Sean’s Blog

Goals Update - July

It’s been a while sine I updated my goals and thought it might be kind of instructive to look back through them.  I didn’t put down one of the biggies that is affecting a whole bunch of other goals which is Get Married (hopefully I will be come August, unless she kills me first).

But I’ve gotten pretty far along and thought I would just update them

List after the jump:
More »

Recovering…

I spent a lovely Fourth of July weekend sick as a dog.  Luckily, I am all better now but for some reason last Wednesday I cam down with something and I wasn’t feeling fully recovered until yesterday.

I did get a bit of reading done which I was happy about.  I finished Vernor Vinge’s A Fire On The Deep and am almost finished with Charlie Stross’s The Atrocity Archives.

Other then that I’ve managed to get almost nothing else done other then updating the Wordpress plugins on my blog.  If you are not yet running Wordpress 2.5 the automatic plugin upgrade functionality is just fantastic and reason enough to make the switch.  Just a punch of the button and you have the latest version.

Anyways, I hope to get back to regular posting this week.

Polling Damage

The Young Earth Creationist website RememberThyCreator.com has a poll asking if creationism should be taught along side evolution in schools.  I’m guessing “Yes” was winning until last night when PZ Myers linked to it.  Now it looks like this:

Let’s see if we can take it under 1% before the admins catch on and lock it down.

Most of the time, creationist polls just serve to depress me since so many people seem to belive that nonsense.  This one made me happy.

Some Cool Things I Learned at PodcampOhio

This weekend, I went ot PodcampOhio.  It was just a really awesome new media conference here in Columbus.  I learned a whole bunch and met some cool people.  I thought I would share some of the things I picked up for everyone who couldn’t attend.

• Blackbird - A lightweight Twitter client for the Blackberry.  No need to use text messages for tweets.  Not as pretty as twitterberry (which I’ve been using for a while now), but (as far as I can tell) faster.  I’ve switched to Blackbird.
• Multiple Loops In Wordpress.  Requires some Wordpress hacking, but this looks to be a really cool setup.  I am currently playing with this on my Wordpress test install.  Here are the link to Mitch’s slides (from Studionashvegas.com) on how to do it.
• Custom Fields in Wordpress - Also from the slideshow, how to add custom fields for a sort of graphical tagging ability.  Currently playing with this in dev as well.
• CMSMadeSimple - I’ve been looking into CMSs for a side project I am working on but the learning curve for Joomla seems a bit steep for my liking.  CMSMadeSimple seems like an awesome solution.
• JungleDisk - I’ve heard of this service offered by Amazon, but after hearing some of the praises for it, I am really considering using it for backup.
• Summize - A way to dig into twitter for subjects.  Just about everyone seemed to be using it.

I really had a good time and would like to thank all the presenters and organizers.  I was really surprised to find something like this in my home town.  Do some digging in yours and you may be surprised.

Firefox 3

I’ve been running Firefox 3 for a while now, and really only have good things to say about it.  I install it when I installed Hardy Heron (FF3RC5 was the default browser).  It seems to be faster, less resource intensive and have some great new features.

I have noticed though that on my work PC is does seem to crash every once in a while.  This only happens on Windows.  My linux PCs seem fine.  Maybe another reason to switch? 

If you haven’t yet, take the time to upgrade.  It’s painless and quick.  Here’s the link

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union : Book Review

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon

This week I finished Michael Chabon’s book, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.  The book is a really interesting mix of a hard-boiled detective novel and an alternate history.  While I’ve never been a big fan of the detective novel genre, I loved the world building that took place in the book.

The basic premise of the story is a murder mystery.  A detective finds a dead junkie in his building and the resulting investigation takes him from Hasidic crime families to messianic Zionists and international politics.  I won’t go too much into the story as discovering all this is a lot of the fun of reading it.

The big twist though is that it takes place in Sitka, Alaska.  But this isn’t the Sitka of today, it’s a Sitka that might have been.  Back in the late 1930’s FDR’s Secretary of State Harold Ickes proposed moving the Jews of Europe away from the persecution of the Nazis to the not yet state of Alaska.  This was actually proposed in the Slattery Report.

Chabon plays this alternate history through with a Jewish pseudo state in Alaska that is on the verge of being reabsorbed into the United States.  In this history, the Palestinians had pushed the Jews out of Palestine and modern Israel had never been founded.  Throw in Zionists, evangelical Americans, a fictional Hasidic crime family and chess and you have the makings of a really good novel.

I really enjoyed The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.  Not having a lot of experience with detective novels, I don’t know how much a crime novel fan would like it, but Chabon has a great way of playing with language and a great imagination.  Get ready to break out your Yiddish dictionaries as well, because the book is full of it.  I would highly recommend this book if you are looking for a interesting read.

Set Up Adhoc Lists with Tags in RTM

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.

Podcamp Ohio: This Weekend!

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.

Quitting Smoking: One Week In

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.

Back From Vacation

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.