Jamie Thingelstad

Too hot to be sitting at a computer. Over 80 in my office.

First Twitter reference just made at OPA Tech Day.

Done with the short route at the Minneapolis Tour bike ride

Tammy has been leading the way on a number of environmentally conscious improvements in our house. We’ve done a lot of big things like our solar heat project and buying wind credits for all of our electricity. But these larger efforts are somewhat “mailing it in”. You do them once, write a check to someone, and continue as you always have. They don’t require you to change behavior at all. Recently we’ve been working harder on these types of change, including starting to compost and using air conditioning more sparingly. Tammy however has been pushing even farther, looking at where she buys clothing, where items comes from and what we bring into the kitchen.

Over the last year or so we’ve weened ourself off of the traditional grocery stores. We’ve been longtime co-op members and shop at Lakewinds. However, for a long time we supplemented with occasional trips to “normal” grocery stores for other items. We no longer do this, having pushed those items out of our kitchen. We can happily report there are no trans-fats, and no high-fructose (or otherwise) corn syrup products in our house. Shopping exclusively at a co-op makes this much easier to do. We recently got new sheets for our bed and she persisted her search there. She found bedsheets made of bamboo that have a much smaller footprint on the environment. By the way, the bamboo sheets are awesome.

She has recently declared no more bottled watter. She read Garbageland a while ago and that really got her thinking about trash (hence our push into composting) and bottled water is a huge problem in this regard. We now all have our Sigg bottles and eschew the ubiquitous bottled water in favor of bringing our own along. The September 7th edition of The Week goes into much more detail on this problem in it’s briefing entitled The High Price of Bottled Water. Here are some highlights I felt needed to be shared.

• In 2006 American’s consumed 30 billion bottles of water spending $15 billion. Think of those 30 billion water bottles in landfills. Only 25% of them are recycled. (Okay, 22.5 billion water bottles in landfills.) That’s 2 billion pounds of plastic.
• 75% of New Yorkers when given a blind taste test prefered New York city tapwater to bottled water.
• EPA standards for city water are more strict than FDA standards for bottled water. For example, city water is tested 100 or more times a month for coliform bacteria, and bottled water once a week.
• It takes 1.5 million barrels of crude oil to create the plastic bottles. 37,800 18-wheelers are in use every day to haul bottled water around the US.
• If you paid for your tap water at the same rate you pay for bottled water, your water bill would cost $9,000 a month.

The only value being provided here is convenience. The water isn’t better. It’s just in a nice, convenient package. A simple change in behavior could help us out in so many ways.

I’ll be carrying my Sigg bottle more often… get yourself one!

One of the unexpected byproducts of getting the iPhone is that I’m listening to a lot more music on the go. There are two primary reasons for this. The most important one is that my phone is almost always with me (unlike an iPod). Since the iPhone is much more than a phone, but is my phone, I now almost always have music with me. The second reason is that the experience is just so nice that I really enjoy using it. The integration of the phone and music player into the same device has some nice other benefits, like still being able to receive a call while walking around the city or working out and listening to music, or books, or podcasts.

Listening to more music I decided to do an upgrade of the earbuds that come with the iPhone. The included buds are okay, but you can do better. This is a tricky upgrade however. The iPhone comes with the customized headphones that have a mic in them for making phone calls (which is great by the way, it’s really nice to do calls with both ears). Of course you can plug in normal headphones and they work fine, but with less functionality.

UltimateBuds came to the rescue with an innovative approach. You can send them your iPhone headphones and they will detach the Apple earbuds and put the Etymotic ER6i earbuds on in there place. The microphone functionality is not affected, since it is still the same headphone set. Brilliant! I opted for this and sent my headphones in a week ago. The turnaround time was fast and the quality of the replacement is great.

I’ve now been able to try my modified Etymotic ER6’s in a variety of conditions and I am very pleased. I’m typing this while using them on a plane and having used noise cancelling headphones as well, these are far superior. The thing that takes some getting used to with the ER6’s is that they don’t really sit in your ear like typical buds do. They are rather just speakers designed for your ear canal. They go deeper into your and that takes a little getting used to. The sound is great though. Detail comes through crisply, bass is reproduced with depth and boom. Two thumbs up!

My only challenge with them thus far has been on an airplane. I’m a bit more sensitive than most to air pressure and ears. I found that placing the headphones in with a complete “seal” made for a lot of pressure on my ear. Working the earbud around a bit makes it okay though.

If your looking for better sound on the go with your iPhone, and don’t want to sacrifice the microphone, this is a great option.

At Minnesota Renaissance Festival. Got a cape and a staff to go with it! Very busy today! Hazzah!

Just played a bit of network Battle Tetris. Wow!

At Rafferty’s Pizza in Nisswa! 🍕