2006s
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Is orange bad? What is really bad? Orange sounds horrible. Does this mean my plane is going to explode?
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What caused the threat level to be orange? Is there a global terrorism plot targeting the Minneapolis airport on the day I’m flying? Did some high school kid threaten to explode football stadiums?
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At what threat level do I not fly? Seriously. If this is supposed to inform me and make me more educated, when do I turn around and go home. Maybe orange? I’m going home, I don’t want to die.
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This is stupid.
Threat Level Orange
I just got home from another business trip. I seem to be in the middle of another spat of business travel with all the requisite fun of airports, flights, taxis, rental cars and hotels.
As I drove to the airport for this trip I noted the electronic sign at the entrance of the airport proclaiming:
Threat Level Orange
I have to ask, what good is this? What in the world is this supposed to do to make my life better? Really. Let’s think about this. My reaction to the blazing orange threat level was essentially as follows:
So I’m back to the beginning, what is the point? Other than making me feel nervous, slightly anxious, remind me that if I’m lucky enough to win the lottery I might have a terrorist incident in the airport. The only real impact this blazing “Threat Level Orange” had on me was to reinforce a low level of fear that is propogated by a variety of government and non-government agencies.
I decided to visit the [Department of Homeland
Security](http://www.dhs.gov/) website and find out what these levels
really were. The image to the right is from the DHS website. I love the
names. I've never, ever, seen green. That really makes sense after all,
when are you ever safe. Someone may be stalking you right now, and yes,
your plane may blow up. Be afraid, very afraid. Guarded is great. Blue
doesn't make intuitive sense to me on this scale, but I'll leave that
for now. Be guarded, don't trust those strangers. Then there is the
issue of the scale as a whole, is it really linear with these equal
bands? It would seem to me that the way a scale like this should work,
if it should even exist, is that from 0 to 60 it's low. In essence, the
vast majority of the time. And 61 to 80 is guarded. An exponential, not
linear, scale.
Since I cannot determine any value provided to me from this wonderful service other than fear it just strikes me as very Orwellian. What better way to keep people under control than constantly remind them of things that are statistically irrelevant.
Update!
I just went to the DHS website and it looks like the threat level may now be yellow!
Or not? I love this graphic. The top says the threat level is
**ELEVATED** (note the all caps, it's important) and the yellow bar is
highlighted. Then the text says it is **HIGH**. Turns out that they are
just telling us that there is a "significant risk of terrorist attacks"
in general, and that in the airlines there is a "high risk of terrorist
attacks". It's confusing to say the least, but make sure you stay
scared.
Watch out!
Smaller Than a Redwood
Tammy has launched her website, Smaller Than a Redwood. You should check it out. Her website is finding it’s groove right now. She’s got some early content on it. She doesn’t intend it to be “diary based” like this site. You won’t see what we did when and where on it, but instead different thoughts and comments that she wants to put up. She is also looking to put content from her friends on it as well.
The name of the site came from a conversation Tammy was having with Ann as she was preparing for a trip to San Francisco and the Redwood Forest. She has an assignment to write something for the site while sitting under the Redwoods.
Her site is pretty fun!
Wii Obsession?
I’m
not a gamer.
Starting a post titled “Wii Obsession?” with a statement like “I’m not a gamer” may seem like denial, but it really isn’t. If I’m looking for a fun time at my computer I’m most likely going to play around with some new software, do something on one of my websites, or blather on my blog. I don’t even follow the console gaming world with the exception of information that I get just by being around people I know.
However, I’m really fascinated with the soon to be released Nintendo Wii. I love that Nintendo is zigging, while Sony and Microsoft zag. Instead of going for more, bigger, faster, better Nintendo is focusing on game play and quality entertainment. The crazy remote that the Wii comes with is a big departure, and I think it will pay off. I read about the radical departure of the Wii in the Economist of all places.
Tammy and I got a Nintendo DS a number of months ago and we have had a lot of fun with it. A big part of the fun is different games enabled by a stylus and built-in mic. The Wii’s controllers enable tennis and boxing games where you actually swing your arms around. How fun! The Wii will also pair wireless with the existing DS which could create some interesting gaming options as well.
I’ve made it clear that a Wii would be a welcome Christmas present, however they will not be trivial to get. Who knows, I may yet go back on the promise I made myself years ago – no more consoles!
The last three weeks have been a backyard fire extravaganza! We’ve had three great evenings burning stuff with a variety of friends on late fall evenings. The air is brisk, and the fire is toasty. The best of all worlds.
I recently caught up to this new episode of Nova called the Monster of the Milky Way. I like Nova, but this is one of the better ones I’ve seen and if you have the opportunity to watch it in full high-definition wonder the computer graphics are stunning. It’s also just incredibly interesting stuff.
Perhaps the Geekiest Thing Possible?
So when your wife is upstairs on her computer, and you are downstairs on your computer, how do you communicate? Why not video chat? 🙂
New Site Up!
After wasting a lot of time messing with the routing options on my Zywall 10 I think I finally got the port-forwarding configuration setup right so that the new website is up and running! Yeah! Hint for anyone trying to configure that on the Zywall, go to the manual, and jump to the example configurations at the end. It was the only way I found the voodoo required to make it work.
Let me know what you think of the new site. There are a ton of features on it, and I’m planning on enabling some more stuff and filling out the corners over the next few days.
Regular visitors will notice that the photo galleries are gone. I’m looking for a solution for that that will work well with WordPress.
New Website Coming!
This post is a heads up that a new thingelstad.com is on the way! I’ve finally made the push to get things into a new blogging package (WordPress) and am just finalizing things now. The new site will be up by the end of the week.
I’m going to try to redirect as many links as possible, particularly the RSS feeds, but if you haven’t heard anything from this blog in a few days you should check your feed links.
The new site is going to be GREAT!
#37
I had a busy day on election day with an 8am meeting at work. I was determined to get out and vote and I ended up being the 37th vote in my polling station. This is the line that formed right before the polls open.
Voting went smooth. I was leering at the scanner that read my votes after watching the Hacking Democracy documentary. The software that runs these machines is frightening, the documentary is worth a watch. If there was ever a problem that was well suited for the Internet, it’s voting!
Google Reader
Google released a new version of the Google Reader a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been using it for the last few days. I think that I’ve finally found a web-based RSS reader that I can live with now.
I’ve wanted to move my RSS reading to a web reader so that I can access it anywhere, particularly on a mobile device. Google Reader in it’s previous incarnations just didn’t hit it right to me. The significant redesign they did really hit the usability issues right on the head.
If your looking for something a bit more sophisticated, and mobile, than the RSS functions of Thunderbird check out Reader. I don’t think you’ll be dissapointed.
First RUM Meeting
I attended my first Ruby Users of Minnesota (RUM) meeting tonight. I’ve wanted to go for a long time but the meetings seemed to always fall on days when I was typically out of town for business. It all worked out this time so I was excited to go. I’ve been on the mailing list for a long time and it’s a really good group of people.
Of particular note was my friend Dan
presented a side-project he did using
rex and
racc
(Ruby versions of
lex and
yacc)
to create a parser and validator for math equations written in
LaTeX on Road Sign
Math. This was pretty cool. He hacked it
up quickly and solved most of the hard problems. He got to the point so
he can evaluate that 3 \times \sqrt{4} = 6 is a
valid statement. It will be a nice thing to wrap into Road Sign Math 3.0
when the time is right.
I left the RUM meeting feeling a little scared though. I sat next to a kid named Chris who I can only imagine was dropped off by his Dad since I can’t imagine he was old enough to drive. He was obviously brilliant and immersed in all things Internet, Ruby, Mac and whatever else. Why scared? It’s so amazingly hard to stay on top of the things that you need to know in this world of computer geekdom. Anyway, I’m not going to dwell on that but instead continue to be involved in these sorts of activities that expose you to new thinking.
I have about a dozen of URL’s, notes and such to followup on from the meeting and am looking forward to the next one. (OmniGraffle Pro, parse tree, Gruff for Ruby, Nick Sieger, fuzz testing, Rinda)
Funny side note – I did a count of laptops in the room. 11 Mac laptops (mostly MacBook) including me (one of only 2 black ones) and a whopping 2 Wintel laptops. 🙂
Triple Caffeine
The
title of this post is a reference to what one of my friends calls my
regular coffee order. Iced Triple Espresso. It doesn’t get me hot in the
summer, in fact it’s refreshing. It has enough caffeine in it to shock a
horse. In fact, since the espresso is cold you can take a drink and hold
it in your mouth, swishing it around. This will give you a caffeine buzz
extra fast as it absorbs through the tongue (for best results, hold
underneath your tongue as well). Not that espresso is all about
caffeine. It does taste good after all. And I recently decided that I
wanted to be able to have the espresso experience at home. So I ordered
a DeLonghi Magnifica
fully-automatic espresso machine.
Fully-automatic is essentially like having a coffee shop in your home. This thing requires nothing of you other than hitting a couple of buttons. Occasionally you need to dump the grinds out, add some more beans and top of the water reservoir. But typical usage just involves turning it on, and a couple minutes later hitting the single shot button.
So far I’m really happy with it. Everything works exactly as advertised. I relied heavily on the user reviews on Amazon and this machine got nothing but good comments. We’ll see how it stands the test of time.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying effortless cups of espresso with perfect crema every time.
How Many of Me?
This site showed up in one of my RSS feeds recently, How Many of Me? It is a fun little site that takes census data to do rankings of people with the same name. For example, did you realize there are 49,535 people with the name John Smith. That is bigger than my home town. You could fill a medium sized city with John Smiths.
According to the census data, there are no people in the US with the last name Thingelstad. There are however 328,466 people with the first name Jamie. Of those people, 69.86% of them are female. This is something that Tammy loves to tease me about all the time, even before she had the hard data to back it up. This usually presents itself as me paying at a restaurant and the waiter not knowing who to give the card back to.
My name is the 182nd most popular first name. While Tammy’s name is compltely unambiguous – 100% of Tammy’s are women – her name is 144th most popular so not quite as creative. Of course her actual name, Tamara, is much less popular ranking 421st. However, we know from Name Voyager that neither Jamie or Tamara (Tammy) were creative for their time since they peaked in popularity when we were born.
Mazie enjoys a very rare name. There are only 4,500 Mazie’s in the US (100% are female) and it’s the 2,762nd most popular name.
Isn’t the Internet so much fun? 🙂
Sore Thumbs!
I am a frequent “CrackBerry” user. That’s the slang term for a BlackBerry for those that are not “in the know”. In recent months though I’ve started to look angrily at my CrackBerry. I’m starting to get pain in my thumbs on a pretty regular basis.
Any of you that have seen my various computers know that I have an eye to ergonomics. I use a trackball instead of a mouse because it eases my wrists. I have a split keyboard so that I’m more comfortable. I had a mild bout with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in the early 90’s that woke me up to these issues and I’ve taken them seriously ever since. I’ve not had any hand pain issues since then, until the BlackBerry entered the scene.
A quick search on Google for blackberry thumb pain results in dozens of articles on the topic. It’s obvious that there is a problem here. The thumb wasn’t intended to type! I’ve found recently that even spinning the scroll wheel up and down is a problem. I’ve resorted to reading the shortcut tips to reduce my keystrokes and simplify things. However, I think the real solution is to just use the thing less.
Thats the rub! The CrackBerry is named that for a reason – it’s addictive. On top of that, people at work have expectations that you have it with you. I’m going to manage it and pay close attention to the pain in my thumbs.
Holiday MinneDemo
Minneapolis is becoming a much cooler place to be a techie geek, startup business sort of guy. Thanks to the hard work of a very small group of people last year Minneapolis had it’s first ever Minnebar. MinneBar is a BarCamp event, also known as an “unconference”. The idea is simple, a bunch of people of like interests (in this case all things geek) convene on one spot and self-organize into a worthwhile conference. It’s like wiki meets conference.
Anyway, the 2nd edition of the more frequent and shorter minnedemo has been scheduled for December 11th at Acadia Cafe.
Minnedemo is different than Minnebar in that it’s shorter, somewhat more social, and features short demos rather than longer form presentations. I missed the first one due to a business trip, but I’m definitely going to be at the 2nd edition!
Check it out, sign up, and meet some great people. Plus, Road Sign Math is a sponsor. 🙂
Birth of a Painting
Right around 4 months ago Tammy and I spent the evening at our neighbors house with a really cool local artist named Erik Sletten. Our neighbors have several of his works and we were celebrating with them the arrival of two new ones. That night I got to do something I had never done before – flip through an artists sketchbook. I was flipping through Sletten’s sketches and as I turned the page in the middle a sketch caught my attention in a unique way. A couple of weeks passed and we decided to commission the work.
This last weekend we got to do another first. We joined Erik in his studio as he started to introduce color to our piece. It was a fun evening, and a unique opportunity to connect with him and the art. Tammy and I had mixed feelings about joining him while painting. As I told him, I want the painting he would paint, not the painting I would suggest him to paint. But Erik is a cool guy, and very chatty to boot, so it was a lot of fun.
Here is our painting being birthed in raw lines. I can’t wait to see it finished. For scale, the canvas is 5.5 feet square.
Georgia Aquarium
On the way back home from the Great Adventure we took a slight detour through Atlanta specificially to see the new Georgia Aquarium. This is the largest aquarium in the world, and after our visit I was very glad we took the detour. If you are in Atlanta, this is an absolute must see.
I’ve seen several aquariums and always enjoy them, however the Goergia Aquarium sets a new level that all others should aspire to. When you enter the aquarium you come into a space that is relatively dark and at one end there are two aquariums on either side of a relatively small door. The two aquariums have schools of fish swimming with the current toward the door. You join the fish and enter an amazing space.
This aquarium will likely always be known for it’s monstrously large viewing window in it’s equally large oceanarium. This 6 million gallon saltwater tank has a viewing window that is 23 feet tall and 61 feet wide (oh, and 2 feet thick!). You could spend an afternoon in front of that window, it’s incredible.
However, my favorite tank was the reef tank. I love reefs and theirs was the best I’ve ever seen in an aquarium. The design of the tank was great, and the health of the fish and the reef was exceptional.
I could go on and on but words aren’t as good as pictures for this type of thing. Unfortunately the Georgia Aquarium website has almost no good photos. Luckily, flickr comes to the rescue with great photos.
East Coast Adventure '06 - Day 37
On September 30, 2006 our Great East Coast Adventure came to a conclusion when we arrived back home on Saturday evening. After 37 days, 5,890 miles of driving and 8 different beds we finally got home. It was great trip, but it was equally great to finally get home and relax.
We were curious to see how Mazie would react when we got home. 5 weeks is a long time for a 15-month old kid and we thought she may just think it was another hotel. She proved us wrong when her face lit up after seein her toys and play area. You could tell she was noticably relaxed to be home.
I did a final update to the Google Earth Great Adventure with all the relevant interesting stops from the trip.
Go to day: 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37 or East Coast Adventure collection.
East Coast Adventure '06 - Day 35
It’s official! We have just finished the 5th week our trip. This was our last true day of vacation here in Charleston. We will hit the road early tomorrow heading through Atlanta with a brief stop at the Atlanta aquarium and then continuing our long journey home.
We got rained out in the morning today on our visit to the Boone Hall Plantation. Boone Hall is the only plantation still operating in America, they grow fruit now. It also has one of the most amazing entrances I’ve ever seen.
The oak trees that line the drive are 300 years old and were planted when the plantation was initially founded. It took them 200 years to meet in the middle. We didn’t get to see a lot since it was raining, but it was a cool visit.
We took the afternoon to join the local residents in a very popular activity – walking over the relatively new Ravenel bridge that connects Charleston and Mt. Pleasant. This bridge is the longest cable span bridge in the US. It’s also incredibly high and has a walking path on it. We walked up to the middle and then turned back. I have to admit that my fear of heights kicked in towards the top. I made it all the way though. It’s pretty surprising how many people go just to walk on this bridge. There are always people walking or riding their bike on it.
I’ve decided that this is “my bridge”. I find it incredibly interesting. The cable spans are so interesting. The geometry of it is great. I’ve decided that we need a bridge just like it in Minneapolis. I’m going to start lobbying for it when I return. 🙂
Tomorrow morning we depart early for Atlanta and then continue into the evening to see how far we get. We are hoping to get back to home by Saturday night, late. Don’t expect any updates from me on the road. I’m looking forward to getting back home again!
Go to day: 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37 or East Coast Adventure collection.
Thank You for the Sleep
I wrote earlier that Mazie was having a horrible time getting her sleep. Asheville was the breaking point for Tammy and I. We were like zombies, Mazie was miserable and incredibly unhappy. We finally went to a different hotel the last night and Mazie was able to sleep. The good news is that she slept great at Ed & Nancy’s, and she’s been doing great here in Charleston.
She’s slept through the night and went to bed well for the last 5 days and is doing great. It’s amazing how big of a help that is to all of us. Yeah!