Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Thanks to all who voiced their concern about my stupid hand injury. I am, fortunately, pretty functional now, though I just found out that using a mouse with a splinted hand is next to impossible. Oh well. With the combination of injury and attendant slowness, I was unable to join Dave for dinner or breakfast [...]

Beginning a day with 600 pounds of topsoil and ending it in the emergency room is probably not uncommon. Ending it in the ER because of a wineglass is a different story. After a bunch more lawnwork yesterday (including borrowing a Very Heavy Roller and raking about 600 pounds of topsoil), I grilled some t-bones [...]

After a week of Seattle-like weather, it has finally cleared and turned sunny. Just in time for my inlaws to come to town. The blog will likely be quiet for a few days; enjoy Memorial Day. Oh, almost forgot: a year ago tomorrow we saw our house for the first time and put in an [...]

New mix, decades longer than you, posted at Art of the Mix and the iTunes Music Store. Extensive song-by-song notes and a bonus illustration, shamelessly cribbed from Questionable Content, are at AotM.

Salon.com: iTunes free download: M.I.A.’s “Galang”. I downloaded this today and was rocking it all the way into work—a good forty-minute drive on a wet windy day like today. If, like me, you were too lame to download Maya Arulpragasam’s debut album illicitly when it was all the buzz, at least check out the free [...]

Daring Fireball: WaitingForLoginWindow. To get your very own login window to pop up at any time, go to the Terminal and type /usr/libexec/WaitingForLoginWindow. And enjoy the hilarity. The link at Daring Fireball explains how it works, and how to kill it.

I realized the other day, just as I was falling asleep, that I link far too often to official “media” and far too rarely to other bloggers. And I don’t comment on other people’s blogs nearly often enough. And I certainly don’t respond to comments on my own blog very quickly. Which may explain why [...]

In happier music news, Sleater-Kinney released their seventh album (wow!) (and their first on Sub Pop) yesterday. In checking out the publicity for the release, I made my way to their official page, where I found the Sleater-Kinney blog. Yep, all three members of the band writing about touring, Revenge of the Sith, breaking feet [...]

I somehow missed this, but Low’s Alan Sparhawk wrote on the band’s forum at the beginning of the month that the band has cancelled its shows for May and June (and probably beyond) because he is coping with undiagnosed mental distress, probably depression. As much as it hurts to see someone go through this, I’m [...]

Scoble commented on my piece yesterday on MSN Virtual Earth and gently points out, through a link to the Channel 9 interview with the team behind Virtual Earth, that there’s considerably more to the new offering than following what Google did with Google Maps. I agree; certainly the eagle-eye view is impressive (if not destined [...]

Microsoft announced that they will debut a new mapping service, MSN Virtual Earth, this summer (thanks to Slashdot for the link). The service combines satellite images with map data, provides Sims-like isometric views, and allows layering information about businesses and services atop the search results. This isn’t a surprising move. After all, MSN Maps have [...]

How is it that, even with all the work I put in over the weekend on our back yard, I don’t suddenly look like Jesse Metcalfe, the lawnboy on Desperate Housewives? As Larry Niven would say, TANJ. I should at least get the abs from all the exercise. But to take a step back: we [...]

Johannes Ernst, whom I linked from my piece on InfoCard last week, wrote in to point out that I erred in my quick description of the service. He says that in InfoCard: …the PC does not actually store the identity information, only pointers to it. The actual identity information is stored by identity providers, who [...]

As a newly minted oenophile traveling around my home state in the mid-nineties, I discovered two things: Virginia had wineries, many tucked into scenic ruins like the Jeffersonian house at Barboursville. Many of them made wine that only a mother could love. I was always a fan of Barboursville, but felt the winery did best [...]

I didn’t have much chance to do anything with Tiger last week while I was on the road, but this morning I finally started playing with Smart Mailboxes in Mail, which is one of the features I most eagerly anticipated for this upgrade. And it is fantastic, even with just one or two smart mailboxes [...]