Jamie Thingelstad

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.

I was doing some printing in Lightroom recently and was struggling. The prints were coming out really badly, and when looking for the quality controls for the Canon S900 I couldn’t find any of the normal settings. This is what it should look like, with options for the type of printing.

But instead I was getting this, with a big crossed out option and an incompatibility over “architecture”.

I was pretty confused why this wasn’t working and figured I needed to reinstall my drivers, but didn’t want to restart at that point so left it. I kept noodling this over and that word “architecture” was bugging me. Then it hit me!

I’ve posted before about how great Lightroom is in 64-bit mode. It dawned on me that I was running a “64-bit architecture” and the printer driver was probably only 32-bit. I checked the box for Lightroom to run in 32-bit mode and launched it again and the printer settings worked great! It sure would be nice if the error message just said “this doesn’t work in 64-bit mode”.

Lesson learned! Run Lightroom in 64-bit, unless you want to print, then restart in 32-bit. If anyone knows what printers have 64-bit driver support it would be great to have a list.

Great cup of Boulder Blues green tea.

Watching Glengarry Glen Ross. It’s time for my semi-annual viewing.

“Put that coffee down. Coffee’s for closers only” … Beautiful.

Thinking I should host a Glengarry Glen Ross viewing night for local Twitter friends… :-)

Upgrade morning. All three Apple TV’s up to 2.2 and iTunes up to 8.0.1.

Genius on Apple TV is, genius. Will get much more use on TV than in iTunes.

Suspect Apple TV 2.2 has a bug. I keep starting videos and the audio plays but video is black. Hit menu and restart the video and it works. 😕

Anyone know if Apple TV 2.2 “Standby” menu is anything more than what you’ve always been able to do by pressing play for 5 seconds?

At the Humane Society to learn about dog training classes for Chase and Izzy.

Serious punk rocker dude in dog class wearing a Profane Existence shirt. Sweet!

I seriously doubt there is any band that goes better with fall than The Replacements.

Looking to extend my AIM network via Twitter. Use AIM, @ me your username. You can find me on AIM under “jthingelstad”.