Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Continuing the “rate the airport” madness with O’Hare and Logan: O’Hare: 1 point for having a Starbucks open at 5 am. -1 point for no WiFi. -2 points for having non-functional electrical outlets in the Terminal C seating areas. -1 point for the light show on the people mover between terminals B and C, and [...]

I’m scoring the airports on this trip, because I know something is going to go sideways on the flight and it will be interesting to try to compare the experience objectively. SeaTac: No line at the United counter, 1 point (of course it’s for an 11:30 pm flight). Only one metal detector open, with a [...]

I find myself thinking more often these days about what blogs should be, even as I spend less time thinking about what I actually blog. Not necessarily a good combination. But I sometimes think that the relative effortlessness with which really practiced bloggers post is less a factor of short attention spans or carelessness (though [...]

I’m doing my best to get ready for BloggerCon. I’m downloading the Lydon interviews for listening on the plane; I’ve read the conference blog for days; I’ve signed up for dinner with Doc Searls (but will they let me bring my spouse?); am I forgetting anything prior to the conference? Yes. I need to put [...]

I’ll be in beautiful sunny Cambridge this week to talk to MIT and Harvard business school students about Microsoft. I’ll also be at the BloggerCon this weekend. In between I hope to squeeze in a little vacation and maybe celebrate our anniversary (Lisa is coming along). I tend to be productive blogging on the plane; [...]

George just emailed us a link to the perfect excuse, now that we’ve been on the west coast 15 months, to finally head down to Napa (and spend some time with him and Becky): the Wine and Food Affair. Two days in the Alexander, Dry Creek, and Russian River Valleys, over fifty wineries, $40 bucks [...]

Jim sent his final update today from his nearly six month, 2,171 mile long hike through the entire Appalachian Trail. In the final episode, he helps a 62-year-old Irish priest rescue an unprepared day hiker with a twisted knee, explains the trail protocols for getting food from other hikers without asking for it, rhapsodizes over [...]

New York Times: Franco Modigliani, 85, Nobel-Winning Economist, Dies. The great man’s presence at the Sloan school was always felt, though I don’t believe I ever actually met him. The obituary emphasizes his economic research in life-cycle theory, but my corporate finance professor structured much of the theoretical side of our class around the Modigliani-Miller [...]

I have to confess that there’s a little trick I didn’t mention in my first post about summarizing time range data using SQL. Specifically, my solution relies on the data set being sorted in a certain way, in this case by server_id and DateAndTime, and then inserting a sequential key on the table using an [...]

Some additional thoughts and links about the Diebold voting machine security issue: Greg was kind enough to point out to me over IM, rather than chiding me publicly for it on his blog, that it’s unlikely that Georgia’s Democrat Secretary of State, who has responsibility for running elections, would be unlikely to help rig an [...]

I was hoping to go for a whole week with album covers that consisted of black and white portraits of two men, but didn’t quite make it. Still, I continue to be slightly creeped out by the Kruder and Dorfmeister cover, which is like a bizarro version of the Bookends cover. And is the pose [...]

Lots of stuff today while I was at work shipping internal products: Tony Pierce talks about the show that I should have gone to when it was in Seattle…White Stripes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. All rock goodness, it sounds like. Weblogs Inc., dedicated to producing niche “blogs” dedicated to aggregating industry focused content and [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these; seems like the seasonal beers are easier to make notes about. This is probably because a lot of seasonals, particularly winter beers but also some autumnal varieties, rely on a lot of spices to provide their flavor, and it’s easier to say “nutmeg up front” [...]

Like a switch had been flipped: today is the first day of fall, and the Lake Sammamish valley in which downtown Redmond sits was shrouded in fog as I drove in this morning. Good metaphor for how I felt all yesterday. Today is looking up, though. I got a call from Esta last night, and [...]

I’ve been on the fence about this whole California recall thing. While California is clearly a state in the toilet right now, its voters re-elected Gray Davis fair and square even after he had screwed the state up. If someone wanted to prevent him from doing future harm, the best way would seem to be [...]