Jamie Thingelstad

I dropped our Honda Odyssey off this morning for regular maintenance at Richfield Honda. I was pretty impressed to see this sign on the door.

That’s a nice touch. Getting a call mid-day from the service department can be little annoying and a simple text message is a great alternative. Well done and a great example of going where you customers are.

I went to my fourth spin class tonight at LA Fitness. First off, after four sessions I still think the spin bikes are incredible. They are so much better than any others I’ve used. I’ve been really happy with the classes, especially the last two. While I’m ridiculously out of shape, I’m really impressed with how well I am doing.

In the past I’ve talked with people that have done a few marathons and then don’t run much for a couple years, and ramp up really quickly for another marathon. I think I get that more now. Even as ridiculously out of shape as I am right now, I’m finding that I can hang in the class pretty good. My guess is that I don’t have the mental barriers that others may have. I get that it hurts when you climb, and I know what that hurt is like, and I know how to manage it. The fitness level just determines how much power I can get with a certain level of suffering. Over time, I’ll get more power, but the suffering is the same. I’m also really pleased that my natural cadence is still right around 90 rpm’s. That still just feels “right”.

I was pretty proud after tonight’s spinning session. I wore my heart rate monitor for the first time and I actually reached max heart rate a couple of times (about 187). Here is the floor under my bike. 🙂

I’ve hesitated and resisted migrating all my native Canon Raw (CRW and CR2) files to DNG. However, over the last couple of months I started to do a DNG conversion on import. Today I went all in.

I’m doing a mass conversion year-by-year. I’ll write another post on the process and how much space I saved, and a little of why I did it.

For those of you I’ve told for years to not use DNG, forget all that. 🙂

Mill City Farmers Market for the last weekend. Stocking up.

Textmate, Rails, Git. The rust is slowly breaking off of my hands.

Watching Frontline: The Choice. Good show.

I’m a couple of weeks down the path to losing a bunch of weight. This will be a long road and to help along I have a few tools that I’m using to help me along. The last time when I really focused on losing weight was 2000 and I used a program called Lifeform extensively, several times every day, to track everything. Now in 2008 my iPhone is almost exclusively my tool of choice for this goal.

Background

The first thing I wanted to figure out was a good way to log my food. I firmly believe that tracking your food intake is likely the most important thing you can do for weight loss. In the past I kept a very specific, to the gram and individual calorie, log of everything I ate. This was incredibly powerful, but in retrospect it was not the best long-term solution.

The reality is that you will not weigh your food and track everything you eat for the long term (even though I did it for nearly 2 years). It is too hard, obstructive and quickly becomes a crutch. While you cannot be clueless about the nutritional impact of your food, you can also become far too obsessed about it. For me this was a problem because leaving that gram-precise sterile environment resulted in drift and a lack of discipline.

However, writing everything down is incredibly powerful. I was once on a century ride with two guys that I later found were psychiatrists. I mentioned to them how powerful I thought food logging was and they explained that that power came from being able to “objectify” what you have written down. The simple act of logging allows you to step outside of yourself and review and coach your own behavior. I can see this, and would admit that I have at times changed behavior because I “didn’t want to write it down.”

Last time I kept grams and every detail in Lifeform and now I needed to find a new tool. I wanted something that I could use for logging and it needed to be on my iPhone. I did not want a web application because speed is everything. Databases become big issues with food logging programs, and the means of entering information were important. I did a lot of searching for food logging on the iPhone and I found a bunch of programs and frankly none of them were very good. They seemed clumsy. They were really designed for a mouse interface, not a native touch feel. I was bummed as there seemed no good solution.

My Diary

I then stumbled into some diary programs. This intrigued me since a food log could easily be a food diary. Simple, few word entries. The key features include multiple entries per date, ability to enter things with a time stamp in the past and searching. I found My Diary (iTunes) and it’s great for this need!

That screen shows lunch, snack and dinner for Saturday, October 11th. I’ve been using My Diary now for nearly a month to track my food and I’ve found it great.

Logging your food can tip you into an OCD view of eating that ultimately is not healthy. Using a diary format allows you to not be shackled down by numbers and just focus on the healthfulness of what you eat. Additionally, something I really didn’t think about is the ability to put context in your food log. When you read “Awesome turkey burger that Tammy made!” it carries context and value. A food entry saying 112g Turkey, Fried is devoid of all context and meaning. This is very helpful.

I’ve found My Diary to be fast, simple and very convenient. You can change the date and time of entries so if you miss writing it down you can catch up later. And I can’t emphasize how great it is to have this right on your iPhone. I highly recommend using My Diary for food tracking if you are looking to do that.

A couple of weeks ago Canon made a really big splash by announcing the Canon 5D Mark II. I’m a longtime Canon owner now having gone from the Digital Rebel to 20D to 40D now. I’ve wanted a 5D ever since the first one came out since it has no focal length multiplier. The CMOS sensor is the same size as a 35mm negative and since I love to shoot wide and have some great lenses for it, getting rid of the multiplier is a huge win to me. What I wasn’t expecting is that the 5D Mark II would come onto the scene with full HD quality video capture.

It’s best to just see what this camera can do. Full 1080p at 30 fps using all of your amazing Canon glass (lenses) opens up some amazing opportunities. Vincent Laforet put together this video for Canon created entirely on the new 5D Mark II. It’s amazing.

Obviously Laforet has more talent in his little finger than I could hope to have, this is a great video. But look at the technical quality of it and the shots achieved with depth-of-field and a simple fisheye lens. This really opens the door to some amazing options, and simply isn’t possible even on “prosumer” HD video cameras.

By the way, this is the video that I was complaining about Canon not being able to host before.

Mill City Farmers Market is great this morning. (and every Saturday morning)

I’m surprised there isn’t a Hundred Pushups iPhone app.

“He Stopped Loving Her Today” followed by “Shout at the Devil”. Wow. Need Genius on my iPod. 🙂

This is the end of the second week since I took a hard diet change and got serious about getting myself back into something resembling fitness. My initial progress has been great. This week (Friday to Friday) I lost a little 4.4 pounds with a total weight loss of 7.8 pounds. This is what it looks like.

The green line shows my goal trajectory. That line tracks back to 300 by the New Year and I’m keeping close to it. The red line is a smoothed view of my weight and it was going up for a while just as an anomaly of me loading years of old data into it. Now that I have some recent data it is reflecting reality.

I’ve been journaling my food (not logging it). So I’m writing stuff down but not counting calories or points or anything. I’ve got goals for each meal and I’m hitting them well. In fact, I’m not even feeling all that hungry which is great.

I am feeling strong, a bit quicker and am really positive. Off to a great start!

Back in February I posted a feeler to see if people would be interested in getting a Minneapolis WordCamp together. The response was pretty great, without any date, promotion or agenda nearly 75 people signed up to indicate interest.

While there has been a lot of interest, I’m not going to be able to lead the effort to get a WordCamp going here in Minneapolis. Coordinating an event like this is far outside my interest area and not something I do all that well. Plus we weren’t getting great uptake on sponsorship and the current economic meltdown is not going to make that better. We also lost our keynote speaker and were again going to have to look for a new date.

I’m hopeful that someone else is interested in seeing this happen and may take the lead and run with it.

I really dig my iPhone and it seems to get better and better with every software release. However, I really wish that Apple would add a feature to block certain WiFi networks. Here is a screen that all iPhone owners are very familiar with:

Here is the problem with this screen, I see it all the time! I have no idea what the “2WIRE251” network is but I never, ever want to see it since I will never, ever use it. I’m not a customer of the “USI Wireless” network, and would rather not see that. I have no use, ever, for the “Available Now MPLS Wir…” or “City of Minneapolis Publi…” networks.

Please Apple, give us the ability to block networks like these and stop prompting to join networks that I know I will never want to join.

While I’m on this screen, it would also be great to have a checkbox to only join a given network once and not save it for the future. I’m guessing almost all iPhones have a saved preference for “NETGEAR” or “Linksys” networks and I find myself on some broken network named that on a frequent basis.

While I’m dreaming, it would be so nice if a WiFi network could advertise itself as a captive portal. For example, three of those networks in the screenshot claim to be open, but they are not. They are captive portals only useful for customers of the service. We need another type available beyond secured and open.

When I was traveling in the UK I had a couple of really interesting experiences using the normal set of online services I use. The Internet really doesn’t have a concept of countries, but I found myself unable to do some things while I was there because various online services made assumptions by mapping my IP address to a country. This is a process called geo targeting and it is used in online advertising almost always. My experience highlighted that you should be careful to use it for account settings or commerce transactions.

For example, when I was in parts of the UK and tried to login to Google Reader I was greeted with this screen.

I’m not sure what language that is, but it isn’t one I know. Now, while it wasn’t english it was obvious to me, and I think to most people, that you should just login in the form provided. I figured once I logged in it would then know via my preferences where I live and flip the language back to english. Unfortunately, it wasn’t so smart.

Another example of this problem popped up when I was trying to renew my Google Earth subscription. Unfortunately I wasn’t even able to do it since it would only allow me to see the UK store and only allow me to buy the one in £’s even though my account is entirely setup in the US.

Good food for thought on how far you should take geo targeting in building out products, versus marketing.

One of the things that makes the Mac so great is the wonderful independent, or “indy”, software developers out there. Mac software is typically not just functional, but beautiful. I recently bought Timeline 3D from Bee Docs’ and got this great postcard from the author.

Not only beautiful and functional software, but great customer interaction.

Booking person from London that we got our apartment from is attempting to rip us off and not return my deposit. Very pissed off.

A few days ago I watched this amazing video that was created on the brand new Canon 5D Mark II. I was going to put a link to it on my site, but when I went to found it I was greeted with this screen.

What? Canon USA has “EXCEEDED [THEIR] DOWNLOAD CAPACITY” (the all-caps is courtesy of them). Does anyone at Canon realize how ridiculous it makes them look to have this message on their site? I’m wondering if maybe Canon just hosts at Dreamhost or something.

Canon, if you are going to tell people about how serious you are about amazing imaging and beautiful video, the first place to start is by being able to serve that content to the web. And please never use ALL CAPS.

Apparently the video will be back up “shortly” and I’ll post a link to it then.