Sean’s Blog

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)

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.

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.