Eblend.org: Shawn’s blog

Electronic bill pay is just amazing. You enter information once and it continues to pay the bill for you automatically each month. This is great until you forget to cancel (or just cancel a few payments — not all of them) the health insurance payment to your ex. Umm, yeah that was a $25.00 lesson. I *thought* that I canceled the payment, but apparently I had only stopped the payment for two months. It happily decided to send a check out a few days ago and I had to look like a freak when I called Everbank to ask them how I could stop the check. They suggested that I just ask for a check in return. That isn’t going to happen, so I had to pay $25.00 to stop payment on the check. I’m an idiot. But $25.00 is worth not having to deal with the situtation.

I went crazy with my camera during the 2005 Cincinnati Pride Parade. Kathy was nice enough to give me a volunteer post with an excellent view of the parade. View the Cincinnati 2005 Pride Parade Pics. Feel free to pass the link around and let me know what you think.

The Political Compass is pretty interesting. I’m lower-left (-6.25, -5.44). Take the quiz, it is pretty interesting. The commentary is even better.

From Andymatic:

Excedrin for Racial Tension Headaches. This is freaking hilarious, but sadly true on some levels.

I’m a big fan of Cary Tennis who writes the Since You Asked advice column from Salon.com. His prose is excellent and his advice is insightful bordering on spiritual sometimes. Today a reader asked him why his ex-girlfriend called him defensive since he thought he was only “standing his ground”. Cary hit the nail right on the head when he said that it wasn’t about why he did something, was about what and why she felt it.

Sometimes you just don’t need to explain why you did something. Just deal with the feelings. Why is that so hard for some people to actually do? Being right all of the time might allow you to win all of the battles, but you might just end up losing the war.

I knew it was true! Someone posted an article to Craig’s List about Why Geeks and Nerds Are Worth It…. Just replace “girl” with “guy” and I’m happy. So what nice gay, geeky/nerdy guy wants to hook up with this hunky geek?

Woohoo! I just walked out of the last class of my undergraduate career. Unless I do really, really bad on my exams next week I’ll be walking down the isle next Saturday to get my empty deploma holder. Exams are next week and I should be done by Wednesday at 3pm.

This evening (well morning now), I went to the GLSEN Prom. For those that don’t know, it is an all-ages dance for GLBTQS youth and adults. That might not seem like a big deal at first, but the majority of people there could not openly take their boyfriends/girlfriends to a school prom without being made fun of, attacked, or even worse. Couples were from high school, college and on up. I had a great time and almost got to dance with Dan — he was even more hilarious and cute since he was so tired. I did dance with Doug which was pretty cool.

April won a sex party. I’m invited and she invited Dan too. That should be interesting. Plus she looked so HOT in her dress and shoes. I took some pictures and will post them tomorrow.

update: Pictures are up in the GLSEN Prom gallery.

I haven’t updated the site for a while because I have been busy working on my papers for the SSSA conference in New Orleans. I will be presenting two papers on privacy. Once will be on privacy and homeland security in the US and then other will be about privacy policy in the European Union. Apparently the EU isn’t the shining example of privacy protection that some people have been making them out to be. Yes they do have excellent protections for privacy with respect to commerce, but on just about every other front there are few protections.

I’ll post my papers and presentations soon.

It has been a long, long time since I have posted anything on this site. Well, I finally spent some time upgrading from Movable Type to WordPress. I broke my MT installation when we switched servers in November of last year.

My old posts are still sitting around in a backup folder.