Jamie Thingelstad

I’ve already written about how annoying it is to be bombarded with advertisements while buying gas. Now they’ve gone even further. I went to buy gas the other day and got this great screen demanding my zip code.

Find missing image "I Just Want My Gas! flickr.com/3097/2315643138_4519e68bb2_m.

Now, this is lame for so many reasons. First, the implementation is so poor that it accepted six zeros as a valid zip code. Six zeroes. Yeah. Secondly, this is a real cheat since you don’t know if the zip code is for credit authorization or marketing purposes. Since it took six zeroes I assume it’s for marketing purposes.

Companies need to start respecting our privacy at least the slightest, tiniest bit. We need to vote with our dollars and avoid these scams, or mess them up with invalid data – like six zeroes.

I seem to be on a string of complaints about screens being placed everywhere (annoying ads and zip codes. I admit that being the gadget geek I am, I’m surprised by how offensive I find these intrusions to be. This one I’m a bit divided on though. It seems that the majority of New York taxis have gotten these screens installed that give you the weather, news, location and map information and other stuff.

Find missing image NY Taxi flickr.com/2408/2341902786_5ec8e84dc9_m.jpg.

I find these things incredibly annoying. You get into the cab and immediately start having this thing blast at you. It’s rude. You should have to press it to activate it. Thankfully you can turn it off and I do that with vigor whenever I get into the cab.

However, there is a great value add here since you can now charge the cab fare on your credit card. This is absolutely great. I love not having to figure out the tip and just swipe the card. In fact, on the last business trip to New York this function saved me from expensing $133.01 in cash. Great! Now if they just quit making you sign the receipts!

I’ve been working with financial news for years now and there is a really common problem in financial news, deduplication. The issue is when several news outlets will cover the same story or even redistribute another sources story, creating duplicates that readers find annoying. As the web becomes more mashable, I saw the first sign of this same problem on FriendFeed today. One of the people I follow had both Twitter and Tumblr feeding into his FriendFeed. But, he also had Twitter feeding Tumblr. In flowed the dups!

He removed the Twitter to Tumblr feed to stop this, but it was a glimpse of a feature that FriendFeed is going to need to consider. In this instance, deduplication would be pretty easy since the content is exactly the same.

A couple of weeks ago my aging 1999 Audi A6 Avant decided to start flickering a little red light at me. Kind of like the car was winking at me. A couple of days later, it decided to just blast the light at me. You can see it in the image here, it’s the “Air Bag” light. Sadly, that doesn’t mean your air bags are great. It means they are totally broken, kaput.

Resurrect missing image "Airbag Light flickr.com/3209/2361334568_d8d9e60801_m"

I took it into the shop for other work and got an estimate to fix this air bag situation. Turns out the controller card fails a checksum validation. I had the exact same thing happen with my ABS controller card too and had to replace that. The air bag controller card weighed in at $1,200 to replace. Ouch!

On one hand, this is safety and you shouldn’t cut corners. $1,200 is a small price to pay if the air bags keep you safe. On the other hand, $1,200 is a boat load of money to pour into an older car and I wear my seat belts all the time.

What would you do?

It’s annoying when sales people are so obviously trying to figure out a “tickler date” to call you back.

Just spent 90 minutes rerouting cables, moving peripherals and optimizing my desk.

Five more hours to go before it’s all nice.

• Installing drivers for my ancient HP ScanJet 5500c.
• Scanner heading to be recycled. Drivers are PowerPC only. Ugh.
• New scanner ordered — and a new amplifier to make the audio happier.

Yeah - found a plugin to block registration spam. I’ve been getting hammered with it the last few days.

Watching MacBook Air commercial and experiencing lust.

Ordering a Canon HV30. Finally making the jump to a new, hi-def video camera.

Wow – Safari 3.1 really is blazing fast.

First Gary Gygax dies. Now Arthur C. Clarke. Not a good week for geek heroes.

Vista SP1 has totally hosed my WiFi card. How ridiculous can Vista get. It worked fine before.

Obamas “More Perfect Union” speech one of the most amazing I’ve ever heard a politician give. Brave and inspiring.

I got a fun opportunity to attend a really nice event hosted by True Ventures, Automattic, Sphere, New York Times and Hearst Interactive at the Hearst Tower. It was a collection of who’s who in the publishing/media sector and some great companies with some innovative web stuff. Big thanks to Raanan over at Automattic for thinking of me. Two fanboy moments of chatting with Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress and Lindsay Campbell formerly of Wall Strip and now at MobLogic.tv. Also saw Rupert Murdoch, Kevin Ryan, Toni Conrad, and more.

Jason Calacanis Interviewing Toni Schneider of WordPress on his mobile phone.

Find photo [farm4.static.flickr.com/3226/2343...](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3226/2343498641_11c4d9b8a8_m.jpg)

Matt Mullenweg

Find photo [farm3.static.flickr.com/2052/2344...](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2052/2344379648_344a3745f4_m.jpg)

The Crowd Listening to a Short Background on the Event

Find photo [farm3.static.flickr.com/2410/2343...](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2410/2343551661_d0bfb28450_m.jpg)

In September 2007 I came up with the idea of using a Yahoo! Pipe to create the Thingelstad Superfeed. The basic idea was to provide one feed that you could get all my “stuff” with. It seems it was a good idea, since a couple of companies are now doing exactly this. I setup a profile on FriendFeed to play with and I have to admit that I was more impressed than I expected.

FriendFeed replicates a lot of social networking concepts, but to use it as a basic way to consolidate information on friends it works really well. It makes adding additional feeds really simple, and has built in hooks to many of the most popular websites out there.Check it out, you may find it pretty cool, and feel free to add me as a friend.

• Finally checking into the Westin. Long day.
• The broadband in this hotel is horrible.
• Westin gets my vote for best bed in any recent hotel.