Jamie Thingelstad

$15/day hotel WiFi, please meet my iPhone 4 Personal Hotspot. We won’t require your services.

After much searching Tammy found a pot rack that works in our kitchen. It was a bit of a bear to mount but it looks nice and seems very functional. I can tell you that the studs in that wall are not 16 inches on center.

I’ve struggled with the kitchen in our new house. I think this is going to make it much more pleasant to cook in.

We have done a number of things in our backyard to make it more of an outdoor living space. We decided to put some LED tree lights in to make the backyard more of a place to hang out at night. I had Custom Christmas Lighting do it so it would look nicer. They did a very nice job.

$75 for gas! Bit of a shocker when we filled the minivan up with gas.

At Minneapolis Photo Center for session 3 of Lighting Workshop. Very good thus far.

See list of Photography Workshops.

Happy Easter!

I really wish there was a Tiny Wings version for the iPad.

Just swapped my boot drive for an SSD with no more than 3 minutes of downtime for screws and a reboot. Thank you SuperDuper!

Seeing The New Standards at The Dakota tonight. Amazing seats.

See list of The New Standards shows.

I didn’t even realize I had videos on Google Video until Google sent me an email saying they were shutting it down.

Very bothersome that the Mac Twitter client doesn’t honor Spaces. It forces itself in every space.

Nginx hits v1! Cool.

Awesome new Community Supported Kitchen program from Corner Table and Scott Pampuch.

Congratsulations!

@TECHdotMN: Zencoder Raises $2M for Cloud-based Video Encoding

Last year we had some hardscaping done in our backyard. We created a little planting area next to the garage. This year I’d like to plant it but am not sure what to plant.

The area is almost always in the shade, so we need plants that do well with low light. We only want native plants and have a strong bias for perennials. I could see a couple of annuals if they really added to it. I like tall native grasses but I’m guessing the constant shade will be a problem.

Any suggestions from Minnesotan “green thumbs” reading? Here is a photo of the planting bed alongside the garage.

On Facebook I follow a handful of people who are semi-famous, and I don’t know but I know there work. One of those people is Jim Brandenburg, the renowned photographer that calls Ely, Minnesota his home. Anyway, he posted today that he was selling some of his gear, and it really seems that “Ellen” isn’t quiet getting it. Awkward. The ALL CAPS is just bonus.

My friend Garrick recently posted about an ergonomic improvement to his workspace. He got a monitor arm to get his display up where it worked better for him. Recently I’ve felt a lot of back fatigue and aching and I feel a lot better when I sit up straight. My monitor is typically to low for this though, so inspired by Garrick I ordered a duplicate of his rig. I got the Ergotron LX LCD Arm along with an adapter for the Apple Cinema display.

I have a 30" cinema display that I mounted this on. I had to adjust the tension a lot to hold the big monitor, but my first reaction is that it is way better. Plus, I got a lot of desk space back and flexibility to collaborate with others that come into my office.

I like it enough I may need to get one for home too! (For comparison, that is an 11" MacBook Air next to the display.)

I’m not in love with the cable management, but it works well enough. I could do better with some extra zip ties in a cleanup session.

A few weeks ago we went back to North Dakota for a long weekend to visit my Grandma Rose. In her house she has this needlework display with the names of all the grandchildren, my cousins, on it. Fifteen names in total.

I’ve seen this many times. My mother is the one that did the needlework on it. But now, with my own family in mind, I stood there in recognition for what it represented, family.

My book club is reading Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard University. It has been an interesting read. I was a bit surprised to find Minneapolis with a short highlight on successful cities.

Many might also have written off Minneapolis, which lost 30 percent of its population between 1950 and 1980 and hardly seemed like a natural candidate for urban renaissance. The city’s winters make Boston seem balmy, and the advantages that once came from its riverside location became largely irrelevant after World War II. But Minneapolis, like Boston and New York, has come back. In 2009, per capita personal income in the Minneapolis metropolitan area was $45,750, making it the highest-earning metropolitan area in the Midwest and the twenty-fifth highest in the country.

The secret of the city’s success is education: 47.4 percent of the city’s adults have a college degree, and 37.5 percent of the Minneapolis area’s adults have a college degree, making it the seventh-best-educated metropolitan area with more than a million people in America. The Scandinavian Lutherans who originally settled the region brought with them a belief in learning, but most of all, Minneapolis’s highly educated population reflects its land-grant college, the University of Minnesota. The city’s most striking economic success stories have some link to that school.

Medtronic, which earns $14.6 billion in annual revenues and has thirty-eight thousand employees, was formed in 1949 when a graduate student in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota partnered with his brother-in-law to make medical devices in a garage. The company’s early success reflected, in part, connections with people like Walt Lillehei, a University of Minnesota professor and a pioneer in open-heart surgery, who saw the need for a small, battery-powered pacemaker and turned to Medtronic to whip one up. Minneapolis’s megaretailer, Target, owes much of its success to Bob Ulrich, another University of Minnesota graduate, who helped create the chain’s blend of logistics and style. Target’s slightly more highbrow alternative to big-box competitors like Walmart and Kmart seems natural for the sophisticated Ulrich, a collector of African art who has spent a fortune endowing a Museum of Musical Instruments.

I didn’t realize Minneapolis ranked so high in education.