Jamie Thingelstad

On Friday night we went to see The Incredibles on opening night. We erred on the side of caution and went to the later show to avoid the overflow of kids that were sure to go to the earlier one. However, on the flipside Tammy found it impossible to stay awake. Somehow we have really turned into early risers.

Pixar did a great job on this one. I remembered back to Toy Story and it’s amazing how far animation technology has come. The nice thing is that you no longer even think about the fact that this is all computer generated (unless you want to), it’s completely transparent which I think is proof that this stuff has matured.

The story was fun and funny. It was surprisingly longer than I expected. I guess I’m used to these animated things being 80-90 minutes and at 105 this was notably longer (or maybe it was the later hour!). Anyway, fun flick for all, recommend it.

On Saturday we found ourselves doing something that we both recalled we hadn’t done probably in a decade. We were hopping into the car to drive hundreds of miles just to see a performance. Now, a decade ago I may have been found doing a road trip like this for a punk rock concert, today we found ourselves driving 360 miles to see Ira Glass of This American Life.

We headed out on I-94 and went straight from home to Milwaukee. As we were driving I noted again that either Wisconsin has tremendously more road kill or they do not do a good job of cleaning up the roads. We saw more than twenty deer in various states of decay on the side of the road. Driving I-94 West instead of East for a dozen hours as I’ve done many times you will see a deer on the side of the road dead, but it’s rare. For some reason Wisconsin peppers the side of the road to a disturbing amount.

We arrived in Milwaukee and checked into the Wyndham hotel downtown. The hotel was perfect as it was in the same building as the Pabst Theater. We had dinner with a friend of Tammy’s family, Jennifer McDaniel. Tammy was friends with Jennifer when she was like 9 months old. We had dinner at the Water Street Brewery and then walked back to the theater for the evening with Ira Glass.

We saw Ira Glass perform about a year-and-a-half ago in Minneapolis and were amazed by how great it was. The show is about how they make This American Life. We both love the show – we listened to five episodes of it on our drive. The show that we saw was the same structure as the one that we saw last time, however it was still great. The content inside the structure was updated. I can’t encourage you enough to go see one of his performances.

By the way, the Pabst Theater we found out while there is the 4th oldest operating theater in the country. It was a very nice place with the exception of pretty tight seating as is common in old theaters.

I just finished reading the new Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything. I’ve read a number of Bryson’s books and they are all without exception great. I would recommend Bryson’s books to essentially anyone I know. I eagerly got this new book a while back. First, Bryson’s books are typically very funny. I didn’t find this one nearly as funny, but it wasn’t because he failed, I just don’t think he tried to make this as funny. However, it was very interesting nonetheless.

This is a good book for people who, like myself, find science really interesting but not so interesting that you want to read text books. Bryson does just as the title suggests and covers everything from the magma cooling and the formation of Earth all the way to leaded gasoline, cellular biology and the history of mankind! It’s a great book to fill a Cliff Claven like reportoire of interesting facts. Bryson correctly focuses on the things that the average person would find interesting and doesn’t delve into deep science. He highlights the politics of science and those rare individuals that spend their entire life focusing on a single species of moss.

Amongst the things that you can impress friends with:

• Did you know that Yellowstone Park is on top of a huge volcano that is likely to blow in the next few thousand years and take out a lot of the United States?
• Did you know that sometimes planes drop a 1,000 feet out of the blue? It’s rare, but it’s happened.
• Did you know that the same person that introduced CFCs also introduced leaded gas? He did more damage to the environment than perhaps any other single person.

I found out today that First Avenue has closed its doors. Anyone that spent there twenties in the Minneapolis area in the 90s spent many very fun evenings at First Avenue. It will always be remembered, and hopefully it comes back!

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 quarts of water
• 10 sticks of cinnamon
• 10 all spice berries
• 1/2 teaspoon whole cloves
• 2 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 gallons of apple cider
• 2 quarts of orange juice
• 1 cup of lemon juice

Directions

1. Bring water, sugar and spices to boil for 10 mins.
2. Let water mixture cool for 1 hour.
3. Add apple cider, orange juice and lemon juice.

I store it back in the gallon jugs I buy the apple cider in. The more times you reheat it, the better it seems to taste.

Friday Night Lights is the movie that you get when you mix Hoosiers with Any Given Sunday. The movie has the great but completely unrealistic action shots that make Any Given Sunday so much fun. This is high school though, not pro or even college, which really reminded me of Hoosiers. It even had the alcoholic Dad that embarasses and abuses his son subplot where he comes clean in the battle to “win State”.

I did like it though. It was an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours and even had me pumping my fist a couple of times at the choreographed action on the screen.

I really don’t care for daylight savings time. There are a couple of things I appreciate. The balance of getting more light earlier and later is a give and take. Mostly I really dislike how it disrupts my sleep pattern. It always seems to take a full week for me to get used to it. It’s like mini-jet lag without moving anywhere.

My method for dealing with it is very specific. I like to make sure I change every clock before I go to sleep, and then I wake up somewhat unaware that anything changed. I forgot to do that last night so I had to run around first thing this morning before I became cognizant of the time. As I was changing the 15th clock it dawned on me that we have household clock proliferation.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

• Digital cameras all have clocks. Had to change two of these. Let’s see, there is enough computer in here to do amazing stuff with imaging but no ability to automatically change the clock?
• Remote controls!? You bet. Two Philips Pronto’s with their own clocks. They can learn IR codes and do all sorts of gymnastics that make them worthwhile. Dealing with DST is not one of them.
• One Polar wristwatch. It can tell me what my heart rate is and theoretically my VO2 Max but no clue about handling DST.
• Microwave and ovens both have clocks, two more. I’m not going to blame them a lot since the electronics are so basic. But it sure would be easy to fix.
• The phones have their own clock. Kudos to them for taking the time of the master unit so I don’t have to change it on every phone. But it has date and time, it’s trivial to adjust for DST as well!
• I count at least 10 good ole’ clocks that I had to change. Can’t blame them, it’s just a AA battery with a clock mechanism.

Only devices to deal with this on their own are the computers and our TiVo. There has to be a better way.

Tammy and I volunteered at the Circus Juventas Boo Ball last night. I think it’s a fairly common thing that volunteering for small to medium sized events is generally a somewhat chaotic and unorganized event. We were initially given the task of “walk around and just help out with things” which was quickly turning into “you just get into the event for free” which I felt a little bad about. After all, didn’t seem like volunteering to me. In the end though we were asked to help direct people as they came to the event to get them into the right line – will call, cash or credit card. In short, we had a job that would have been done better by some moderately decent inanimate signage.

Some observations from our evening of volunteering…

The Boo Ball is a 21+ event and working the door we did get to check out all the costumes as people came in. The men didn’t really have any rhyme or reason to their costumes. There was a really good mummy and some notable scary looking costumes, but no prevailing theme. However, for the women the theme was clearly, shall we say, revealing? It seems that Halloween events must really be an excuse to look as trampy as you can without worrying what your girlfriends might say. I’m not complaining of course, this is just an observation.

Additionally, you would expect that queuing people into the right line would be a fairly simple task. And in fact, early comers to the event were fairly observant. However, you could tell the few drinks at the bar before hand as people arrived later significantly degraded their ability to comprehend anything quickly. A couple of times I thought I was explaining particle physics to someone looking for an answer to “Do you have tickets already?”.

The event was pretty cool. I’d recommend going to the Boo Ball as a participant in the future. If you are curious how the heck we ended up volunteering at Circus Juventas it is because Tammy and her sister are taking their adult circus classes. She loves it. I keep telling her to write something about it here, but she is shy. 🙂

After vowing to never buy another video game system ever again after dumping more money than I care to even think about into the Dreamcast a few years ago and before that into the cutting edge 3DO I finally broke down and bought an Xbox.

Mod Chips. The Xbox has proven to be one of the most modifiable consoles out there. For not a lot of money I can get a mod chip that snaps onto the board and replace the hard drive with a whopper 200G drive and instantly I’ve got a really fun, media center type PC.

You can FTP files to it, it can play music, photos, videos off of your network. You can copy entire movies to it, even entire Xbox games. How cool!

I just got the unit last night and am getting myself a mod chip now so I can rig it up with everything that I want. Out of the box it’s not all that exciting. Homebrew apps on your Xbox – very fun!

I’m sitting here watching 60 Minutes tonight and they are doing a piece on electronic voting. If there is one place where I would say that open source would make a lot of sense, how about this? The software that these systems run sounds horrible and has almost no security mechanisms included in it.

This problem can be solved, these companies just seem to be pathetic.