What’s this about Drivel?

Occasional Drivel is the personal web space of Sean Phillips. I’m a Professional Engineer by training, a family person by choice, and a photographer by barely contained passion. I like to write, to teach, and to help others make their lives better and more efficient. People ask me questions all the time and I often do lots of research to figure out the best way to answer those questions. I even write detailed instruction sets or tutorials to show them how I do things. My Dad is a fantastic source of inspiration for this blog. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard him say “I’m going to ask a dumb question…”!

I have several other outlets to write about a variety of topics, but I have made the decision to keep them very narrowly focused on the subject for which they were created. As a result I found that I didn’t have anywhere to share my thoughts on other random topics that are interesting or important to me. So I created this! You may find everything here to be incredibly boring and useless, but you might just find a few useful tidbits too, so be sure to check it out and come back often!

Who is Sean Phillips?

I’ve lived in Canada my entire life. I’ve traveled all over the world, but not enough that I would say that I’m a Man of the World or a World Traveler. Having said that, when I was growing up my Dad was in the RCMP and we got transferred to new towns regularly. Between that and my own wandering ways as an adult I’ve rarely lived in one place for more than 5 years. I’ve been able to meet people from all walks of life and learn about different ways of thinking and living. I love to try new things and I love to eat good food!

I currently live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with my wife and two children. We live in a nice home in a nice neighborhood and we have nice friends. I freely admit that we are very lucky to have great lives, but I also know that we’ve worked very hard to take advantage of that luck!

I’ve been an uber-geek for as long as I can remember. From my earliest days in school some of my best memories are of taking apart computers and playing with gadgets. I was the kid who always had his bike in pieces because I wanted to know how to put it back together. My favorite vehicle was a 1986 Ford Bronco II because I could do all my own maintenance. It’s not that I was a good mechanic, I just wanted to figure it out. I never let processes or systems sit still unless they are working perfectly. Until then I’m always trying to figure out how to make them work better. On many occasions I’ve spent hours (or even days) creating macros in Microsoft Excel that save me 5 minutes of work every month. I’ve read the manual for every camera I’ve ever owned!

You can check out LouiseandSean.com if you want to see my personal family related photography; try Sean-Phillips.com for my professional landscape and nature photography. You can also find me on Flickr, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

That’s me in a nutshell. I hope you can get something useful out of the things I write. And if the things I’ve written up to now have been boring or irrelevant to you, feel free to ask me a question; maybe I can help you figure something out.