Jamie Thingelstad

I lived in the Twin Cities for a number of years without anyone ever mentioning a thing about the fireworks in Stillwater. Maybe most people don’t know, but Stillwater has some amazing fireworks. It is on par with the best fireworks I’ve ever seen. The first time we saw them was 2002 when we ended up in Stillwater on a whim and decided to check them out. We both left thinking the show was awesome. I cannot remember off-hand why we didn’t go back last year, but this year we were able to enjoy them. They last a little under 30 minutes with music accompanying them. Adding to the fun are all of the boats that line up on the water to watch. There are thousands of people that line the shore and vendors even setup concession stands. Warning: getting an ice cream cone right before the fireworks can take quite a while! Anyway, highly recommended for your 4th of July planning in the future.

Two things really stood out to me though while I was doing some people watching before the event. Have you all realized that well over 90% of teenage girls are now wearing flip-flops and a decent proportion of their male counterparts as well. All these girls were walking by and essentially every single one (with minor exceptions) had flip-flops? Who finds these comfortable? Who would ever want to walk a mile in these things. And why are they all wearing them? Perhaps it’s some sort of flip-flop plot to cause some counter-insurgance in the country.

The other thing I wondered is are more people smoking? Sure seems like there are more people lighting up lately than there were even two years ago. Have we gone completely insane?

Of course, one could write-off both of these observations with my sample set. Perhaps both flip-flops and smoking are a craze exhibited only in pickup driving towns with teenagers overloaded with hormones. Perhaps. Or should I say I hope.

We recently added yet another camera to our collection of digital cameras. There is absolutely nothing wrong with my current Canon EOS Digital Rebel. I find it to still be a great camera and I’m having a wonderful time figuring out how the different lenses can give me different shots and how to really work the camera. The goal is to not just happen upon a great shot here and there, but really start to understand photography better. At some point I would like to take some classes to get some formal training in it.

Additionally, my old camera (or Tammy’s camera as it’s known now) the Canon PowerShot G3 is also still working great. It’s prosumer point & shoot qualities make it a great camera for your average day of shooting. It’s also nice that Tammy and I can go shooting together and we’re not sharing a camera. At some point, we’ll get another digital SLR body and we can just start sharing lenses.

However great both of these cameras are, especially the Rebel, there is one thing that neither of them are and that is light and portable. With our upcoming trip to Europe I found myself really wanting another camera that we could take for just whimsical shots around Paris or more importantly something I could have on the bike with me and take shots while riding in France. I read our tour guide and as it mentioned all these great sights from our ride I knew more and more I wanted a camera that could make the trip with me. (As it turns out, I’ve gotten a handlebar bag that is big enough that I could probably fit the Digital Rebel in it if I wanted, so I may have options.)

We purchased the Canon PowerShot S500 for both of these qualities. I’ve shot about a hundred pictures with it and so far I’m very pleased. We previously had made a trip into the small & portable digital line with the Canon PowerShot S230 and returned it because the pictures were horrible. This camera hasn’t had any of those problems. Pictures are crisp and clear, focusing is good, color quality seems nice and shooting a 5 megapixel image means we can still get really nice prints if wanted. Important as well is the case. This camera is built like a tank and I don’t think twice about just sliding it in my pocket and forgetting about it.

(You can tell I have a thing for Canon. I find their cameras to be particularly intuitive and the overall design is well done. I appreciate Nikon’s lens variety and camera quality, but their firmware on the camera is just not intuitive and has caused me frustration nearly every time I’ve picked one up. I’m sure I would get used to it if I worked at it, but I’m stubborn.)

It is really a treat to be a cycling fan in America these days. As little as 4 years ago it was hard to get any coverage on TV other than a weekly melodrama that CBS or NBC would air giving you 30 minutes of coverage for an entire week of racing – and that includes the boring “story” pieces.

These days courtesy of OLN and the popularity of cycling thanks to Armstrong you can get a full, heaping plate full of Tour de France coverage. Simply put, it’s awesome.

Today the business of the 2004 Tour de France got underway. It was a nail biting prologue with Lance putting seconds into his biggest rival Jan Ullrich. However, he didn’t take the prologue. Instead that was courtesy of a 23 year old rider from Switzerland named Cancellara in his first tour. He was in tears as he realized he would be wearing the yellow jersey on the first road stage of the biggest bike race in the world.

The excitement of the Tour is now on and it’s so fun to watch. This year has a special tone since in only 14 short days Tammy and I will be there on our vacation watching the action go down as the race goes into the high mountains.

I ran across this Tron suit page and was stunned, confused and frightened. Just had to share it.

The hardest sporting event in the world is finishing up right now. RAAM (the Race Across America) has concluded for another year and there was a bit more excitement this year with teams getting close on the road and even some espionage between teams. It’s amazing what happens as you pedal yourself across the country without sleep.

This animated progress map for RAAM is a nice way to see the race progress.

I called up TimeWarner today about my cable modem service. I’ve had it for a couple of years now and wanted to see if there was a better deal I should be on to save a few dollars. Turns out I was able to upgrade my service at no cost and get a 4x increase in download bandwidth. Yeah! So now I’ve got 3 mbps down and 768 kbps up.

I was doubly impressed that they had this done and in place in about an hour. I was able to do some speed tests to verify it, plus it actually feels a lot more zippy.

Here is the scene…

You’re sitting in your car watching the rain drops steadily hit the windshield. It looks cold and is obviously quite wet out there. You’ve been up for a couple of hours now, even though it’s only 8 a.m. right now, and to top it off it’s a weekend. You look up through the sunroof on the car and see the bikes that you put on the roof rack the night before mocking you as they drip with water. The car is telling you it’s a little over 50 degrees out. It really is cold. Is this actually the end of June? Man, Minnesota is a downer at times.

You scan through the radio stations for a while trying to get some read of the weather. If only you had an Internet connection in your car! Doppler radar surely would give you the answers your looking for. Of course, if you weren’t a wimp you would simply walk out in that rain, get your bike down and scoff at the world for thinking twice about riding and getting a little wet. However, last you checked you weren’t wearing the yellow jersey in the Tour de France nor were you putting food on the table by winning bike races. No, you are just an average Joe, weekend warrior out for his fix of adventure.

You spend a few minutes cursing the weatherman. 70 degrees and sunny? I mean really. How can you be that far off. Sure, 60 degrees and cloudy would be no problem. Wouldn’t fault the weather services in anyway. But 50 degrees and raining? That is a far, far cry from 70 degrees and sunny. How do these people stay employed? But, given the summer you’ve been having so far it seems that it’s time to build an arc and don’t forget your fleece because the sun just isn’t gracing your presence.

You get outside and just feel it. Yeah, this is no good. Here is where you have a real battle. You may actually leave. Really, why are you here after all? You don’t have to do this. Just go home. But you drove for over an hour to get here. And really, how can you just leave. So, after a lot of internal debate you decide that the war stories are worth the suffering and get on your bike and start to pedal.

If you’ve ridden a bike for a few years, you’ve been through this scene (you maybe didn’t drive away, Tammy and I did this morning though!). We were excited to go do a new ride that leaves out of St. Joseph, MN called the Tour of Saints. It is billed as a very nice “fun” ride with great food stops and wonderful roads. However, the weather was miserable. The ride offers both a 35 and 50 miles option. We embarked on the 50 miler but the weather turned it into a 35 miler. Given the weather forecast we didn’t come geared up for an entire day of riding in the rain which only combined to make matters even worse. I rode for a long time just dreaming of the cache of gear at home that would make this ride fine. Booties, leg warmers, full-fingered gloves. All just sitting there in a nice dry bin at home doing me absolutely no good here. Tammy gets the absolute trooper award since she did the entire thing in her sandals with nothing more than a soaked pair of DeFeet socks.

After riding a few miles we finally got warmed up and it got a little less miserable. We bypassed the first food stop at 12 miles, that’s too soon anyway in favor of the stop at 29 miles. In hindsight we should have simply rolled all the way to the finish, it was only 6 more miles but Tammy really wanted to warm up a bit so we stopped. The food stop was nothing to get excited about but we did get to sit inside for a bit. Here is the thing though, when we walked back outside it felt 20 degrees colder. And getting going again on the bike was incredibly frigid. I hammered up a few hills just to get some body heat going.

Among the more amazing sights today though we saw a guy riding in blue jeans. In the rain! Riding in blue jeans! That’s insane!

As several riders veered off for the extra 15 miles we sprinted into town to get out of our wet clothes and go get some hot food. It was miserable. But as suspected, the war story was worth it. :-)

Anybody that has talked to me about music recently knows that I’ve been working on a huge project to move all of our music to a home media server in MP3 format. A couple of months ago I completed ripping and tagging all of our CDs to the recently built Teraserver (home server with a total of 1.4 terabytes of disk). That was a huge milestone as it involved going through nearly 1,000 CDs.

However, still in front of me was my (relatively small) collection of records – good ole’ vinyl. Well I just completed ripping, splitting into tracks and tagging all my vinyl as well to the media server so I have now completed my project. :-)

We did the Minnetonka Summer Festival 8k run this morning. This is the first time we have done this run (two years ago we did the 2 mile fun run that is part of this event). The course was fairly hilly and challenging but an enjoyable run nonetheless.

The pancake breakfast afterwards was a bit cheesey but very good and exceptionally cheap.