Jamie Thingelstad

I didn’t see this covered in any of the reviews of the iPhone 2.2 software but I’m really excited that they really smoothed out the process of updating applications that you’ve installed. The first great thing is that the “Update All” button has reappeared, and with 2.2 it actually works. I’ve updated as many as five applications in one swoop and had zero problems, including some big applications.

The other great touch is that you no longer get the new version installing in another window, and then jumping once the old version is out of the way. It now occurs “in place” where the current application is. It’s a small thing, but really makes the updating process feel solid.

Tammy has wanted to change some colors in our house for a while. If you’ve been to our place you know we are not afraid of color in any way. Our living room is orange, yellow and red.

There are a couple of rooms that she wanted to change and keeping with the green theme she searched hard to find a No VOC paint option that would work. What is VOC? Volatile Organic Compounds. I really don’t know much about this world, but as I understand from her the fumes from VOC’s in paint are really bad for you. And it’s not just the fumes from when you are painting, those chemicals continue to be present for a while and leech into the air in your house.

After much searching she found Safecoat. Safecoat is a No VOC paint, but it goes even further and contains nothing bad. You see, some No VOC paint is only that by label, in that it contains some chemicals that are not good for you but aren’t labeled as a VOC so they can still have the label. Safecoat is pristine in it’s health and eco credentials.

Over the last three days the kitchen has received new paint on the walls and ceiling. Using the Safecoat product was an eye-opener. We didn’t have any windows open while the painting was going on, and there was absolutely no smell in the house. If you didn’t see the paint, there is no way you would know painting was going on. It was really amazing.

If you’re going to do some painting do yourself and your family a favor and use Safecoat. In the Minneapolis area head over to Natural Built Home to get it.

Upgraded to Handbrake 0.9.3 in the middle of my big DVD ripping project. Presets are all different, hopefully better.

GitX is actually nice for seeing branching activity in your project. Also nice to see diff’s very fast.

Looking at ways to do push-deployment of PHP from GitHub.

Frenzic may be the best iPhone game yet. I liked it on the Mac too, but the touch interface is perfect.

At pharmacy. Turns out this problem with my neck is either a staph or strep infection. Antibiotic time.

Today in Review: PHP, Coda, Git, Ubuntu, GitHub, TextMate, FBML. Awesome.

Today I hit the first milestone on my fitness program. I stepped on the scale to do my weigh-in and was under 300! I’m just under two months in and I’ve now dropped just around 25 pounds.

I hit this goal much faster than I expected. I had originally targeted 300 by the end of the year and I did it in about half the time I had allocated. I know that can easily be a bad thing, but I think it’s fine. I’m eating comfortably, and even am having desserts from time to time. I’m not working out crazy. I’m doing my walk with the dogs every morning, and now 2 spin classes a week. I’m feeling great, and the weight has come off pretty quickly.

In addition to the numbers on the scale my belt has notched way down and my jeans are too big. I’m very excited to also be able to put my wedding ring back on.

My 280 goal date is January 31st. I’ve got Thanksgiving, Christmas and my birthday between now and then, which will slow things down some, so 10 weeks for 20 pounds seems aggressive but achievable.

Lately Twitter has actually been reasonably reliable, at least compared to it’s previous daily (hourly?) issues. But can this really be right? I pulled up the page at 10:22 am CT and apparently they are down for database maintenance? First off, you should be able to do maintenance without going down. Secondly, why on earth would you do this during the day when you are swamped with traffic?

One of the earliest posts on this blog was a celebration of the installation of 6 inch rain gutters on our house. By the way, those rain gutters have rocked. It seems only fitting that I should comment on the very small project that we had done in our garage that made me just giddy yesterday.

We had a row of shelves installed on the back wall of our garage. In a period of 6 hours, including moving stuff, having the shelves built, and then putting everything back away the garage was transformed from a disaster scene to a soothing zen experience.

If you come to my house in the next couple of weeks, expect to get a tour of my garage shelves. 🙂

Happy to report that the Airport Extreme can map internal requests to external port mappings. Whew.

DNS-O-Matic is pretty darn cool. Happy days!

Favorite word for today: metacognition

Dogs and/or Cat pulled the Firewire cable out of the Drobo again. Grrr!