Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Two additional Moses und Aron reviews. The Boston Herald review is effusive: Levine’s Moses is stunning, honest to God. T.J. Medrek writes, “But head and shoulders above all was the visceral, virtuoso performance of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Called upon to whisper, growl, shout and, yes, even sing, portraying everything from the Voice of God [...]

I couldn’t be happier about today’s decision to mount a repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. When one considers how much that instrument has pushed back the frontiers of our knowledge, ruling out a repair mission when a safety protocol exists seems unnecessarily cautious. Here’s to a minimum of seven more years of Hubble [...]

There’s only one thing I hate more than comment spam, and that’s flying with a cold. Partway into Saturday night’s performance, the cold came down like a big hammer and I barely sniffled my way through.
I managed to rally enough yesterday to finish our remaining kitchen cabinetry, a small pantry/desk area consisting of a 24″ [...]

I’ve had a lot of difficulty standing and walking this week; I woke up on Tuesday after a long rehearsal Monday night with very strong pain in the toes on my right foot and wasn’t able to put any weight on my second or third toes—meaning I couldn’t walk very quickly and putting on a [...]

Posted at Art of the Mix and iTunes. This one took a while to put together but mines some material from some recordings I’ve had forever—a benefit of going back to listen to all of my ripped CDs on shuffle is that tracks like the one from Shu-De surprise you. And then there’s “Red Clay [...]

Back from a quick trip to DC (Crystal City to be exact), footsore and tired, but still pleased with what I found in the paper (online) this morning: BSO brings prowling Schoenberg opera to life. Key paragraph (emphasis added):

But of course what gives this parable its weight and power is Schoenberg’s bracing 12-tone score, some [...]

Boston Globe: BSO’s epic undertaking. The numbers the article provides are fairly daunting even from the outside. But here’s how those hours break down for me, as of this week:
12 rehearsals for the TFC… of which I had to miss four thanks to work, including two runthrough rehearsals.
5 rehearsals this week… one Monday night, one [...]

I’ve received an email urging me to comment on the recent claims by import company Lik-Sang that Sony has put them out of business. On the face of it, Sony’s actions—they got a UK court to bar Lik-Sang and other importers from selling the Japanese version of the PSP—seem anticonsumer and anticompetitive. So why aren’t [...]

Via BoingBoing, a great collection of photos from home inspections gone horribly horribly awry, courtesy our good friends at ThisOldHouse.com. In the first gallery, you have to check out the crawlspace water feature (also known as an unconnected tub drain); be careful of the rodent photos in the second gallery.

I have a running playlist in iTunes that was destined to be a mix, consisting of odd cover songs that actually work (or don’t). I was all excited to work on it this weekend until I saw the 66 Alt-Rock Cover Songs list on the iTunes Store, which took all the wind out of my [...]

Today’s link round-up thanks major players in our lives for working to make things better for us:

Thanks to the No-Fly list and the Department of Homeland Security for making sure that the 9/11 hijackers can’t ever fly again!
Thanks to Microsoft for releasing tabbed browsing and improved web standards support in Internet Explorer 7. Welcome to [...]

It feels weird to be in the office and have an hour or two to myself. I was in Baltimore Monday and Tuesday, and on the road a few days last week; the rest of the week is full of remote customer demos. And rehearsals for the Moses und Aron.
About which: I have to say, [...]

Hooblogger Luke Melia shared this Shaker proverb that has applicability to software:
If it is not useful or necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to make it.
If it is useful and necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to enhance it by adding what is not an integral part of its usefulness or [...]

A little more work on the kitchen this weekend. I installed the molding strips under our wall cabinets (check the master kitchen renovation photoset, starting here, for the details), which was slightly more complicated than I expected. Cutting and mitering the strips was a cinch thanks to my miter saw, but I had to shape [...]

Lisa and I took time off work yesterday to recuperate from the past few weeks (she had a product launch last week). We drove west along Rt 2 to see what the leaves looked like. It was a little early still but nice, as the photos hopefully show.
Our stops included the French King Bridge and [...]