Jamie Thingelstad

On Monday of this week I woke up and as I usually do after getting ready for the day went to sit down at the iMac that is off of our kitchen to check on email, visit some websites for news, etc. When I sat down I noticed that the iMac was off which seemed very strange. We don’t turn our computers off and on top of that I had just two days prior put a UPS on this computer so a power blip shouldn’t have had any affect.

Not sure what was going on I hit the power button and the power indicator would light up for a fraction of a second and then turn off. Tried again, same thing. I wondered if this UPS was a problem so I plugged it straight into the wall, no go. This is not good but luckily it’s still on warranty.

I did some searches and it seems like a failed power supply in a iMac G5 isn’t terribly rare. At least it’s common enough that Apple has posted instructions for diagnosing this on your own. I followed the instructions and verified that I needed to take it to an Apple shop and get fixed.

I dropped it off at FirstTech that afternoon over lunch and they called back that very afternoon to verify the power supply was dead. Here is the classic part. Apple doesn’t have any of these. Oh, and they don’t know when they will get any in. So, I called just yesterday and the status is still the same. My wonderful, fancy and expensive G5 sits on a shelf awaiting a new power supply from Apple. They have no ETA.

Why is it that Apple cannot figure out supply chains? They never have parts or enough of anything it seems. This has been a problem for them for years and years. Oh well, someday I will get my Mac back.

I recently received a flier from the League of American Bicyclists regarding the Bicycling Friendly Community campaign they run. I’ve been a member of LAB for years and plan to continue. I’m a member of many bicycling organizations but LAB is unique and in many ways the most important. The other organizations focus on rides and trails mostly while LAB focuses on Washington DC and policy. They are our voice (I’ll use the word lobbyist trying to forget the slimy implications) for cycling in America. In addition to getting some additional funding from me for this program, I decided to do a little grass-roots advocacy of my own. The letter below is to the Mayor of Minnetonka.

Mayor Anderson,

I will keep this brief since I’m sure you are very busy. I live in Minnetonka and am also a cycling enthusiast. In addition to being a member of the Twin Cities Bicycling Club I’m also a member of the national organization League of American Bicyclists (LAB). I love cycling in all of it’s modes whether for competitive racing, recreational riding for fitness or just commuting to work. The bike is an amazingly elegant machine.

I’m writing to you because I recently became aware of the LAB program Bicycling Friendly Communities. This program is an awards program that recognizes cities that actively support bicycling. I looked over the list of communities in the program and was surprised to not see Minnesota anywhere in the list (click here for list). We have a surprisingly strong cycling community in Minnesota given our winters and have a history of advocacy, in fact leading the country in miles of bicycle trails!

This brings me to the point of my letter. I would like to encourage you to nominate Minnetonka to become a Bicycling Friendly Community and be the first in Minnesota to achieve at least a bronze specification. I think it would be a reinforcement of the already strong bicycling program the city has as well as a road to additional ways to bring cycling into our community.

Sincerely,

Jamie Thingelstad

Our power service is horrible (example, another). There is just no way around it. We seem to get regular under-voltage events and the occasional power cycle on a regular basis. Every once in a while for fun we get thrown a multi-hour outage as well. What a blast! For a computer geek like myself, this is nerve racking. I had some new UPS units on my Amazon wish list for a long time but it seems nobody thinks that is a fun present.

I hadn’t “right-sized” my UPS for my server for years. During that time I went from a simple tower with a couple of drives to my terabyte server with 10 platters spinning at all times. The Back-UPS Pro 650 I had on it was completely inadequate and to make it even better a couple months ago the battery had given up the ghost so there was NO battery power at all. I issued a self-test one day on accident which resulted in an immediate reboot!

I upgraded my server setup to a Smart-UPS 1500VA RM model. I chose the rack-mount model because I plan in the coming weeks to buy a half-rack for my server gear in the laundry room to get it all organized and setup nice. Great UPS. Got a little nervous first time I plugged it in. This thing has much more robust circuitry than any other UPS I have so it makes a lot of “electrical noises”.

I also solved the problem for my home theatre PC and the two TiVos. Now we will not miss our favorite satellite content even if the power is down for a bit! 🙂 I got a Back-UPS RS 1000VA for this stuff. My only disappointment here is that it seems that the Back-UPS RS line only works with PowerChute Personal Edition so I cannot tie it into the main PowerChute Console and manage everything from one place. Maybe they will change that in a future release of the software.

I got a new battery for my old Back-UPS Pro 650VA and that is now running my office and moved the absolutely lame Back-UPS 350VA that I had here to my iMac G5. Every computer is now on its own UPS. Yeah!

I just had one of those amazingly rare situations of having great customer service, with a bank no less! The second part of this sounds funny since I live, eat and breath technology but this whole experience was great.

I reconcile my bank accounts essentially daily in Quicken. I’ve done this forever (or at least over 6 years which is mostly forever). I saw on Friday that a check cleared for our plumber (see related story) for $158.95 but I had entered $138.95 in the register. Something was amiss!

So, first I logged into USBank.com and used the nifty feature where I can see an image of each check processed. I looked at this check and right away saw the issue, I had written the 3 somewhat sloppy and you could mistake it for a 5, but the long-hand version clearly said “thirty”. I called up USBank and entered my information to get to a customer service person. After getting the person on the line she brought up the check on her system. We both agreed on the error and she applied a credit.

Here is the part that just shocked me. She told me to refresh my screen and I would see the correction. I was taken aback. Surely the USBank.com site runs on some daily dump of data. There’s no way this is all tied right into the main transaction system for the bank! No way. I hit refresh and right there was my credit.

I wish all my transactions were this simple. I left with an immediate solution, I was empowered to verify the situation without even calling them and I and the customer service person were looking at the same information. Kudos USBank!

I’ve written on our site about some of the trials and tribulations I had with my previous gigabit switch. I had purchased a cheap SMC 8508T switch a while back, it died, I had to RMA it and I’ve been having very, very odd problems lately. I finally decided enough is enough and I decided to get a switch that I could manage at some level. I looked at a number of switches and the NetGear GS716T seemed to be a good compromise between price and performance.

I plugged the switch in tonight, just unplugged everything from the current switch to the new one. Everything came up no problem. The 716T is a smart switch but it doesn’t require any configuration, out of the box it will just operate as a dumb switch. After plugging in and verifying everything was working fine I installed the administrative software and it immediately found the switch and I was able to configure it for the network.

Physically the box is stable. Power supply is internal so no annoying power brick. Good compliment of lights – however I find the use of green v. yellow LED for different speeds impossible to detect on the device. Luckily I don’t really care since the web interface gives all this information and more. The two fans built into the unit are loud though. I wouldn’t want this thing where you would care about ambient noise. Rack mount ears included and it will be very stable in a rack.

The administrative interface is basic, but covers all the bases. I haven’t figured out the details of the VLAN support, trunking, QoS, etc. Not sure I even need it but will be fun to play with. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next firmware upgrade so I can get jumbo frames and basic SNMP support (need to have MRTG graphs on all the ports of course!).

Tammy and I went to our first baby class tonight. We are taking the 6-week Introduction to Child Birth class at North Memorial. Highlights from the class include…

• Obligatory wearing of the Empathy Belly by all the men in the class while their pregnant wives instructed them to lay down, roll over, bend down, pick up something, sit. A variety of commands similar to what you would give to any trained puppy. Yes I fully participated as well. Rolling over with 40 pounds strapped to your gut is rather hard. My pleas that I had already formed my own empathy belly over the last few months were met on deaf ears.

• Instructor asked us to get into small groups and put together our list of top 10 questions. I suggested to put on the list ‘What are we supposed to do when we get home with the kid?!?’ The person taking notes that I was joking. Oh, if only I was. ;-)

• Required graphic video of a woman delivering a baby. Oh boy. Don’t think I need to add all that much here, particularly don’t need to include any pictures.

• Found out we were the only couple in the class using a midwife. That surprised me. Maybe it shouldn’t have.

• Realized we need to get our doula picked soon. Surprised that a handful of people didn’t know what a doula was either.

I feel like I should invite Tammy to my next annual physical just so we can level the field with all this information I’m getting lately.

Today Tammy and I truly realized how completely and totally clueless we are in some respects to our upcoming adventure in parenthood. The day started with what seemed like a simple task. We needed to go and register for the upcoming baby shower. Simple enough task. We registered for our wedding and that was actually kind of fun, I got to shoot things with the scanner and she got to shop a lot.

Tammy had done some research on this to figure out what should be on our list, what the necessities were, etc. All-in-all this should have been a pretty simple process. Our first stop was at USA Baby. Tammy showed me the car seat and stroller combination that she liked and I thought it looked great too. If the rest of the day was going to be like this it would be a breeze! Evaluate the different products, give it a tug, see which one feels better and move on. The rest of the trip to USA Baby wasn’t worthwhile and we decided not to register there, not enough registry worthy stuff.

We then proceeded to the mega-mart of baby goodness that is Babies-R-Us. We stopped at the registry desk and got set-up. They had a scanner gun for me so I could have fun shooting things with the little red line. This is how shopping should be all the time. You get to carry a device and scan each item you want. Seriously, let’s get rid of the shopping carts and just walk around with scanners. Wireless transmission of each item as we scan it and then pick up a box at the checkout! Anyway, that’s another post. 🙂

We proceeded to start building the registry list and walked over to the thing that any moron knows you need if you are going to have a baby, bottles! We stood looking at the “wall of bottles” from a variety of companies. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. We picked up different bottles and looked them over. Fifteen minutes passed. We wondered if we wanted the bottles with the plastic bags in them or not. Twenty minutes passed. Do you want bottles with a bend in it? Do you need a sanitizer? What about a bottle warmer? What is the bend in the bottle even for?

This is the point where we realized we were really, hopelessly lost. These books list a ton of things that you “need”. Do you really need all this stuff? It seems crazy! Babies were born and prospered plenty before the invention of all these plastic items. What do you need? What is purely optional? What is a poor sales job trying to simply extract money from your wallet? Aargh!

We spent about 2 hours or more building a list of items. We left in a state of despair wondering where the baby sleeps when you go to a hotel? How and where is a bassinet used? Do you need the bottles with a bend in them?

I’m sure we’ll figure all of this out but it sure left us in a state of confusion. A quick call to a friend left a recommendation to get a copy of Baby Bargains. We proceeded directly to Barnes & Noble and purchased the book. Hopefully we will be able to get some wisdom from it…

I’ve commented before on the incredibly poor quality of reading materials for dads-to-be. One of the books that we have been following week-by-week of the pregnancy has these inane “Dad Tip” sections in each week. This weeks was so crazy to me that I just had to share it. From Your Pregnancy Week by Week the “Dad Tip” for Week 29 is

After the baby is born, you may want to take time off to help out at home and to be part of your baby’s early development…

This is the 5th edition of this book by the way. It was published in 2004! Now, I realize that there was a day and age when a new father may simply get a call from his wife in the hospital and go visit after work, but wasn’t that like 50 years ago or more! It seems rather insane to me that a father would need to be “tipped” to take some time off when his new baby is born.

I like to think that I’m not a helpless guy around the house. I try to fix things here and there. I’ve got the tools to do basic repairs and maintenance. Sometimes I get in over my head and I usually have a pretty good sense of when it’s time to stop and call in professional help before causing more problems than we started with. In reality I’m probably not all that “handy” at all, but I sure like to think that I am. Probably a “guy thing”. So, when prompted with the opportunity to prove that “handiness” I don’t hesitate to dive in and see what I can do.

Last night I got home about an hour before we were expecting dinner guests. Nothing big, only one couple coming over, not a big party or anything. Anyway, when I got home Tammy informed me that the kitchen sink was stopped up. There was water standing in both basins and she had tried running the disposal more thinking it would agitate things out but it did no good. I decided to take a look into the situation and see if I could help.

First thing I did was unplug the garbage disposal. Tammy’s constantly shoving her hand in there and fidgeting with things without unplugging it. This makes my spine tingle for very irrational reasons. Before I shove my hand in that “beast of destruction” it’s getting unplugged and I’m testing that it doesn’t turn on with the switch. I felt around and nothing was amiss. We ran it and this time it shot water a good foot out of the sink. Water that was also laced with little bits of carrots and potatoes, the last things to go through the disposal.

I started poking on the other basin and trying to see through even more carrot and potato bits floating in a few inches of water. Deciding that it just had to be clogged with too much debris from the disposal I put a clothes hangar (this is one of the “professional tools”) down the drain and I could feel a lot of blockage and muck, or whatever word plumbers use to describe the junk that keeps water from going down in your drain.

I decided that if I could just put a plumbers snake down this thing I could probably clear it. I retrieved our miniature snake that is used primarily for getting hair out of shower drains from the garage and tried to run it down, but the drain openings were just too small. And this is where things went from relatively harmless to a complete mess.

I felt the drain through the water and the bottom “bolt thing” (another professional term) was loose so I started to remove it. My thinking here was this was just a bolt to hold this drain cover on. I could remove it and voila, I would have all the room I would need to run the snake. It turns out this bolt is actually much more substantial than just holding any old cover on. It turns out in fact, as I’m sure anybody that knows really anything about plumbing knows, which I obviously do not, that this bolt holds the drain onto the sink!

I was able to remove the bolt with no problems, but then as soon as I started to fidget with the drain I heard a gushing sound as the water that was in the basin started to rush onto the floor! I’m not talking about a little bit of water by the way. I was doing all this work through about 4-5 inches of standing water, a few gallons of water! After about 10 seconds of water gushing we had a small lake of carrot-y, potato-y water on the floor and about 15 minutes until our guests would be arriving for dinner.

Here is the point in my story where I really must thank Tammy. She could have read me the riot act for not turning on my brain or trying to do this minutes before guests arrived, but she just laughed. It was a huge mess. After the water drained on the floor I put things back the way they were, we got things cleaned up and other than the fact that we couldn’t use the sink the night proceeded as normal. That is until a couple hours later when we went downstairs and realized the water had came through the floor and poured itself all over my desk downstairs! Luckily no computers were damaged, however my iPod has a nasty dishwater residue all over it. I’m now groaning over the potential for the ceiling drywall to be damaged. Hopefully we’ll be spared.

A plumber is on the way today. I should have skipped my little adventure and just fixed this with a phone call to begin with. But hey, now I know what that bolt thing is for in the middle of the drain!

Subject really says it all. This is definitely a rant. I’m writing this on a plane. I’ll post it after I land and get to the hotel when I will be a rejoicing with glee at no longer being confined to my 9 cubic feet of space. I’m on a business trip right now and being reminded minute by minute why flying is such a horrible experience.

I’m flying coach, as seems to be the case most of the time these days. I don’t fly enough to be gold or platinum anymore and upgrades come far and few between to those that are just silver frequent flyers. Honestly though, I would rather not get the upgrades and fly less frequently. It’s not a very good trade-off.

Just now while getting my laptop out I had to lunge to the rescue of my poor screen. I had opened the computer on my seat tray and pushed myself back as far as I can in the seat so I had some hope of using the it. Just as doing this the person in front of me decides to recline and my computer was being squeezed in this vice. I kindly (I hope) asked the person to not recline, they were okay with this, so now I can actually try to do something productive for three hours. Here’s an idea, let’s all just agree that you CANNOT RECLINE IN COACH! Deal?

While typing the last paragraph I’ve been nailed by the beverage cart TWICE as it went down the aisle. No “excuse me” from the attendants or anything. After all, we are just cattle right?

Just as I get settled in and start typing, tunes going on the laptop and feeling comfortable the guy on the window has to get up. Yeah. I’m typing now while standing with the laptop balanced on the top of the seat. Oh, and even more amusing. After I write about my experience with the seat reclining a guy in the row next to me just had his laptop taco’d by a recliner in front of him. He didn’t ask him to stop though. Is that more considerate than me or just being a push over? You pick. This plane is 100% full. If the airlines cannot make money in this market, I don’t know how they ever could. Maybe if they spent just 1% of effort actually trying to make customers more comfortable they wouldn’t be thought of as the Greyhound of the Sky. Grrrrr…