Jamie Thingelstad

I’ve been taking the dogs out on walks every morning, provided the temperature is about 0 °F. Now that we’ve had a bunch of snow I’ve found the morning to be a bit slippery, especially on the one hill. And the fresh snow doesn’t give much traction. Feels a lot like walking in sand.

I was reading Robert Craig’s blog and saw his post about his YakTrax and how well they worked. This seemed like a great addition to my morning activities. Santa Claus visited our house early last night (we are traveling this Christmas) and left some YakTrax for me, as well as winter gear for the dogs.

The YakTrax are easy to get on. They slip on the bottom of your shoe without much hassle. I have the YakTrax Walkers. The dogs and I went out for an hour today and the YakTrax made a huge difference. I didn’t slip at all, and had as much traction for walking as I’d ever want to have.

Tammy said that some people online were complaining that they had broken on them, sometimes on the first use. I’ve only wore them once so I can’t speak to how well they will last. I can see how if you put them on wrong, or had one of the bands crimped badly, it could cause a problem. We’ll see.

In the meantime, if you walk reasonable distances in the snow, I’d highly recommend buying a pair of YakTrax.

I was shoveling the driveway for what seems like the 20th time already. For some reason I haven’t pulled the snow blower out yet. It’s been fun getting out there with the shovel, and Chase in particular has fun running around in the snow. He was having a blast today, and took a break in some pretty deep powder.

Fluid.app makes Pandora into a standalone app pretty well!

Subscribing to Pandora (after lapsing) due to Airfoil’s magic. Will use Pandora 100x more than before. Wish Pandora had a standalone app tho

AppleTV units could benefit from a /sbin/reboot in the crontab at 4:00 am. Wonder if I could add that via ssh.

If you have a LaserJet 2605dtn and are using Leopard - you need to get firmware 20071108. It will make you much happier.

Mosaic installation on the fireplace is starting. Pretty cool.

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.