Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

I expect the next few days of blogging to be quiet as I spend some time with the BSO preparing to perform the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday. Good rehearsal this morning. The major challenge with this work for me is memorization. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which is the volunteer chorus in [...]

Nice hint at MacOSXHints about using the certificate that encrypts iChat sessions in Tiger to authenticate and encrypt mail as well. Timely for me; I haven’t gotten around to renewing my existing certificate that I set up with Thawte, and I think it expires soon (if it hasn’t already). See my earlier post about issues [...]

To my Boston area readers, as well as anyone interested in relocating: our firm is hiring, just in time for the holiday season. Positions include a senior software QA position, customer support engineer, and a direct field sales position. At iET Solutions, we, like Gartner, are bullish about the future of the IT Service Management [...]

Over at the Sony Boycott Blog, I just posted a longish (albeit first draft) essay called “Using Blogs and the Media for Change: The Sony BMG Case Study.” It tries to analyze the timeline of media coverage around the Sony story together with events in the case to draw some general conclusions on how blogs [...]

It felt nice to have a three day blog hiatus over the weekend, just as it feels nice to get back on the horse this morning. I guess sometimes just the change of routine is important. I got a fair amount done on the house over the holiday. I primed the plaster in the newly [...]

On this Thanksgiving day, a year after my last epic cooking adventures, things are oddly quiet here. We’re much better prepared than I was last year; we’ll be eating an hour later but just about everything is done or pre-cooked so I’m able to relax and write this blog post. For the record, our menu [...]

Salon: Chris Whitley 1960-2005. I read a note in the paper earlier this week that the amazingly inventive blues/rock/country singer-songwriter had terminal cancer from a lifetime of smoking and had gone home to be with family; I missed the announcement that he passed away on Sunday. I always liked his performances and thought he never [...]

I’m going to try to go to IKEA later today, so the concept of “flat pack” refugee housing—an entire dwelling for four designed to be assembled into a shipping container sized package—tickled me. 10 feet by 9.5 feet by 8 feet is not exactly a flat pack, but Vestal Design, the project creators, explicitly credit [...]

I’m going to occasionally post stuff here about the Sony Boycott that doesn’t seem appropriate for that site. Since this site is allowed to be as narcissistic as it has to, these things will end up here… The Baltimore Sun name checked me on Sunday, citing both the Sony Boycott Blog and my original post [...]

I did not tell Bob Woodward that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent. I figure that, as long as we in the blogosphere all come clean, and further vow that we’re not putting ourselves at risk of perjury to do so, we can narrow it down. I like the suspect that Michael Bérubé puts the [...]

Cool new feature on Houseblogs.net, the site that aggregates the home improvement ramblings of housebloggers worldwide: Ask.Houseblogs.net. It’s still in beta, in fact there’s only one question posted right now. But I can think of no better way to leverage the collective bruised fingers and hard learned lessons of all us amateur contractor types than [...]

Remix albums aren’t normally my thing; generally I end up wishing the remixers had left well enough alone. The exception to my rule has been Verve’s excellent Verve Remixed series, which has treated the source material—killer jazz cuts from Verve’s deep vault—with respect while shining a fresh new eye on the performances. Now the same [...]

I have a fair number of updates from the weekend to post, including Justin Rosolino’s gig at Club Passim, the annual Old South Thanksgiving service at the historic Old South Meetinghouse, and the (all-but) completion of our bathroom renovation—not to mention a CD review. But in the meantime, check out the Sony Boycott blog, where [...]

Now this is what Blogcritics does at its best: White Stripes Nation, a group blog series that performs critical readings of various seminal White Stripes songs in the context of a manifesto for Jack White as Dictator-For-Life. The first post is beautiful, on a par with the Onion’s classic Clinton Threatens to Drop Da Bomb [...]

One feature that Windows portables have long had that I’ve wished for in Macs is a suspend-to-disk (aka hibernate) mode, where instead of a normal sleep session the current contents of memory are written to the hard disk and re-read on startup. This allows a user’s session to be preserved even if the battery drains [...]