Sean’s Blog

I like to share stuff.  I like find a lot of stuff on teh interwebs and I would like to share it.  The problem I run into, is that almost no one I know actually uses Google Reader, which has a nifty interface for sharing.

So sharing through reader is kind of out of the question.  After some searching, I found this nifty feature.  Basically it is a small snippet of Javascript that allows you to publish your shared items on a page of your choosing.  Here is the documentation from Google.

So I went and created a page.  I’ll add things to it from time to time that I find interesting as well as any notes that I have.  If you click on the “Read More” link, it will take you to the Google Page where all the notes I’ve added to shared items will be (if you care).  Take a look at the Shared Items page.

I go back and forth with the social media thing. Granted, it has made the web a much more interesting place to be. But 90% is pure and utter crap. Instead of communication, it seems like a bunch of people making connections then having nothing to talk about.

Such was the case of the disastrous Myspace.com experiment. I got on Myspace way late in the curve. And although I ran into a couple people that I haven’t talked to in a while, it didn’t really open up any worthwhile conversations and became a spam magnet. So I left.

I’ve been thinking about it though, and it really seems that you get out what you put in. So I’m going to give it another shot. I’m going to go hit the big networks and see what I can see. Hopefully this will work out better. I’ll keep you all appraised on how it goes.

I found these two things today that were just hilarious:
You almost feel sorry for the telemarketer:

Much more geeky, but still as hilarious:

For a while now I’ve been using Remeber The Milk and while it is useful, the reason I’ve really come to love it is for how it lets me keep track of books.  I read a lot and, like most of you, I am always finding or hearing about books I would like to read.  The problem is that I can never remember them, let alone while I am browsing at the library or bookstore with eight thousand other books staring at me.

Enter Remember the Milk.  Whenever I run across a book that I might be interested in reading, I add it to the list.  Most of the time, I’ll  check  to see if it’s  available at my local library as well.

When I go to the library, I’ll check out some books from the list.  If I see anything that catches my eye browsing, I’ll add it to the list.  This is where the mobile feature of being able to use it on my Blackberry really shines.

When I get home, I’ll add a personal task to return the books I checked out due by the date and mark the books in the list as completed.  This system should really work with any task manager, but RTM just makes it really easy for me.

This American Life has a really great episode about how the subprime mortgage crisis happened. Since I had gone through the loan process myself (although for a 30-fixed), I though I had some idea of how it worked. What I didn’t understand is how people could borrow money that they new they couldn’t afford.

What the show did a great job of explaining is how many different forces contributed to a perfect storm that brought down Wall Street giants and individual home owners. Blame seems to fall every where. The borrowers taking loans that they new they couldn’t afford. The mortgage companies selling NINA (No Income No Asset Verification) loans. The brokers calculated the risk for mortgage back securities with data that was so out of data as to be meaningless.

In the end, the result was so inevitable that it couldn’t turn out any other way. People who should have known better at all levels fell victim to the quest for more money. Give it a listen. It is really informative.

This American Life’s Giant Pool of Money* _{tip of the CDO to JD at Get Rich Slowly}

*According to the site it is only available for a few more days (May 18th)

I almost feel like I’ve been cheating for the past week. After a long time pimping MonkeyGTD, I’ve switched to Remember The Milk. I don’t think I am going to be switching back anytime soon either. After I wrote the post last week about staying organized away from the computer I started to look into applications that would work on my Blackberry.

Remember The Milk got some serious love on Lifehacker’s Best GTD applications and I though I would give it a try. I was pretty much immediately blown away. RTM had everything I was looking for and more.

First off, it is web based and free (for the non-pro version). It easily manages my tasks and has a mobile interface (this was the killer for MonkeyGTD in my book). It integrates with Google calendar and can send me messages when tasks are due.

One of my killer apps was to be able to jot down books I wanted to read and then have access to that list at the library. I simply created a list called Books, and started keeping track of books I wanted to read whenever I came across them. Then when I made a trip to the library, i just logged on top the mobile interface, pulled up my book list and grabbed several of them. I added a couple books on the fly at the library that I didn’t want to take out yet, but wanted to read in the future.

When I got home, I put in a task to return the library books due on the books due dates.

The Pro version has tools that will actually sync with the native Blackberry applications, but right now I don’t need that level of integration.

MonkeyGTD is a great tool, but I am going to be sticking with Remember The Milk. Give it a try. It rocks my geeky world.

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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There are a million food blogs on the Internet, but one of the few I subscribe to is Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks.  Most of the recipes are vegetarian, but all look really good.  Most are not overly complex and rely on ingredients that most people should be able to find with not to much problem.

For me though, the real kicker is the photography.  There are beautiful  shots that accompany  every recipe.  And food photography is HARD.  Generally when I try to take a picture of something I made that looks especially good, the resulting photograph makes it look grey, shiny, disgusting … thing.

Take a look and give some of the recipes a try.  101 Cookbooks

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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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