Can't Get Built-in Joomla SEF to Work

Hey thanks Saka. After some further investigation I've figured it out and wanted to share for the community here. I found that my hosting company which provides that temporary URL for my domain (esc65.midphase.com/~newellcr) does indeed have the mod_rewrite loaded, but that it only works when the domain's DNS settings point there (fully resolved domain name). Since I'm not quite ready to launch yet, I changed the following file on my local PC:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

By adding this string:

Now I can access the site via the soon-to-launch URL
www.newellcreations.com/

Once I did this the .htaccess redirect worked fine, and so does Joomla's built-in SEF.