Family
Heartfelt updates about family milestones and everyday moments. From taking Mazie to college and annual visits to the Renaissance Festival to Swedish‑pancake breakfasts and VR outings with the kids, this category celebrates togetherness.
- While I’m sure physical signs of getting older have been appearing for a while, but I seem to be noticing them more. Hair is thinning. A few grey ones. But in general I still think I have my boy like look. 🙂
- I’m totally smarter now that I’m 40. Or so I think…
- It’s really rare that I sleep past 7 am. I think that has more to do with kids than being 40.
Super Fort
This morning Mazie, Tyler and I built a super fort in the living room! Here is the view from inside!
It was awesome!
We anchored it on the couch and then built support structures with OGOBILD Kit Pod sets. For Christmas Mazie got one of these sets from Grandma and Grandpa Olson. These things were as much a toy for me as them it seemed. The only problem with the kit? There was only 30 poles and 10 connectors. We couldn’t build big enough.
So, on my 40th birthday I decided the kids each needed a present from me. Two OGOBILD Kit Pods later (Amazon) and we were ready to build! We made some pretty big structures but always wanted to turn them into forts. Sheets weren’t big enough, and they weighed too much. What to do?
Parachute!
Not just any parachute. A 20 foot parachute! I thought about getting the 12 foot one but it seemed like it could be too small. A few days later and we got to build some huge stuff and wrap it in an awesome parachute. More fun than you can shake a stick at!
Honestly the parachute is too big for inside use, but it has plenty of room to make forts out of. Plus it is pretty light so it hangs way better than a sheet. It’s still plenty durable for the kids and even Chase the dog. We had a great morning hanging out in the Super Fort.
Now we just need even more OGOBILD’s to make bigger stuff! Just kidding!
SOPA Scrapbook
I participated in the SOPA blackout on January 18th. All of my personal websites went dark at 8:00am CT and returned at 8:00pm CT. I served 6,235 STOP SOPA notices. My handful of sites were just a drop in the big ocean of over 115,000 sites that went dark. It really felt historic. I took notice of the first time that so much of the Internet banded together to make something happen, and did it happen. Just two days after the blackout the bills have lost major supporters and are going back to committee.
It felt like something momentous. A punctuation mark in the big timeline of the Internet. I decided to grab some screenshots and make a little scrapbook of the day.
My Sites
Here is what thingelstad.com looked like on SOPA blackout day.
Tammy also participated, blacking out Smaller Than A Redwood.
And so did Mazie. I explained to her that we were blacking out our websites in protest of a proposed law. She asked what protest meant and I explained it to her. She didn’t have a strong opinion about SOPA, but felt it was right to go along with her Mom and Dad.
Same Template
The awesome template I used to black my sites out was developed by Zach Johnson. He had an amazing SOPA blackout story with so many websites using his template. Here is what his website looked like. He increased the font size slightly on his site.
His template got picked up by a lot of sites, including Greenpeace.
Net.Freedom
I was happy to see sites and services that I care about, and in some cases donate to, supporting the blackout. Wikipedia was the largest site on the Internet to go completely dark. I thought it was a great touch that you could still get to the Wikipedia page for the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) though.
I’m a big fan of Semantic MediaWiki, which is a suite of extensions for MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. The team behind that project followed the lead of Wikipedia and also went dark. I liked their message and display.
WordPress is a strong supporter of an open and free Internet and they made WordPress.org completely dark.
It was cool that Automattic also took action with WordPress.com and did a very creative blackout of just content.
I’m a supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and they censored their logo and used their site to share information on their opposition to SOPA.
I’m also a supporter of Creative Commons and they put a black banner on top of their site.
Publishers
A variety of publishers took part on the blackout. Ars Technica had a good banner with content regarding SOPA. Although I thought the banner ad on top was tacky and a bit tone deaf to the point of the protest.
O’Reilly did a very nice job with it’s blackout and a strong message an simple design.
Wired did a very cool blackout using the censoring of words and then changing it as you moved around on the page.
One of the best web comics did an awesome blackout. This is what xkcd did.
And The Oatmeal also did an amazing blackout. This one had an animated GIF that went on for a while about why he took issue with SOPA and involved Oprah on a jet ski in only the way the Oatmeal could.
I Can Has Cheezburger had a nicely done call to action.
Disappointing but predictably, my former colleagues at the Wall Street Journal came out in favor of SOPA.
Big Sites
I was curious what Google would do. The censored logo was striking, and to many folks that weren’t plugged into what was going on I think it was a strong message.
Flickr did a very creative blackout allowing people on Flickr to blackout any photos on Flickr they wanted to. I blacked out one of my photos.
Mozilla, the organization behind the open source Firefox web browser, participated in the blackout.
Reddit was one of the first big websites to say they would participate in the blackout. They had a great mix of content and call to action.
Criagslist participated in the most boring HTML display possible, totally fitting Craigslist.
BoingBoing did a nice blackout and I thought it was cool that they actually showed the HTTP status code.
Minecraft, a game played by 4.7 million people, went dark for the day.
Facebook didn’t do anything that impressive, which was a bit disappointing. They could have blacked out their logo like Google. However, Mark Zuckerberg did at least post a comment on Facebook regarding SOPA.
More Protests
I’m a customer of Pinboard, a paid bookmarking utility. He didn’t blackout, and I was happy they didn’t since I pay for the service and use it daily. There was a call to action on the top of the site.
I was happy to see my congressman Keith Ellison participating in the blackout.
Dave Winer blogs at Scripting.com and had really debated if he was going to black out. He did, and in fact just totally blacked out with nothing on his site.
Archive.org went dark as well.
Going White
TheDailyWTF decided to be different and go white.
FARK also went white. I don’t know much about FARK other than they “fark’d"Road Sign Math once.
ZanHabits also went white, in a very zen way.
Tin Ear
Sadly, not all Internet leaders participated. Even though Bing has this big image format on their website that would have easily led to something interesting, even just a black image. But instead it just looked as it always does.
Yahoo was even worse, sporting football news and advertisements. Completely ignoring such a historic event.
Forty
Two weeks ago I turned 40. I’ve been wanting to write a “Forty” blog post but each time I think to do it I find myself with little to say. I figure it is time for me to just start writing and see what happens.
I had an absolutely awesome birthday, thanks to my most awesome wife Tammy. She planned a simply great day of fun! We had a great breakfast at Original Pancake House. We had a nice time at the Como Park Conservatory where Mazie took lots of pictures and Tyler was in constant surprise of everything. We came home and Mazie baked a birthday cake for me, with help from Tammy. I had suggested that I would like a vanilla cake with strawberries and whipped cream frosting but she could do what she thought would be good instead. She decided I would like a super chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. 🙂
I picked dinner and we had Indian food ordered in from India Palace which was delicious. Tammy had planned that we would have a family fire that night with S’mores because I like fires but complain we don’t do them enough. After about an hour a bunch of friends showed up and the S’mores fire turned into a birthday celebration with music, fires and beer. It was awesome and I was completely surprised!
It was pretty much the best birthday, ever!
I’ve been asked many, many times “How does it feel?” and I don’t think I have any good answers. Feels the same as yesterday. So, let me see what comes to mind:
See, not much interesting. Tammy had much more to say about being 40. Ask a question in the comments and I’ll see if I have anything more interesting to share about being 40!
First Snow of 2011
First snow of the year just started falling. Really big flakes slowly floating down. First snow is always special. I hope it is still on the ground for Mazie in the morning.
Tyler Double Doodling
Tyler has been having a great time playing with the Magna Doodles lately. He will not just play with one. He has to have both. And he mostly enjoys carrying them all over the house. Occasionally he will stop to scribble on them. But only for a moment and then more carrying.
Soccer with Puddles
Mazie had a soccer game on Saturday. The field had a few puddles on it. The kids had no issues playing through.
Keep Out
Mazie and her friend Gigi were playing today and decided to add some ad hoc signage to the playhouse. So awesome. I love the spelling.
Tyler and I played outside a bit tonight after dinner. He spent some time playing with the lock box. I think given enough time, he might get it. 😀
32 Plants Planted
The landscapers were here this week and got the yard looking a lot better. We decided to do the planting ourselves though and took advantage of 50% off sales in September at Wagners. We left with 32 plants and got them all in today. I did most of the digging and Tammy and Mazie put them in the ground. It looks great and the plants should have plenty of good weather to get established before winter.
Tyler's Tractor
Shortly after Tyler was born my Mom got him a pedal tractor. At my Grandparents farm there was always a metal pedal tractor that my cousins and I use to ride all the time. In comparison to new toys, it was ridiculously heavy and hard to get moving. But we had a great time with it. It was a John Deere, just like Grandpa drove.
I’ve kept the tractor in the box since Tyler was just too small, but I decided to put it together today so he can start playing with it. He is still far too small to make it go, but he thought it was pretty cool to sit on!
I had to do one of these hip retro photos too.
Mazie had to give it a try to!
