Jamie Thingelstad

For what I believe is the third time I downloaded my RAW files off of my compact flash card, put it back in the camera and formatted the card. Then, remembered that I didn’t download the video I took with the 5D Mark II. Ugh.

Next Olympic venue?

“Welcome to the W-E-L-Y Ely Timberwolves High School Football radio pre-game show.” - WELY 94.5 FM

Upon upgrading to iTunes 9 today I noticed that some old iPhone restore images had been dumped in my trash. I’m not real sure where they were being kept before, but the trash now had this stuff in it.

Nifty. That cleared up 1,793 MB of storage that was never going to be used again. Especially the files for iPhone 1,1 - a device I don’t even own anymore.

For the first time I decided to try some canning. I didn’t feel confident enough to do real canning, so I’m just doing some freezer canning. I got 20 pounds of tomatoes at the Mill City Farmers Market over the weekend. They were organically grown on a farm about 70 miles outside of town. I cleaned them all and ran them through the food processor. I put the whole lot into a big kettle and reduced it at low heat for a few hours, just stirring every 30 minutes or so.

I got 12 pints of tomato sauce out of it. I chose to not put anything into the sauce so I can use it in anything I want. I’m going to place these in the freezer for some local tomato dishes this winter. The house smelled really nice while the tomatoes where simmering down.

There are a bunch of reasons that you shouldn’t have a website that is just one big flash application. Here is one simple one. The other day we were thinking of going to Tejas for lunch and wanted to check their hours. Simple enough. So I brought up their website on my iPhone. This is what I got.

Needless to say, totally and completely useless. In fact, it took me a while to even realize if I was on the right website. At least have the header, or something at all, in HTML! We went somewhere else.

Dark humor via bumper sticker.

I started out
with nothing and
I still have most of it

Suggestion: If going to the Renaissance Festival, leave your iPhone at home.

A couple of weeks ago I was having an email dialog with my friend Dave Oosterhuis about iTunes metadata. We had been discussing the finer points of dealing with duet albums. Are they compilations? No. What artist field do you set? It’s all just a bit annoying for the obsessive-compulsive crowd.

During this exchange he suggested a feature in iTunes that I now really wish I had. If only I would have been able to remain ignorant. His idea is that iTunes should support “song linking”. He isn’t a blogger, so I decided to put this idea out there in the hopes that millions of people on the Internet will barrage Apple with requests to make this happen.

The basic premise behind Song Linking is that sometimes you have more than one copy of the same song, or maybe a just slightly different version of the same song. Immediately the song If I Can’t Change Your Mind by Sugar came to my mind. Sugar was more prolific with singles than most bands. This song appears on their first album, Copper Blue. It then appears again on their Besides collection as well as on The Joke is Always on Us collection. Additionally it is on the Helpless single not to mention that the two different singles titled If I Can’t Change Your Mind with the song appearing once on the ‘yellow cover’ version, and twice on the red cover version. Oh, and just for fun it appears on Bob Mould’s solo album The Silence Between Us. Whew.

So, after all this iTunes looks like this.

So, what would song linking do? Song Linking would allow to me select multiple songs and then link selected metadata for those songs. The songs would be unchanged in their various album locations, but I could have the option to link play count and last played date. These are not independent songs and when building a smart playlist based on last played date they should be treated as linked. They are independent songs if you are playing any of the albums that they are on.

To link you would simply select any grouping of songs and invoke the link feature. You could then select checkboxes for what metadata to link. This should contain rating, play count, last played date, skip count, last skip date and genre.

Using this feature in the example above, I would be ecstatic to link items 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8 into one set. Items 2 and 4 would be separately linked since they are both solo versions. Item 1 would not be linked since it is a fairly different rendition of the song (as indicated by the different rating I applied). iTunes could show a small chain icon next to the tracks that have links, and on hover could provide links to the linked tracks.

I could see using this feature a fair amount and it would really help make Smart Playlists more effective.

Delicious corn at Minnesota State Fair.