Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

My new site design appears to crash IE 5 on the Mac, and I think I know why—it looks like a problem with the custom list CSS that I use to show the category buttons in the sidebar. If I suppress that section of the sidebar, the page loads, but the same code doesn’t render [...]

On a completely different, um, note, the generation line of melodramatic “singers” with large heads has been crossed: Henry Rollins will be guesting on William Shatner’s next album. And, in sadder news, the LA coroner’s office ruled that Elliott Smith’s death is still an open case; the coroner said they couldn’t rule out that someone [...]

A bunch of disturbing trends in national security over the last few days: Our beloved Attorney General, Singin’ John Ashcroft, shows some sense and recuses himself from the investigation of the Plame leak. As always, Joshua Marshall is all over the story. He suggests that this, combined with other announcements, suggests that this is a [...]

It’s so quiet here this morning. Except for the dogs, who are having their usual morning romp, in spite of the thin snowfall. Yeah, sadly, the first real snow we’ve seen in Seattle is hardly “real.” The area under the tree shows nothing but green grass, and the stuff that fell on our skywall has [...]

We bought a new Whirlpool washer yesterday. I thought I had taken down the dimensions at the store, but can’t find them now, so I went on line to try to find them. And tried. No reference to the model number (LSB6400LW—well, now there will be at least one) is found in Google. And the [...]

Sometime in the last hour, we suddenly got snow. We now have a light dusting of the white stuff over the patio and our back lawn. Calls to mind the old line from Doonesbury, where in the American Samoas, after volcanoes, hurricanes, and locust plagues it starts snowing. After all, this is Seattle, not Boston…

Just got back from a quick morning’s skiing at the Summit at Snoqualmie. Regular readers of this blog will recall that I very quickly started writing about other resorts shortly after our visit last January. That was because Snoqualmie lived up to its nickname, “Snow-crummy”—less than 3 feet of base snow, coupled with rain. Today, [...]

Contrasting notes from my reading over the holiday. I found a passage in Peterson’s Jefferson that I think is pertinent to the current arguments about restrictions of liberty during wartime. Writing during his vice-presidency in the hostile Adams administration during a British war scare, concerning to the Alien and Sedition acts (which entrenched xenophobia in [...]

Looks like Moxie is redesigning too. Her woes make mine look small by comparison. And Dave Sifry (of Technorati fame) did some redesign work as well, mostly back end.

George calls my new design “cleaner” and says the new graphic is “cool.” Greg tweaks me, pointing out in his “on the side link” that the site now, for the first time almost since its inception, “features [an] actual house.” About that graphic (I’ll add this to the FAQ): the photo is not the Jarrett [...]

I think that most of the work on the redesign is done. As you can see, the site now sports a new logo, new fonts, a different design, streamlined navigation, some new pages, and a bunch of other goodies. So what’s left to do? There are always a few things. I think there may be [...]

It’s time. I’m pulling the trigger on the site redesign. Doing it incrementally isn’t really possible, but I’m rolling out the first phase separately anyway: doing away with the news item department icons on each post. Their time is up.

Quick shout out to everyone’s favorite Tin Man, who turned 30 yesterday. In his countdown of the ten most memorable events of his 20s, he included the Virginia Glee Club’s Northeastern Tour, which I helped organize; thanks for the reminder of good times, TM, and hope that there are plenty more to come.

A reader, Hartley Odwak, found my iPod Surgery photo album and reported that he found the same problem with his unit. He wrote: My ipod charges, but neither of my macs will recognize it. I am certain that it is the port; hence why i dismantled mine! What I see where my Firewire port attached [...]

A thread on Plastic collects pointers to news about Peter Jackson’s Return of the King, including a tip about the running length of the extended cut: “the DVD version of Return of the King will be longer than 4 hours and 50 minutes.” Say what? I already had to split my viewing of the extended [...]