Jamie Thingelstad

Initial estimate shows that dropping DirecTV and going iTunes/Apple TV plus OTA HD will save me $432 a year.

I can do all sorts of things on DirecTV.com, except for cancel my service. So common on the web, but so rude.

Leopard seems much faster talking NFS as compared to SMB.

Turning my Windows Server 2003 box into a Ubuntu 8.04.1 Server box.

Waiting for Metallica to take the stage. This is gonna be loud!

For those of you tracking my progress on my weight loss journey here is an update. Since my last check-in I have had a lot of great progress. At my last check-in I was at 314.6 and today I’m at 307.4, losing 7.2 pounds in those two weeks with a total loss of 14.8 pounds. Most of that weight came off in the last week with some intentionally focused high-quality food work.

I’ve continued my program without any changes and I’m feeling really good. If anything, I was a lot less hungry in the last week which isn’t surprising. I’m currently on track to hit my first goal of being sub-300 by the end of the year, and am actually a bit ahead.

I’ve known about flow and experienced flow all of my life. I think I started to really understand it when I started programming in my early teens. I had no idea what it was called, but I definitely understood the absence of time, the stream of thought that just worked and the clarity of presence that accompanied it all. Kathy Sierra (her blog is suspended, but she is active on Twitter) talked a lot about the power of flow, and notably how so much on our computers and the Internet is a “flow killer” (i.e., Twitter).

I was watching some recent video segments from TED and was excited to see flow on the agenda. This is a good talk about flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Csikszentmihalyi is “the man” on flow, and has a book on the topic called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. I may need to read that.

Tammy and I decided to relax a bit tonight and rent a movie. I felt like watching a documentary and a couple of clicks later we were watching King Corn.

Tammy and I understand the “Circle of Corn” in America and have opted out of it in every way we can, other than enjoying some great fresh sweet corn late in the summer. We didn’t know much about this documentary though.

If you’ve read Omnivores Dilemma your very familiar with industrialized corn. The middle section of Michael Pollen’s book is specifically on this topic. King Corn is sort of a movie version of that section of the book. Michael Pollen even shows up in the movie with a number of interview segments.

King Corn follows two guys in there mid-twenties that have roots back to Iowa (great grandfathers) but live in Boston as they relocate to Iowa and grow a single acre of Liberty Corn outside of Greene, Iowa. They go through the whole process of growing it, the economics and the eventual products made from it. It’s a good documentary and if you are unfamiliar with the dominance of corn in our food chain it would be a great starter. If you are familiar, it is an entertaining refresher. They have a segment in the movie where they visit the Earl Butz, whose farm policies altered the course of our food chain so drastically.

I’ve posted before about the immense problems with bottled water. Tammy and I have been on a massive push to push all non-necessary plastic out of our lives banning bottled water was one of the first ones we did.

I was browsing the web the other day and ran across a campaign where you can sign up to Break the Bottled Water Habit.

Tammy and I had our first real test of this commitment when we went on the road for 6 weeks this summer. It was really tempting to get bottled water and in fact I broke down twice and did get two bottles of water during the entire trip. Tammy was pristine and drank nothing other than tap water transported in her trusty Sigg bottle.

C’mon, drop the plastic and turn on the tap!

The USB drive on my Airport Extreme just blew chow - complete erase and new filesystem. There goes four machines Time Machine history.

Just watched the Nova episode on the Space Shuttle Disaster. Well done. Sad.