Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

My website has a Seattle section; why doesn’t it have a Boston section? I’ll pull one together pretty soon, but the plain truth is that Boston isn’t so new to me the way Seattle was. Still, every now and then I find things that make me think about the city. Every morning on my way [...]

I started writing this weblog this summer while I was in Seattle for an internship between my years at MIT Sloan. At the time, I thought the stay in Seattle would be just a summer, and I didn’t know when I’d return. Now I know. Yesterday I signed an offer from the company I worked [...]

A very nice weekend. We were here in cold New England watching leaves change and drinking bad microbrew. It went from the low seventies to the mid forties over a two-day period. Lots of fun for the sinuses. I was really sad to hear that “Man of Visions” Rev. Howard Finster, folk artist and (improbably) [...]

Today is going to be a good day. To quote whoever that guy was in Beck’s “Loser”: “I’m a driver, I’m a winner. Things are gonna change, I can feel it.” Thanks for the kind thoughts about the midterm yesterday. I think it went pretty well. Today is a day for me to catch up. [...]

“What!” you cry. “No words about the Windows XP launch?” Well, I have a midterm exam today, so in lieu of a real update I present this short note courtesy of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia. I’m not just a user; I’m also an alum. From Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: He [...]

Cell phones: Finally giving up on my old Motorola StarTac. It did well for me for a few years, but a year in MIT Sloan of running out of battery before 6 pm every day (even with frequent recharging) and of having no signal all the time made me decide there’s got to be a [...]

UPDATE 1:45 PM EDT: A few links are surfacing that are pretty authentic about Apple’s new digital device, the iPod: a Firewire capable, ultraslim, hard disk based digital music player. Plus version 2 of my favorite Mac application, iTunes… Here’s the MacCentral coverage. Finally Apple’s page on the device is up. And you can get [...]

Glenn Fleischman wrote this review of Mac OS X 10.1. I’ve already posted my thoughts about the upgrade, but it’s worth repeating. Mac OS X 10.1 is my everyday operating system. At any given time I’m running half a dozen apps — Mozilla, TextEdit, iTunes, Word Test Drive, GraphicConverter, Palm Desktop, Excel, OmniOutliner, Mail and/or [...]

Update 12:15 PM: I’m a little behind in pointing to this, but I was ahead in saying it was a bad idea. When I visited Intel in January 2001, a few of us asked why Intel was in the business of making consumer MP3 players. The answer we got? “Well, we’re a really large supplier [...]

Today was the first day I broke out my tweed jacket. Jim’s ex-girlfriend used to say that she knew when fall arrived, because I would be wearing my tweed. It’ll only be in the fifties today, so I suppose this counts as fall. The tweed was a souvenir from our trip to Ireland a few [...]

Busy day today. Waiting for phone calls, working on an end of the semester project and a major assignment, and trying to get other things done as well. Anthrax scare at MIT yesterday. Still trying to find out whether it’s for real. For the record, this is at the other end of the campus from [...]

Apologies to anyone who saw the mess that was my homepage this morning. I updated the template yesterday to include Blogrolling links in the left hand nav, and found this morning that the page didn’t appear–except for the print friendly links. I looked at it and saw that my HTML syntax for the comments I [...]

It was a nice weekend. I’m in danger of getting into a risotto rut: I made a kind of unusual one this weekend. Instead of using onion in the base, this one used pancetta, garlic, sage, rosemary, and beef shoulder cut into 1/2 inch dice, with a reduction of Spanna (a Nebbiolo based wine, distantly [...]

After all the things I’ve written about using wireless access in public places, I was really sad to see that Mobilestar is in danger of closing. I was talking this morning to some classmates, working on a project that was trying to identify customers’ perceptions of Zipcar. One of the perceptions was essentially “It sounds [...]

I was talking to some folks this weekend about my work experience, and mentioned that my programming experience had been in client server systems. “Client server!” they said–”boy, I haven’t heard that expression in a long time.” Feeling instantly old. So what’s the connection between client-server and this XML-RPC/SOAP/scripting/web services thing I keep writing about? [...]