Jamie Thingelstad

Wrapping Tammy’s christmas presents and am really excited that somebody finally started putting a grid on the back of gift wrap!

Merry Christmas everyone! This year is a travel year for us. We’ll be heading back to North Dakota to spend Christmas day with my family. We are looking forward to seeing everyone!

If you’ve been checking your mailbox anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Thingelstad letter, or even just a card, you’ve been sadly disappointed on your daily trip to the mailbox. No card this year.

We could be bleak and blame it on the economy. We could be green and hightlight how much carbon we are saving by not sending out more cards and saving some trees while we are at it. We could also highlight that the trend seems to be that we only write a Christmas letter every other year. We had a letter in 2007 and 2005. The even years, 2006 and 2004, seem to fall short. But mostly, we just didn’t get one done and didn’t feel strongly about getting one out.

We’ll store up the enthusiasm though and 2009 should be pretty great! :-)

I was browsing through Last.fm’s “Best of 2008” coverage. There have been a number of blog posts and articles about the best new music of 2008, and I’ve found some great stuff reading these. Last.fm’s “Best of” is interesting since it is based on analysis and ranking of all the ‘scrobbled’ songs that they track for users. I wasn’t that surprised to find that Coldplay’s Viva La Vida was the #1 album of 2008. It was played by 1,907,044 users a total of 12,584,691 times. On top of all that, it didn’t come out until late in the year!

I was surprised by this comment in the excerpt though.

It’s probably not a stretch to say that Coldplay are the biggest band in the world today.

Now, I’ve always understood that the title of “biggest band in the world” was solely, and strongly, held by U2. So, I figured I’d check out some numbers.

The first place to look is Facebook. Facebook has pages for bands (and anything else) so I checked out the Coldplay page and the U2 page. Drumroll…

Coldplay: 1,175,125

U2: 335,374

How about Last.fm weekly charts. The most recent week’s data ended on Sunday, December 21 2008.

Coldplay: 116,299

U2: 50,867

Maybe Coldplay is the “biggest band in the world”. It also seems this isn’t a new debate at all. It has been debated for 3 1/2 years, U2 vs Coldplay in May 2005.

Are “Hip Hop” and “Rap” really the same genre? They seem totally different to me.

Trying to thaw a frozen pipe.

AirTunes FTW in a big way – blog post to come in the future. Happy camper this morning.

git seriously needs tab-completion for branch names.

Getting 5 (!) countertops replaced today. Process starting now.

Guys are here taking large mirrors off the walls to facilitate counter replacements. Hoping to not hear any large crashes.

The 9 1/2’ by 4 1/2’ mirror, with three outlet holes, came down safely. Yeah!

Mirrors all removed from the walls. Counter installer here now to start the replacement. Everyone on time and no hiccups thus far. Great!

The sawsall is going upstairs. Best for me to stay downstairs and not worry.

I started down this rabbit hole tonight trying to make a bash script do more than I probably should make it do. But I didn’t want to move to something else. This may be some of the ugliest stuff I’ve ever written.

for file in $files; do
    if [ "$file" != "./00000000000001-tSQLVersions.sql" ]; then
        echo "Checking if $file is already loaded..."
        # oh this is ugly, oh so very very ugly
        # the tr on the end trims the newline out of the return from SQL
        check=`$MySQL -u$MyUSER -h$MyHOST -p$MyPASS $MyDB --execute="SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tSQLVersions WHERE message = '$file';" | tr -d '\n'`
        check=`echo -n "$check"`
    else
        # ridiculously ugly hack to hardcode updater to always assume this special file isn't loaded
        check="COUNT(*)0"
    fi

    if [ "$check" = "COUNT(*)0" ]; then
        echo "Loading $file..."
        $MySQL -u$MyUSER -h$MyHOST -p$MyPASS $MyDB < $file
        $MySQL -u$MyUSER -h$MyHOST -p$MyPASS $MyDB --execute="insert into tSQLVersions (message) values ('$file');"
    else
        echo "File $file has already been loaded!"
    fi
done

The tr -d '\n' at the end of line 6 is my personal favorite. MySQL was dumping a newline in the STDOUT and screwing up my comparison. Fix it right? Nah. Just rip that newline out of there. All better!

I share this for others to know what not to do.

But hey, it works. :-) Who needs any fancy pants migrations.

Have had the fireplace going for four hours. Birch, oak. Love fires.

Just hit me how great it would be if the WordPress theme world lived on something like github. Fork! Fork! Fork! Would be great.

At a coffee shop and the woman at the table next to me is selling a Yellow Pages listing to a guy. Tough sell. Lot of work for not much revenue.

Making some new loans on Kiva. 100% repayment rate so far.

Wrestled Capistrano down today. Now have multi-stage Capistrano deployment working for this PHP application. Nice.

Today I feel like I turned the corner on two tools: git and capistrano. +1 for me.

Really digging the new album from The Killers. - Day & Age.

To all Minnesotans: it’s not that cold out. You live in Minnesota. Move on. 🥶

I was just updating our oldest Mac, my original MacBook (black) that is now pretty much Tammy’s laptop. I was upgrading it to 10.5.6 and realized two things.

1. It was way behind in updates. I’m usually so good with this, but 6 updates to apply? Yikes!

2. The battery is so wasted that it couldn’t even make it through the update process. Ouch! I fired up CoconutBattery to see how bad it was and promptly ordered a new battery.

184 load cycles and 31 months isn’t horrible though.

New Battery

Took a quick trip to the Apple Store and got a new battery. The old black MacBook is now like new! Actually, better than new looking at the numbers.