Jamie Thingelstad

While getting the Internet side of life setup while on the Great Adventure I made a trip to Best Buy to get a wireless router. The apartment has broadband (of course), but it terminated to a single ethernet cable and being tethered to a desk with only one laptop simply wasn’t acceptable. I’ve got my two laptops here, plus the work one, and sofa computing is a must.

I really debated at the store. I grabbed a WRT54GS and was going to walk out but I already have a WRT54G at home and it seemed lame to get something with nothing new at all. So, I decided to jump into the world of 802.11n with the WRT300N. On top of it? It has a super cool antennae array on top. ;-)

I also grabbed a 802.11n PCMCIA card for my laptop, WPC300N, and I’m all up and running. Of course, I have no local servers here that can actually test the speed that I now have, but it will come in handy at home since I’ve found even 802.11g to be too slow for mutlimedia content or even RAW digital photos.

The setup was simple on the WRT300N, no complaints. The chassis is the same as the WRT54G with a nicer front facia. It also comes with a clip so that you can side mount it.

I did miss the opportunity though to get a router that would support IPsec and allow me to build a VPN tunnel back to the home network in Minneapolis via the ZyWall. It would have been cool, but there wasn’t a clear option in the price range I was willing to jump into.

Over the last couple of years I’ve really let my weight slide. Or should I say, climb. Slide would imply sliding down something, and I’ve definitely not been going down, but instead going up. I won’t even recount reasons for this – whatever – it is what it is. It’s time to reverse the trend and restore sensibility!

I’ve been logging my food now for two weeks. I dropped a little over 3 pounds last week. I’m happy to be logging my food. It provides a structure for me that I find very helpful. I’m going to be away from home for the next 5 weeks and I will be using my food log to keep things in control. I’m shooting for around 2,000 calories a day, plus or minus.

My first goal is to get back below 300, that will happen pretty soon. After that 280. And then to 250. When I got married I was at my lowest point I can ever recall, 210. That’s not a goal, mainly just focusing on 250.

I actually don’t have an option other than lose weight. Next summer my father-in-law has arranged a trip with all the son-in-laws. We are going to Canada fishing for a week. It sounds like a lot of fun, but the final leg of the trip is on a seaplane and each person is limited to 330 lbs of load, including themselves. So, I either drop a decent chunk of weight, or I have to go with no food, gear or clothes. 🙂

I’m going to post updates on the blog here. I know from when I did this the first time (and this had better be the last time!) that it’s good to share your objectives and progress with others.

On Friday we embarked on the Thingelstad Family Great East Coast Adventure 2006! What is this amazing event you ask? We are going to be away from home for 5 weeks. The first three will be in New Jersey while I work out of our office here, taking advantage of being in the same office as so many others. The last two weeks will be on vacation in North Carolina. Yeah!

Days 1 and 2 of the adventure were travel days. We left Minneapolis on Friday morning around 9:30a and drove, and drove, and drove. We took breaks for Mazie to get out and run around. We camped in a Starbucks in Rockford, Illinois waiting for a monsoon like rain to pass and providing an opportunity for Mazie to let out some energy, and me to get some back (triple espresso!!!). We also had a great Japanese dinner in Rockford. However, we didn’t take into account that as soon as Mazie saw the food on the grill getting cooked that she would want to eat. Squaking was moderately high. We spent the night just outside of Toledo, OH in a splendid Holiday Inn Express.

We arrived to our great little apartment here in Lawrenceville, NJ last night after another long day of driving through Ohio and Pennsylvania. At one point while driving through Ohio in the morning Tammy looked over at me and said the best line of the whole drive

I’m going to sleep. Try not to do anything stupid.

I appreciated her vote of confidence and continued to motor along while her and Mazie got some rest.

We spent Sunday here in NJ getting the apartment setup and preparing for the week. Stay tuned for more updates from the Great Adventure.

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.

Mazie is growing up so fast. She’s such an amazing kid. For the last couple of months if I asked she would come over and give me a kiss on the cheek. Well this weekend she decided all on her own she was going to give her dad a kiss! Man was that awesome. I was holding her and she comes around and gives me a smack on the cheek. I’m still beaming!

She’s doing really great. I can tell that she’s trying to learn how to deal with stairs which has her, at times, over-protective dad freaking out. I’m constantly lurching to grab her as she approaches anything resembling a stair. She’s doing a lot better walking along with me – she stays with me well for as long as a block only wandering off a little bit.

She is also starting to talk more and more. She’s figured out “help”. If she gets into a tough spot walking around, or wants something off of a counter, she will ask mom or I for “help”. She’s got “dog” or “cat” down well, including a very convincing “meow”.

She just gets better and better, and being Mazie’s dad is the best job I have. 🙂

We are all in Iowa City this weekend to see our friends Lisa & Eric and particularly their new baby girl Rachel. She’s as cute as can be and so tiny! I know Mazie was that tiny, but I have no real recollection of it.

We are staying at the Hotel Vetro, which is an overly hip hotel for Iowa City and while going to the elevator today Tammy saw someone in the hallway she was positive she knew. She stopped the guy while telling me “Isn’t that someone we know?” I looked at it wasn’t, but it was one of the actors from Desperate Housewives, Doug Savant.

I checked online and his wife is from Iowa City so I would guess they were here visiting.

Today when I stopped at Starbucks and got my morning coffee – I won the Change Game!

That’s only the 3rd (maybe 4th) time ever that I’ve won it in over 4 years.

Yesterday we were at Best Buy on my occassional visit to wonder around the store and just check stuff out. Tammy finds these trips annoying since I rarely buy anything, and after 5 minutes decide to leave. Yesterday though I decided to check out the gaming aisles and stumbled on the Nintendo DS. I had read about these “brain games” for the DS in Scientific American Mind magazine and was intrigued. They had one of these on the demo unit so we played it, and it was pretty fun. 10 minutes later we walked out of the store with a DS Lite and three games.

I decided that my ban on ever buying a gaming console again (at least until Mazie is old enough to find it fun) was not applicable since this is a portable unit. So far, it’s a lot of fun and the portability makes a great for flights. The initial set of games we got were Brain Age, Big Brain Academy and Super Mario Bros. Now it’s time to start looking up information on hacking the DS! 🙂

Tammy and I have been talking for a couple years now about getting some land that we could eventually (10+ years) build a house on and maybe live on when Mazie (and any other potential, future kids – settle down Grandma’s, no news here) have moved out, etc. I’ve been thinking that we shouldn’t bother waiting to get the land until then – prices are likely to be higher and we could use it right now as a getaway on weekends.

This Friday we did our first road trip to tour some options and looked at 6 properties in the Red Wing, Zumbrota area of Minnesota and in Wisconsin on the other side of the river. Mazie was with her grandparents so driving 240 miles in the country was actually pretty fun. We are looking at property between 15 and 25 acres. We want something within one to two hours from the Twin Cities. We want something fairly wooded, with a good building site. Electric service is not needed.

It was really good to look at these properties because it helped clarify how we would use the land and what qualities are important for us. There is a lot that we want to do.

First, a small living option is necessary right away. Tammy did a bunch of research and found this great option for us called the miniHome. As soon as you own the land, you need a place to stay on it and the idea of camping every time you visit wasn’t that appealing to either of us.

The miniHome is a near ideal solution for this. It’s rated as a mobile home so it can be brought to a site without any special police escort. It’s designed to be ecologically friendly and self-contained. They have an option that puts solar electric and a wind turbine with it for complete off-grid usage. It has reservoirs for water and waste. In short, this is a one-stop solution to having 350 square feet of comfortable, heated space with all the conveniences you would expect. The only thing lacking is air conditioning, which you could add if you wanted. (Note: it even has an ethernet network!) We would plan on leaving this on the land to be used as a guest option as well.

The other structure that we would need right away would be some sort of utility building. This essentially would be a 2-car garage. This would be where the solar array and wind turbines would come together with a battery bank to store electricity. The utility building would house all of this and also provide storage for a car and other tools. I would probably need an ATV with a trailer that could be parked in there as well.

Obviously we need to identify a good spot for an eventual home. There are a lot of structural issues to consider for this. However, we would add other issues as well since we want it to be efficient and integrated with the location. Correct sun alignment would be important for passive solar heat, for example.

All of these locations would require access by large machinery. Everything else would be fine just being accessible by ATV.

I would want to have a nice, big firepit on the property. Ideally this would allow 10-15 people to enjoy a fire, and include an option for open pit cooking as well. Preferably this would be in an area with a lot of trees.

For the evenings, and since we’d have the dark sky for it, I would want to put up a dome for my telescope with a permanent mount. This would be wonderful and make it so much easier to take in the night sky. This would ideally be in a fairly open area, on the highest point possible to get the best view to the horizon. Electricity is necessary but can be easily provided by a small solar PV module and an isolated battery. I would need to extend the network to it as well, most likely using some sort of wireless option.

It would be a shame to have a bunch of land without a good spot for a garden. Tammy and I are far from green thumbs, but we definitely want this option. And last but not least we want to have a cool walking path that would snake through the land and connect everything up. This would allow for nice, evening strolls or just serve the utility of getting to various places.

We also learned that the approach to the land was important for us. We didn’t like land that was right next to a busy road. We liked it much more when you left the highway, then took a smaller road with may eventually meander to a gravel road for access. Also of importance is what is around you. We really liked one property but didn’t like that there was a big campground a couple of miles down the same road.

There is much more research to do, much to learn about this, and we aren’t in a rush. However, it is pretty exciting to think about the potential!

We got the Nintendo DS because we liked these brain games. We bought both Brain Age and Big Brain Academy. As if you care , here are my comments on the games.

Brain Age

Brain Age is slow to impress, but opens up a lot as you start to play it more and more. The game feels well grounded in research, and in general the puzzles get plenty hard fast enough. The game does a very good job of introducing random elements into it, and even though multiple people don’t play it at the same time, it brings data from other people playing Brain Age into the sessions. For example, when I finished the math quiz today it told me that Tammy did a better job than I did. This resulted in me doing the quiz over and over until I beat her of course. Great encouragement.

One of the really fun things about Brain Age is it’s use of voice recognition. Some of the puzzles require you to speak to identify things and it does a good job of interpreting you. Last, the included Sudoku game is very well done. All in, this is a lot of fun.

Big Brain Academy

Big Brain Academy is more game-like than Brain Age. The characters are almost goofy looking, and the games seem more like parlour tricks than well researched logic tests. However, it is a lot of fun as well. It allows multiple player profiles, but doesn’t tie them together in anyway to create competition. It doesn’t use handwriting recognition or speech. The puzzles do get very difficult and it is certainly taxing, but not as well executed as Brain Age.

The winner is…

Honestly, if you like puzzles, get both. They are different enough that they are both worth having. However, Brain Age is definitely superior in almost all dimensions – even without the Sudoku game.