Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

A Microsoft friend of mine was quoted in a CNET article this morning (Why my cable DVR stinks). Arvind (whose last name was misspelled in the article) said (and this is something I’ve heard from him before) that the rich-client, local processing model that Windows Media Center uses is a much better way to provide [...]

I got a glimpse into the mind of global warming deniers today, as I was waiting for my lunch in a pizza shop near my office. Abutting a story about The Independent Republic of California doing a deal with the UK to create an international market in greenhouse emissions (not itself a bad thing) was [...]

A fortuitous and formidable gadget showed up on our doorstop yesterday: a Roomba. (What can I say? It’s the Jarrett House. Gadgets have a way of finding their way here.) This particular Roomba was a Roomba Red, the entry level model, but I’m not complaining. It charged all day today, and tonight while we ate [...]

Or, more precisely, Power Back On. I’m in my office now, but was working from home this morning because of a power failure that took down our entire building. (Apparently an air conditioner overloaded.) But they fixed it and it’s back to business. So without further ado, this Random 10, in which the first two [...]

—Oh yes. We had noticed a gas smell near our next-door neighbor’s house, and they don’t have a gas hookup so we figured it must have been a leak in the main. So Sunday afternoon the crew from Keyspan was out there digging. They found a stub that would have been used to connect our [...]

Friday morning, and the power is out at my office building (like, in the whole building. That’s a new one.) so I’m working from home and breathing in. It’s been a busy, crazy, nutty week, as they all seem to be recently. I neglected to mention on Monday that I traveled to Chicago for one [...]

It’s not uncommon for a folksinger’s bio to mention the influence of James Taylor, Suzanne Vega, and Linda Ronstadt. It’s a lot rarer for the bio to go on to mention degrees in classical vocal performance and experience in the Jewish, Arabic, and gospel traditions. It’s almost unheard of for a musician to live up [...]

It occurs to me that I’ve posted a couple of lists of review links, but haven’t actually written about the experience of performing great choral masterworks at Tanglewood. First a few specific notes about the Mozart performances, then some general observations: First, the amount of music that the chorus actually sings in Don Giovanni is [...]

My first ever picture in the New York Times! (I’m the face circled in red.) The New York Times review of the Requiem was the first to appear, late last night, followed by the Globe: New York Times: At Tanglewood, Scintillating Send-Offs for Don Giovanni and Mozart: “With the festival chorus, meticulously trained by John [...]

Only one review so far for the weekend’s performances, but it’s a good one: Boston Globe, Levine leads triumphant Don Giovanni. I would agree with Dyer’s assessments of the soloists, particularly Matthew Polenzani, Soile Isokoski, Morris Robinson, and Luca Pisaroni. The cast had tremendous rapport and it was fun to watch from the best seats [...]

The concert week continues; I sing the chorus part in Don Giovanni in a few hours. The chorus part consisting of approximately 30 measures of music, this will be mostly an excuse for me to watch the action from up close. And the cast being amazing, the action should be excellent indeed. I was actually [...]

Today’s Random 10 is brought to you by the letters C and B, where C stands for Carver Middle School and B stands for bus. Carver was the middle school next to ours—immediately adjacent, oddly enough—where a lot of the kids from my neighborhood went, some of the nice ones and some of the troublemakers. [...]

I came from an intoxicating rehearsal of the Mozart Requiem this morning (if you’ve ever sung the “Rex tremendae” with a huge, well-tuned chorus after listening to four nearly perfect soloists hit the “Tuba mirum” out of the park, you know what I mean). This afternoon I was startled to come across a suggestion that [...]

I’d be really curious to hear someone attempt to explain, without going to Biblical sources and speculations about when life begins, why I should agree with the President’s veto of the stem cell research bill. Because honestly, there seem to be far more articles written from the other side that are a lot more convincing [...]

Slashdot: Microsoft acquires Winternals and Sysinternals. Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft, this is great news for Winternals the company and Mark Russinovich the industry figure. (For those that don’t recognize the name, think Sony BMG: Russinovitch’s blog at Sysinternals blew the whistle on Sony BMG’s rootkit.) It’s clear that this is a talent [...]