Sean’s Blog

I’ve been running Firefox 3 for a while now, and really only have good things to say about it.  I install it when I installed Hardy Heron (FF3RC5 was the default browser).  It seems to be faster, less resource intensive and have some great new features.

I have noticed though that on my work PC is does seem to crash every once in a while.  This only happens on Windows.  My linux PCs seem fine.  Maybe another reason to switch? 

If you haven’t yet, take the time to upgrade.  It’s painless and quick.  Here’s the link

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon

This week I finished Michael Chabon’s book, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.  The book is a really interesting mix of a hard-boiled detective novel and an alternate history.  While I’ve never been a big fan of the detective novel genre, I loved the world building that took place in the book.

The basic premise of the story is a murder mystery.  A detective finds a dead junkie in his building and the resulting investigation takes him from Hasidic crime families to messianic Zionists and international politics.  I won’t go too much into the story as discovering all this is a lot of the fun of reading it.

The big twist though is that it takes place in Sitka, Alaska.  But this isn’t the Sitka of today, it’s a Sitka that might have been.  Back in the late 1930’s FDR’s Secretary of State Harold Ickes proposed moving the Jews of Europe away from the persecution of the Nazis to the not yet state of Alaska.  This was actually proposed in the Slattery Report.

Chabon plays this alternate history through with a Jewish pseudo state in Alaska that is on the verge of being reabsorbed into the United States.  In this history, the Palestinians had pushed the Jews out of Palestine and modern Israel had never been founded.  Throw in Zionists, evangelical Americans, a fictional Hasidic crime family and chess and you have the makings of a really good novel.

I really enjoyed The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.  Not having a lot of experience with detective novels, I don’t know how much a crime novel fan would like it, but Chabon has a great way of playing with language and a great imagination.  Get ready to break out your Yiddish dictionaries as well, because the book is full of it.  I would highly recommend this book if you are looking for a interesting read.

I keep finding more useful ways to use Remember The Milk.  My booklist, my wedding planning, my bills.  It is just a generally great tool.  Last week though, when I went on vacation I ran across a really cool feature that I’ve never used.  Tags.

I had a whole bunch of tasks that that I wanted to get accomplished during my week off.  The problem I had was they were spread across a bunch of lists.  Some were things I needed to do for the house, some were things I needed to do for the wedding, some were things I wanted to do for my blog.  I didn’t want to make duplicate action items in a new list, but I wanted one place to be able to view them all.

So I added a tag.  That way, I could just click on that tag and it would pull all the items I had tagged to a list and let me work off that.  I know this is a pretty obvious feature, but I was really impressed with how well it worked.  Generally, the only way I’ll learn a new feature is to actually have some sort of use case like this.

For all the folks in Central Ohio (and surrounding areas if you want to drive), Podcamp Ohio is this weekend (June 28th).  I’ve never been to one, but it looks like it is going to be interesting.  While many of the topics are devoted to podcasting, There looks like there is a good subset of presentations on more general blogging technologies.  Plus it’s free and looks like a great place to meet some other bloggers in my area.

If your going, look me up.  I’ll be around.

Here’s a link to the official site.

I’ve been smoke free for just about a week now.  It hasn’t been any where near as bad as I was thinking it was going to be.  I’m a little more irritable and a little twitchier, but all and all it is going pretty well.  I’ve really found that the hardest part so far has been at work.

At work it gives me a great exuse to get up and go outside for a while.  And I’ve been missing that.  Luckily, I don’t have any smoking buddies in my department, so everyone I talk to is already out there and they don’t come in to see if I want to go out.

I’ve been using the patch, which for me, is really the only effective method that I’ve tried.  It curbs the cravings enough that I’m not constantly thinking about it.  It does manage to give me some really crazy dreams though.  I don’t really remember what they are about, all I know is they are weird.

I’m feeling pretty good about this attempt though.  I actually really want to quit and while everything hasn’t gone perfectly, it seems to be going pretty well.

I’m back from vacation .  I took a bunch of pictures and some of them came out really well.  I hope to get those up later this week, but right now I’m just trying to get back into the swing of things.

Over the weekend I went sailing for the first time.  My dad owns a little 12 foot Snark and we went out a couple times on Lake Erie this weekend.  It was a lot of fun.  Not really a transportable hobby though since there aren’t a lot of sailing opportunities in Columbus.

Anyways, a bunch of stuff going on this week and I’ve hopefully got some good posts in the work that I should have up soon.

We all know how important it is to lock our computers when we walk away, but sometimes we forget.  And some times we have to pay a price for that forgetting.  The other day I wanted to show my fiancee Jess something on Facebook and just logged in with my account.  I didn’t log out.  Well today I logged on and found that she thought I didn’t have enough group memberships.  So Jess went and added me to:

• Zac Efron Bleongs Between my sheets group
• Fishing is the way of life group
• Emo/Goth/Freak …call me what you will I still won’t change group
• Hannah Montana Fan Group
• I Love Scrapbooking Group
• I Love Puppies Group
• Addicted To Cheese Group
• I want to be Nancy Drew Group

Lesson learned.  And it will probably notify everyone when I unsubscribe…

Last weekend was spring commencement at Ohio State.  Jess was graduation with her MEd (Masters of Education).  I’ve never been to a spring commencement having graduated Summer of 00.  It was held in the Horseshoe and was in the nineties and sunny (ie really hot).  Jess’s dad Bob and I dropped her off a little early and got pretty good seats.

I took my Canon S2 and the 12X zoom made all the difference.  Here is a link to the photos on Flickr.

This weekend I was working to setup a new blog that I have been getting ready.  I had the wordpress installation all set and ready to go and I ordered the domain name from GoDaddy.com.  I then pointed the new domain at the directory on the webserver that would be hosting the new site and set it up as an addon domain.  Everything looked good until I tried to navigate to the site.

When I actually when to the new site (we’ll call it addon.com) it redirected me to the front page of seanelavelle.com.  Now I know that the new blog was set up correctly on the webserver at http://seanelavelle.com/addon/ and the DNS record should point to the subdomain as addon.seanelavelle.com, but going to that address also seemed to redirect me to the main site.  I was at a loss.

After talking to Bluehost support we determined the problem was not DNS, but the Wordpress installation.  More after the jump

Read more »

I’ve added some more services to the social page.  Check it out here.  I’ve got my twitter, facebook, flickr, del.icio.us, and more accounts out there.  If you know me and use one of these services, go ahead and ping my on them.  If you don’t know me, ping me anyways.  I always like meeting new people.

Since we’re on the subject of being social, I’ve been using Twitter for about 2 weeks now.  I gotta say, I didn’t expect much out of it, but I really like it.  There is a active community and most everyone s very friendly.

The learning curve beyond the basic posting and replying is a little confusing sometimes thought.  There are groups that you can follow, retweeting, a whole bunch of other stuff that you really need to see in action to get a basic understanding of what is going on.  Actually, the best way to get a feel for twitter is just to dive right in and try it out.  You get the hang of it very quickly and it has really opened my eyes to the local technology scene here in Columbus.  I haven’t yet met many people in real life via twitter, but I definitely plan on checking out the next Columbus Tweetup when it rolls around.

So if you are thinking of trying, jump in.  Don’t know anybody?  Ping me at @seanelavelle on twitter and I’ll follow you. (At least as long as your not following 45,000 other people.  Just looks like spam to me)