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mashby

The personal blog of Michael Ashby

Month / December 2004

The Final Days Of The Bacchanal

The Bearitage BearAs with any new year, many of us will decide to turn over a new leaf. To make positive changes in our lives so that we will be happier and healthier and all that jazz. With the new year looming just around the corner, I too am planning on making resolutions to change certain habits that I currently have. One in particular is to get back on the South Beach Diet. My family went on the diet last year and it worked very well. 95% of the weight that I took off has stayed off. The diet was fairly easy to stick to and the food tasted good, however in today’s American culture, it’s easy to fall of the wagon.

Since the summer my diet has been a downward spiral into fast food and junk food. To be honest, it’s not that the food tasted any better. It’s not as if a Big Mac is a culinary delight, it’s just easier. When your day is stressful and you’re looking to cut a few corners to get through it, it’s just easier to eat at McDonald’s than it is to go home and cook.

On top of that there’s been the holidays. Spending the holidays in Nashville would be hard enough, but having the holidays in Louisiana is a whole other bailiwick. Every time we go to Baton Rouge, Holly and I graze from one side to the other. Holly and I have been to Baton Rouge three times over the past two months, so we’ve gone back in some cases for thirds. They say that food is life. If that is indeed the case, then life in southern Louisiana is good. Just to give you some idea of what I’ve had to eat over the past two months, here’s a quick run down.

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Confessions Of A Sex Addict

Sex And The City - an HBO original series.I admit it, Holly and I are sex addicts. It came on so unexpectedly. At first it seemed like something we could handle, yet slowly but surely we found that we couldn’t get enough of it. Holly would come home from work and we’d lose ourselves for hours at a time. We would go to bed exhausted and wake up bleary eyed and find it hard to go to work. Yet like clockwork, Holly would come home and we’d do it all over again. Well that is until we ran out of episodes. What do you mean, “What am I talking about?” I’m talking about “Sex And The City“. What did YOU think I was talking about? 😉

I’ve been a member of NetFlix for just over a year now and I absolutely love it. It’s allowed me to watch The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and many other shows that I missed by not having HBO. Having been selfish for most of my rentals, I decided to start a series that I thought Holly would like – “Sex And The City”. During it’s heyday, it was quite a popular show, especially with women, so I figured it would be something Holly would enjoy.

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Merry Christmas!

A quick post to wish everyone a very merry Christmas! In lieu of a proper Christmas card, here’s a picture Holly and I took in New York when we were there last weekend for her birthday.

White Christmas In Louisiana?

An alligator cooking in a snowstorm.It’s Christmas Eve and Holly and I came down to Baton Rouge, where we’re from, to visit with family and friends for the holidays. In years past when we’ve come down, this trip is also a bit of a refuge from the colder weather in Nashville. Not this year however. A cold front has been sweeping through the south bringing record cold temperatures. The last weather report I saw on television said that they expect Corpus Christi, Texas to get up to 4 inches of snow. Corpus Christy is near the Mexico border! I don’t know that we’ll get any snow, but thus far I have seen a small bit of sleet.

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A Scam I Almost Fell For

Sherlock HolmesA few weeks ago I received an e-mail asking if I was interested in selling one of my domain names. I’ve sent e-mails like this for clients of mine from time-to-time, so I thought nothing of it. I almost deleted it, but decided to respond to it on a lark, just to see what would happen. What I discovered was that I was walking into a scam. So if you own any domain names of your own, I highly encourage you to read on.

Here’s the original e-mail that I received:

To: Michael Ashby [michael@ashbygroup.com]
From: Jan Schmidt [schmidt@warmesoft.com]
Date: 12/05/2004
Subject: flamingball.com for sale?

Hi,
Our company is interested in your domain name. Is it available for sale?

If it is available for sale please email me your asking price. (Please note that we are willing to buy only the domain name, not a web site)

In case you have no idea what price you should ask for, we recommend you to use free appraisal service at http://www.valdomains.com.

If our company can afford your domain I will contact you as soon as possible.

We run a software development company. We provide custom software development on different platforms (Unix, Windows, Apache etc). Selling and buying names is not our main business but we have done it quite long as a side business.

More information of our company: http://www.warmesoft.com

Best regards,

Jan Schmidt
Business Manager, Warmesoft

Seemed professional enough and on the surface quite valid. I went to the domain name Warmesoft.com and browsed it briefly. There wasn’t much there, but neither does my own corporate site. I’m always working on someone else’s and not my own, so it’s still “under construction” and has been for many years. Anyway, at this point, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, so I decided to respond.

To: Jan Schmidt [schmidt@warmesoft.com]
From: Michael Ashby [michael@ashbygroup.com]
Date: 12/08/2004
Subject: RE: flamingball.com for sale?

Thank you for your interest in one of my domain names. I don’t have any plans to sell the domain, however I would entertain an offer. You never know, it may just be too good to pass up.

Michael T. Ashby
Consultant
The Ashby Group
http://www.ashbygroup.com

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Mashby’s Version Of How Christmas Trees Came To Be

A Victorian ChristmasLast week Holly, Mom and I all went out to find a Christmas tree and just as Home Depot was closing we found one and brought it home. It’s a pilgrimage that we make every year and every time we make it, I re-question just why we’re doing it in the first place. I don’t mean to sound like a Grinch, because I’m really not. I enjoy Christmas as much as the next person. It’s a joyous season and I like the music and the decorations, the food and the festivities. Although it’s a crazy time of year, I find the season very enjoyable. The only part I don’t find fun is the Christmas tree.

In my mind having a Christmas tree is pure insanity. I don’t know how this custom came to be and I sure as heck don’t know how it became a custom that everyone agreed was a good idea. I mean who seriously sat back and thought bringing a tree inside your home made sense?

In lieu of a definitive answer, I imagine a couple in a log cabin at the turn of the century. They are at the kitchen table enjoying a hot cup of cocoa talking about how to decorate their house that year. Because I’m sure that’s what early pioneers did in their log cabins. 😉 In my mind the conversation went a little something like this:

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Grandpa's Wonder Pine Tar Soap packaging

Grandpa’s Wonder Pine Tar Soap

A few years ago I stumbled upon a company called Rivendell Bicycle Works and I knew that I had found a home for my bicycle interests. No glitz, no glamor, just good bicycle stuff that works. I identified with their philosophy immediately because it was just like my own when it came to cycling. If you’ve been a reader of this weblog, you’ve no doubt heard me refer to Rivendell more than once and I look forward to their catalogs in my mailbox. I pour over each page and read all the details about the products that they offer. Surprisingly, Rivendell sells more than just things related to bicycles. If they find a product that strikes their fancy they try to add it to their catalog. One of the items that has always caught my eye was Grandpa’s Pine Tar Soap.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

A Lemming parachuting with an umbrella.I was very excited when I received my new pa1m0ne T3 in the mail several months ago. At that time I was all a twitter regarding Bluetooth and was thrilled that the T3 represented the final piece of the puzzle. I had the BT phone (SonyErricsson T608), a BT headset (Jabra FreeSpeak 200) and now a BT handheld. Unfortunately, what I expected to be the cornerstone of my new BT personal area network, turned out to be it’s biggest weakness.
I’ve been a Palm OS user since 1997 and my PDA is an integral part of my personal and business life. I use it for just about everything I do. Address Book, Date Book, project planning, keeping track of all my many passwords and logins, recipes, photos, videos, managing my money, e-mail and even playing games. To say that I’m a rabid user is an understatement. If I forget my Palm at home before heading to a client site it’s as if my right hand is missing.

Prior to upgrading to the pa1m0ne Tungsten T3, I was using the pa1m0ne Tungsten C which I liked quite a lot. It wasn’t perfect, but the built-in Wi-Fi rocked. By using the Enterprise Edition of SnapperMail, I could manage all 15 of my e-mail accounts easily and quickly. The battery life was excellent, especially considering the power consumption of the wireless adapter. The screen was sharp and bright and I really liked using the device.

Yet, like I said it wasn’t perfect. The integrated keyboard was handy, but I missed using Graffiti for some things. In an ideal world, I would have both, but pa1m0ne hasn’t released an uber device that features Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Graffiti and a built-in keyboard yet. Technically I can do on-screen graffiti, but I miss the dedicated graffiti area and I’ve found trying to fill in a form directly a little cumbersome. I also didn’t like the fact that the headset jack was mono. Supposedly this was for some kind of VoIP application that never became a reality. Instead of headphones, you use a mono mobile phone headset which is less than ideal for listening to MP3 or video files. I can do both of course with the device, but I don’t because of the poor audio quality.

When the T3 came out, it seemed like a good upgrade. I would get graffiti back (and thanks to Mike Rohde’s help a way to get Graffiti 1 reinstalled on the device) and complete my Bluetooth PAN (personal area network). For years I dreamed of being able to look up a number on my Palm and then have it dial my phone. A WiFi card was in the works at the time too, so in the end the only thing I would lose would be the integrated keyboard. I use the AlphaSmart Dana for heavy typing (like this entry) and I could always get a Stowaway Keyboard, if I had to. All-in-all it seemed like a win-win situation.

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