Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

I ended up on the road all day yesterday, so no update happened. It was a really surreal week in Mexico City, and I didn’t see that much of the city other than my hotel, our customer’s offices, and the roads in between. That’s pretty much a normal business trip, but because the hotel was [...]

Currently waiting for my review at eMusic, once my subscription renews: two early Lucinda Williams recordings, Gillian Welch’s Hell Among the Yearlings, In Camera’s 13 (Lucky for Some), and Scott H. Biram’s The Dirty Old One Man Band.
Currently listening: the Sacred Steel compilation, Max Roach’s astonishing We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite, and the Replacements’s [...]

I don’t know that there’s anything more inspirational on the anniversary of the post-Katrina disaster as this prank by the Yes Men, who impersonated HUD officials to tell a crowd of contractors and media in New Orleans that HUD would be refocusing its efforts on getting people back into their homes, rather than knocking the [...]

The blessing and curse of business travel is that while one gets to visit exotic locations that one would never have visited otherwise, they all tend to look the same.
I’m sitting in a very nice hotel in Mexico City—the suburbs, technically, looking out the window and waiting for the sun to come up over the [...]

With the rules of the Random 10, the odds of any mariachi music coming into this list are probably pretty slim. But it should be there anyway: I have a three day business trip to Mexico City next week and will be experiencing that fair country for the first time. Should be a heck of [...]

So in the middle of a broad battery recall for older Powerbook and iBook batteries (my machines weren’t affected by this one), I thought I’d follow up about my own battery situation. As you’ll recall, Apple is also recalling some MacBook Pro batteries, not for explosive reasons but because they apparently “don’t meet the company’s [...]

Catching my breath for the first time this week, and there are some interesting things going on out there:

Diebold’s voting machines failed miserably in the Alaskan preliminary and ballot measure election yesterday, forcing a hand recount. Surprised?
Navarro Vineyards Wine Grape Juices, which sound like a great alternative to wine on the table—good for pregnant women [...]

Finished reading The Discoveries last week. A recap of the major scientific discoveries of the 20th century, complete with the actual research papers, it plunged me back into my physics past.
It made me think about quantum physics and how it has really changed everyday life. Example: while for some medical imaging ultrasound is the way [...]

One of my German colleagues is in town this week. As we sat through a design session this morning, he asked, “How do you say streber in English?”
I shrugged, and he said, “Go to Leo.org.” We looked in the English-German dictionary on the site, and we found the following translations: careerist, eager beaver, geek, grind, [...]

Last night’s rehearsal of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron was … interesting. I can’t add a lot to fanw’s characterization of the rehearsal except to note that it’s a little early in the process to be gathering more than first impressions of the work. None of the singers are secure enough yet in the melodic line [...]

Between returning from travel, working on our kitchen, my job, and rehearsals starting today for Moses und Aron, posting will be intermittent this week.
In the meantime, if anyone wants to help me out and has relevant technical presales experience, take a look at this.

I’m in a sketchy Travelodge (well, only as sketchy as the places I’ve stayed outside Tanglewood for our residencies, so not bad, just not the Ritz. Hey, there’s free Wifi.) in Lancaster, PA tonight. Just finished re-watching (for the first time in probably 15 years) Pump Up the Volume, the movie about the deep anxieties [...]

Musical discovery of the week: Sufjan Stevens’ delicate masterpiece Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State takes on additional resonance as you’re driving through the industrial outskirts of Lansing. But it still doesn’t cleanse the chorus of “Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)” from your brain.
We are in town for a morning sales call and [...]

If you followed any links from Jeff Rowland’s copy Overcompensating that I pointed to yesterday, you may already have seen the music video for the Snakes on a Plane theme. Just in case, here it is:

You can also download “Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)” as an MP3, thanks to a bunch of MP3 bloggers, [...]

Universal Hub: Where’s Mel Gibson now?. Making moments like this live forever on teh Intarweb was why God created YouTube. This is worthy of my first-ever YouTube embed, in fact:

I don’t mind telling you, I laughed so hard I cried a little. (It’s a good day for that.)