Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

BBC: Elvis producer Phillips dies. One of those headlines you really wish you could rewrite. How about, “Sam Phillips, secret father of rock and roll, dies”? Because surely Phillips’ role in encouraging Elvis’ recording sessions away from bad ballads and towards “That’s All Right’ is among the founding moments in the creation of the music, [...]

DaveNet: Rolling Stone supports RSS 2.0. Well, it’s about time. There’s a long moribund Rolling Stone album reviews feed in my aggregator that worked about a year ago. The new feeds are RSS 2.0, and include movie, music, and DVD reviews as well as music news and a separate photo feed.

A cool piece today in the New York Times about the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, contrasting it with the usual summer performances by the BSO. Sounds cool. Kind of wish I could see one—the Contemporary Music works sound right up my alley.

Jim writes, again from his New Jersey base of operations, after finishing the New Jersey/Delaware leg of the trail, and shares some advice about water on the trail.

If memory and Google serve me well, today is Greg Greene’s birthday. Stop by the Green[e]house sometime today and wish him well, won’t you? And tell him to update his freaking Amazon wish list.
It’s also Doc Searls’s b-day, and Wil Wheaton’s. If that’s not a trio headed for trouble, I don’t know what is.

A local distributor just started carrying a couple kinds of beer from a St. Petersburg brewery, Baltika (Russian site here). The Original Dark beer is dark, but only the way an amber or Newcastle is dark. But the flavor is great—a touch of caramel balanced by some hops, with a dark malty undercurrent. I might [...]

George and Becky are getting ready to leave Boston for the cooler climes of the Bay area. Now we have no excuse not to visit California. He also has some kind things to say about a kite dealer in Kitty Hawk.

The word yesterday and today was get the heck out of the house. So we drove to Mt. Rainier, through construction around Tacoma (it has never taken two hours to get to the south of Tacoma before. Don’t want to go through that again). There were, naturally, some compensating factors, like driving through a gap [...]

Anil Dash lays into Microsoft (er, us) for the Add Font dialog box in Windows XP, which has not substantially changed since Windows 95. He has a complaint, and an offer we can’t refuse:

… you still can’t even get this one dialog box to look like every other one in the operating system, with a [...]

Via Scripting News, Deane asks whether RSS aggregators should strip style attributes (presumably, this would also apply to aggregators of Atom/Echo/whatever the RSS successor format is called as well).

Count me in the minority that wants my feeds presented as the author provided, within limits (“I wants my funk uncut”). There is semantic meaning carried [...]

If I had realized MacNetJournal was going to point to my item about setting up my new Mac this morning, I would have added more detail to begin with. Here is a little bit of a deeper dive into how I made the transition.
Partitioning? Nah
My old G3 had a 30 GB drive partitioned into a [...]

Things that were easy about getting the new Powerbook set up:

Getting it out of the box and turning it on.
Getting iChat AV working with our camera. We had my in-laws seeing our moving, smiling faces about half an hour after we brought the laptop out of the box. Also, we bought them an iSight and [...]

Just setting up my new 1 GHz 15″ G4 PowerBook. It may take a while for me to transfer all the files off the old machine so that I can blog, etc. again. I know—sympathy may be lacking.

Last night we visited a new wine bar in town, the Purple Café, and then put ourselves to bed early. Coming back to bed from brushing my teeth, lights out, I could still see a yellow and blue corona around the trees through our north window, the remnants of the sunset on Lake Washington. Summer [...]

George Clinton turns 62 today. And he’s still funkier than almost anybody else alive. I saw the P-Funk All-Stars in DC a few years back with Craig and it was a mind-blowing show. If you’ve never heard it, it’s definitely worth your time to check out “Mothership Connection,” and “Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome.” And [...]