Jamie Thingelstad

I just got home from another business trip. I seem to be in the middle of another spat of business travel with all the requisite fun of airports, flights, taxis, rental cars and hotels.

As I drove to the airport for this trip I noted the electronic sign at the entrance of the airport proclaiming:

Threat Level Orange

I have to ask, what good is this? What in the world is this supposed to do to make my life better? Really. Let’s think about this. My reaction to the blazing orange threat level was essentially as follows:

1. Is orange bad? What is really bad? Orange sounds horrible. Does this mean my plane is going to explode?
2. What caused the threat level to be orange? Is there a global terrorism plot targeting the Minneapolis airport on the day I’m flying? Did some high school kid threaten to explode football stadiums?
3. At what threat level do I not fly? Seriously. If this is supposed to inform me and make me more educated, when do I turn around and go home. Maybe orange? I’m going home, I don’t want to die.
4. This is stupid.

So I’m back to the beginning, what is the point? Other than making me feel nervous, slightly anxious, remind me that if I’m lucky enough to win the lottery I might have a terrorist incident in the airport. The only real impact this blazing “Threat Level Orange” had on me was to reinforce a low level of fear that is propogated by a variety of government and non-government agencies.

I decided to visit the Department of Homeland Security website and find out what these levels really were. The image to the right is from the DHS website. I love the names. I’ve never, ever, seen green. That really makes sense after all, when are you ever safe. Someone may be stalking you right now, and yes, your plane may blow up. Be afraid, very afraid. Guarded is great. Blue doesn’t make intuitive sense to me on this scale, but I’ll leave that for now. Be guarded, don’t trust those strangers. Then there is the issue of the scale as a whole, is it really linear with these equal bands? It would seem to me that the way a scale like this should work, if it should even exist, is that from 0 to 60 it’s low. In essence, the vast majority of the time. And 61 to 80 is guarded. An exponential, not linear, scale.

Since I cannot determine any value provided to me from this wonderful service other than fear it just strikes me as very Orwellian. What better way to keep people under control than constantly remind them of things that are statistically irrelevant.

Update!

I just went to the DHS website and it looks like the threat level may now be yellow!

Or not? I love this graphic. The top says the threat level is ELEVATED (note the all caps, it’s important) and the yellow bar is highlighted. Then the text says it is HIGH. Turns out that they are just telling us that there is a “significant risk of terrorist attacks” in general, and that in the airlines there is a “high risk of terrorist attacks”. It’s confusing to say the least, but make sure you stay scared.

Watch out!

Tammy has launched her website, Smaller Than a Redwood. You should check it out. Her website is finding it’s groove right now. She’s got some early content on it. She doesn’t intend it to be “diary based” like this site. You won’t see what we did when and where on it, but instead different thoughts and comments that she wants to put up. She is also looking to put content from her friends on it as well.

The name of the site came from a conversation Tammy was having with Ann as she was preparing for a trip to San Francisco and the Redwood Forest. She has an assignment to write something for the site while sitting under the Redwoods.

Her site is pretty fun!

I’m not a gamer.

Starting a post titled “Wii Obsession?” with a statement like “I’m not a gamer” may seem like denial, but it really isn’t. If I’m looking for a fun time at my computer I’m most likely going to play around with some new software, do something on one of my websites, or blather on my blog. I don’t even follow the console gaming world with the exception of information that I get just by being around people I know.

However, I’m really fascinated with the soon to be released Nintendo Wii. I love that Nintendo is zigging, while Sony and Microsoft zag. Instead of going for more, bigger, faster, better Nintendo is focusing on game play and quality entertainment. The crazy remote that the Wii comes with is a big departure, and I think it will pay off. I read about the radical departure of the Wii in the Economist of all places.

Tammy and I got a Nintendo DS a number of months ago and we have had a lot of fun with it. A big part of the fun is different games enabled by a stylus and built-in mic. The Wii’s controllers enable tennis and boxing games where you actually swing your arms around. How fun! The Wii will also pair wireless with the existing DS which could create some interesting gaming options as well.

I’ve made it clear that a Wii would be a welcome Christmas present, however they will not be trivial to get. Who knows, I may yet go back on the promise I made myself years ago – no more consoles!

The last three weeks have been a backyard fire extravaganza! We’ve had three great evenings burning stuff with a variety of friends on late fall evenings. The air is brisk, and the fire is toasty. The best of all worlds.

I recently caught up to this new episode of Nova called the Monster of the Milky Way. I like Nova, but this is one of the better ones I’ve seen and if you have the opportunity to watch it in full high-definition wonder the computer graphics are stunning. It’s also just incredibly interesting stuff.

So when your wife is upstairs on her computer, and you are downstairs on your computer, how do you communicate? Why not video chat? 🙂

After wasting a lot of time messing with the routing options on my Zywall 10 I think I finally got the port-forwarding configuration setup right so that the new website is up and running! Yeah! Hint for anyone trying to configure that on the Zywall, go to the manual, and jump to the example configurations at the end. It was the only way I found the voodoo required to make it work.

Let me know what you think of the new site. There are a ton of features on it, and I’m planning on enabling some more stuff and filling out the corners over the next few days.

Regular visitors will notice that the photo galleries are gone. I’m looking for a solution for that that will work well with WordPress.

This post is a heads up that a new thingelstad.com is on the way! I’ve finally made the push to get things into a new blogging package (WordPress) and am just finalizing things now. The new site will be up by the end of the week.

I’m going to try to redirect as many links as possible, particularly the RSS feeds, but if you haven’t heard anything from this blog in a few days you should check your feed links.

The new site is going to be GREAT!

I had a busy day on election day with an 8am meeting at work. I was determined to get out and vote and I ended up being the 37th vote in my polling station. This is the line that formed right before the polls open.

Voting went smooth. I was leering at the scanner that read my votes after watching the Hacking Democracy documentary. The software that runs these machines is frightening, the documentary is worth a watch. If there was ever a problem that was well suited for the Internet, it’s voting!

Google released a new version of the Google Reader a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been using it for the last few days. I think that I’ve finally found a web-based RSS reader that I can live with now.

I’ve wanted to move my RSS reading to a web reader so that I can access it anywhere, particularly on a mobile device. Google Reader in it’s previous incarnations just didn’t hit it right to me. The significant redesign they did really hit the usability issues right on the head.

If your looking for something a bit more sophisticated, and mobile, than the RSS functions of Thunderbird check out Reader. I don’t think you’ll be dissapointed.