Jamie Thingelstad

Considering a switch from del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia. Thoughts?

I dropped our Honda Odyssey off this morning for regular maintenance at Richfield Honda. I was pretty impressed to see this sign on the door.

That’s a nice touch. Getting a call mid-day from the service department can be little annoying and a simple text message is a great alternative. Well done and a great example of going where you customers are.

I went to my fourth spin class tonight at LA Fitness. First off, after four sessions I still think the spin bikes are incredible. They are so much better than any others I’ve used. I’ve been really happy with the classes, especially the last two. While I’m ridiculously out of shape, I’m really impressed with how well I am doing.

In the past I’ve talked with people that have done a few marathons and then don’t run much for a couple years, and ramp up really quickly for another marathon. I think I get that more now. Even as ridiculously out of shape as I am right now, I’m finding that I can hang in the class pretty good. My guess is that I don’t have the mental barriers that others may have. I get that it hurts when you climb, and I know what that hurt is like, and I know how to manage it. The fitness level just determines how much power I can get with a certain level of suffering. Over time, I’ll get more power, but the suffering is the same. I’m also really pleased that my natural cadence is still right around 90 rpm’s. That still just feels “right”.

I was pretty proud after tonight’s spinning session. I wore my heart rate monitor for the first time and I actually reached max heart rate a couple of times (about 187). Here is the floor under my bike. 🙂

I’ve hesitated and resisted migrating all my native Canon Raw (CRW and CR2) files to DNG. However, over the last couple of months I started to do a DNG conversion on import. Today I went all in.

I’m doing a mass conversion year-by-year. I’ll write another post on the process and how much space I saved, and a little of why I did it.

For those of you I’ve told for years to not use DNG, forget all that. 🙂

Mill City Farmers Market for the last weekend. Stocking up.

Textmate, Rails, Git. The rust is slowly breaking off of my hands.

Watching Frontline: The Choice. Good show.

I’m a couple of weeks down the path to losing a bunch of weight. This will be a long road and to help along I have a few tools that I’m using to help me along. The last time when I really focused on losing weight was 2000 and I used a program called Lifeform extensively, several times every day, to track everything. Now in 2008 my iPhone is almost exclusively my tool of choice for this goal.

Background

The first thing I wanted to figure out was a good way to log my food. I firmly believe that tracking your food intake is likely the most important thing you can do for weight loss. In the past I kept a very specific, to the gram and individual calorie, log of everything I ate. This was incredibly powerful, but in retrospect it was not the best long-term solution.

The reality is that you will not weigh your food and track everything you eat for the long term (even though I did it for nearly 2 years). It is too hard, obstructive and quickly becomes a crutch. While you cannot be clueless about the nutritional impact of your food, you can also become far too obsessed about it. For me this was a problem because leaving that gram-precise sterile environment resulted in drift and a lack of discipline.

However, writing everything down is incredibly powerful. I was once on a century ride with two guys that I later found were psychiatrists. I mentioned to them how powerful I thought food logging was and they explained that that power came from being able to “objectify” what you have written down. The simple act of logging allows you to step outside of yourself and review and coach your own behavior. I can see this, and would admit that I have at times changed behavior because I “didn’t want to write it down.”

Last time I kept grams and every detail in Lifeform and now I needed to find a new tool. I wanted something that I could use for logging and it needed to be on my iPhone. I did not want a web application because speed is everything. Databases become big issues with food logging programs, and the means of entering information were important. I did a lot of searching for food logging on the iPhone and I found a bunch of programs and frankly none of them were very good. They seemed clumsy. They were really designed for a mouse interface, not a native touch feel. I was bummed as there seemed no good solution.

My Diary

I then stumbled into some diary programs. This intrigued me since a food log could easily be a food diary. Simple, few word entries. The key features include multiple entries per date, ability to enter things with a time stamp in the past and searching. I found My Diary (iTunes) and it’s great for this need!

That screen shows lunch, snack and dinner for Saturday, October 11th. I’ve been using My Diary now for nearly a month to track my food and I’ve found it great.

Logging your food can tip you into an OCD view of eating that ultimately is not healthy. Using a diary format allows you to not be shackled down by numbers and just focus on the healthfulness of what you eat. Additionally, something I really didn’t think about is the ability to put context in your food log. When you read “Awesome turkey burger that Tammy made!” it carries context and value. A food entry saying 112g Turkey, Fried is devoid of all context and meaning. This is very helpful.

I’ve found My Diary to be fast, simple and very convenient. You can change the date and time of entries so if you miss writing it down you can catch up later. And I can’t emphasize how great it is to have this right on your iPhone. I highly recommend using My Diary for food tracking if you are looking to do that.

A couple of weeks ago Canon made a really big splash by announcing the Canon 5D Mark II. I’m a longtime Canon owner now having gone from the Digital Rebel to 20D to 40D now. I’ve wanted a 5D ever since the first one came out since it has no focal length multiplier. The CMOS sensor is the same size as a 35mm negative and since I love to shoot wide and have some great lenses for it, getting rid of the multiplier is a huge win to me. What I wasn’t expecting is that the 5D Mark II would come onto the scene with full HD quality video capture.

It’s best to just see what this camera can do. Full 1080p at 30 fps using all of your amazing Canon glass (lenses) opens up some amazing opportunities. Vincent Laforet put together this video for Canon created entirely on the new 5D Mark II. It’s amazing.

Obviously Laforet has more talent in his little finger than I could hope to have, this is a great video. But look at the technical quality of it and the shots achieved with depth-of-field and a simple fisheye lens. This really opens the door to some amazing options, and simply isn’t possible even on “prosumer” HD video cameras.

By the way, this is the video that I was complaining about Canon not being able to host before.

Mill City Farmers Market is great this morning. (and every Saturday morning)