Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Once again, I come up with reasonably snappy one liners about the things in my aggregator so you don’t have to: SJ’s Wiki Hut of Horror: Feats of Clay. No, we aren’t slouching towards Bethlehem as software designers; no one knows where perfection is or what it looks like, so we just have to do [...]

Wil Wheaton writes compellingly today about the outcome of his latest audition. There are a couple of things here that spoke to me. First: Wil, like me, is in an industry that is playing the hiring game in a very risk averse way. In Wil’s industry, Hollywood, it makes a lot of sense—people literally make [...]

I feel a bit odd just now, as though I’m part of the machine or something. Here’s why: Go to the Sub Pop home page, which currently offers a link to a site for the new Low recording. Click on the Low splash page. Click on the link in the navigation that says “>S>P info [...]

I went into Boston yesterday to audition for a part time gig while I continue looking for my next opportunity. My preparatory instructions said, “Treat this like a job interview, because it is one.” Okay, I said, and put on the suit I normally wear for first interviews. It wasn’t the smartest move, because I [...]

Everyone’s favorite men’s renaissance a cappella group, the Suspicious Cheese Lords, will be on Washington DC classical station WETA on Sunday night, doing the “Millennium of Music” program hosted by Robert Aubry Davis. The station has a streaming audio feed (Real or Windows Media Player only, unfortunately) so you can preview parts of their amazing [...]

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of Allied (Soviet) forces at Auschwitz and Birkenau. While I can’t find words to express the mix of sorrow, rage, disgust, and shock that still fills me when I contemplate what happened in that camp and others like it across Nazi Germany, I have to try. Because [...]

Another day, another shovelful. Having grown up in a nominally warmer climate where it only ever really snowed once every couple of years, I never really learned how to deal with snow. It turns out that it’s all about maintenance. Every morning after the snow falls, you go out and shovel the walk and snowblow [...]

Apple has released the .Mac SDK, allowing developers to integrate their applications with Apple’s members-only suite of web-hosted applications. Interestingly, the “Using the .Mac SDK” page says that “.Mac supports network access via WebDAV, HTTP, XML-RPC, and other open standards.” The focus of the SDK however appears to be on a set of Cocoa classes [...]

Dan Gillmor: Newspapers: Open Your Archives. Right on. This is not only the right move from a business model perspective (more in a second) but from a Public Good perspective. Why is it a good move from the business model perspective? Three things. First, keeping archives publicly accessible increases the newspaper’s share of voice in [...]

Paolo Valdemarin writes about the connection between folksonomy tagging and his proposed ENT extension to RSS 2.0. Go for it, Paolo—and yes, Steve, UserLand should support this extension in Radio and in Manila. I would like to have a structured way to tag posts that’s more flexible than the existing Manila category system.

TidBITS: Why Go Pro (Audio Hijack Pro, That Is). Interesting review of the Mac audio shareware package. Sounds like the real time filters might be a really good thing to look into for podcast productions.

MacOSXHints: Avoid a bad iPhoto5 ‘vanishing album’ bug. I haven’t upgraded yet but this is probably a good thing to bear in mind…

I keep forgetting to document the set of assumptions I’m using to size the hard disk requirements for my home music server. This might be helpful to someone, so here goes: On average, Apple’s lossless codec (ALAC) compresses files to about 58% of their uncompressed size. This means that to do capacity planning for moving [...]

MacOSXHints: An AppleScript to manage two music folders. The poster was running out of room on his PowerBook hard drive (sound familiar?) and created two music libraries—one on a shared disk on his home network, and a smaller one on his PowerBook. An interesting alternative to the other solutions I’ve identified to this problem, which [...]

Two articles on Metafilter, apparently unrelated: identical messages of support for Ashlee Simpson have appeared online in about fifteen message boards, all signed mandyc19, leading some to speculate that a viral marketing company is trying to start a “groundswell” of support for the once-lipsynching, now known to be just-bad singer—Ashleeturfing, if you will. And AOL [...]