Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

I am working at home this morning so that my hacking cough (getting better) does not disturb my coworkers. One benefit of doing this is being able to drink delicious, delicious home brewed coffee… so much better than the stuff from the single-serving machine at work. It is perhaps a good thing that our office [...]

I’m still fighting this cold. Today was better but tonight I’m still hacking hard enough to pulse a vein in my forehead. And it’s sapping my energy, both at work and on the blog (as if the longeurs between posts on this blog weren’t bad enough, now my limited brain cells are being crowded out [...]

Quiet few days after Thanksgiving. We had a successful dinner and then spent Friday catching up on sleep and doing … well, a whole bunch of other stuff I don’t remember. Lisa’s folks, here since Tuesday, took off yesterday, leaving the rest of the weekend for us to recoup. And I had to recoup from [...]

Last year it was a mild and easy meal, the year before an epic battle, the year before that a show-off feast, and in 2002 and 2001 we helped out in other people’s kitchens. For this, the fourth Thanksgiving in a row we’ve hosted and the sixth since I started blogging in 2001, we’re playing [...]

It’s been a while since I did anything non-kitchen-related on the house, but the time had come. Today I finally got around to hanging a mailbox by our front door. This may strike some as odd, since we’ve been living in the house for over two years, but until we replaced the front door last [...]

I have a new laptop on the way at work, and, yesterday’s post notwithstanding, I’m looking forward to getting it so that I can load Windows Vista on it. Why, you may rightly ask, would I want to do that to myself? Well, Vista is the first Microsoft OS in seven years that I haven’t [...]

Joel Spolsky writes an interesting perspective about how introducing choices in a software interface can make the UI worse. He uses the example of the new Shutdown UI in Windows Vista, and points out that there are seven states of Shutdown (Switch User, Log Off, Lock, Restart, Sleep, Hibernate, and Shut Down) that are exposed [...]

We had an opportunity to give the kitchen a trial run before Thanksgiving. On Saturday night we made a polpettone—big meatball, essentially an Italian meatloaf—along with two pots of bolognese sauce and a cake. Last night we had our neighbors over to help us eat the bolognese sauce and the cake. It was an entertaining [...]

I was saddened earlier this month to realize that I couldn’t sing in the concert I was most looking forward to in this symphony season, the Boston premiere of El Niño (The Child) by John Adams. I was particularly down because I would be missing the chance to sing with Dawn Upshaw, who has been [...]

My newest mix, doin’ the outside dance, has been posted to Art of the Mix and iTunes. I’m experimenting with iTunes’ new blog sharing code to put the songs on my site (see below). Unfortunately, only the parts of the mix that are in iTunes show up on the live preview. The mix is composed [...]

The deluge appears to have stopped here for the moment, so I can contemplate spending another few hours with the leaves tomorrow, in between painting and other house chores. I figured the few leaves left on our tree wouldn’t be a big burden after I got everything else up on Saturday, but I was wrong, [...]

Reading today’s Cary Tennis advice column (one of my guilty pleasures, btw), “Does less of a paycheck make him less of a man?,” I find myself thankful for how lucky I really am. When I was between jobs after moving back east, it was extremely difficult. Financially it was OK, though not great; Lisa was [...]

The recent announcement that Microsoft would share $1 of revenue for every Zune sold with Universal Music Group—because, according to UMG Chairman and CEO Doug Morris, iPod-like devices are “just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it”—sounds familiar. So I went back and found the precedent for this apparently unprecedented business model: the [...]

It has been a long time since our kitchen has been ready for prime time, but since the weekend’s work we now have a couple of meals under our belt and I have to say, I like the setup. On Sunday we roasted a chicken—about the simplest recipe I know (stuff two lemons into the [...]

A good link for everyone who read and enjoyed Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver: a scan of the 18th century work Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer, aus dem 16ten und 17ten Jahrhundert (Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians from the 16th and 17th Centuries). Gorgeous book even if one doesn’t speak German—and isn’t an occult philosopher. Thanks to BoingBoing [...]