Jamie Thingelstad

Updating two Slicehost slices to Intrepid Ibex. Hopefully goes as smooth as my home machine last night.

Some nights it is totally fair to say that I hate our dogs. Halloween is one of those nights. Total crazy barking and stress.

Upgrading my home server from Ubuntu 8.04.1 (Hardy Heron) to 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex).

Upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 was totally easy, breezy.

Oops - Just ran out of candy. Tammy says I give out too much. All the lights turned off.

aptitude install ruby is a lot less than aptitude install ruby-full.

My relationship with Twitter ebbs and flows. Sometimes I find it very enjoyable, and at other times it seems like a worthless distraction. However, there is one part of Twitter that I have never liked, direct messages.

Why not like direct messages? I’m not a fan of anything that creates another queue that I have to monitor and respond to. I try to keep everything in one workflow, and that workflow is email. My annoyance isn’t limited to Twitter direct messages, but extends equally to Facebook messages and any other website specific inbox. I think Facebook could actually do their members a huge service by making their message system IMAP-capable. It would make it infinitely more useful and you could happily sit in your choice of email clients. On the other hand I would rather just not deal with Twitter direct messages.

I’d thought for a while that part of a Twitter Pro premium service could be to turn off direct message function. I decided to take matters into my own hands and rid myself of direct messages now instead. You can use this little program to do the same for you.

The first thing to do is tell Twitter to stop notifying you of a direct message. Go to your account Settings and in the Notices tab uncheck the Direct Text emails option.

Now, this 28-line Ruby program will simply respond (via direct message) to any direct messages you have received and then delete the direct message from your account, leaving no queue behind. If you don’t like the delete, you can just comment out line 24. To make life easy this uses the Twitter4R library for Ruby. You will have to edit lines 9 and 19 to your credentials and personal message.

# Get requires out of the way
require('rubygems')
gem('twitter4r', '>=0.2.0')
require('twitter')
require('time')

# Let's get a Twitter Client created
# Put your credentials in here
client = Twitter::Client.new(:login => 'USERNAME', :password => 'PASSWORD')

# Get Direct Messages
messages = client.messages(:received)

# Loop through any direct messages received
messages.each do |message|
  # Reply to the message
  # Set the message text to what you want, make sure it is Twitter length compliant
  response = Twitter::Message.create(
    :text => 'PUT YOUR MESSAGE HERE. YOU PROBABLY WANT YOUR EMAIL IN HERE.',
    :recipient => message.sender,
    :client => client)

  # Delete the message
  client.message(:delete, message)

  # Put a brief pause here just to make Twitter happier
  sleep 5
end

There is no error checking and by default it outputs nothing. It is intended to be invoked via cron at whatever interval you would like. If you do not have the Twitter4R Gem installed just run gem install twitter4r.

When I worked downtown I was really lucky to have this very cool independent coffee shop just a block away from the office. I made a daily trip, even in the freezing cold of January, to get a coffee from One on One. Now that I’m not downtown all the time I don’t get there as often, but it seems I did make it into the background on a recent photo shoot!

I was there a couple of weeks ago and I remember them moving some bikes around and it seemed a bit goofy. I saw a photographer and just figured they were doing some promotional shots for the website or something. Turns out it was actually for an article in the Star Tribune and I snuck into the background. See the top-left corner.

If you are in the area and like coffee, bikes or both stop by. I highly recommend the cold press coffee, this is where I was turned on to the wonders of that stuff.

By the way, the Robin Williams visit mentioned in that article was captured in person at the end of my Farewell video by my buddies Jim and Kent.

Thanks to Eric Marshall for tipping me off to this!

Initial estimate shows that dropping DirecTV and going iTunes/Apple TV plus OTA HD will save me $432 a year.

I can do all sorts of things on DirecTV.com, except for cancel my service. So common on the web, but so rude.

Leopard seems much faster talking NFS as compared to SMB.

Turning my Windows Server 2003 box into a Ubuntu 8.04.1 Server box.

Waiting for Metallica to take the stage. This is gonna be loud!

For those of you tracking my progress on my weight loss journey here is an update. Since my last check-in I have had a lot of great progress. At my last check-in I was at 314.6 and today I’m at 307.4, losing 7.2 pounds in those two weeks with a total loss of 14.8 pounds. Most of that weight came off in the last week with some intentionally focused high-quality food work.

I’ve continued my program without any changes and I’m feeling really good. If anything, I was a lot less hungry in the last week which isn’t surprising. I’m currently on track to hit my first goal of being sub-300 by the end of the year, and am actually a bit ahead.

I’ve known about flow and experienced flow all of my life. I think I started to really understand it when I started programming in my early teens. I had no idea what it was called, but I definitely understood the absence of time, the stream of thought that just worked and the clarity of presence that accompanied it all. Kathy Sierra (her blog is suspended, but she is active on Twitter) talked a lot about the power of flow, and notably how so much on our computers and the Internet is a “flow killer” (i.e., Twitter).

I was watching some recent video segments from TED and was excited to see flow on the agenda. This is a good talk about flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Csikszentmihalyi is “the man” on flow, and has a book on the topic called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. I may need to read that.

Tammy and I decided to relax a bit tonight and rent a movie. I felt like watching a documentary and a couple of clicks later we were watching King Corn.

Tammy and I understand the “Circle of Corn” in America and have opted out of it in every way we can, other than enjoying some great fresh sweet corn late in the summer. We didn’t know much about this documentary though.

If you’ve read Omnivores Dilemma your very familiar with industrialized corn. The middle section of Michael Pollen’s book is specifically on this topic. King Corn is sort of a movie version of that section of the book. Michael Pollen even shows up in the movie with a number of interview segments.

King Corn follows two guys in there mid-twenties that have roots back to Iowa (great grandfathers) but live in Boston as they relocate to Iowa and grow a single acre of Liberty Corn outside of Greene, Iowa. They go through the whole process of growing it, the economics and the eventual products made from it. It’s a good documentary and if you are unfamiliar with the dominance of corn in our food chain it would be a great starter. If you are familiar, it is an entertaining refresher. They have a segment in the movie where they visit the Earl Butz, whose farm policies altered the course of our food chain so drastically.

I’ve posted before about the immense problems with bottled water. Tammy and I have been on a massive push to push all non-necessary plastic out of our lives banning bottled water was one of the first ones we did.

I was browsing the web the other day and ran across a campaign where you can sign up to Break the Bottled Water Habit.

Tammy and I had our first real test of this commitment when we went on the road for 6 weeks this summer. It was really tempting to get bottled water and in fact I broke down twice and did get two bottles of water during the entire trip. Tammy was pristine and drank nothing other than tap water transported in her trusty Sigg bottle.

C’mon, drop the plastic and turn on the tap!

The USB drive on my Airport Extreme just blew chow - complete erase and new filesystem. There goes four machines Time Machine history.

Just watched the Nova episode on the Space Shuttle Disaster. Well done. Sad.

Considering a switch from del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia. Thoughts?