Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Thank God for payday. Context: I started work on July 8 and got paid for the first time today. Not normally a big deal, but a bit of a stretch if you’ve bought a house and had work done to it, bought a car, and moved across country (not necessarily in that order). [...]

NY Times: IBM to Purchase Consulting Group for $3.5 billion. I think that’s a little more realistic than the $18 billion PwC would have gone for in 2000, had HP bought them.

A drought in the services industry is an interesting time to go shopping for additional consulting capacity. On the one hand, the capacity is [...]

A few people have followed up on my Ziff Davis article from yesterday since Doc linked to it. Brian Buck argues that many of us who are playing armchair pundit on the apparent impending bankruptcy are missing the point: Ziff Davis had weak fundamentals to begin with, including massive debt loads and questionable judgement toward [...]

So… Is my Blog HOT or NOT?
(he asked, knowing full well that if you have to ask, you already know the answer)
Update: So I feel so bad over having posted that, I’m going to have a stab at justifying HotOrNot. It’s…a distributed polling system. Oooh, oooh! Better! It’s a distributed reputation evaluation [...]

Jenny Levine: “Doesn’t the RIAA have something better to do than pay legislators to pass laws that will ultimately harm its members?”more…

Birthday greetings today to Greg, Wil, and Doc. Evidently July 29 is a date of high blogpower.more…

In the spirit of publicizing grass roots word creation: George vs. mung.
2 casts and about 10 pounds of mung later, I called it quits. I am still trying to find a definition of Mung, but it seems to be what locals call the weeds out in the water on the Cape.
Of course the [...]

Doc Searls pulls it all together in this presentation for the O’Reilly Open Source Conference. Some really sound points about the fundamentally open nature of infrastructure, and why Hollywood doesn’t understand it. The payoff slides start here, situating the proprietary-open vs. public-private matrix on the boundary between commerce and infrastructure. This is a [...]

New York Times: Ziff Davis is said to plan a bankruptcy. The once powerful media giant, whose magazines I (and every other computer user my age) once avidly, avariciously consumed, is about ready to pull a Worldcom.
It’s been a tough year in the ad business. A lot of corporations, spanked by the downturn or [...]

Greg writes about Google. Some facts are better off unfound, he says. Absolutely true.more…

Right now there is a new “Reflex Silver” Volkswagen Passat sitting in my driveway. It’s not the one I bought yesterday, though.

I had a great experience through most of the buying experience with this dealer, who shall remain nameless. The woman who followed up my request through Autobytel, M., was extremely helpful and very low [...]

AP (in the New York Times): In a stunning show of proof that idiocy knows no party line, “Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif., formally proposed legislation that would give the industry unprecedented new authority to secretly hack into consumers’ computers or knock them off-line entirely if they are caught downloading copyrighted material.”
Under the provisions of [...]

My DVD-ROM drive in my PowerBook G3 (aka PowerBook G3 2000, aka PowerBook G3 FireWire… man, these things need model numbers) started slowly going south back at Christmas. I couldn’t watch Blazing Saddles on the DVD over Christmas without going through an elaborate ritual of rebooting the computer (yes, I was running X, but the [...]

…or just about everything. Lisa got a call from Delta saying they would bring her bag by later tonight. The plumbers are all but finished—just some touch up work in the bathroom they were remodeling. I may get a car this weekend. My DVD-ROM drive has been replaced in my laptop (more on that below). [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve updated the houseblog (which really needs its own category—maybe soon…) The plumber has just about finished work on the second bathroom. The tile is up, all the appliances are in place. The dishwasher stopped working, so the electrician will be out to fix it, but otherwise [...]