Jamie Thingelstad

Ann Coulter being interviewed on the TV. The evil is warping the image and starting to melt the plastic.

I can’t have jam.ie, too bad. I could have thingl.es.

The domain maz.ie is actually available. That would be a nice reservation for my daughter. But €75 a year? Ouch!

Debating the merits of a domain that ends in .ly — Libya? Hmmm…

Checked into Holiday Inn in New Jersey. This hotel may redefine the meaning of cheap. So tired!

Just finished great dinner at Los Dos.

Threat level ORANGE! Stay terrified.

Just loaded summer travel plans into Dopplr. Phew!

This weekend we were in a store and I saw this t-shirt. It was a must have for Maze!

If you have trouble reading that, it’s:

AB/CD
FOR THOSE ABOUT TO WALK
WE SALUTE YOU

Awesome!

Impressed by an actually interesting Super Bowl! Congrats to the Giants!

Another “Proud Papa” post. This landed in my voicemail a day ago. Made me melt.

Oh boy…

I love Delicious Library. Why? Delicious Library to me epitomizes the belief that software can always be better. Fundamentally what Delicious Library does could be easily done in a basic spreadsheet, but that would be incredibly boring. Delicious Library 2 is the long anticipated Leopard-only upgrade to this great program.

Just won the Change Game on $5.67!

I was checking out Edward Tufte’s site the other day and I noted that he is going to be returning to Minneapolis again for his seminar. I’ve been to his seminar twice and would consider going a third time but I’ll be out of town.

If you haven’t been to his seminar before I really recommend it. It’s like taking a bath in high quality analysis of visual displays. Even if your day job doesn’t directly involve designing it is still a very worthwhile and educational way to spend a day. Plus you get copies of all four of his books.

For the last few months I’ve had a Jumpnode appliance in my house keeping a tab on all of my computers, the network and other infrastructure. The Jumpnode is an appliance created by a Minneapolis startup that allows people to keep an eye on technology in remote offices, server performance or anything else that you can query via SNMP or WMI. It delivers on it’s promise of ease-of-use and exceptionally simple setup.

When you get your Jumpnode you simply unbox it, record the unique serial number and plug it into your network. Everything else is done with a slick Flash application that is hosted by Jumpnode.

Nobody likes to deal with backups. It’s a chore. It usually has some expense to it. But we all know it’s critical. Your probably backing up to a USB drive that you picked up and plugged into your machine. That’s good. Maybe you’ve actually progressed with another computer in your house or a NAS device and are backing up over the network. This is a good idea to provide some separation between the backup and the computer the data is on.

But, what if there was a real catastrophe? What if your house burned down? What if someone broke into your house and stole all the computers? Bad things happen, and those hard drives no longer just have letters and check book accounts. Those are your family photos and videos, and if your like me you cannot lose that. There is only one way to guarantee your data and that is offsite backup. I’ve finally implemented a robust offsite backup regime that I think works best.

The first thing about doing offsite backups is that it requires pairs of storage. You could get by without it, but that will double your trips offsite to insure that you always have storage offsite. My approach is to have an A-set and B-set of disks, and swap them via a safe deposit box at the bank. If the A-set is at your house or in transit, the B-set is in the bank. If the B-set is in motion, the A-set is in the bank. There is always a safe set.

Now what kind of disk do we go with? There are a lot of options for USB and FireWire drives that will do the job, but there are some challenges with that approach. First, these drives have custom power adapters that are unique to the drive. They also have a lot of air in those cases, greatly increasing the phyiscal space required to store the disks. This is important if you are placing them in a safety deposit box with limited space. The answer is to just use bare hard drives, just like you would put inside your machine.

IMAGE OF DISKS

But it’s crazy to open up your machine all the time. That is where a USB drive adapter comes to the rescue.

IMAGE OF ADAPTER

$8 for the MnPASS lane!? I’ll pass on that.

Registration just opened up for RailsConf 2008 in Portland, Oregon. I’m heading out to my first RailsConf!

Our house keeps getting greener and greener. Tammy has done an awesome job of finding alternative products for us to use that are better for the planet and us. This process started in the kitchen and has slowly spread, now reaching the bathroom.

Green products and the bathroom are a struggle. We’ve all gotten so used to the various products that we have available that switching is challenging. Natural soaps are easy. Even natural toothpaste is a breeze. Tom’s of Maine toothpaste is great, and after using it for a while you will think regular toothpaste is overly sweet and nasty.

Shaving however was filled with canned gels in nasty packaging with nasty ingredients made in nasty processes, not to mention huge marketing budgets. Tammy pushed me to get off of those things and switch and I eagerly jumped in. There are only two options at the co-op for shaving and luckily the 2nd one is great.

Alba Botanical makes this shave cream that works like a charm. It is actually one of those great examples of a green product that you prefer over the previous product after you get used to it (like the toothpaste). It’s not all foamy so you don’t get to see big lines of white foam come off of your face as you shave (note photo for this post). You have to keep track on your own where you left off. It’s incredibly smooth and I find much more refreshing than the other gels and foams I’ve used over the years. It also defies our American approach of some being good, so a lot must be better. You apply this stuff sparsely and it’s great. If you slather it all over, it doesn’t work as well.

As a bonus, it’s just a lotion so you can easily put some in a small container and take it on a plane without the need for special packaging. I know some guys that actually just shave with handsoap now to avoid taking shaving cream containers on planes. You should really consider some of this lotion instead.

Go ahead and start greening up your bathroom with your morning shave.

Sometimes I get stuck on something, particularly late at night and I get totally obsessed. It’s almost always not very important, but then I obsess about it and the only thing that pushes me away to sleep is the dead battery of my laptop. The other night I got totally obsessed with taking a different tact on my OS X desktop. Clean. Simple.

This is the look. I’m really liking it. I went with an abstract desktop for focus and really minimized what I had in the dock. Instead, I’m using a lot of the fancy Leopard folder tricks to launch things. Front and center in this is CoverSutra for the tangible side of digital music and WeatherDock to keep me in the loop with the temperature. Quicksilver rounds out the stack to tie it all together. Also, Warp is a must have extension to make Leopard’s Spaces more usable. The Shared Desktop folder on my desktop is synchronized on every computer I use with the application that I can’t seem to kick, FolderShare. Microsoft bought FolderShare forever ago and it’s still a PowerPC binary but it works like magic. I wish there was a better Mac-centric, OS X Intel option. Oh well..

I feel so calm. :-)

I don’t have New Year resolutions every year, but this year I figured what the heck. Looking back, while I didn’t call it a resolution, I did force a switch to Camera RAW for photography on January 2nd, 2006 and that was great. I have a few technology and Internet related resolutions that I thought I would share this year. Hopefully I’m as happy with these changes in a couple of years.

Digitally Signed Email

The time has come for this to be standard. This feels a lot like the Camera RAW resolution above. Not many people use digital certificates with their email because it's generally a pain and complicated. But, without it email is like writing on a bathroom wall, in a really big bathroom. It's so wide open it is somewhat shocking. Digital certificates solve this problem.

I have now enabled my OS X Mail with a digital certificate from Thawte and if you get email from me it will be signed. This isn’t universal since the iPhone at this point doesn’t sign messages, and I do occasionally have to resort to webmail. But if it’s from Mail.app it will be signed.

Go get your own certificate as well and we can even encrypt the message. There is a somewhat dated, but good explanation on doing this for OS X at Joar Wingfor’s website.

Less Google

Yes, less Google. Google knows too much about me. I've decided this trend needs to reverse. I've stopped using GMail and am using Tuffmail for my mailbox. I've ditched Google Calendar. I'm even thinking about moving from Google Reader, a frightening thing to even consider. But I think 2008 needs to end with less Google than it started with. It isn't that I think they are evil, it's just that I don't think one company should really have that many angles on my personal data. After moving my email to Tuffmail, I had this sense that I was no longer being monitored. Real or not, I had that feeling.

More Wikipedia

This resolution was made by another guy at the office and I liked it so much I'm adopting it myself. It seems that many times when I search on Google I end up at [Wikipedia](http://www.wikipedia.org/). So I'm going to try to cut down on the middle man. Even better, how about doing Wikipedia searches from inside OS X's Dictionary.

Cleaner URL’s

I have a tendency to put an unnecessary trailing slash on URL’s. I’m going to try to stop doing this.