Dave Lawlor {Dot} Com

Jailbreak!

Dave Lawlor — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:42:08 +0000

So as a geeky tech guy you would have thought I would be lining up to jailbreak my iPhone but honestly I just never had a need to do it. Until now! I needed additional call management features that iBlacklist has but Apple has decided to no allow it in the App store. So that led me to do some quick reading on the subject of jail breaking your iPhone and outside of voiding your warranty I couldn’t see any reason not to. I ended up using the evasi0n program to do the jailbreak and it was super simple and easy, nothing to fear here!

Can I Still Access the App Store?

YES! That was my biggest concern that I wouldn’t have access to the App store but you still do. I also didn’t lose anything in the jail breaking process all my apps and data was still on the phone after the procedure. After the jailbreak I went in and updated my apps through the App store with no issue whatsoever. Not only do I get access to the normal App store but now I also get access to Cydia which is the “Black Market” app store.

Im just starting to explore Cydia and test some of the blacklisted apps, Ill give an update in the future on how it goes!

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A New Direction

Dave Lawlor — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 22:05:12 +0000

In the past I used this site as a portal for my consulting work along with industry related posts. Since I have been in house for almost 5 years now, with limited consulting roles I don’t nearly post as often. I have usually done most of my personal posts on Facebook, but I feel that is limiting and useful for quick updates only. I want to use this space to do a much better job of posting personal and professional things. I have gotten away from writing too much in the last few years and would like to have that outlet again. Hopefully I can keep up with a better posting schedule then I had in the past and keep up to date with things going on with the family and me!

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Pubcon 2011: How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Social

Dave Lawlor — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:27:52 +0000

Last week I had the opportunity and pleasure to attend Pubcon Las Vegas 2011 through my full time position at Zacuto USA, and I must say that it was the best year yet for me for several different reasons that go beyond just the great knowledge that goes on in the sessions.

Be Social

While I have been to various conferences throughout the years (this is my 3rd Pubcon), this one I made a promise to myself to be much more social oriented in getting out there and networking. Most people will say that is the primary benefit of going to these conferences, but I will admit that in the past I was reluctant to engage in a lot of the social activities. I think this was based on the thinking that most of the people there all knew each other already and it was awkward for me to interrupt or approach groups where I knew no one (probably also a side effect of my time in corporate IT where I would be locked in a server room with only 1 or 2 other admins).

To help overcome this fear, I started engaging those in the industry more on Twitter earlier in the year, kind of a pregame to the conference. While no substitution for in-person interaction, it would allow me to at least go into situations where I could feel that people would have some vague notion of who I was, which as it turns out was all I needed to push me forward into introducing myself more. Though I will admit that I still find it hard to walk up to someone like Graywolf or Joe Hall, just because usually they already have a crowd around them and I don’t want to interrupt. I think that I had a great success in social this Pubcon and I got to interact with a large number of great people in different events, and because of this not only did I learn more, I enjoyed this Pubcon much more than the others I have attended.

Pubcon Sessions

I won’t go into recaps of specific Pubcon sessions, you can find some superior live blogging of the events by Ryan Jones or Outspoken Media (scroll to bottom), but I can tell you some very knowledgeable speakers got up and put out some good info if you pay attention. You can also find a compilation of tweets by Click2Rank that give good bite sized info. I think my biggest gripe is that there seems to be a lot of tracks of sessions and I think some of it gets watered down. I know some sessions seemed awfully sparsely populated, yet some of the best speakers were put into competitive time slots. I hope that Brett and the Pubcon team take a look at the attendance data for the sessions and adjust accordingly.

If I had to pick one speaker that I got the most out of, it was Greg Boser from Blue Glass, he has a distinct way of putting things out there that is straight forward, and he doesn’t push a company or agenda beyond the way he presents his data in a competent demeanor. I had to miss one of his sessions because a work emergency came up that pulled me back to my laptop at the hotel, but if not for that I would have said I was most of the topics he was presenting on. A close second is going out to Carolyn Shelby, she is scary smart & does a great job of not only presenting information but getting you to think outside the box.

Carolyn Shelby & Greg Boser

If you are ever at a conference and see either of their names on the schedule I would highly recommend attending their sessions.

After Hours

There are a ton of events that go on after hours at most conferences, and in the past I would avoid them like the plague. This time I wanted it to be different, so I made an effort and it was well worth it. I want to single out two specific ones though because of how great they were.

Raven Tools’ Pubcon Poker Invitational

Photo Credit: Michael Dorausch

If you are in the SEO/SMM space and you don’t know who Raven Tools are then you are not paying attention. These guys kill it on the tool side, and I would definitely recommend them, we do use them at Zacuto. I found out that Raven was throwing an invite only poker tournament at Pubcon thanks to an errant tweet from my friend Ryan Jones, so I immediately hit up Arienne Holland to see if I could finagle a seat out of her, and she was nice enough to extend one to me.

The event was held at the MGM Poker room and you could tell from the start it was going to be a fun night, as the crowd was playful and the tables were always fun. I think I went through about 4 table changes and I can honestly say there was never a bad time at any of them (Beyond some bad beats of course).

Photo Credit: Raven

As people got knocked out they hung out and cheered the rest on, it was a nice spirit going on in the poker room and Raven was nice enough to provide drinks in the attached bar to help ease the sting of any beats. I was surprised how fast we got down to the final table, and eventually because of the technicality of the fact out of the last four players, two of them were Raven employees who bowed out, it was down to Dawn Wentzell & myself.

Photo Credit: Michael Dorausch

After just one hand I pushed all in and won the tournament for the $1000 prize, with Dawn taking home 2nd place for $250. I just want to thank Arienne and the rest of the folks at Raven for putting this together, and also a big hand for the players who made it a great time win or lose.

Dawn, RavenCourtney, & Myself Dawn, RavenArienne, & Myself
Photo Credit: Raven

You can see more pictures and tweets from the tournament on Storify put together by RavenCourtney.

#EpicDinnerVegas

Photo Credit: Matt Siltala

Again a hat tip to twitter for making me aware of this great event, when Alan Bleiweiss tweeted out that he was making a list for a dinner at Pubcon. In past years, I would have avoided events like these, but in my making the most of Pubcon I signed up right away, and I am glad I did because the interest was large for this event and Alan eventually had to cap it due to seating limits.

Dinner was at Pampas Brazilian Grille in Planet Hollywood “Magnificent Mile” area, and was everything you could hope for in an event this size. Great food and great people to hang out with, I was sitting with Dave Roher, Carolyn Shelby, Tony Verre, & Charity Verre at our end of the table. I had never been to a Brazilian Grille before and didn’t know the system, but I can tell you I’m kind of hooked on it, and the ones in Chicago will definitely be getting some business from me. The food was terrific and it just kept coming out and I don’t think I had a bad piece of meat at all.

It was a full house!
Photo Credit: Dana Lookadoo – Yo! Yo! SEO

The only problem with so many people attending it was hard to meet everyone I wanted to, but I guess that leaves me with more opportunities at the next conference. Everyone I did talk to was friendly and it’s nice to have common interests with the people your out with. Honestly my local group of friends & family have no clue to what I really do, so having that shared experience makes it much easier to engage in conversations then I anticipated. The night want by way too fast, but I’ll have that great swag coffee mug to remember it by over the Chicago winter.

For some great images visit Melyssa St. Michael‘s #EpicDinnerVegas Photo Album

Alan did a terrific job of pulling everything together, along with the sponsors. For a full list visit #EpicDinnerVegas page on Alan’s site.

Final Thoughts

As I said in the past I had attended Pubcon and hit all the sessions but did very little social networking, I found by making that extra effort and getting out there I made the experience much more in depth and something that will extend beyond just 3 days in Vegas by keeping up those relationships I started via Twitter/Facebook/G+. If your going to spend the time & money to go to Pubcon, or any other convention, then don’t be off put by the groups that have known each other for awhile, take it as encouragement that this is a great group of people that are worth introducing yourself to.

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SEO Columbus Review & Recommendations

Dave Lawlor — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:36:49 +0000

This morning while wasting time networking on Twitter one of my favorite SEO link builders tweeted about Mike Halvorsen. Apparently Mike, like most other SEOs that take client work wanted to rank for his local area searches. This is done all the time all over the world, but in this case Joe Rozsa has decided that he owns the words SEO Columbus.

It doesn’t seem to matter that there is no registered trademark with the state, nor that both those terms are too generic to really be trademarked. In going to Mike’s website I have NO confusion about who he is, I know from reading his site that he is a SEO in the Columbus area, and not part of the company SEO Columbus. (How lame is it to name your company that way, good thing you got the exact match domain too Joe cause I think your going to have ranking problems in the near future.) It goes to the heart of what is really wrong with a lot of America today. It’s the need to threaten or browbeat a competitor instead of being a better service or product. Joe has decided instead of making sure he keeps his #1 ranking in the SERPs by hard work, he will threaten Mike with an incredible weak arguments in my opinion. (As a side note I have no training as a lawyer, but I deal with a ton of TM issues in my in-house position with usage of our name and images)

If you read the emails from Joe they are the slimy kind of thing you would expect from someone who is the worst in the industry, veiled threats all the while telling you that he is only doing it for your own good. Joe even manages to do a semi name drop by being condescending enough to tell Mike, “Heck, you’ve probably seen me speak at a conference somewhere.“, it just goes to show there are so many ass hats in this field who get speaking engagements. Anyone in the Columbus area looking for a good SEO I would heartily recommend Mike Halvorsen, simply because not only is he good at what he does he doesn’t need to make threats to rank.

http://michaelhalvorsen.com/

For further views on this story I recommend:

Joe Rozsa – SEO Columbus or Columbus SEO or Whatever
Goodbye (SEO) Columbus
Joe Rozsa – Not a Columbus SEO
SEO Columbus Fan Page
SEO Columbus YouTube Channel
and last but not least….

SEO Columbus Sucks

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Google Chrome – The Switch is On

Dave Lawlor — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 03:17:04 +0000

For years I have been a diehard fan of Firefox as my browser, but lately between numerous updates and generally crashing once every few days I’m done with it. I have been flirting with the idea of moving to Chrome for awhile but I just couldn’t be bothered finding all the little things that I use in Firefox and my password manager didn’t have an extension for Chrome, which was a huge deal breaker because really I cant be expected to remember all my passwords between clients, work, and personal sites.

Then I saw a tweet by SEO journalist Danny Sullivan talking about his first day experience with the new Chrome OS. It’s a great read and one of the things that was referenced in the article was a password manager called LastPass. It got me thinking that I could now start using Chrome more and not have to remember passwords. Also I have applied for the Google OS pilot program for Zacuto as I have a few users that could benefit from that kind of machine, so I figured I need to get comfortable with Chrome in case I do get selected.

So I sat down to install Chrome and get my customizations in place to make it workable. I want to do a real go at switching which means I don’t want to be switching back and forth to do different things. After some searches I found extensions and web apps that will cover all the things I need taken care of in my day to day work. I lost one toolbar from Raventools.com, but I can still do all my work from within the site so it wasn’t a deal breaker though it was close. Ill petition the Raven guys for a chrome extension, they are pretty good about working on requests if enough interest is generated. (Sidenote: If you work with Internet Marketing check out Raventools.com, amazing reporting/monitoring tools.)

I also am taking this opportunity to test Springpad as I have been trying to find a good to do/task app that works across all my platforms, as I recently traded in my iPhone for a EVO with Android. It looks pretty good so far but only time will tell how I interact with it.

If you have been waiting until Chrome is more “mature” to start working with it, I believe that time is here. With Chrome OS coming its important that if you do any kind of tech support work your going to see it, so you might as well start getting into it. I’ll update in a few weeks to discuss how the switch is going, good luck with yours!

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Good or Great?

Dave Lawlor — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 16:21:56 +0000

I was in Vegas for Pubcon, which was both a wonderful learning experience and also a thought provoking event for myself. As I tweeted at one point I had a realization that at this point in my life I am going to have to commit to a career path. For the last 8 years I have been bouncing between online marketing(SEO/SEM) and IT work. This has worked well for the mostly small businesses that I have been employed by because they got two roles filled by one person.

I feel I have done good work in these hybrid positions and always provided value to the companies, my current position included. Though I have found that with my kids getting older I am not able to dedicate the amount of time I had in the past to keep up to date in both disciplines. I wouldn’t say it is causing my work to suffer, but I am definitely behind the curve in testing new ideas and platforms.

That being said, I really want to get back to doing GREAT work. The only way at this point in my life that I think I can do that is by focusing on one of the paths. This will allow me to excel at that path and keep a healthy work/home balance with the wife and kids. The problem moving forward is I love doing both online marketing and IT work. I need to weigh the paths and the destination to figure out what will be best for myself and the family.

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Preparing for Microsoft exam 83-640, Windows Server 2008 Active Directory, Configuring

Dave Lawlor — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 04:43:57 +0000

Since I finished up my exam 70-642 right at the end of 2009, for one of my resolutions going into 2010 would be to finish up my MCITP this year. In that regards, I am giving myself 45 days to prepare and pass the 83-640 exam. I am going from today (Jan 3rd 2010), so I am going to set my exam for Feb 17th which will work well for my schedule as luck would have it.

This exam replaces the 70-640 exam in the US because a part of the exam uses the performance based testing that I did the pilot for.

I am going to use the following resources to study:

Train Signal’s Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Training
Transcender Practice Exam
Microsoft Self Paced Study Guide

I will start by going through Train Signal’s video courses first, then using the self paced study guide and virtual machines to get more of a hands on feel to deal with more of the performance based testing.

I feel this schedule will be tough, but I just got done designing and implementing a Server 2008 Active Directory network for a small business not to mention I have been working on Active Directory since 2000. I am going to document regularly here as I go through the study material.

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Passed 70-642 Windows Server 2008 Network Infrastructure, Configuring

Dave Lawlor — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 04:59:31 +0000

I have been so busy at the office that I have been putting off taking some of the exams I need to get done, when I noticed that one of my vouchers was going to expire I quickly registered to make the expiration date.

With the holidays and family commitments it was tough to get studying in but I managed to squeeze some on. Today even though I was knee deep in drama at the the office (another post on that in the future), I managed to squeak at a 850 to pass. This adds another line to my MCTS.

The next exam on my list is the 70-640, hopefully it wont take 6 months for me to get around to taking that one!

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Block Yahoo Web Chat

Dave Lawlor — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Another set of users were using the Yahoo web chat instead of doing what we are paying them for so I needed to block them also. There are a lot of useless and out of date messages posed about this but I finally figured it out, and the answer was close to what I did to disable gmail chat:

I setup my DNS with two primary domains for:

httpcs.msg.yahoo.com
webcs.msg.yahoo.com

I then set a host record for those to go to 127.0.0.1

After that they couldn’t chat no more!

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