Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

NY Times: Summer Breezes In, Sipping Barbera. Two of my favorite Italian reds, barbera and dolcetto, are mentioned in this article and barberas are reviewed.

iTunes Plus, the DRM-free version of the iTunes Store, launched yesterday with kind of a big bang—Paul McCartney’s full catalog. The promised Upgrade My Music feature launched too. I didn’t really know what to expect there, so I was kind of astonished to see that the list of my purchases that were eligible for upgrade [...]

BBC: Music site Last.fm bought by CBS. That’ll buy a whole lotta servers. It also puts CBS in an interesting position to mine data about listening habits—interesting, because CBS also relaunched CBS Records last year. Maybe they can do a better job than the current crop of majors at dealing with the realities of the [...]

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of Jeff Buckley into the Mississippi River, and into legend. At the time, the death of the 30-year-old singer felt like a body blow, and ten years haven’t dulled the impact; if anything, the feeling of cosmic unfairness has deepened over the years. So the new anthology [...]

I posted a whole bunch of photos to Flickr last night from this weekend’s trip to Richmond to see Esta graduate. Many many things at which to marvel, including a sea of academic regalia, some pretty great party faces, Richmond’s very own Art Deco movie theatre and SR-71 reconnaissance plane, and others. I also posted [...]

At Art of the Mix, a new one somewhat in honor of my sister’s graduation this weekend from seminary: empty as a pocket with nothing to lose. Somewhat in honor because it didn’t start out that way, but between the gospel and devotional music in the first half and the general promise at the end [...]

Next week is shaping up to be interesting for those of us in the Boston area who care about the direction of the Internet. First, there’s the O’Reilly Ignite session (an evening of networking, speakers, five-minute elevator pitches, and more). Then the next day, the Berkman Center hosts the 2007 Internet and Society Conference, on [...]

Good to know that one can go from a legislative aide position to a federal immigration judgeship on the strength of one’s ability to riot in corridors pretending to be a grassroots protester. Yes, I’m talking about the poster child for the problems at DOJ, Garry Malphrus, whose fast track to success started when he [...]

It is Friday evening on Memorial Day Weekend. I have the honor of flying to Richmond tonight so that I can attend my sister’s graduation tomorrow as ambassador from the Boston Jarretts. I am excited and happy for her, but at the same time I’m puzzled. Why? Because I’m sitting in an empty airport, that’s [...]

Househack of the day: Sliding bookcase-door Ikea style, courtesy Ikea Hacker, complete with part numbers and instructions. On the cusp of the movie’s 30th anniversary, Wired finds some guy who never saw the movie for the obligatory first impression. Verdict? A pretty funny set of observations, including “Big fat guys who look like bikers can [...]

Bebel Gilberto, whose music hovers the blurred boundaries between bossa nova, salsa, and trance music, has come a long way from her first album. Tanto Tempo came out of nowhere to establish Gilberto as a fresh voice in the global musical culture, with its catchy blend of traditional Brazilian sounds and global dance music. The [...]

Some very good news for the good guys today. Watertown blogger Lisa Williams was among several local bloggers who won a NewsChallenge grant today. The grants are being given in honor of “ideas and projects that will transform community news”; certainly H2OTown qualifies, as does Ethan Zuckerman for his work on Global Voices (thanks to [...]

New York Times: How to Make Your Cellphone Act Like a BlackBerry. David Pogue discusses three options for doing email on a regular cell phone: Google, Yahoo, and Teleflip. Who? I first linked to Teleflip almost two years ago, in the context of their still-free universal email-to-SMS gateway (now rebranded as FlipOut). The new service, [...]

The passive-aggressive notes blog (see my prior post) is a great example of a subgenre of blogs that neatly illustrates the idea that there is an advocate and observer for every possible peccadillo in life, no matter how modern. I refer to them as the Obsessively Tracking Mildly Objectionable Things blogs, and their main value [...]

The passive-aggressive notes blog reminds me of a coworker of mine at Microsoft who used to fly off the handle about water cooler hygiene. At one point, he got so outraged about how people were using the water cooler that he posted a note that said “Don’t dock the bottle! If you must refill a [...]