Jamie Thingelstad

Oct 24, 2009 ∞

Surly Darkness

Haven’t tasted Surly Darkness yet, but I was lucky enough to get a bottle into the house. SurlyDarkness

Oct 24, 2009 ∞

Would love to be at Surly Brewing Darkness Day but not going to stand in line for 4 hours. :-/ Will see what line report is at 11a.

Tempted to go to Darkness Day and try for my shot at 6 beers. Surly Brewing says 300 in line. Quandry.

Oct 22, 2009 ∞

Unauthorized Transactions

This morning when I checked my email I found many more unread messages then typical. A bit concerned, I found many PayPal messages.

That isn’t a great way to start the day. You see, I have no idea who “NC Interactive, Inc.” is. Additionally, I can tell you that at that time I was fast asleep getting a good nights rest. Ugh!

It seems that someone got access to my account and decided to buy some credits for an online game. Each transaction was between $39 and $59. There were 16 transactions totaling nearly a $1,000 of fraudulent charges.

After seeing this I immediately changed my password as well as my secret question answers. I filed these transactions as fraudulent and I’m assuming that this will be easy to get PayPal to reverse. However, they say it will take about a week to get it resolved.

I wonder if the criminal just stopped using it after $1,000? The charges stopped a couple of hours before I noticed it and changed the password. They didn’t seem to do anything further in my account either.

In years of using PayPal, and generally just doing commerce on the web, this is the first time I’ve gotten hit with any fraudulent activity. I guess my luck ran out.

Oct 21, 2009 ∞

Happy Birthday to Microsoft [Windows 7]!

Oct 20, 2009 ∞

Shooting Anvils

Forget about model rockets - let the anvils fly!

Oct 12, 2009 ∞

R.I.P. Thawte Web of Trust

Still saddened that the Thawte Web of Trust system is being shut down by the new owners, Verisign. Anyone surprised since Verisign offers a pay product that Thawte did for free? To make matters worse, I had become a Thawte notary a few months ago. It’s crazy that while they have sent emails to everyone the Web of Trust website doesn’t indicate anything about it going away. They are still happily letting people sign up? Huh?

Oct 12, 2009 ∞

Mail.app Smart Mailboxes

I’ve been using Smart Mailboxes in Mail.app for the first time ever and finding them very helpful. I’m guessing there are a lot of people that don’t know that these exist. I found this post on 43 folders helpful for some hints.

Oct 11, 2009 ∞

Inspired Software Keynote

I was honored this year to be invited by the Computer Science department at the University of Minnesota to give the keynote for the 2009 Computer Science Open House. The department has an open house every other year and it is a great opportunity for all the various research groups to present the work they are doing. The common area of the building was filled with researchers talking through their research and what the impacts will be. Really great stuff. Informative, inspiring, interesting.

The audience for the keynote was a mix of students and people from the industry. I decided right away that I wanted to take the opportunity evangelize my perspective that software has a critical, fundamental, role in our society and that we as the people who make that software are responsible to create elegant and inspired environments. The anti-codemonkey.

The talk was really put together in three sections. First, a quick brief on the huge impact that software has had on people. I was shocked in my research to find that 6 in 10 people, in the world, have a mobile phone. Talk about amazing adoption rates! I then made the case that open source is not just an alternative means of making code, but is perhaps the means that is best suited to the giant role that software plays in the world. And lastly, I wanted to reinforce the role that the individual developers has in making inspired software a reality.

Related: Open House Keynote Speakers