Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

To paraphrase William Burroughs: “Warning to young couples with Select Comfort beds: watch out for the family dog!” To be more specific, watch out for dogs that like to sleep under the bed and like to chew things.
Last night I went to adjust the pressure in my side of the mattress, using the wired [...]

I had to point to this item about MPAA chairman and anti-DVD-piracy bigmouth Jack Valenti being interviewed by the savvy staff of The Tech, the student newspaper at MIT. As one might expect, Valenti came away… schooled, but there’s no evidence of forward motion:

TT: No, you said four years ago that people under Linux should [...]

Generally under-reported yesterday: some long out of print singles are now available on the iTunes Music Store. Specifically, the first 45 singles ever released by Motown. Hopefully this leads to more deserving out of print material being made available.
Moving quickly from the sublime to the ridiculous: I voted yesterday for KEXP.org in the Radio category [...]

DC’s Fugazi is the latest band to make a deep catalog of their live shows available for purchase to their fans. It looks like even with only 20 shows, they’re already running into production difficulties. Small wonder, what with the killer pricing (two CDs for $10 for US addresses).
I’m not a huge obsessive fan, but [...]

I just used the new Party Mix feature of iTunes 4.5 for the first time. The first song was “Son of Sam” by Elliott Smith, followed by…“Sister Ray.”
Man, that’s some kind of party.

Thom Gunn, British writer transplanted to San Francisco, formalist poet of highly informal topics, is dead. New York Times, SF Chronicle obituaries. Neither captures the full impact of the man and his poetry.
As a young soon-to-be-ex-poet in 1992, I was blown away by The Man With Night Sweats. Such highly formal structure (rhymes, even), on [...]

I switched to Safari on my Mac a while back, and I hardly miss the Mozilla platform at all. —OK, that’s a lie. I miss the rapid updates, the cool features like being able to browse the DOM tree on pages I’m developing, and most of all the keyword searches. God, I miss the keyword [...]

iTunes 4.5 is out, with support for lossless imports (via Quicktime 6.5.1), WMA import on Windows, music videos…and shared playlists. You can click any playlist in iTunes and publish it to the iTunes Music Store. You can also click any song title, album title, or artist and jump to the appropriate content in the iTMS.
I [...]

It was pretty nasty yesterday afternoon and evening, the first real East Coast-style wind/thunderstorm we’ve seen since we moved out here two years ago. My first clue of the intensity of the storm was a lightning strike directly outside the office across from mine, so close that I could feel the hair on my arms [...]

A friend just shared this little jewel of a wedding dress auction, and I had to pass it along. I have to say, the man has guts. I don’t think I’d have quite the shape to pull that off. At least the updates to the page show he’s having fun—and maybe he’ll get a decent [...]

It’s a good day when an old friend releases a new album, and today is definitely a good day. Justin Rosolino, with whom I sang for a year in the Virginia Glee Club before his muse led him elsewhere, has just released his second album, Wonderlust.
The record, which features contributions from members of Sixpence None [...]

A few times in the last month, I’ve had conversations with people that went something like, “Oh, I wonder how Google’s editorial staff keeps up to construct relevant search results for all those terms.” Apologies to the speakers, but that’s a little like wondering how those elves make the cookies taste so good.
My former coworker [...]

Lisa and I spent Saturday and Sunday on our front porch. Alas, not in rockers. More like off our rockers.
Saturday began with the ceremonial Removal of the Cruddy Outdoor Carpet, that green plastic thing that used to cover our porch. No more! Now the two-inch gap in the flooring in front of the old front [...]

It’s been a few days since my in-laws returned to New Jersey. While they were here, they kick-started a ton of projects around the house, including replanting the beds in front of the house (formerly hidden by our trees), getting the junk out of the pathways around the garden beds, and the front porch repainting [...]

This week in Doonesbury, original cast member B.D. loses his helmet (without which he has not been seen, though over the years it morphed from a football helmet to a police helmet to a GI’s helmet, in over 30 years)… and his left leg, from the knee down. In response, local papers in Colorado and [...]