Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

The dinner event last night at the conference I’m attending was a tour of the Erdinger Weissbräu facilities, followed by traditional Bavarian food and “Bavarian olympics.” Misgivings that conflated Bavarian olympics with Beer Olympics gave way when I learned that (here, anyway) Bavarian olympics meant finger-wrestling, sawing wood, hammering nails, holding a 10kg beer stein, [...]

Bruno artist Chris Baldwin reported on Friday (sorry no permalink) that his should-be-in-every-newspaper comic strip, Little Dee, will be available through Comics.com, United Features Syndicate’s online comics portal, where it can be read alongside Peanuts, Doonesbury, and other greats. It’s not syndication but it’s a huge step. Wired picked up the news yesterday, so I [...]

I’ve written in this space before about Mission of Burma—both about their recent limited edition singles and the live show where I saw them open for the Pixies. I got their new release, The Obliterati, last week, which came with a limited edition concert DVD. And damned if the show they filmed wasn’t from that [...]

So here I am in the airport hotel in Munich, my home for the next three days and nights, and I can hardly think.
It was kind of a whirlwind Memorial Day weekend. We spent the time dragging the last few waterlogged and moldering things out of the basement; demolishing some of our existing cabinetry and [...]

I was able to take a day off today—much needed. Didn’t do much of anything really—though I did move forward on The Great CD Project. (Incidentally, I ended up following a combination of the two approaches I outlined in my prior post. I made the new drive a standalone concatenated RAID array using the diskutil [...]

It’s good to see BeerAdvocate, the site that has consistently had the best and broadest selection of beer reviews and information about pubs, getting some recognition. On the heels of last week’s Top 100 Beers, this week they’re getting linkage from CNET for their list of the Top 50 Places to Have a Beer In [...]

I’ve been working on the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium for the last few months, helping to pull together this annual conference that brings together CIOs from across corporate America with thought leadership and technologists from industry. This year’s topic is about maximizing the business value of IT, something that’s near and dear to my heart.
Over [...]

Dave points out a wonderfully lame Business 2.0 quotation, on a par with Steve Ballmer’s “most common form of music on an iPod is ‘stolen’”: “In an ideal digital world, we’d be able to buy copyrighted music and videos wherever we wanted, not just on a designated store. But that’s been the fate of iPod [...]

NY Times: Sony BMG Settles CD Case. Yesterday the final settlement approval was granted by the judge who was presiding over several of the class-action lawsuits against Sony BMG over the rootkit issue. Terms of the settlement are what was reported on SonySuit back in February: Sony must cease the manufacture of XCP and MediaMax [...]

…is carpet and pad saturated with floodwater. On Saturday Lisa and I stripped the carpet out of the basement, where it got flooded last Sunday. It was a slow job. We had to gingerly move all the bookshelves, CD racks, and other furniture pieces, which fortunately kept all my media up, dry, and out of [...]

I got back from San Francisco at 10 am this morning and spent the rest of the day catching up on email. But now I can breathe again, and it’s time for a special Random 10—since I’m sitting at my Mac, this will be an iTunes driven list rather than off my poor little iPod.

Smashing [...]

How was it that I missed the Zuni Cafe the last two times I was in San Francisco? Oh my goodness. Oysters. Pappardelle with duck sauce. Goat cheese with fennel. Oh yeah.
I consciously split the oysters across species lines this time— Pacific oysters, kumamotos, and Virginicas. You know, the Virginicas? Really really good. In [...]

In addition to a good conference week, it has been a great food week here. Monday night I went to the Thirsty Bear, which had moderately interesting beer (the ESB and Maibock were quite good, but the Märzen was weak) and good tapas (marinated anchovies and small portions of hangar steak).
I took a quiet night [...]

I spent the day today bouncing back and forth between sessions that were a little closer to our product’s core functionality (service desk, asset management) and actually doing product demo. I had a demo via Webex that ended just twenty minutes before I had to check out of my hotel room.
An aside to the Gartner [...]

Below is a partial transcript of new Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwarz’s Q and A at the Gartner Symposium.

Q: Let’s talk about StorageTek — loyal following but what’s next?

A: Talked to a board member who lost their tapes. I said, “What’s the big deal? The tapes are encrypted, right?” But tape data isn’t encrypted. So [...]