My cousin Quinn Chrest just got a blog! He is starting his career in technology and I urged him (nudged?) to get going with a domain and micro.blog. I also set him up with quinnchrest.eth for decentralized services! Welcome @quinntchrest!
Chess game with Tyler tonight. We both made a couple of major blunders, but he forced me to resign (I was black) and won the match. ♟️
Edina Art Fair 2023
We endured the very hot afternoon and visited the Edina Art Fair. This is one of our favorite art fairs every year. Some of the artists that caught our eye while we were there:
- Mark Eliason: These graphic pieces captivated me right away. The “John Wick” one had me staring at the detail for a long while.
- Neil Russell: Abstract art with intense colors and very pronounced textures.
- Wired by Bud: These wire sculptures were cool and made us all smile.
- Wenwen Liao: Incredibly artwork with cool scenes that sparked the imagination.
- Roth Illustration: These pieces were impressive and I loved how the people and shapes blended in with the wood and the scene.
- Bloom Key Papercrafts: These were really cool but hard to display as they are lit frames and that is difficult to show in the bright sunlight of an art fair. The scenes were really great and the lighting effects were well done.
- Barret Lee: I liked these paintings a lot.
- Faith Mebli: The organic look of the wood carvings that Mebli does is incredible. She had an Octopus that was at least five feet tall and incredibly eye catching.
- Carla Bank: Tammy and I were both very taken with Bank’s work, particularly the Blackbird piece. We really enjoyed all of her work.
- Hardwood Music Company: These make such cool and rich sounds, and they look amazing.
- Brian Schmidt: Mazie bought some prints of Schmidt’s last year and his style is very cool, the scenes suck you in.
- Andrew Carson: We’ve had a windmill from Andrew Carson for years and love it. We stopped by his section hoping to say Hello as he announced he is retiring shortly. I particularly find his kinetic sculptures fascinating!
- Tiny People Big Laughs: This is a regular at the art fair and the scenes with miniature people are always great.
- Naomi Tiry Salgado: The detail and scenes in these oil paintings were both modern and classic at the same time.
- A. D. Hogan: His National Parks Collection really struck a chord with me. I loved the style and bold look. Plus I’m a big fan of the National Parks.
This is the first time I’ve ever failed attestations running my validators on Gnosis Chain. Two things:
- Only zeroed out about two days of attestations. 🤷♂️
- Dappnode sent updates on June 1 that corrected the issue and required no action on my part. Yeah for auto-updates! 🎉
Blog turns 19!
Today marks the 19th year of my blog at thingelstad.com!
Over those 19 years I’ve written 8,186 posts totaling 493,751 words. My website is older than the iPhone, Bitcoin, and Instagram.
I love having my own home on the Internet.
You’ll note some posts from 2000 to 2003, but I don’t count them in the timeline as they were added later.
Today was Mazie’s last day of High School! 🎉 I took her out for our “last” last-day-of-school breakfast at Sun Street Breads before dropping her off at Washburn, and Mom welcomed her home with flowers to celebrate. 👩🎓
Need a reason to get donuts? 🍩 Tomorrow is National Donut Day and #TeamSPS is enjoying a day early this year! First Donut Day since the pandemic. See also: 2018 Donut Day.
Today micro.blog added cross-posting support for Nostr! I’ve been having fun playing with Nostr using Damus as the client. Now I’ll be able to syndicate my blog posts to my Nostr profile as well. 🎉
First round of Smashburgers on the flat top for 2023! 🍔🍔🍔
Move along quickly under the broken tree hanging across the bike trail. 🤞
Great day for a family bike ride to Dairy Queen! 🍦
We are UNITED!
Levi and Tyler ran around after the Minnesota United game and collected signatures from: Bongokuhle Hlongwane (21), Sang Bin Jeong (11), Kervin Arriaga (33), and Joseph Rosales (8). They had an awesome time and the players were great! 👏⚽️
M - N - UFC! Come on you Loons! Minnesota United FC v Real Salt Lake tonight. ⚽️
Pool is open for the summer! 💦
At the Hook and Ladder with friends for Summer Breeze Yacht Rock Fest featuring The Lonesome Losers. 🎶
I now have a Bluesky Social account (thanks Maique for the invite!) and with micro.blog syndication anything I post on my blog will appear there too. Curious to explore Bluesky and see what it does well.
Lightning Ideas
Having finally gotten first-hand experience with Bitcoin Lightning, a workable and functioning micropayments option, it opens up a variety of interesting and fun use cases.
- Create a circular economy at home. Set your kids up with Bitcoin Lightning wallets and create bounties for projects and milestones they earn Satoshis for. Earn your allowance in Bitcoin. You are the bank to offramp back to USD as they want.
- Send Satoshis as Antispam. AI is going to make spam detection ever more difficult. You could Satoshis to an address and then reference the receipt in an SMTP header that the recipient could use to validate the email. More Satoshis could be more priority? Even works for newsletters since a few thousand Satoshis is about $1.
- Little Free Library Support. There are many Little Free Libraries in our neighborhood. Since “things” can have a lightning wallet, put a QR code on the library so people can send some Satoshis to support the library as an optional Thank You.
- Lightning as Creator Support. Send tips to creators you appreciate, potentially triggered on events. When a newsletter is received send 3,000 sats. When this RSS feed has a new item send 1,000 sats. Many Lightning wallets are adding support for automated sends under a user set threshold to remove friction for micropayments.
- Subscriptions with Privacy. Lightning invoices can be paid by any wallet, and the payment is immediate. Instead of subscribing to a service and needing an address and credit card details just get what you need and present an invoice to immediately pay. Fast, easier, and private.
- Buy a fridge with a year of electricity. Since “things” can have wallets, create one for each fridge. The fridge meters it’s electrical usage, uses a lookup to determine cost, and the fridge manufacturer sends Satoshis via Lightning to offset the first year of electricity.
Board Search Criteria
A friend shared this Board Search Criteria used by Constellation Software and highlighted in their 2017 President’s Letter. I thought these dimensions were interesting and a good model. Recreated the primary points of the table below.
THE ROLE
- Thought Partner: Thought partner for senior leadership.
- Long-term Orientation: Unfazed by short term pressure. Focused on CSI’s long-term issues.
- Timeframe: Able to serve on the board for 20+ years.
- Investment in CSI: Willing to make a significant equity investment in CSI, above and beyond board comp.
THE CANDIDATE
- High Quality Business: Understands what constitutes a high quality business.
- Autonomy: Appreciates the motivational power of autonomy, decentralisation.
- Cultural Fit: Respects and gets along with the current senior CSI management as well as the board.
- Ownership: Believes in the motivational power of equity ownership.
- High Impact / Low Ego: Will intervene when necessary, contribute meaningfully, but not dominate discourse.
- Out of Kitchen: Can resist the urge to get into the kitchen when there’s a chef already in there.
EXPERIENCE
- Builder: Helped build or maintain (as a director, manager or major shareholder) a large organisation (>1000 employees) over an extended period, while providing a superior return to owners (ideally including employee owners).
- Decentralized: Experience with a decentralised company (nice, not necessary).
- Capital Allocation: Experience in a capital allocation role (nice, not necessary).