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? 🙂