Sean’s Blog

It’s 80 degrees and sunny outside and I am stuck at work. Ahh, the joys of being part of a 24X7 operation. Besides working today, it was a pretty good weekend. We spent along time in clearing out the the ivy that has slowly been trying to consume the house and then mulching the flowerbeds in the back yard.

We also walked down to the ice cream place down the street since I have been on a milkshake kick for the past couple days. Last, but not least, we installed a squirrel bungee, which has the potential to be INCREDIBLY AWESOME.

So I get to be at work on a day nobody is updating their blogs, going through back issues of xkcd (which is just brilliant) and I ran across a great commentary on the whole “managing your image online” debate :

I keep going back and forth on how to run this blog.  I want something that isn’t constrained to a topic and is just generally about me, but I also like to write about technology and would like to make an attempt at running a serious blog (ie by serious I mean getting more professional about it, not tone).

When I started out I had two blogs.  This one and a technology focused blog.  I sortof lost interest in the tech blog because I was still learning about blogging and how to best do it.  It ended up going under, but I think I am going to give it another shot.

In the last year I’ve learned a lot about blogging and social media in general and I think that this will help me to write a much more value packed and professional blog since I’ve been around the corner and have made a lot of mistakes that I’ve learned from.

What that means for you is that I am going to take this blog as really a personal blog.  A sort of catch-all that random things I’m interested in will show up on.  It probably means that i won’t be able to blog on this site daily, but who knows.  Over the last couple of months I’ve found that I really enjoy writing again and posting isn’t the chore that it was when I started.

Keep an eye here for when I officially kick off the new site.  It should only be a couple of weeks from now.  I really want to have some great content lined up before I start and am working through a couple of ideas now.

May has come around and it is really getting nice outside. Maybe it is to make up for all the snow and general craptasticness of winter in Central Ohio. But with the new house, we finally have a (usable) backyard and this weekend Jess and I got our patio furniture. Of course it rained most of the day Saturday.

It was just one of the standard sets you can get at most stores, but we replaced all the tiles on the top (they just pop out) with some 12X12 slate tiles from Lowe’s and it really looks great. Hopefully this will help alleviate my generally year round pastiness since my wifi just barely reaches the patio. What’s that you say? Maybe spend time out doors without the computer? That’s just crazy talk.

I was pretty good for a while of getting book reviews out after I read them, but recently I’ve let them pile up. This week I am hoping to clear out some of the backlog, so I should be publishing a good amount as we go, so check back for some.

Lastly, I’ve found that my library keeps a “reading list” of sorts online . It keeps (in my account) a list of books I’ve checked out and returned. This is a pretty cool feature, in my humble opinion. I know some people my have privacy concerns, but there is an option to clear the list. I also know for a fact that librarians in general are pretty fanatical about the right to keep your checkout history private (Thanks Librarians!).

Last week, when I installed the new theme for my site (Xplosive from BlogOhBlog), I noticed my stats in Wordpress.com Stats plugin dropped to 0. I thought this might just be a fluke, since every once in a while I will have a day where the visits are in the single digits. But by day two I was getting worried. Then I received a message from a friend using the Contact page and I knew something was up since it was still showing 0 hits.

I was still getting a page count via Google Analytics, but I love Wordpress.com Stats. The stats are (almost) real time, and it gives me just enough information for a quick over view of what has been going on. After some digging I found that this sometimes happens.

The fix is pretty easy, although it will require you to modify actual PHP pages (which is not that hard with the Wordpress Theme editor. I am assuming Wordpress 2.5 for this (although everything should work in earlier installations). Simply go to the Design Tab->Theme Editor. Now we will need to add the function in 3 places:

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I was trolling form my name to keep an eye on the Googlegangers the other day which I do with some regularity and I got a little sidetracked. My name isn’t that common and there isn’t that much movement. My resume over at emurse.com still holds the number one spot and that makes me happy. I’d like to get the blog or the site positioned a bit higher since most people don’t search on me with my middle initial, but all and all it’s not that bad of a ranking when I think of what some more commonly named people have to deal with.

Somehow, the post about a Irish politician always manages to maintain a spot in the top five which is weird.

Regardless, after searching for “Sean Lavelle” I just though I’d try my last name and see what I came up with. I was somewhat surprised with what I found. I knew about Lavelle Rubber Manufacturers in Wisconsin, but there was more!

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I’ve generally gotten pretty good about keeping organized while I am at the computer.  Using MonkeyGTD and keeping my inbox clear have really helped.  But at least 75% of my time is spent not in front of the computer and without any of these tools I’m not much better then my previous unorganized self.  There are tons of methods on the web about keeping organized away from the computer.  But most involve notebooks or PDAs and i really don’t like to carry anything extra.

What I do always have is my phone.  Because I always carry it, making sure I have some important lists on it has really been a life saver.  One of my big annoyances is books I want to read.  I have a context in MonkeyGTD where I keep a list to read, but when I’m actually at the library, I generally don’t have it handy.  So what I’ve started doing is emailing myself a message and then copying it to a memo.

Now there are some obvious problems with this setup.  First off, you need to be able to access your email on your phone.  I have a Blackberry, so this isn’t a problem for me.  You also have to remember to send and update your lists.  There should be some way to automate it so when I enter something in whatever I am using, I won’t need to do these multiple steps.  I’ve tried brining up MonkeyGTD in the built in Blackberry browser, but it is completely unreadable.

I think I am going to try another task manager, even though I really like MonkeyGTD, that may handle mobiles a little better.

I’ve been getting burned out recently.  I just don’t seem to have the enthusiasm that I i previously did.  Not at work and not for blogging.   I’ve noticed that this occasionally happens and I usually have some good tricks for dealing with it.  I though since I’m going through one of these periods, I’d share some and hopefully get out of my rut.

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If you’ve been following the saga of Expelled, the intelligent design movie showing how the poor ID  proponents are being harassed by big bad science, then Expelled Exposed won’t be any news to you.  I have been seeing add daily on Headline News recently though and though I would put a link up to the National Center for Science Education’s website.

Take a look at it.  They’ve done a good job address most of the more egregious lies of the movie as well as showing the duplicity that was involved in getting some of their subjects to participate.

Expelled Exposed - National Center for Science Education

I’ve been wanting to do a post about RSS readers for a while now and I couldn’t think of a what I really wanted to write about it. So I though I would try to cover the basics for people that aren’t familiar with RSS and then share some of my favorite tips on how to use it.

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Yesterday I hit 1000 views.  I know alot of blogs get more then that in a day, but it is still pretty exciting for me.  Let’s see how long it takes to get to 5000!