Jamie Thingelstad

Today I turned 36! It was a great, great day spent with my wonderful wife and amazing daughter. And, this super cool cake.

Thanks to everyone for many well wishes via phone and email. I also got a barrage of new camera stuff that will undoubtedly lend itself to some future posts.

If you have commented on my blog you have likely noticed this blue Gravatar image appearing next to your post. This is the default image that appears if you have no avatar, and you really should get one. I’ve been on a total avatar kick lately. I had my own custom avatars made. I think that this is part of keeping the Internet personal and “connected”. I love to fill in my OS X Address Book with pictures for people so that when they call or I get email from them I get to see them.

A gravatar is a globally used avatar. It’s a service that takes your email address and creates a key to map it back to your gravatar. Automattic now owns Gravatar and is embedding it into WordPress. Now there is a plugin for the OS X Address Book that allows you to pull Gravatars into the Address Book.

So, why wait? Go to Gravatar and personalize yourself. It’s cool!

I purchased thingelstad.com in April 1999. I’m a little surprised that it took me until 1999 to buy my own last name. It seems odd to me now that I didn’t buy it in 1995 or so, when I clearly knew that this whole Internet thing was real. Luckily I beat a Thingelstad in Norway who had to settle for thingelstad.org in June 2000.

I recently filled out my personal domains and grabbed thingelstad.net as well as thingelstad.name. These were imminently obvious. It also seems to me that if you care to own your identity on the Internet you should make sure to own your full name. As such, I also own jamiethingelstad.com, jamiethingelstad.net, jamiethingelstad.org and jamiethingelstad.name.

Lastly, I have to deal with a name that is long and not easy to spell. The most common misspell of my name is to transpose the e and the l. So, I also now own thinglestad.com, thinglestad.net, thinglestad.org and thinglestad.name. These all just do a permanent redirect to the real domain.

GoDaddy really loves me. 🙂

A long, long time ago I decided to do an experiment. I built a server with 1 terabyte in storage. I wanted to see if the average person could deploy a terabyte of storage. The answer to my question was a solid no. That was April 2004. It cost a little over $3,000 and was painful. Oh times have changed.

I was loitering around the Apple Store the other day and I saw this nifty little Western Digital 1TB My Book. I was hesitant to purchase this since I figured mail order would be a better deal. I whipped out my iPhone and surmised that I was going to pay a $30 “convenience” cost to walk out of the store with it right then. Off I went.

I realize it sounds kind of “old man” of me to say that I’m amazed I can get 1 terabyte in a single disk. But, I am amazed! This is a decent drive too, supporting FireWire 400 and 800, as well as standard USB. As an added bonus it supports eSATA. I have it on my FireWire 800 port with the Mac Pro and it’s nice and fast.

I’m not brave enough to let Time Machine take this drive and have it’s way with it. I’m going to keep on using Chronosync to backup home movies, photos and iTunes media to it. I also need to find a place to put the raw DVD rips of 300 discs that I’m planning to start soon. More on that another time…

If you are looking for a big, huge disk to have around this is an easy alternative. Surely a lot easier than building a horrific box with 8 SATA drives. Ugh!

It’s very possible that my friends and family think I need to have more fun. There must have been a vast conspiracy to hit me with a bunch of new games for my Wii this year. And how completely great! Here are the additions to my Wii gaming library from this Christmas. These games are all new, so I haven’t played them extensively yet (unlike Guitar Hero III.

Super Mario Galaxy

How can you not like the Mario series, and with a game that is rated 5 stars by all the major publications (IGN: “The greatest Nintendo platformer ever?”) Super Mario Galaxy is a must have. Mario continues his never ending mission of saving Princess Peach from Bowser. Galaxy is set in space and you leap from various planets. It’s Mario in 3D which I’m usually not a huge fan of, but this is done really well. After about 10 minutes of setup you are into the game and having a great time. The integration with the Wii controls is intuitive and really nice, which you would expect from Nintendo anyway. Must have for any Wii owner.

Wii Zapper with Link’s Crossbow Training

This combo pack is really cool. The Wii Zapper is a plastic mold that you place the Wiimote and the Nunchuck into and in concert they make a gun. A really nice gun too. It’s a little small for a big guy like myself, but still really playable. I’d possibly actually enjoy a first-person shooter with this setup. The included game, Link’s Crossbow Training, is light on any story and really just filled with action for you to learn how to use the crossbow. I need to do some research on any other games that use the “zapper”, but it’s a very fun play. The lack of story insures that this will be a favorite when friends come over and just want to play the Wii for a little while.

Zack & Wiki Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure

Zack & Wiki is a ridiculous name for this game. It’s as if they went out of their way to find something that would discourage you from buying it. I didn’t even know about it until a friend of mine IM’d me a link to a review (IGN: “Buy it. Now.”) that was off the charts. After playing it for even a short while, I concur with the review. This is a great, fun game. The characters are well done, the game play is superb and you could easily see getting lost in it for hours. The game is setup sort of like a movie, so it has a decent amount of setup time and getting to know the plot. But even that is enjoyable. I highly recommend this game.

Super Paper Mario

As I said above about Galaxy, I’m not a huge fan of Mario in 3D. I still think of Mario in my old platform 2D world. Always going from left to right (always!). Paper was really interesting to me because it has much of that classic 2D platform experience. Again, there is a decent amount of setup in this game like Galaxy and Zack & Wiki. In fact, there is a lot of setup. I think it was 20 minutes before I was actually playing. The cool thing about paper is that the entire game world is both 2D and 3D. Early in the game you earn the ability to “flip” into 3D, but you can only do it for a little while at a time (like holding your breath underwater). The result is a game with puzzles that require you to flip and explore in order to proceed. Way cool! Plus, for some reason, to me the graphics look stellar in the 2D mode. I love the crisp and vibrant colors.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08

I’ve been a long-time fan of the Tiger Woods series. I’ve played the games on a couple of different consoles as well as versions for the PC and Mac. This is a great continuation of the series with wonderful adoption of the Wii control system. I can see this game being very playable right away, and in fact the intro sequence you run through to get familiar with the swing gets you almost all the way there. I don’t groove on the funky character customizations all that much, like different shirts and setting how long my facial hair is. I sort of yearn for integration with the Wii’s Mii system, but that doesn’t make sense since they are far too cartoon-like to appear at Augusta. I’m looking forward to playing this some more and if you are a fan of the series it’s worth it. (Note, I borrowed Tiger Woods PGA Tour ‘07 from a friend before and I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between ‘07 and ‘08. It’s likely not worth the cost if you already have last years edition.)

Big day today! I beat Guitar Hero III on medium. Wahoo!

I don’t think I’m even going to attempt hard. It just seems rather insane. I’ll be happy with this milestone and enjoy my medium fame.

If you want to play some time, my friend code is 5026 3031 4382.

I got my brother-in-law Denny a new Bluetooth headset for Christmas and my brother-in-law Hector showed up after putting in a mandatory morning at the office and just loved his new headset. Words cannot do his reaction justice. This short movie attempts to capture the moment.