocking, horrifying and gut wrenching and this was just a little community drama done in church. What Mel Gibson has done with his movie, The Passion Of The Christ is take it to a whole new level.

The “Passion” existed before Mel Gibson decided to make a movie about it. It is a staple of the Catholic faith and of many other Christian faiths. But why? Because it’s easy to forget, that’s why. As we go through out daily lives and deal with all the issues that face us, it’s easy to lose sight of why we believe what we believe. Every faith has some form of “refocusing” where you’re supposed to turn your attention to your faith for a period of time. For Catholics, this time of year is called Lent and it’s the time of year where you’re supposed to remember why you’re a Christian and what being a Christian means. On Palm Sunday the Passion is the focus of attention and forms the cornerstone of the Christian faith – Jesus was the son of God and he died for our sins. He died to absolve us of Original Sin and to provide us with everlasting life.

March 21, 2004

A Few Notes

Just a few notes regarding the weblog that I thought I would share.

March 18, 2004

Settling In With SuSE

SuSE - Simply Change You may have noticed that in past entries, I’ve referred to the fact that I’m running SuSE9 (Linux) on my laptop. In the past, I’ve always referred to Red Hat as my preferred distribution of Linux, so why the change? Well, Red Hat announced that they were no longer going to provide a free distribution of their software. Technically, you could still acquire a copy of Red Hat, but without paying a support fee, you would not be given access to the updates to keep your Operating System updated and secure. In a nutshell, Red Hat has gone corporate and it makes perfect sense for them to do this. At the end of the day, no one wants to see them go out of business and if this is a necessary step for them to stay profitable, then so be it.. However, there are a lot of home users and small businesses that were disappointed that Red Hat was no longer going to be available for free and I was one of those people.

So what version of Linux was I going to switch to? Red Hat isn’t totally getting out of the free Open Source market. They have a version of their desktop called Fedora. This is an open source, free desktop whose goal is “to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software” However, the impression I got when looking at Fedora was it was too new and a bit of an unknown at the moment. So I decided to look around and explore a few other distributions and see if there wasn’t something else that could fit the bill. If I’m going to have to swtich my OS, I might as well trying something new.

March 18, 2004

Making Time For Yoga

I was real close to skipping working out yesterday. I wasn’t as productive as I would have liked to have been and the temptation was to keep working and just blow off working out. It was a strong temptation, but in the end I opted to go workout.

March 16, 2004

Ground Control To Major Mike

The Bliss wallpaper from Windows XP Spring is just around the corner. I can feel it. In fact, I’d have to say that watching the world change is one of the fringe benefits of writing this weblog. I have a routine on most mornings and when I write my weblog entry, I sit at the kitchen table. I bang it out on the Dana Alphasmart Wireless and as I look up to ponder my next thought, I can look out the bay windows that overlook our backyard and the pasture behind it. The view reminds me of the Bliss Wallpaper found on Windows XP machines. You know the one with the green hill and blue sky behind it? It’s not exact, but the pasture behind my house reminds me of that and I have to admit, I do feel blissfull looking at it.

Right now the trees are still stripped bare of their leaves. The wind kicks up and the trees shake as if waving their fists demanding that their clothing of soft green leaves be returned immediately. “Where I my leaves?!”, they shout. To whom I don’t know, but they’re tired of being naked, that’s for sure. Behind the trees lies the pasture, which is one big hill that stretches up until it’s bathed in the blue of the sky. From my perspective, clouds can drift behind it like boats sailing behind a levee. For the first time in a long while the hill looks green. It’s been brown for so long, seeing the green is a bit of a surprise. Although it didn’t appear overnight, it seems like it has.

March 16, 2004

Gym Time

Since I started doing the South Beach Diet, I’ve begun going getting back into the gym. This may be the first time I’ve written about it here in the workout log, but I’ve been fairly consistent. The first week I went to the gym three times, but then it fell off to two times a week, then one and there were a few weeks where I didn’t go at all. 🙁 At this stage of the diet, I would say that I average two times a week now.

March 15, 2004

A Little St. Patrick’s Fun

With St. Patrick’s day just two days away, I thought it might be fun to replace the smileys I normally use with a set entitled Leprechauns. This icon set was made by Jason and thanks to his hard work, I’m able to easily include them on my site. Thanks Jason!

Author / Michael Ashby