2004s
- TI-99/4A
- Apple //c
- Fat Mac
- Macintosh IIc
- “the wonderful world of Unix”
- Windows NT
- on and on…
Fargo Redux
We had a nice stay in Fargo however it is far from being the vacation get away that you may want to visit on a regular basis. I gushed long enough about the hotel in my previous posting, so I wont go on about that any further. Tammy and I divided our two days in Fargo into a suburban day followed by a downtown day.
The first day we drove out to the West Acres Mall, it was absolutely packed. We met my mother and a friend of the family for lunch at a Taste of India, which was fabulous. I asked the owner if it was connected to the one in St. Louis Park and it is not but they know each other. Sadly this one is going out of business. Apparently their business has been poor since 9/11. None of us could figure that out. People, it’s Indian food! Anyway, we explored the suburban areas some more. Had a trip down memory lane with dinner at Happy Joes and spent the evening crawling a Barnes & Noble for books.
The next day, our last, we ditched the car and saw downtown Fargo by foot. They are working on revitalizing their downtown like so many cities and it is working, but it is still a work in progress. We had lunch at a mexican restuarant where Tammy and I were both lured into the taco bar. What were we thinking? The regular food I’m sure would have been better, if only warmer! We visited the Plains Art Museum and then kicked back in Babb’s coffee shop which seems to be the most happening place in downtown Fargo. It had a line both times we went there. I got an extremely tight (read, short) haircut at a local barber and we saw a matinee showing of The Machinist at the Fargo Theatre which shows independent films. After a full day we got dinner at the HoDo Restuarant in the hotel and returned to our room.
It was a nice relaxing two days. I think Fargo would be better for recreation in the summer though.
Baby Check-In - Week 18
I haven’t chatted much about the baby since the initial announcement. It seems a little weird that you have this life changing thing going on but there is little in the way of noticeable differences right away. Tammy is just now starting to show so it doesn’t seem real yet.
Tammy and I had our regular appointment with the midwife yesterday. All is well in babyland! This was the first time I was able to hear the heartbeat and it was pounding away! The midwife said that the static occasionally was the baby moving. Little tyke was moving around quite a bit! Tammy and I are bypassing the majority of the screening tests. We decided that we do not want to deal with the high false positive rates.
In a couple of weeks we’ll have the ultrasound done where we get to find out the sex and make sure everything is where it’s supposed to be.
We both have found it amazing how when other people say they are pregnant you just assume that a few months later they’ll have a baby. When it’s us we are sort of on pins and needles that nothing goes wrong. It seems far from a sure thing. However, hearing the heartbeat yesterday and now that Tammy is starting to show sure makes me feel good!
Amazon Raising Funds for Red Cross
I really don’t think the impact of the earthquake and tsunami have or will hit me. It’s hard to fathom that kind of disaster and it’s so far away. You hear the death tolls and the numbers just seem unreal.
If you are looking for a way to help out in whatever way you can Amazon makes it as simple as one click to donate to the Red Cross. They’ve already raised over $6 million, correction, $7.6 million now, and counting.
That number makes me embarassed at the $35 million that the US government has committed so far. Hopefully it will be raised substantially.
Panasonic PV-GS400
I’ve now entered the world of digital video in addition to the digital photography one I’ve been in for some time. My wife was cool enough to get me the Panasonic PV-GS400 digital camcorder. This is a very slick 3CCD unit with more bells and whistles than I know what to do with at this time. It even takes 4 megapixel stills! I’ve been playing with it over Christmas, taking some really dumb video and realizing that it’s hard to fake your way through video production. 🙂
Now this will of course spark a fury of other things I need to learn and play with including a better disk subsystem for my PC since moving those big video files around will be oh so slow. This is how it always works – fun!
This present signifies my first “Dad Gift”. I am now fully equiped to stand with all the other geeky Dads spinning hours of video of their kids that nobody will ever want to watch other than them. I’m also very okay with this.
Other Christmas gifts this year included a couple of Logitech wireless Xbox controllers (and they are great!), an awesome clay poker chip set, Six Feet Under Season 2, great books and numerous other fun things. Not to mention a lot of great time with friends and family. Can’t really ask for much more!
Fargo Vacation
Like a large percentage of my office mates and I’m guessing the country at large I’m taking this coming week off. Had a personal day that I needed to use before the end of the year and with the combination of holidays it was easy to stretch a couple of days into a big break from the office.
We didn’t want to do anything too exotic so we decided to keep our downtime in line with our holiday plans. This year was a trip back to North Dakota with my family so Tammy started investigating options. We arrived tonight in Fargo, ND where we are going to spend three nights and relax. You might be wondering why Fargo? Well, we built the entire stay in Fargo around a hotel and I have to tell you upon check-in we were not let down.
We are spending the next three nights at the Hotel Donaldson in downtown Fargo. We reserved the “Big Dog” suite (go to the website, click on sleep on the top, click the down arrow by the picture until you see Room #10) and were shown to our new home-away-from-home with big grins on our faces. The space is amazing. Our suite has 17 foot ceilings, hardwood floors, living room with dining area separate from the master bedroom. Huge plasma TV with everything you would want. Even the WiFi is deluxe with 802.11g. The Hotel Donaldson only has 17 rooms and each room is unique with local art and exquisite accommodations.
Do I dare tell you that this room is less than the box with a bed I usually stay in when I travel for business to the coasts? I can honestly say you could build a trip around this hotel. I’ve gushed enough and it’s late. I’m hopeful the rest of Fargo can live up to this hotel.
Dell Coupons & eBay
I’ve been trying to order this Dell 2005FPW monitor for a bit now and there is this (amazingly stupid) Dellf game that Dell has where you can win coupons. One of the coupons is a 25% discount on the monitor I’ve wanted so I’ve been banging on it over and over. I’ve won $50 off a $100 printer more times than I can count but never got the one I wanted.
Then eBay came to the rescue. I’m continually amazed at what people sell on eBay. Turns out there are a plethora of Dell coupon codes for sale on eBay. I punched it up and $2 later I had purchased a coupon code from some guy in California. Placed my order a couple minutes later. $2 to save $200+. Sounds good to me!
Monitor is on the way…
Merry Christmas
Tammy and I begin our Christmas journey today. We alternate Christmas and this year is a trip to my family so we’ll be driving a long ways to Minot, ND tonight and then continuing to my grandparents farm outside of Lignite, ND.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
PS - I failed again to do a holiday letter and get Christmas cards out to friends and family. However, I feel really good about next year!
In Code
I just finished reading In Code by Sarah Flannery. Sarah’s book is about her love of mathematics and a project that won her great acclaim in building a new public key cryptography algorithm. The book is light on math, enough to get you interested and is approachable to a variety of skill levels. Sarah was a mere high school student when doing all of this and challenging the famed RSA algorithm. Ultimately her CP algorithm is found to be vulnerable to an attack lessening it’s usefulness but not her story.
The book is an interesting read about a brief moment in this brilliant woman’s life. I think this would be a great read for girls that are interested in math but are far too often discouraged from embarking on it due to societal concerns.
Google Owns Everything in 2014 ← This is a well done, interesting future view of history now.
Mac Mouse Done Right
A little piece of heaven was waiting for me in my mailbox tonight. A few weeks ago I purchased an iMac G5 and it’s been a lot of fun. Apple has made an amazing machine, and finally the OS is good enough to stand on the same stage as the hardware. However, Apple’s stubborn attitude with it’s single button mouse is one of the few serious shortcomings of an otherwise great package.Thankfully a 3rd party has provided a solution, MacMice.
My new two button Mac mouse with scroll wheel and blue tooth capability showed up tonight. I whipped some batteries in it, the Mac instantly detected it and I was off to the races. The mouse feels just like the OEM Apple mouse. It has good heft and tracks well. It matches the style of the iMac however not as perfectly as the Apple one but very close. The mechanism is exactly the same under the covers pointing to Apple sending this to a 3rd party for their own mouse. The wheel is wonderful and the right-click works perfectly.
Apple should throw out their mouse and just start shipping with this thing. Go buy one.
Trouble in Gig E Land
In February I upgraded my home network to Gig E. The speed is great. However, a couple of days ago I woke up to find a bunch of my machines unreachable on the local network. I went downstairs and my SMC 8508-T had croaked. It looks like at 10:30pm on Thursday evening it just stopped functioning for all gigabit devices. No link, nothing.
After flirting with the idea of upgrading to a layer 2 or layer 3 managed switch I decided that a simple RMA really was the best thing to do. In the process I found out there are two 8508-T versions out there. I have 751.0154 but there is also a 751.7513 version. Interestingly, I was never able to get jumbo frames to work as advertised on my switch. It’ll be interesting to see if the one I get back works for jumbo frames. Of course I will let you all know.
By the way, if your looking to have a real switch (but not so real you need a maintenance agreement) at home I would recommend the Netgear GSM7224 and GSM7324 models. Very slick! 🙂 Go with the 7324 and you get layer 3 with fiber so you can get a neighborhood backbone setup.
Special Numbers
Do you know what a googol is? A googol is a very, very large number. 1.0 * 10100. Or, in long-hand…
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
I remember googol from some trivial bit of knowledge in my “math geek” high school days. I just stumbled across it again in my reading and it’s fascinating me. I’m reading all about natural numbers which are normal numbers like 0, 1, 2, 3 and so on. Not the supposedly unnatural numbers like 3.14159265. Decimals and fractions are straight out. The most natural are the prime numbers. Once you are a prime you are in a class of your own, however, there is even a pecking order in there with a variety of special types of primes. While it’s not a prime hunt, Sierpinski numbers are one example of this that I’m currently helping hunt for.
After stumbling on googol I had to try my favorite Google function ever, the Google Calculator. There is no connection between Google and googol other than sharing the same letters and both sounding like something a 8 month old baby may emit during feeding. I was not disappointed, Google Calculator let me know exactly what a googol is. The calculator even defies the 32-bit (or even 64-bit) world and at least pretends to tell me things like googol mod 154351. However, it has yet to give me a number that doesn’t evenly divide into a googol so I’m tempted to test it to see if it’s really doing it right. Maybe a prime number generator built off of Google? Would probably be really slow but could make a great article for Wired magazine. 🙂
I now have a new favorite Google Calculator query (replacing the answer to life the universe and everything):
mass of the earth * (googol * speed of light) / pi
which it effortlessly tells me is
(mass of Earth * (googol * the speed of light)) / pi = 5.70099405 × 10132 m kg / s
which is completely meaningless and entirely useless, but very fun.
Prime Number Hunt
I’m reading a book on math (specifically cryptography). I was doing some searching online about prime numbers and ran across the project Seventeen or Bust. It’s interesting and you can participate by running the client.
Oceans Twelve
Tammy and I along with her two sisters and their significant others went to see Oceans Twelve today. I thought Oceans Eleven was great so I was eagerly looking forward to Oceans Twelve. It was a fine movie, but didn’t live up to the previous one. For some reason the soundtrack and cinematography impressed me more than the actual story. Will have to check out the soundtrack when it is available.
The Da Vinci Code
The last time I read a book as aggressively as I read The Da Vinci Code had to be the Dune series. I don’t intend to elevate this book to that level, after all, Dune is one of my favorite stories ever. However, this book is an absolute page turner. Usually books take about 50 to 100 pages to get me really interested. This one took the first 2!
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. A very fun read. I’m not going to say anything about the story – I want you to be as surprised as I was while reading it.
What's the Matter With Kansas?
I heard about Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter With Kansas? on The Daily Show shortly after the presidential election. The author caught my interest and I picked up a copy of the book. I found this book to be a great read. He does a good job of looking at historical precedent and taking apart what has changed.
From the book:
A while back the Wall Street Journal ran an essay about a place where hatred trumps bread,? where a manipulative ruling class has for decades exploited an impoverished people while simultaneously fostering in them a culture of victimization that steers this people’s fury back persistently toward a shadowy, cosmopolitan Other. In this tragic land unassuageable cultural grievances are elevated inexplicably over solid material ones, and basic economic self-interest is eclipsed by juicy myths of national authenticity and righteousness wronged.
The essay was supposed to be a description of the Arab states in their conflict with Israel, but when I read it I thought immediately of my dear old Kansas…
Frank does not write from the center. He clearly is pro-liberal, pro-union and pro-choice. However, the text does not turn into self-righteous drivel. In fact, he takes issue with the lack of liberal attitudes in the democratic party – pointing out the weakness that now dominates it.
Finding Neverland
Finding Neverland is a really great movie. We went to see it today during a matinee and it seems others had this idea as well. The movie was in one of the smaller theatres and it was packed for a 2:00pm matinee. Johnny Depp is great in this story about the making of Peter Pan.
I will not try to summarize the story only to tell you that there were very few dry eyes leaving the theater. The story takes a sad and heartfelt turn at the end.
You will not regret parting with your $8 for this one.
iMac G5
Those of you that have had to endure me rambling on and on about
computers at some time probably know that I cut my teeth in the world of
Apple. Actually, my computer lineage is like this:
I was a huge Mac fan (err, zealot?) when that wondrous thing called multi-finder was released. I was eager to see the first color Mac. I really like these machines, but I got so frustrated with the sad excuse for an operating system that I had to bail. Additionally, they just don’t carry any weight in the business world.
I’ve been excited about Mac OS X for a while now and I finally took the plunge. They had a one day sale and I decided it was time to get an iMac. I got the 20" iMac G5. It’s the most visible computer in our house so I appreciate the aesthetics. Plus, it’s just a lot of fun.
I just got it set up tonight. It’ll take a while to stop fumbling around in this thing. I’ll share my re-acquaintance experiences as it goes.
Thingelstads Announce Pregnancy
MINNETONKA, Nov 25, 2004 (BABYWIRE) – Jamie and Tammy Thingelstad took a moment out of their Thanksgiving day activities to announce they are pregnant with their first child. The couple are ecstatic with the news and eager to let friends and family know.
The Thingelstads had decided that it was time to start a family shortly after getting married in 2002. After an unsuccesful attempt last year they were eager to try again. Tammy suspected that she was pregnant after having continual cravings for Lion’s Tap cheeseburgers. She took a home pregnancy test and was excited to see the good news. It was very early though and the couple kept the news close.
After passing the first trimester the couple made a trip to get an ultrasound as initial tests for the heartbeat were not successful. The ultrasound showed a healthy, early stage baby with two legs, two arms, a huge head and a quickly beating heart. While conducting the ultrasound it kicked a few times and spun around. Fetal movement is a great sign of a healthy baby.
This is the first grandchild for both sets of grandparents. Upon reaching them they were overjoyed. Kaye Olson, mother of Tammy, simply shrieked after hearing the news! Rosalin Chrest, mother to Jamie, was excited to hear the news and started sewing baby clothes immediately. Meanwhile Don Olson, famed softball coach and father to Tammy, immediately renewed his contract with the local girl’s softball league and quickly joined Tammy in hoping for a daughter. The numerous aunt’s of the future child were all delighted as well.
The Thingelstads are looking forward to a smooth pregnancy and a new member to the family in June of 2005. Tammy is hopeful the child will not take after her husband’s 9 lbs 8 oz birth.
About the Thingelstads
Jamie and Tammy Thingelstad reside in Minnetonka, Minnesota with their cats Logan and Gypsie. They have been married since July, 2002. The couple enjoys outdoor activities and decorating a very colorful house.
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SOURCE: Thingelstad’s
Jamie and Tammy Thingelstad