Sean’s Blog

It’s finally starting to get nice around here. Got the windows open and have been working on the yard. Here are the links:

• Bulgarian Idol is Way Way Better - Best Micheal Jackson cover ever.
• Tickets to Rile - From the UK Daily Mail, the 10 most outrageous parking tickets.  I won’t be complaining as much for getting ticketed parking illegally (yes I will)
• Autumn of the Multitaskers - Walter Kirn in the Atlantic takes a funny but deep look at how multitasking affects us and in most cases makes us less productive (or crash your car).
• The Following Post is [about] Anonymous / Anonymous Takes on Scientology - 2 separate but very interesting pieces about the hacker organization Anonymous and it’s ongoing battle with the Church of Scientology.
• Man Cries Wolf…er…Wombat after “rape” - Claiming a wombat is raping you will probably be a lot less funny to the police then you think…

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…

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

I’ve been sick and having wireless problems this week. Both of which have sapped my resolve to stay on top of the blog. I think the wireless card is crapping out in my desktop since I placed the AP in the same room as the computer and still got a 0% signal. Who knows…

Here are the links:

The One Day Sabbatical - David at LifeClever has a great idea on taking a one day sabbatical. Just taking a day to get out of your routine and spend some time looking over the big picture. Step back from the projects and normal daily grind of your life. It seems like an interesting idea and I am going to to give it a try here in the next couple of weeks.

17 Tips for Getting Bloggers to Write About You - Cory (who runs BoingBoing.net) at Information Week has a good column about common sense steps to make your blog as link friendly as possible. Most of these things are common sense, but I have seen then too many times to count.

How an Information System Helped Nail Eliot Spitzer and a Prostitution Ring - Larry at ZDNet has a great aricle that uses the Spitzer case to show how banks and the government work to find illegal transactions and money laundering. This is a really clear description of some very complicated stuff. An interesting read.

NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows as Agency Sweeps Up Data - Siobhan Gorman at the Wall Street Journal has an article on the rebirth of Total Information Awareness, a NSA spying program that was scrapped several years ago do to privacy concerns and general outrage. It appears that it is attempting to be resurrecting int the new government surveillance bill.

I spent all day yesterday trying to dig out from what the news was saying is 20 inches of snow so I could make it into work this morning.  I did, not that I’m happy about that.   Here are the the links:

How to Plan a Round the World Trip - Vagabondish puts together a good list for something I’ve always wanted to do, but never had the time or money.  Namely traveling around the world.

Shrine of the Mall Ninja - Someone put together forum postings from one of the greatbraggers of internet history.  From talking about the body armour he needs to the missles (!) they talk about adding to their golf cart, the mall ninja will school you about mall related defense.

The Connection Has Been Reset - An Atlantic.com has a great piece on the Great Firewall of China and the Potemkin Olympic village that is being setup for the Games.   China will unblock their draconian internet filtering form the Olympic Village and sites sorrounding the Games in hopes that people don’t actually see how restrictive Chinese net access is.  Also gives some details on the technical makeup of the firewall.

*Spoiler Alert* If you haven’t watched last Sunday’s Wire yet (and you plan to) stop reading now! You have been warned. Here’s a round up of some interesting stuff I’ve found through the week this week:

MyDeco : No CAD skills necessary. You can create a 3D layout of your room, move things around and even upload photos to see what different arrangements, or colors, or even flooring would look like.

Obituary For Omar Little : This past week, quite possibly the greatest character on television met his end in a horribly senseless way. Which, I guess, was the point. Omar Little, the shotgun wielding stickup boy from The Wire was gunned down by a 10 year old looking to make a name for himself. “A man’s gotta have a code”.

Franklin County Board of Elections : We here in Ohio vote on March 4th and for the first time I can remember it actually means something in the primaries (at least if you are a Democrat). This is the link to the election site if you live in Franklin County like me.

Why You Don’t Need Mortgage Life Insurance: Nora Dunn over at Wisebread makes the case that Mortgage Life Insurance is a bad idea. She argues that you are basically insuring the bank if you die, while regular life insurance can be used by your family in any

Links for the week of interesting stuff I’ve come across.

The Answer To The Toughest Interview Question - Penelope Trunk over at the Brazen Careerist talks about how to handle salary questions in a job interview. This is great advice and one of the questions that always worries me. Her basic answer? Never give a number.

Ultimate Guide To Packing Light - Go Green Travel Green has rounded up 45 tips for packing light when traveling. This is something I am working on. I’ve gotten down to a travel backpack for a week in India and a week in Puerto Rico, but I still find I pack lots of extraneous stuff.

How To Get A Great Deal on a New Car - A three part series over at Gather Little By Little with some great tips on who to get the your new car for the least possible money. My car is going on 7 years old, and I will probably buy used next time, but these are good tips.

2 big idea posts from my cooking hero Mark Bittman(PBUH):

• 101 Simple Appetizers in 20 Minutes or Less
• Summer Express:101 Simple Meals in 10 Minutes or Less

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but have always been destracted. There is so much good information ou there that it is impossible to find all the good stuff. Every Saturday or Sunday I will try to share the best stuff I have seen the previous week. So without further ado, here are the weekly links for week ending 2/16/2007:

Unasked for Advice to New Writers About Money - John Scalzi over at Whatever stirred up the hornet’s nest with this post. Regardless, it really contains some good advice for anyone (not just writers) for dealing with money. Check out the followup posts here and here.

What People Eat Around the World - Photos and food costs for a week of food from around the world. It’s great (and in the case of Darfur, incredibly depressing) to see it laid out like this.

Lori Nix’s Art - Lori Nix build beautiful surreal models and then photographs them. They are really fantastic.

1975: And The Changes To Come - What the future of 1975 holds! I love these. People of the 60s looking ahead to the wild world of the mid 70s. I’m pretty sure all our predictions will look as ridiculous to future generations.