Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

The plus side of being stuck in the JetBlue terminal at JFK on a layover between Buffalo and Boston is free wifi. The downside, of course, is being stuck in JFK. With that, this week’s random 10: Pulp, “Like a Friend” (This is Hardcore) Prince, “Goodbye” (Crystal Ball) Eva Osinska, “Polonaise brilliante in C major, [...]

Sez here that, following on the heels of the Talking Heads reissues (which have been spectacular, btw, at least the first four albums), another early ’80s David Byrne masterpiece is getting loving reissue treatment, with a twist. Byrne’s collaboration with Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was a significant milestone, if not [...]

I’m on the road again, and ran into two Internet service concepts for travelers that I haven’t seen before. The first: JetBlue’s free WiFi at JFK. Now this is an airline that knows how to inspire loyalty. I only had 20 minutes before my connection boarded, and normally I would hate to buy WiFi just [...]

I wrote a few days ago about why I love our nearby big city—but our own little burb isn’t without its charms. For instance: how many towns can claim an Australian expat as a local celebrity—one who has been living on the streets for a month? The Arlington Advocate published a story today about Funny [...]

NY Times: Much Ado About Mutton, but Not in These Parts – New York Times. It’s rare that I read about a meat that I’ve never either cooked or eaten, but this article on mutton in the Times made me want to go rent a cooler to hang some mutton in for a few weeks. [...]

Why do I love living in Boston? Because somewhere in the vicinity there is a Universal Unitarian minister blogger who writes fashion and makeup advice for ministers. (Via Universal Hub.) I have a sister in Presbyterian seminary who could probably write the mid-Atlantic frozen chosen version of the ministerial attire rules.

I had a great weekend in Pennsylvania with my parents and my grandfather. I’ve written a bit about his health from time to time on the blog: the stroke, his struggles with diabetes. When I saw him last summer he was withdrawn and uncommunicative, and had trouble moving, though he did respond when I talked [...]

I wonder what it’s like to be in President Bush’s world, a world unconstrained by checks and balances or, apparently, reality. That’s where it seems our president spends his days, anyway, based on this Boston Globe analysis of the President’s “signing statement” for the Patriot Act renewal. In the signing statement, Bush (or his staff) [...]

I have a long drive ahead of me this afternoon, heading down for one of several annual Brackbill family gatherings; I’ve documented the summer picnics a few times over the years on this blog. It’s in Lancaster County, PA, where it smells strongly of cow—the Amish believe in natural fertilizer and the fields are full [...]

Serial (or parallel?) entrepreneur and Linspire founder Michael Robertson announced a new shot over Microsoft’s bow today: a general purpose Ajax application platform called ajaxLaunch.com, with its first application, ajaxWrite, a web based word processing application that can read and write Word files and do WYSIWIG formatting. This is a pretty damned impressive application on [...]

In the software industry, it’s predictable that major releases slip. The more features that get added in, the more ambitious the release, the higher the testing burden, the greater the risk of incompatibility with other products, the more complicated the interaction matrix between features, the bigger the regression risk. More risk = more uncertain schedule. [...]

NYT: Decanting Robert Parker. The premise of the article is that Robert Parker, whose 100 point wine rating system and apparent love of big wines has revolutionized the industry, feels that he’s being made a scapegoat for everything that is wrong with the wine industry today. Oh well. The price of fame. Still, among the [...]

Someone came to my blog this afternoon who was searching for katie couric I definitely want Duke [in the Final Four] because I feel sorry for all those kids who couldn’t get in to UVA. Heh. Did she actually say that? I haven’t watched the Today Show in years, but I might have to start [...]

Don’t know how I missed this one, but DRM-free download service eMusic has quietly added vast swatches of the Harmonia Mundi catalog, including Anonymous 4, Theatre of Voices (including their sublime Arvo Pärt collection De Profundis), the Baltic Voices compilations (including a Górecki composition I’ve never heard)… Oh man. Good good stuff. If you have [...]

Via MacOSXHints, a great article about Cocoa’s text bindings and the Amazingly Cool Things you can do with them—like, implement a standard keystroke to wrap a piece of text in some HTML formatting in every Cocoa text field in your whole system. Also a list of default bindings as shipped in Mac OS X, and [...]