Jamie Thingelstad

I’m surprised there isn’t a Hundred Pushups iPhone app.

“He Stopped Loving Her Today” followed by “Shout at the Devil”. Wow. Need Genius on my iPod. 🙂

This is the end of the second week since I took a hard diet change and got serious about getting myself back into something resembling fitness. My initial progress has been great. This week (Friday to Friday) I lost a little 4.4 pounds with a total weight loss of 7.8 pounds. This is what it looks like.

The green line shows my goal trajectory. That line tracks back to 300 by the New Year and I’m keeping close to it. The red line is a smoothed view of my weight and it was going up for a while just as an anomaly of me loading years of old data into it. Now that I have some recent data it is reflecting reality.

I’ve been journaling my food (not logging it). So I’m writing stuff down but not counting calories or points or anything. I’ve got goals for each meal and I’m hitting them well. In fact, I’m not even feeling all that hungry which is great.

I am feeling strong, a bit quicker and am really positive. Off to a great start!

Back in February I posted a feeler to see if people would be interested in getting a Minneapolis WordCamp together. The response was pretty great, without any date, promotion or agenda nearly 75 people signed up to indicate interest.

While there has been a lot of interest, I’m not going to be able to lead the effort to get a WordCamp going here in Minneapolis. Coordinating an event like this is far outside my interest area and not something I do all that well. Plus we weren’t getting great uptake on sponsorship and the current economic meltdown is not going to make that better. We also lost our keynote speaker and were again going to have to look for a new date.

I’m hopeful that someone else is interested in seeing this happen and may take the lead and run with it.

I really dig my iPhone and it seems to get better and better with every software release. However, I really wish that Apple would add a feature to block certain WiFi networks. Here is a screen that all iPhone owners are very familiar with:

Here is the problem with this screen, I see it all the time! I have no idea what the “2WIRE251” network is but I never, ever want to see it since I will never, ever use it. I’m not a customer of the “USI Wireless” network, and would rather not see that. I have no use, ever, for the “Available Now MPLS Wir…” or “City of Minneapolis Publi…” networks.

Please Apple, give us the ability to block networks like these and stop prompting to join networks that I know I will never want to join.

While I’m on this screen, it would also be great to have a checkbox to only join a given network once and not save it for the future. I’m guessing almost all iPhones have a saved preference for “NETGEAR” or “Linksys” networks and I find myself on some broken network named that on a frequent basis.

While I’m dreaming, it would be so nice if a WiFi network could advertise itself as a captive portal. For example, three of those networks in the screenshot claim to be open, but they are not. They are captive portals only useful for customers of the service. We need another type available beyond secured and open.

When I was traveling in the UK I had a couple of really interesting experiences using the normal set of online services I use. The Internet really doesn’t have a concept of countries, but I found myself unable to do some things while I was there because various online services made assumptions by mapping my IP address to a country. This is a process called geo targeting and it is used in online advertising almost always. My experience highlighted that you should be careful to use it for account settings or commerce transactions.

For example, when I was in parts of the UK and tried to login to Google Reader I was greeted with this screen.

I’m not sure what language that is, but it isn’t one I know. Now, while it wasn’t english it was obvious to me, and I think to most people, that you should just login in the form provided. I figured once I logged in it would then know via my preferences where I live and flip the language back to english. Unfortunately, it wasn’t so smart.

Another example of this problem popped up when I was trying to renew my Google Earth subscription. Unfortunately I wasn’t even able to do it since it would only allow me to see the UK store and only allow me to buy the one in £’s even though my account is entirely setup in the US.

Good food for thought on how far you should take geo targeting in building out products, versus marketing.

One of the things that makes the Mac so great is the wonderful independent, or “indy”, software developers out there. Mac software is typically not just functional, but beautiful. I recently bought Timeline 3D from Bee Docs’ and got this great postcard from the author.

Not only beautiful and functional software, but great customer interaction.

Booking person from London that we got our apartment from is attempting to rip us off and not return my deposit. Very pissed off.