Now appearing on The Smoking Gun.com for a minor traffic violation and DUI in the Ross Hall shower room. 

The Pipe Organ in the Sky

Other family members that have blogs have posted their thoughts on the passing of William E. Brown, my grandfather. I'll add mine as well.

Grandpa was one of those people that was in love with music and playing his pipe organ. Mom told me stories about the applause box that was built into the side of it. with a push of a button after playing, two pieces within it would clap in approval. She later told me it broke because the kids overused it.

It was during the funeral when I realized all the memories I had involving Grandpa, especially his recording equipment and his music. It's that artistic nature of the Brown Generation that was passed down to the next two generations.

Thursday in my dorm room at 9 am I got a call from Mom that Grandpa passed away. At age 93, he was the last surviving grandparent I had. My brother Chris spoke at the funeral saying how that top layer of the generations is gone now, but should not be forgotten.

Cherry Ice Cream, Tapioka Pudding, Yogi, Obi-Wan Kenobi (the cat, not the Jedi), railroads, steam engines, and old movie reels are a few things I'll remember Grandpa by.

When he's playing that pipe organ in the sky.

I don't want your damn pizza.

I would like to take this break in the hectic-yet-relaxing finals week to tell you about the first time I was mentioned on TV.

About 3 years ago when Austin 3:16 and the WWF was hot, there was a local access show in the Pittsburgh area by the name of Pro Wrestling Review. It featured a bunch of Pittsburgh area pro wrestling columnists talking about current events and news of pro wrestling. Every week would feature a trivia contest and the winner would receive a free pizza from their local sponsor.

Dring one week, 3 of the 4 questions could be answered through research and the 4th was "which fruit was thrown at" during some match. Well an orange was the logical guess, so I went with that and sent the other ones in.

The following week, they run down the correct answers. All of them correct, even the orange one.

I won.

"This week's winner is Gary Ashley from Kittanning, PA"

Crazy how I won a trivia contest and a free pizza from a place I don't even know where in PA is at. While I was shocked over the win, I forgot about the tag at the end of my trivia answers: "Where the hell is Dravosburg?". Dravosburg was the location of the pizza place.

Brian Krasman of the McKeesport Daily News, after announcing me as the winner:

"Yeah, and Gary also writes 'Where the hell is Dravosburg?' Get a frickin map, moron."

Ironically, I search Mapquest after the show for Dravosburg.

At the same time I was both insulted and honored on local access TV. I'm not sure what means, but I think the 7 other people that were watching the show thought I was a douchebag.

The followup was that Krasman e-mailed me an apology that I accepted, the free pizza coupon was mailed to me, and a few months later the show shut down due to production costs.

maybe cause you gave out too much damn pizza.

Irks of an Digital Artist

Art and creativity has always been on mom's side of the family. Herself has a studio of sorts in the house, my Aunt does photography, and I do the personal computer-enhanced photography and logo design stuff. Nothing professional from my end.

It's the artist blood inside me that boils everytime I'm on one of those HotorNot sites and I see people absolutely botch the pictures they put up there. Here's Top 5 imaging aggrevations:

1) person scans a wallet sized photo and saves the file monstrously huge with white space

nothing more aggrevating than treasure mapping across white space cropping out your little rinky dink wallet photo from a 2 MB file.

2) To show who is who in a picture, they either scratch out the other faces or draw a "me" with a crude arrow pointing to them

Nothing says "I'm lazy" than stating who you are in a picture of you and your friends by drawing an ugly white arrow to you, thus ruining the entire photo in the process. Here's a better idea: how about getting a pic with just YOU in it!?

3) People with highly-compressed JPG images

Don't get me wrong, but sending me JPGs is fine with me. But if it gets to the point where the file is so messed up that I can't make out the person's face, then it's a problem. But it could be worse:

3a) People who send me highly-compressed JPG images that I have to cutout for transperency

Of all the aggrevating things, this one takes the cake, the ice cream, and the batted remnants of the pinata. To give you some idea, when a JPG file is saved in MS Paint (which I swear by never to use in your life under any circumstances), it messes up the colors of the image when saved. Thus, when I have to work on it (let's say it's cutting out a logo), there's specks and crap everywhere and it just gives me a headache. But that's just solely on my end.

4) Unresized images

yes, I would like to see a picture of you and your friend. No, I would not like to see up both your respective nasal passages. Unless you're sending me a trace cutout for a mural, resize it so I don't have to view your picture from a helicopter.

5) 90 degree flips

This is more for the HotorNot sites, and there's nothing worse than when it's a picture of a cute person flipped the wrong way. Save yourself, me, and the rest of the people looking at your profile pic some neck pain and give it a good kick to the side to make it all vertical.