Jamie Thingelstad

I have been searching for a good video hosting service for a while. Something that solves my online video problems like Flickr solves my online photo problems. At first blush you probably think this is silly, YouTube is the obvious answer. Well, not really.

After a while searching I found Vimeo and have been delighted. My first test for video hosting services was to upload the 13 minute fishing video from Canada. YouTube denies this video because it is over 10 minutes long. Google Video couldn’t transcode it to Flash after several attempts. Sadly even the .Mac video hosting couldn’t reliably receive the upload from iMovie (sad). Vimeo on the other hand took it with ease and got it transcoded on the first try.

I’m very happy with the quality of video from Vimeo. You get privacy controls if you want them. Embedding it in your blog is simple and easy. Plus you aren’t surrounded by trashy videos like on YouTube. I’m happy to finally find a place to plant video.

Over the course of the next few weeks I’m going to migrate anything from YouTube to Vimeo. While doing it I’ll likely recut some of the video that looks a bit rough.

I’m still having a blast on Guitar Hero III. I played for a while yesterday trying to clear some levels before the big Christmas Day extravaganza with my brother-in-laws where I expect much GH3 action. While playing I saw the notice for a 200 note streak pop up and freaked out. I knew I was hitting the song, but when it was all over…

497 note streak! That is on the medium difficulty in the 4th “level”. Unfortunately the Guitar Hero site doesn’t rank streaks so I have no idea how big of a number that is, but I thought it was pretty impressive! Check out my profile page if you want to prove this isn’t rigged. 🙂

I thought about naming this post “I have a dream” but I figured the SEO impacts would be all wrong. The idea though would be spot on. I decided to go with this title and its gambling reference because I’m quite positive that I am gambling a little. I just bought my third Apple TV and set it up last week.

Yes, I read a bunch of different blogs and I do not have my head in the sand. You don’t have to go very far to read an article about how the Apple TV has already failed and is doomed to sit next to the Newton on the shelf of shame at Apple HQ. In fact, simply buying an Apple TV doesn’t give you a lot of assurance the product is doing well. The unit I just bought and installed still had the 1.0 software on it. The 1.1 release was made a long time ago so you know this unit was sitting on the shelf for a while.

However, I find the allure of these little boxes to be too strong. The promise is great. Integration with the iTunes ecosystem. Great user experience. By far the best “ten foot” user experience I’ve ever seen. The integration is great. You can watch part of a movie on a plane, come home and sync your iPhone and then sit down on the couch and the Apple TV will offer to resume where you left off. For music, it’s a great device with nearly no issues (please add rating from the Apple TV!). It falls down in video, and that is really where the entire iTunes world falls down.

I’ve decided to continue betting all the way to three of these units for a few reasons. First, as part of the iTunes world it is not easy for Apple to just shove it aside. I don’t expect that there will be a breaking change that will cause them to stop working for a long time, if ever. Additionally, I really like the form factor and it’s complete lack of noise (although it’s hotter than nearly any device I’ve ever owned). If it really got ugly, I also feel comfortable that I can hack the thing wide open and do some of the stuff that Apple should be doing for me already on it.

Now, I’m just hoping these rumors of significant Apple TV enhancements at WWDC in January come true!

I was out in New York last week and couldn’t pass up an opportunity to check out the brand new Apple Store on 14th Street. It’s worth a visit if you are in town. It’s far more spacious than the Fifth Avenue store and the glass spiral staircase is impressive. It has three floors which are nice to segment the store up.

It seems that delivering Wii’s to stores isn’t the only supply problem Nintendo has. Every time they release new versions of the software for the Wii, and even some of the pay titles available in the Wii Store, their servers get overloaded for days.

I tried updating my system a dozen times and it finally just worked today, a few days after the update went out. I still can’t get some of the titles in the Wii Store to successfully download. I’m trying to get Check Mii Out now and that fails on every attempt. It spits out these errors about your network setup, but it’s really just that their servers are totally overloaded.

Somebody at Nintendo needs to wake up and sign a deal with a content distribution network.

I’m totally obsessed with my Wii all over again and it’s because of Guitar Hero III - Legends of Rock. In between attempts to update my Wii software, I’ve been rocking out with Guitar Hero III. I can’t remember the last time I played a single game for over an hour – until now.

This is a seriously fun game. Think of Dance Dance Revolution, but without a silly dance pad and way better music. Oh, and I can actually play Guitar Hero, unlike DDR. It comes with a plastic “guitar controller” that you mount the Wiimote in and you start playing away. I was hooked pretty much instantly. It’s a must have Wii game, particularly for the air guitar sort.

If you are playing Guitar Hero already connect with my profile and let’s shred!

My RSS reader is filled with a lot of technology stuff, a variety of Apple websites and a ton of friends that have blogs. I recently subscribed to a new blog that I had to create a new group for. The group is called Interesting, and the blog is Dictionary Evangelist.

I got exposed to this blog by watching Erin McKean’s presentation at TED entitled “Redefining the Dictionary” via their podcasts. The video was fun, and her posts are “interesting” and fun as well. Erin is a lexicographer, which is to say she makes dictionaries. Cred’ out to Dictionary Evangelist (Add Feed).

What’s in your “Interesting” group?

I have given myself and a couple of my friends (him and him) a task for the upcoming Winnipeg Folk Festival. There is a tradition on the final night that all of the performers at the festival come on stage and conduct the finale. The three songs that comprise the finale are The Mary Ellen Carter, Wild Mountain Thyme and Amazing Grace. The assignment is to learn the lyrics to these songs, especially the Mary Ellen Carter, so that everyone can sing along without looking at the lyrics in the songbook.

Now, when I say sing along I mean sing along with gusto. Think of an Irish bar 30 minutes before closing time and the whole place rocking and singing to a traditional reel. That’s the idea.

This post is the study guide for this assignment. I’ve compiled the lyrics for these songs and validated them against specific tracks from iTunes to make sure they are correct.

The Mary Ellen Carter by Stan Rogers

The Mary Ellen Carter (iTunes) is a pretty amazing song. On the Wikipedia page for the song it is credited with savings someone’s life! The lyrics for it are substantial and have some areas where emphasis is needed (highlighted in yellow). This will take a while to get it right. I’d suggest focusing most attention on this song.

She went down last october in a pouring driving rain
The skipper he’d been drinkin’ and the mate he felt no pain
Too close to three mile rock and she was dealt her mortal blow
And the Mary Ellen Carter settled low

There was just us five aboard her when she finally was awash
We’d worked like hell to save her, all heedless of the cost
And the groan she gave as she went down it caused us to proclaim
That the Mary Ellen Carter would rise again

Well the owners wrote her off, not a nickel would they spend “She gave twenty years of service boys then met her sorry end.
But insurance paid the loss to us, so let her rest below”
Then they laughed at us and said we had to go

But we talked of her all winter, some days around the clock
She’s worth a quarter million a-floating at the dock
And with every jar that hit the bar we swore we would remain
And make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again

CHORUS: Rise again, rise again
That her name not be lost to the knowledge of men
Oh those who loved her best, and were with her ’til the end
Will make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again

All spring now we’ve been with her on a barge lent by a friend
Three dives a day in a hard hat suit and twice I’ve had the bends
Thank God it’s only sixty feet and the currents here are slow
Or I’d never have the strength to go below

But we patched her rents, stopped her vents, dogged hatch and portal down
Put cables to her fore and aft and girded her around
Tomorrow noon we hit the air and then take up the strain
And make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again

CHORUS

For we couldn’t leave her there you see to crumble into scale
She’d saved our lives so many times living through the gale
And the laughing, drunken rats who left her to a sorry grave
They won’t be laughing in another day

And you to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go
Turn to and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter rise again

2ND CHORUS: Rise again, rise again
Though your heart it be broken your life about to end
No matter what you’ve lost be it a home, a love, a friend
Like the Mary Ellen Carter rise again

2ND CHORUS

Wild Mountain Thyme

This is a traditional Irish song. As such, the lyrics are modified by various performers. This recording by Carl Peterson (iTunes) isn’t the best but it’s a good one to learn the lyrics with. It’s really slow, and you can go along at your own pace without any issue.

Oh, the summer time is come,
And the trees are sweetly blooming,
And the wild mountain thyme
Grows around the blooming heather.

CHORUS:
Will you go, lassie, go?
And we’ll all go together
To pluck wild mountain thyme
All around the blooming heather,

Will you go, lassie, go?
I will build my love a bower
By yon clear and crystal fountain,
And on it I will pile,
All the flowers from the mountain.

CHORUS

If my true love, she were gone,
I will surely find another
Where the while wild mountain thyme
Grows around the blooming heather.

CHORUS

Oh, the summertime is coming
And thre trees are sweetly blooming
And the wild mountain thyme
Grows around the blooming heather.

CHORUS

Amazing Grace

I’m sure you know most of the words to Amazing Grace. This recording by Anne Murray (iTunes) is a good one to hammer the lyrics in with. I know, Anne Murray? Yes, I know. It is what it is.

Amazing grace!
How sweet the sound,
That sav’d a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,

And grace my fears reliev’d;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believ’d!

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun.

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound,
That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

It was nine months ago that we added Izzy to our family. Today we added another dog to the family. His name is Chase!

We adopted Chase today after visiting him on Thursday night. He is about 5 months old and is a Border Collie/Black Lab mix. His color is all Black Lab, and his face has a lot of the Collie in it. He was born in South Dakota and found his way to Minneapolis with a couple of siblings. We found Chase on the Internet (with the unfortunate name of Lurch), while casually considering getting another dog. After visiting him we pondered it for a while and decided to take the leap.

Chase arrived today and for about five hours he and Izzy just ran around chasing each other. Complete and total mayhem. I’m pleased to say that as I write this though they have settled a bit and Chase is actually laying down. First time today.

Chase is going to be high energy and will be a good friend for Izzy. Izzy loves other dogs and will appreciate the company. Chase is going to be very smart, and even at his young puppy stage he’s already learned a few commands. I get a sense he is going to be much easier to train than Izzy. He should get to 40-50 lbs fully grown.

Tammy and I are both considering our moment of insanity. :-) Getting Chase is reminding us how much Izzy has grown since we got her. Welcome to the family Chase!

On Thursday of this week I experienced a disaster. I got a phone call and while taking my iPhone out of my pocket it slipped and I fumbled it ever so oddly, culminating in it hitting the plastic arm of the chair I was sitting in. I flipped it around and to my horror the glass had cracked!

The image above is not my phone. I was not able to get a picture of it. The image is from GeckoAndFly.com under the Creative Commons license. See the post where this picture originated.

It was really odd. I had dropped my iPhone before, and in much worse situations, and everything was fine. This was a minor hit, and on a plastic surface no less. I think the issue was that it hit exactly where the cutout for the speaker is, on one of the corners. It would make sense that this would be one of the weaker points in the glass. Same exact hit that is in the picture above.

Distraught at my lack of a perfect iPhone (it worked fine with the broken glass BTW) I headed to the Apple Store. I wasn’t optimistic that it would be replaced gratis. Upon arriving my assumptions were proven out. Apple replaced it with a “replacement only” unit that cost $249. A big $50 savings off of a brand new unit, and you have to immediately hand over your broken unit (hence no picture). The money aside, the replacement was flawless. I came home, docked it, and iTunes quickly restored exactly as my previously broken one was.

After months of waiting Pleo has finally arrived! Pleo is the first robot from Ugobe.

It seems not many people had pre-ordered Pleo (according to Jyte). Of course there were only 2,000 of the special “First Hatch” editions available.

I charged Pleo’s batteries and woke him up for the first time. So far I’m pretty impressed. Ugobe has done a great job of getting Pleo to convey a variety of emotions. I took him to work today and people had a great time playing with him. He’s already learned several new motions and actions. I had read another blog post saying that they thought he was really loud. Granted you can hear the servos, but I don’t think they are too loud. Engadget has a nice write-up on Pleo.

I’ll post more on my first few days with Pleo later, perhaps with some video.

Ever since I’ve gotten my iPhone I now have a new routine before I travel. I make sure to sync the iPhone with iTunes and get all the most recent episodes of podcasts, and maybe a movie and some TV shows while I’m at it. Since the iPhone is my all-in-one device, it’s great to be able to load up so much content on it and head to the airport.

The iPhone is a superb device to watch video on. The screen is bright and large enough to enjoy the show. Unfortunately, all is not perfect. You really cannot expect to hold your iPhone for an hour while you watch a show on a flight.

The first part of this problem is that the iPhone itself is aluminum and thus relatively slippery. I have the incase cover for my phone that is nice and grippy and I found that I could prop my iPhone on my tray by placing something behind it. This worked okay, but resulted in looking down at the seat tray for a long time, and some neck pain to go along with that. So I pondered this for a while and came up with an alternative.

I got all MacGuyver on this one. The ideal scenario is to have the screen right at the headrest of the person in front of you. How to do that? Two rubber bands and two safety pins later and the problem is solved.

If you don’t have the Incase cover you can just make the rubber bands tighter to hold it in place. You’ll want to make sure and get the safety pins fairly level. After mounting, this worked great!

Fire up a movie, recline and enjoy!

I’m presenting at Code Freeze 2008 in January. The title of my presentation is Innovation in Product Development.

Everyone wants to have the next hot product. We are constantly “pushing the envelope” and “thinking out of the box”. We have the aspiration, but in many cases it doesn’t happen. In this discussion we will review key aspects to fostering innovation in a development team, creating room to play and ultimately making great products.

I’ve got some ideas for my presentation and a theme I’m thinking of winding it through. However, I’m curious if you all have anything to say on this topic. What do you think drives innovation in product development? What are the key contributing factors that you see?

Let me know what you think.

I recently picked up a Linksys WTR-54GS travel router based on the positive recommendation of my friend Chris. He had gotten one before going on a big trip to make sure that he had WiFi in all the locations he wanted it and it worked really well.

I’ve considered getting something like this for a while, but never had a need that pushed me over the edge. The iPhone was the tipping point. When staying in a hotel I wanted to get my iPhone online and even if a hotel does provide WiFi they usually limit each room to one device (via the MAC address). By using a travel router like this I can put a small network in my room with several devices and not have to pay any additional fees. I’m using it right now in my hotel room with my Dell laptop, MacBook Pro and my iPhone all online. It works really well.

As an added benefit the WTR-54GS has a firewall integrated into it so you can protect all of your devices from other hotel guests. I’ve noticed lately that if I launch iTunes in a hotel I could see a large number of peoples shared music. Tsk tsk. The firewall in the travel router will keep me protected from such things.

The WTR-54GS itself is a nice package. It has an integrated power supply so there isn’t any extra junk for plugging it in. It comes with a nice, very packable, 10-BaseT cable. It’s small and can easily be thrown in your suitcase for any trip. One of the unique features of the Linksys model is that you can even bridge from one WiFi network to your own, thus still getting the advantages even when the hotel offers only WiFi.

If you travel with any regularity, and are an electronics pack mule like me, you should consider grabbing one of these.

It seems that I lost my Crash pen today. This makes me very sad. I’ve had this pen for a few years and I think it’s just supremely cool looking. I’ve even ordered parts for it in the past.

I think I’m going to have to order a new one. Bummer. I guess on the bright side at least I can order a new one.

If you are reading thingelstad.com via the RSS feed you will notice that I have added a copyright notice creative commons license to the feed, along with a digital fingerprint and for fun the IP address of the machine that pulled in your RSS feed. I’m doing this to fight back against website hijacking.

I’m noticing a lot of my content being stolen via my RSS feed and then republished on spammer websites. This is a slimy practice and is a growing trend. Lorelle wrote on this at some length recently. I decided to do something about it with the CopyFeed WordPress plug-in.

I went out of my way to just put the copyright notice creative commons license in a regular HTML block at the end of the post. I decided to post about this to encourage others to consider adding this if their content is being stolen, and to let you know why the copyright notice creative commons license has appeared.

I’m writing this post on a plane. I’m drafting with MarsEdit to post later. There isn’t much interesting about that. What is interesting is checking out people looking at my computer screen. Why? It looks like I’ve time warped back 20 years.

I’ve been doing almost all of my writing for the site using WriteRoom. WriteRoom is a Mac application that defers to a simple, distraction free writing environment. They describe it best as:

For people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full-screen writing environment. Unlike the cluttered word processors you’re used to, WriteRoom is just about you and your text.

Here is what my screen looks like right now.

Pretty whacky huh? That’s WriteRoom. When you launch WriteRoom your entire screen goes black, and you just type. All of those other applications, and even the user interface of the editor itself fades to black. You just write. So simple it took a decade to make.

There is a lot more to WriteRoom. For example, it never has you typing at the bottom of the screen. Your actual typing is always in the middle. Seems like nothing, but is really nice. In short you can customize the heck out of it and make it the experience you want for editing. If pure text mode isn’t your thing, it even has a minimal rich editor.

Ya know the thing I love about WriteRoom? It’s the same thing I love about Quicksilver. As well as dozens of other applications on my Mac that are written by very small independent software developers. It’s different. It’s elegant. There is so much fresh and new thinking going on in the independent developer world of the Mac. It’s a great time to be a Mac user.