Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

A few months after I posted about not being able to use Keyword Assistant, my favorite iPhoto plugin, because it didn’t work on Intel Macs, I broke down and toggled iPhoto so that it would launch in PowerPC translation so I could use the plugin. It was slow, but it worked, and I could tag [...]

A few tunes on today’s mix speak to my feeling of total disillusionment with the Senate, particularly the Johnny Cash, the Monk, and the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet.

Johnny Cash, “I Hung My Head” (American IV: The Man Comes Around)
U2, “Spanish Eyes” (B-Sides 1980-1990)
Thelonious Monk, “Nutty” (Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane)
Ed Harcourt, “Black Dress” (Strangers)
Golden Gate [...]

The legislation that passed the senate yesterday, which legalizes torture, suspends habeas corpus, strips judicial oversight, and includes war crimes immunity in an effort to turn this proud nation into a Potemkin democracy, is in my opinion the saddest moment of our national history post-9/11. My favorite analyses:

New York Times: “ Congress passed a tyrannical [...]

I got home at 5:30 this morning from my trip to the LA region. The trip reiterated how superior the JetBlue experience can be if you are going to the right place. My colleague and I flew directly from Boston to Long Beach, had at the most an hour drive between Long Beach and our [...]

Somehow in spite of the hectic travel schedule, my coworker and I found our way on the waterfront in Long Beach last night prior to heading back to the airport for our red eye, and somehow we landed at the Yard House. (Hey, things like that just seem to happen to me.)
Now, I should preface [...]

Well, that was quick. It’s amazing what putting together a five and a half hour meeting and a six hour plane flight in the same day can do to really chew up the time. I just flew into Long Beach and drove up to Pasadena where we have a meeting in the morning. This is [...]

A coworker who DJs a jazz show on WICN pointed out the Beantown Jazz Festival, happening this weekend. The opening night concert sounds like a beautiful thing to me:

BeanTown Jazz Festival kick-off concert with the Story of Impulse Records — The McCoy Tyner Septet with Charnett Moffett, Eric Kamau Gravatt, Dave Liebman, Wallace Roney, Steve [...]

After a week on the road and some fun medical procedures (all diagnostic, nothing serious going on, except getting poked and prodded in places I’ve never been poked and prodded before), I’m feeling downright ornery. My iPod and its semi-random shuffle feature appears to be reflecting that in this playlist, both taunting me with some [...]

Breaking news this morning was that Dick Schmalensee, the dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, will be stepping down at the end of the year to return to research. What is interesting to me is that (a) two other school deans (the head of Engineering and Science) are stepping down at the same [...]

And in this case, I mean the closure of the walls over the new pipes and electrical. But I’m not ready to show that yet, so I’ve just uploaded a few details of some of the finished work for your enjoyment. I’ve decided to keep one big photoset of the renovation as it progresses, so [...]

Boston Globe: Church’s new sound is meant to be appealing. The new bell wheel, which will allow the bell at Old South to be properly tolled, is beautiful—it has been at the front of our sanctuary for a few weeks. I’m looking forward to hearing it.
And looking at the picture in the Globe, I’m wondering [...]

It’s a big milestone birthday for Esta this year: she turns twenty-something . Happy birthday to my favorite seminarian.

New York Times: Princeton Stops Its Early Admissions, Joining Movement to Make Process Fairer. This change hits oddly close to home. I was a beneficiary of one of Princeton’s early admission processes. At that point they came in two flavors: early decision, which was a binding agreement that you would go to the school if [...]

Just a quick note that I did, in fact, make it in last night. It’s taken me a while to get things going today thanks to the over 300 email messages in my personal account, many of them spam comments that needed managing.
Salt Lake is just as beautiful as I remember it. I haven’t strayed [...]

My flight from Boston arrived at 9:30 last night, something like two and a half hours past our planned departure. Of course, I had feared something like this, but when they were announcing the delay I had seen my bag loaded onto the plane and figured I was stuck with it for the long run. [...]