September 8, 2005 – Jarrett House North

I have griped in the past about the dangers of lock-in, but never figured I would be directly impacted myself. A few weeks ago, my RSS feed started having problems in Bloglines. I’m not sure what caused the problems, but I suspect the Added Values plug-in, which redirected permalinks and may have redirected my RSS feed, is to blame.

At any rate, my feed stopped updating in Bloglines. Now here’s where it gets fun. I contacted Bloglines about the problem, and they said they fixed something with the feed and that it should now work. Unfortunately, it didn’t. So Craig pinged them. This time, Bloglines deleted the non-responsive version of the feed, and said that re-subscribing should fix the problem. Now the number of people subscribing to my feed in Bloglines—or at least the “working version” of my feed—has gone from 41 to 4. At the same time, my average daily traffic has dropped substantially. I think there are a bunch of people who only saw my content through Bloglines and who aren’t coming to the site to check in.

If this were an RSS issue, I might be able to do something to correct it at my end. But since it’s a Bloglines issue, I have no way to notify any of the subscribers of the problem—except to post it here and hope that someone comes across it. Please re-add me to your subscriptions if you want to continue to get information from this site!

After months of cajoling, I finally convinced Lisa to try the Publick House, which I got excited about a year ago after reading the recommendation in the Globe. The reality: the beer is every bit as good as they say; the food is good, but not quite up to my elevated expectations; and the crowd is much much younger than I would have guessed.

Lisa and I arrived on Sunday night and hit the first hard reality: the place was packed and there was no host to give us an idea about wait times. Fortunately as I hovered I spotted a couple leaving the back room and we pounced on the table. Beers, in the meantime, were quite good: we started with an Ommegang Hennepin and a Whale’s Tail Pale Ale, both on draft, both excellent.

Perhaps it was just a “back to class” night, but we were just about the oldest people in the room, which isn’t a normal experience for me at beer-related venues. We shrugged and ordered, sticking on the “pub grub” side of things. Lisa’s andouille sandwich was excellent as were the fries; my upscale mac and cheese, topped with some undistinguished sausage or other, was good but not the “great 8” wonder that I was expecting from the menu. I wonder what the food experience would have been if we had tried some of the other menu items — sadly, the mussels promise in the Boston.com article were not on the menu.

Good fun. I think I’ll have to find someone else to go back with me next time, though. Niall, you interested?