Sean’s Blog

Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda by Scott Peterson

Some books have a profound impact on the way you look at the world. Me Against My Brother was one of them for me. I read this book about 5 years ago and just finished rereading it. Although the conflicts described have changed and have almost moved out of the realm of current events, the lessons that we can take from this book have not.

Today we see a Rwanda struggling to over come the horror of a very personal genocide. Sudan and Somalia are still at war, although the locations and combatants have changed. Me against My Brother gives us some perspective on these current conflicts and our responses to them.
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Busy, busy, busy this week. Here’s the links:

War Torn Somalia Eradicates Polio - Good news from a country that has had so much bad news. One of the volunteers helping with the inoculations was Ali Mao Moallim, was the last man on Earth to contract smallpox more then thirty years ago.

What Life Will Be Like in 2008 - From the 1968 issue of Modern Mechanix. I love these, although I want my self-driving robot car. Some are pretty dead on though.

The Internet? Bah! - From the other side of the sprectrum, an article from Newsweek in 1995 on how the internet will never amount to more then a curiosity. Best line from the article: ” So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?”.

Hazards of Wifi - Apparently there are people who believe wireless networking is detrimental to your health. Not just by making you pale and obese from all the time indoors on Teh Interweb, but give you cancer and other diseases. Ahh, nutjobs…

I went to try out Adobe’s newest offering, which is called Photoshop Express. Basically, it looks like a stripped down editor for the web. One big hit I ran into right off the bat is that it will only recognize .jpg files. When I import from my Canon cameras, it saves things as .JPG files. Unlike windows, Linux is case sensative, so when I was looking for files to upload, it didn’t find any valid files.

I’m sure Adobe will fix this, or you could just rename your files (mv *.JPG *.jpg) which I might do if I have some time this weekend. Dont’ you just love Betas?

Sometimes it is helpful to go back and look over things we do on a day to day basis and see where we can improve or if something may be added to help. Recently I’ve been thinking about what has become my process for blogging and though I would share it with everyone.

First thing I do is log into Google Reader and go through my feeds. I’ve gotten it down so I can pretty much skim the headlines and then I will Star anything that looks remotely interesting to me. When I’ve got a little more time I will go through the Starred Items and read through them in full. While reading through I’ll comment on anything that I feel I can contribute too.. Anything that I want to share in the weekly links I will clip in the Google Notebook that I have setup for that.

When I get an idea I’ll log into my MonkeyGTD page over at tiddlyspot that I’ve written about previously and if not write a first draft of the article, at least jott down a couple of ideas. Later in the day I will try to go through some of those ideas and flesh out the articles a bit.

When I have a post ready to go, I will usually copy it from MonkeyGTD into ScribeFire and set all the links and pictures as well as any formatting I want done. I’ve come to like using ScribeFire instead of the native Wordpress writing interface because it allows me to focus on the writing instead of the little details. Posting graphics in one step via the API is a very handy feature. I’ll then schedule the post and be done with it.

Once it is scheduled, I’ll login to the blog and see if anything jumps out at me like bad spelling, broken links etc. and make corrections.

This has seemed to work pretty well so far. Having everything stored on MonkeyGTD and Google Notebook means that where ever I am writing I have access to what I’m working on. One of the draw backs I’ve seen though is if i lose some motivation, it is easy to let posts slip.

Looking for Jake - China Mieville

Several years ago, I ran across Perdido Street Station in the local library and picked it up hoping for a fun read. What I didn’t expect was that it would change the way I read fantasy forever. Not long after I finished it I ran out to my local book store and bought The Scar and for the first time ever, I preordered a book from Amazon (Iron Council). Needless to say, I have pretty high expectations of China Mieville. Looking For Jake is a collection of his short stories and does not disappointed.

Mieville is one of the most original authors working today in my opinion and I generally read anything of his that I can get my hands on. Although I would recommend Perdido Street Station or The Scar to someone that had not yet read anything by him, Looking for Jake is a fine collection.

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Flock is billed as the Social Web Browser. Being somewhat anti-social, it didn’t seem to be anything that I really would use. I mean, I blog, have a flickr page and use LinkedIn, but I really didn’t use any of the “Social Networking” sites. This weekend though, I wanted to upload a bunch of pictures to Flickr and saw that Flock had built in Flickr support. So I though I would give it a try. After playing around with it for a couple hours, I thought I would give my impressions.

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A while ago, I wrote up a piece on how to install a Dell 720 Printer in Ubuntu. Last weekend, after a reinstall of Linux, I found my printer didn’t work. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just follow my own tutorial”. To my absolute horror, when I tried to do it, it didn’t work. So I started sifting through the message boards, and found alot of old info that didn’t help. Finally, I was able to get everything squared away, so without further ado, here is the updated and correct Howto for installing a Dell 720 Photo Printer under Ubuntu 7.10.

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Last weekend, Jess and I went down to Southern Ohio in the Hocking Hills region. Unlike most of Ohio, the glaciers from the last ice age didn’t cover the area so it is hilly and cut through by steep gorges. After a good rain it has waterfalls all over the place as well.

Here is a link to the pictures.

Back from the trip and got some good pictures. Hopefully I will have them up in the next couple days or so. Here are the links from this week:

• WikiHistory - A great little story about time travel told through forum posts. Very clever. I didn’t know, but this is what the Taiping Rebellion was.
• Photography and the Law: Know Your Rights - A writeup over on photojojo about your rights as a photographer. “Security” is no reason to have your camera confiscated. Good tips.
• Star Wars (Sweded) - “A Cardboard Hope”. Truly independent film making at it’s best. From the hummed theme song to the X-Wings that fall apart mid “flight” a work of genius.

Tags: Links, web, random, Sean Lavelle

Jess and I are heading down to Hocking Hills State Park in Southern Ohio for the weekend. Hocking Hills is a great pace top get away and being only an hour or so outside of Columbus makes it really convenient.

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