Jamie Thingelstad

Noticing that CNN is using Twitter for breaking news!

Just got back from watching Casino Royale

We have been perpetually frustrated with the baby monitor that we got when Mazie was born. We got the Sony NTM-910 because it had good reviews, brand reputation and specifically since it was 900MHz and wouldn’t collide with our wireless network at 2.4GHz and our wireless phones at 5.8Ghz. However, they just don’t work very well at all. The range was horrible and we started to go slowly insane with the random injection of it’s “out of range” beeps at various times.

We decided to upgrade to the Rolls-Royce of monitors, the new Philips Digital SCD-589. This is the first baby monitor to use the new DECT technology that guarantees completely noise-free operation. We started it up today after giving it a thorough charge overnight and initial tests are great. Tammy was able to walk to the top of our cul-de-sac and back without losing any signal. The audio is crystal clear. On top of that you have nice features like knowing the temperature in the kids room, you can talk to them and even start music or lights in the room from the handset. The parent unit is also significantly smaller and lighter, but not as loud at maximum volume as the Sony was.

Have you played with Twitter? If not, try it. Be a friend. Tell me what you think. It’s pretty crazy. You can even link Wordpress with Twitter.

Excuse me for a moment of self-promotion. 🙂 I was featured in an article published last Friday in the Twin Cities Business Journal about what Dow Jones is doing here in Minneapolis, specifically some of the R&D; work that we’ve been focused on.

While the article suffers from some inaccuracies, for example, the entire office is not about Dow Jones Online but is instead many different divisions of Dow Jones. It seems I can never get through an interview for an article without something like that happening.

I’m happy to get the word out. I’ve been trying to get more publicity for what we are doing in Minneapolis since far too few people understand what we are doing, and we need all the best talent we can get.

I’m not one of these folks that scours the internet for Firefox extensions only to make my web browser slower and crash more often. However, I’ve recently been really frustrated by some shortcomings in Thunderbird (email client) and thought I would share some findings.

I use Thunderbird on five different computers popping in and out all the time. My mail server is IMAP-based so that is fine, the same messages are there no matter what computer I use. However, not the address book! This has been driving me nuts. Addressbook Synchronizer has come to the rescue however! This great extension allows you to copy your address book to a network location (including an IMAP folder which is great!) and get the updated one on startup. I now have 5 different address books and they are completely in sync, including the two built-in to Thunderbird. If you use Thunderbird on multiple machines, you need this extension.

There are two other extensions that are immensely useful. Contacts Sidebar restores a feature that Outlook Express had but Thunderbird lacked. It shows your address book in a pane on the left side of your message window. Nice to drop notes to people in your address book. Also look into Duplicate Contact Manager, it does a great job of chugging through your address book and culling out “dups” for you.

Also, in case you are interested I did setup an LDAP server using OpenLDAP and try to just have all my mail clients use the LDAP repository. I got the LDAP server setup, but there were huge problems. A little hidden secret of most personal mail clients, including Thunderbird, is that it can read an LDAP repository but cannot modify or add to it. This is a non-starter.

My software needs to start doing more work for me. Really. Either that or I need to get a digital librarian. What for you ask? I feel like I’m dying under the weight of metadata, data about data.

The vast archive of 33,000 digital photos that I have, the 400GB of music I’ve ripped from my CD collection and the hours of digital video are all great. It’s awesome, and I wouldn’t go back for anything. However, all this digital data has metadata as well, and that metadata doesn’t just magically exist. It has to be placed there somehow.

For example, I’ve recently moved all of my photos into Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom is awesome and is lightyears (no pun intended) ahead of the file-system approach I used to manage my photos with. One of the great things it can do is tag photos (bill, bob, cat, dog, house, etc) and put them in collections (Wedding Photos, France Vacation, etc). After tagging, finding those pictures of Bill, Bob and a cat is as easy as a simple query. No more digging through hundreds or thousands of files. Want a picture of a squirrel? One click will do.

The rub though is that those tags have to be created, and who’s going to do that? I want my software to get smarter and start doing this for me. Facial recognition isn’t easy but it is possible. My Mac Pro sits on for hours at night. Let’s burn some CPU cycles identifying faces in photos. I’m happy to train it.

Music has a similar problem. ID3 tags are a must for a large music collection. If you don’t have them, or if they are wrong, forget it. Luckily here software has done some work for me already and it’s pretty easy to tag things off of big central databases on the net. However, now I have the harsh reality that 70% of my music by volume is tagged as “Rock”. Why? Because a music catalog would call it all Rock, even though I think it’s totally different. And here there is a big problem, because no group of people will all agree what genre AC/DC is – Rock, Metal, Classic Rock, Garbage.

I want to leverage all this great power of the digital world, and the promise is amazing, but software needs to make it simple, easy and quick ways to allow people to start associating metadata. The photography example is obvious to me. I don’t care if it takes a year to do 30,000 pictures – just as long as it does it. And I’m fine sitting down for a few minutes and identifying people and things for it as it trains. This stuff exists, it just needs to be integrated in the right way.

Hopefully that will happen soon.

Alright, the weather is really starting to bother me. Today, December 30th it was 41 °F while we were driving around this afternoon and it was raining. This wasn’t a “normal” winter rain. This rain felt like April showers. Nice big drops with a regular patter on the street. It’s December! Where is the snow!? I realize talking about the weather is so very Minnesotan of me. The faithful readers of this website probably care about my weather as much as what I had for lunch. But I must comment anyway.

I read a great article in last issue of The Week about depression rates being high in Moscow because there was no snow! This is the warmest winter ever for Moscow and the days are so short that the lack of the snows reflective qualities results in their rarely being any light.

What in the world is going on here. Take a look at December with this graph.

For the whole month of December the weather has just hovered in these ridiculously high ranges, barely dipping below freezing at night.

Enough already, let’s get some snow!

I’ve been wanting to use that headline for a while now. ;-) The Wii made the trip to North Dakota for Christmas. I wasn’t planning on taking it but then some of my cousins got wind that I had one of these prized units and suggested I bring it. It was a huge hit. The little Wii served over 9 hours of playtime on December 25th – by far the longest workout it has ever gotten.

It’s really amazing to watch people that never have any interest in video games playing a Wii and liking it so much. Wii Sports, the free “in box” game was the biggest hit of the day. The fact that it requires no experience to play, you just pick it up and go, makes it a big winner with people that are just getting acquainted with the Wii and it’s free motion controls. We even made a number of Mii’s for some of my relatives and everyone had a blast making them look as close to the person as they could.

I also scored two new games for my Wii: Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz and Red Steel. I only played a few minutes of Super Monkey Ball myself hitting a few of the party games. The game has a lot of promise. i played Red Steel for about 20 minutes and it was pretty good. I’m not a fan of most first-person shooters, but this was actually controllable and again the free motion controls made it easy to work with.

In other Wii related news I grabbed the preview of the Internet Channel for it. I was really impressed with it. First off, Nintendo did the right thing by not making their own and getting Opera to build a Wii version. Secondly, the speed is much better than I expected. I’ve always felt the “Internet” features on the Wii were really slow, but it must be something on the Nintendo side since the browser itself was very usable. It even plays flash video, making it a great YouTube surfing station.

Tammy, Mazie and I all want to take a moment to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a great holiday season. You have possibly been checking your mailboxes eager to open the 2nd annual Thingelstad Christmas letter. The anticipation has been high, everyday eagerly looking forward to that postal delivery, only to be let down.

Well, unfortunately the post office isn’t to blame but instead we are. We never got it done. We held out hopes for a last minute “hail Mary” letter to be produced but it never happened. You can stop checking your mailbox with vigor and jeering at your postal carrier for not bringing you the letter. It isn’t coming.

Keep your eyes out however for a 2nd semi-annual Thingelstad Christmas letter in 2007. From our family to yours, Merry Christmas!