Jamie Thingelstad

I’ve been taking the dogs out on walks every morning, provided the temperature is about 0 °F. Now that we’ve had a bunch of snow I’ve found the morning to be a bit slippery, especially on the one hill. And the fresh snow doesn’t give much traction. Feels a lot like walking in sand.

I was reading Robert Craig’s blog and saw his post about his YakTrax and how well they worked. This seemed like a great addition to my morning activities. Santa Claus visited our house early last night (we are traveling this Christmas) and left some YakTrax for me, as well as winter gear for the dogs.

The YakTrax are easy to get on. They slip on the bottom of your shoe without much hassle. I have the YakTrax Walkers. The dogs and I went out for an hour today and the YakTrax made a huge difference. I didn’t slip at all, and had as much traction for walking as I’d ever want to have.

Tammy said that some people online were complaining that they had broken on them, sometimes on the first use. I’ve only wore them once so I can’t speak to how well they will last. I can see how if you put them on wrong, or had one of the bands crimped badly, it could cause a problem. We’ll see.

In the meantime, if you walk reasonable distances in the snow, I’d highly recommend buying a pair of YakTrax.

I was shoveling the driveway for what seems like the 20th time already. For some reason I haven’t pulled the snow blower out yet. It’s been fun getting out there with the shovel, and Chase in particular has fun running around in the snow. He was having a blast today, and took a break in some pretty deep powder.

Fluid.app makes Pandora into a standalone app pretty well!

Subscribing to Pandora (after lapsing) due to Airfoil’s magic. Will use Pandora 100x more than before. Wish Pandora had a standalone app tho

AppleTV units could benefit from a /sbin/reboot in the crontab at 4:00 am. Wonder if I could add that via ssh.

If you have a LaserJet 2605dtn and are using Leopard - you need to get firmware 20071108. It will make you much happier.

Mosaic installation on the fireplace is starting. Pretty cool.

Wrapping Tammy’s christmas presents and am really excited that somebody finally started putting a grid on the back of gift wrap!

Merry Christmas everyone! This year is a travel year for us. We’ll be heading back to North Dakota to spend Christmas day with my family. We are looking forward to seeing everyone!

If you’ve been checking your mailbox anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Thingelstad letter, or even just a card, you’ve been sadly disappointed on your daily trip to the mailbox. No card this year.

We could be bleak and blame it on the economy. We could be green and hightlight how much carbon we are saving by not sending out more cards and saving some trees while we are at it. We could also highlight that the trend seems to be that we only write a Christmas letter every other year. We had a letter in 2007 and 2005. The even years, 2006 and 2004, seem to fall short. But mostly, we just didn’t get one done and didn’t feel strongly about getting one out.

We’ll store up the enthusiasm though and 2009 should be pretty great! :-)