Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

Two personal thoughts this morning for residents of the Gulf Coast: one family friend who’s visiting my parents right now who has no idea what has happened to his Mississippi house and whose wife is stranded (but safe) at a hotel with no power; one for Hooblogger Todd at Frolic, who has now updated after [...]

Just to clarify: a friend asked over IM after my tale of woe with my flat tire: “Can’t you change a tire yourself?” Answer: Yes, and I have always found the Volkswagen jack and tire iron to be exceptionally intuitive to use (having had to change at least one tire in the line of fire [...]

I thought it was simpler in SQL Server 2000 than it turns out to be to move a database from one server to another and restore permissions. At least Microsoft provides a stored procedure to map existing SQL Server logins to users in the database being moved.

New York Times: Missed church? Download it to your iPod. A logical, and perhaps lower-cost, extension of the radio services long used to connect churches with their stay-at-home members, this description of various podcasting churches is ringing a few bells for me. I have long bemoaned the lack of a strong principled moral opposition to [...]

As it turns out, the resolution of my morning flat was relatively painless. I called a towing service, they took it to the dealership, the dealership managed the rest (doubly appropriate since I needed a scheduled service visit anyway). The kicker, unfortunately, was that the injury to the new tire wasn’t a manufacturing defect but [...]

I was on my way to the office to join a group of people heading to an offsite conference in Stowe, Vermont, and happily driving along when I took a left turn into a shopping center for some coffee and heard a pop. Oh no, I thought. I managed to get the car into a [...]

Because I’m obsessive and am going to lose the links unless I note them here: Micrographia: the Microscopy of Vinyl Records Shure M97xE High Performance Cartridge Stereophile: Tweaking your Record-Player Van den Hul: Turntable System Setup Audiophilia: A Beginner’s Guide to Cartridge Setup Audio Asylum Audio FAQ And, just for kicks, the Stereophile Complaint Form

It hasn’t been all hi-fi fun here, unfortunately. Esta’s PowerBook, which used to be my old faithful G3, has bitten the dust. It won’t boot any more. I made an appointment for her at the Cambridge Apple Store, and they indicated that (a) it needed some internal power circuitry replaced, which would set her back [...]

Esta, who arrived on Wednesday evening for a few days of R and R, is helping me with a very important task: auditioning a new turntable. A coworker was looking to unload a circa 1983 Denon DP-45F that hadn’t been played in eleven years. So far the results have been mixed. On the plus side, [...]

Follow up to yesterday’s post: I can be reached at tjarrett at gmail dot com on Google Talk. I don’t really use Gmail for mail services, so use the standard mail form if you want to contact me in a non-IM way.

Courtesy Doveman, here’s Dead Air Space, which appears to be a group blog by the members of Radiohead. So far: announcement of a studio session, during which the guys worked on songs entitled “Suits Don’t Fit” and “Pigsee” or “Pigs Ear.” Also discussion of the band’s time off in 2004 and an intriguing confession from [...]

The Unofficial Apple Weblog is one of a bunch of sites talking about the leak of Google Talk, also known as Google’s implementation of Jabber. Nice to see Mac support (albeit apparently unofficial) in a new Google product before it ships. Also nice to see Jabber getting some traction. With an open API and an [...]

I haven’t been writing as much the last few days, partly because the show floor has kept me busy, partly because the hotel wanted me to pay for WiFi even if I already bought a day of wired Internet use in my room. Memo to Starwood: for a luxury hotel, you’re sure making me feel [...]

It was good to see my extended family over the last two days, but sad as well. My great-uncle Hershey Brackbill passed away on Saturday. What was originally going to be just another annual family reunion turned into a commemoration of Hershey. To back up: My grandfather had eleven brothers and sisters, of whom all [...]

Written Saturday afternoon as I rode south from Boston: I’m on the Acela, a few minutes outside New Haven. The car is filling up, but I have no seat companion as yet. The sun was out as we traveled along the Atlantic coast in Rhode Island and the early part of Connecticut, and it was [...]