Jamie Thingelstad

While doing my blog gardening today I noticed that it was 16 years ago today that I was a guest on MPR’s Midmorning show talking about Twitter! I decided to give it a listen, and while I was at it I ran the audio through Whisper Transcription and added a transcript to the post. Listen or read! 😊

It all seems very quaint in retrospect. I had been on Twitter at that time for 27 months and as John Moe shares in the intro it had 8 million users at the time. Moe quotes Joe Sucheray saying Twitter was “the end of the world.” He was maybe seeing better than Julio Ojeda-Zapata, my fellow panelist and I. I had almost forgot that John Hodgman joined us on the phone and that one of the callers “Dave” who teaches “Greek and Latin” is a friend of mine!

Hashtags weren’t a thing. Moe even says “number sign”. The word “tweet” was only just forming. I refer to the “Twitterverse” at one point.

It did give me a big warm smile at the end though when I got a plug in for using RSS! As Tammy reflected, some things never change! 😁

We stopped into Microcenter today and they didn’t have a single Nvidia GPU in stock. Every case was empty. In fact they only had five individual GPUs of any brand!

Guinness Chocolate Cake from Lynette. Treat for completing tax work.

Tyler’s first time behind the wheel with basics in a parking lot.

My post on Using AI in the Weekly Thing was highlighted in Josh Spector’s For the Interested 456 this week! Thanks to CJ Chilvers for the heads up. 👋

Our family enjoys escape rooms and I have maintained a list of the rooms we had done on my website for a bit. I knew it was mostly complete and for sure it had gaps. We were talking to another Escape Room Enthusiast recently and I decided it was time to get our list right. How many rooms have we done? This needed to be answered. But how?

The list I had was created from blog posts I had of rooms which was good but not complete. These days I blog pretty much every room we do, but I didn’t early on. Then I realized I had four sources of good information:

1. My Blog: This was the source of my original list. I know these entries are accurate.
2. Photos: We almost always, if not always, get a photo at the end of an escape room — but not always with our camera. Either way, my photo collection should have most rooms.
3. YNAB: We use YNAB for personal finances and we’ve certainly paid for every escape room we’ve done. We’ve never paid in cash. Also, we have kept one YNAB file for a very long time so searches for rooms should match.
4. Calendar: We’ve kept the same Apple iCloud accounts and calendars for a very long time as well, and that old data is still there. And we are diligent about keeping our calendars accurate even on trips. This was particularly useful for entries found in YNAB where we almost never paid on the same day we did the room.

After a very thorough and comprehensive scouring of all of these sources we now have 50% more rooms. We previously identified 43 and after a thorough review we are now at 65 escape rooms!

I still want to improve the information in the list. I have a spreadsheet now that is my source of truth and I’m using an overly complex formula to produce the Markdown I can use to update the website. It could also be fun to do some blog pensieve posts for some of the older rooms where I have a photo.

So now, our full and complete List of Escape Rooms!

We’ve been long delayed watching Succession S4. The Logan Roy character played by Brian Cox has to be one of the best characters on a show. Right up there with Tony Soprano.

Yesterday Tyler was talking about 3D printers. We had an entry level 3D Printer in 2019 and realized it was missing very fundamental features to do complex prints — notably the platform wasn’t heated. I’ve been researching a bit and these printers have come a long way since then.

Very good affogato at Mothership Pizza Paradise today. The ice cream from Minnesota Dairy Lab was so smooth and creamy The food here has been incredible on every visit.

We did our 65th escape room this morning solving Puzzleworks “The Hospital” room in 54m 47s! We all particularly enjoyed this room. The puzzles were well done, hard enough to get you going but not so hard to get frustrated. Tammy thought it was one of her “top 10” rooms. I thought the use of an “elevator” in the room was fun and very well executed. We had to call for one clue and realized we had made one completely ridiculous miss in the room. It was a great time!

Lockers.

I “watched” the Apple Immersive Metallica concert experience tonight and was completely blown away. I turned the volume all the way up and had James Hetfield singing right in my face. You get to see Lars Ulrich drum while watching right behind his shoulder. Incredible!

Traditional π Day dinner is all pies! Tonight Tammy’s completely homemade chicken pot pie and a new pie for dessert — Samoa Pie themed off of the Girl Scout cookie.

Happy π Day! 3/14 @ 3:14

Woke up barely able to swallow after having a sore throat for couple days.

Went to MinuteClinic right away and tested positive for strep throat.

Penicillin prescribed and lots of honey Ricolla cough drops today.