Sean’s Blog

Yes, I’m Still Around

I know it’s been a couple days since I’ve posted anything, which is unusual, since I’ve been pretty good about doing one post per day.  I’ve been pretty busy and we had a big storm that came through and flooded the streets and knocked out the power for almost 24 hours.  We had some water in the house and sent a good amount of time cleaning up.

I also have been working pretty hard on content for the new technology specific blog I am looking to launch next week.  Plus I’ve been twittering like crazy which is just a really awesome service.

I’ll be getting back on to a more normal schedule here in the next week or so since I do have some posts I want to do, but I just wanted to make sure the blogosphere knows I m still alive.

Words Americans Should Use More : Whinge

I really like the word whinge. As an American you can’t use it without sounding like a college kid who just came back from a week in London (or Madonna), but it is a good word.
Google defines it as:

whinge:
To complain in a particularly annoying manner.

The Poll Speaks For Itself

Actual Poll at MSNBC

Great Headlines

I’m really busy today, but I ran across these and I thought they were great.  I totally want Mr Giggles to play with my kids…

Many, many more (14 pages) here.

Earth And Moon As Seen From Mars

I’ve always loved astronomy.  I never had the discipline for descent practice of it and my math skills are kind of shaky, but as something casual, i find it a lot of fun.   BoingBoing has a link today about an awesome picture taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter looking back at the moon and the earth.

Link to the NASA page with details and a larger image.

Some Shots Of The Backyard

One of my favorite things about owning a house is just sitting in the backyard with my camera taking pictures of the birds and animals that are running around. Being that we’re around 2 miles from downtown, it is not exactly the Alaskan Wilderness. But we still get some neat birds and it is a nice way to pass some time.

Here’s the link to the gallery.

Is The URL Going Away?

Recently I’ve been noticing an interesting trend. I’ve been seeing more and more entities (people, companies, movements) give out a Google “keyword” instead of a URL. For example, the Ron Paul campaign has a lot of placards that just say “Google Ron Paul” instead of just giving a website address (ie www.ronpaul2008.com).

Apparently companies in Asia have been doing this for a while now. I’m not sure if this is because of the difficulty of acquiring meaningful domain names, or if the subject is just easier to remember.

This means a couple things (to me). One is that while I don’t think premium domain names are going away anytime soon, they may definitely become less important. The other is that namespace crowding is going to be come much more of a problem.

What I mean by namespace crowding is the the inability to control how you rank in your search results. If you are the poor guy who owns Bill Gates Windows and Door Installation, you are never ever going to be able to Google that and be anywhere near the top of the search pile. A unique URL is the only choice at this point.

Your ownership of this phrase becomes even more important. Non-related pages or bad pages become much more of a problem, and one that is sort of out of your control. If the folks at boingboing decide that they want to write a post saying “Sean Lavelle is a tool” that is going to crush whatever Google ranking I have built up. That is sort of an extreme example (Cory, Mark, David and Xeni don’t do it! Please! ) but you can see who this lack of control would give someone who is invested in a particular brand fits.

What this means for me right now is that I am still pursuing a domain name that I want, but keeping an eye on how Google (and other search engines see me) is a very important part of maintaining your brand.

So go ahead - Google “Sean E Lavelle”

Iron Man

So Saturday night Jess and I went to see Iron Man. You know what I thought? Meh. That’s right I said Meh. Now I didn’t go in expecting high art ( the art not the terrible movie), but I had some expectations since THE ENTIRE INTERNET said it was “teh awesome!1!”

I thought that the first part in Afghanistan was really good, but it just kindof went downhill from there. Maybe I’m just not that into superhero movies. I liked the X-Men movies, the Batman with Christian Bale, and Hellboy (but that’s probably because I am a Guillermo Del Toro fanboy), and that is about it. Did I miss something?

I am really looking forward to Hellboy2, as well as The Happening, and I will probably see the new Indiana Jones, but so far the summer movies have left me, well kind of meh.

Some Things Just Make You Laugh

Tip of the innuendo to aboutcolonblank

Piles of Indian Food

I spent most of the day Saturday making tons of curry. Actually I made just 2 large curries to freeze and reheat through the week. Not only are curries really, tasty, cheap and healthy (depending on the ingredients of course), but you can make big batches and freeze them.

Curry is a generic word for any heavily sauced Indian dish. Over the weekend I picked up Raghavan Iyer’s book 660 Curries. This is a great book loaded with recipes from the very simple to very complex. I decided to make a couple simple vegetarian curries.

The first was basically onions, coconut, chilies, black eyed peas and spices. The second was cauliflower, tomatoes, ginger, garlic and spices. Almost all the ingredients can be found at a larger grocery story (even many of the spices). The only problem I had was finding the curry leaves for one of the recipes. After stopping in to a local Indian grocery, we found out that curry leaves from Hawaii have been banned so they are scarce right now.

I’m always surprised to find how many people have never tried Indian food. I love it and would really recommend taking the time to find a local Indian restaurant and give it a try.