Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

When the New York Times writes about the near-demise and miraculous return from tax-evasion death of a Cambridge, MA ice-cream maker, you know there’s something special going on. And, in fact, there is.
To my astonishment, in the nearly seven years of this blog I’ve only written about Toscanini’s once, in conjunction with last year’s Ig [...]

A former co-worker of mine, Jeff Richards, has surfaced at Sonian Networks, which is offering a new on-demand email archiving service. What’s unique about Sonian Archive SA2 is its architecture. It’s built almost entirely using Amazon Web Services, and is architected in such a way that each customer gets their own “virtual stack.” As additional [...]

John Edwards bowing out of the race is no surprise after South Carolina, and I guess neither is his refusal to endorse a candidate. I think he’s setting himself up as a kingmaker, and unless either Hillary or Obama are particularly persuasive, he’ll probably hold off on an endorsement as long as possible. But popular [...]

An interesting trio of articles hit yesterday. One is a summary of industry response to the announcement that President Bush intends to fund a massive network security initiative. The money quote is from Veracode’s co-founder and CTO, Chris Wysopal, who compares the initiative to “posting police on every corner in a dangerous neighborhood, but failing [...]

I think the New York Times is getting a little ahead of itself by preemptively declaring Boston a city with three winning teams. Someone touch wood, quick.
Of course, the article is “balanced” enough to include the dismal history of our teams. Two favorite passages: “Last spring, the team was accused of losing games on purpose [...]

While doing some Wikipedia related research last night, I stumbled across something interesting. The record album Songs of the University of Virginia, which I’ve long thought was recorded in 1947 based on photographic evidence from the University archives, was apparently not released until 1951. How do I know this? From a 1951 Washington Post article, [...]

My last post about Agile software development processes and corporate culture addressed one of the major challenges of adopting Agile within a company: the need to get the buy-in of other stakeholders, such as sales, marketing, and the executive team, who think in terms of specs-as-contracts rather than features as conversations. I got feedback from [...]

I have been struck by an occasional series of Daring Fireball posts in which the question is raised: What explains the relative lack of Mac for-profit malware? The conclusion seems to be that there are two factors: a system-dynamics-based answer that says that the overwhelming Windows market share keeps the attention of malware authors; an [...]

I had been meaning to post this for a while and finally got around to it. I couldn’t quite pull off a top 10 for 2007, but I did manage a top 12, and you can find it on Lists of Bests (where you can create your own list of “Best of 2007” and see [...]

The other category I planned to start almost two weeks ago was this one—it’s high time that I started writing more systematically about product management. And what better place to start than with the latest craze, agile software development?
As Steve Johnson at the Product Management blog at Pragmatic Marketing is fond of pointing out, Agile [...]

My grandfather worked at an old fashioned water-powered mill, making flour and animal feed for the county, during the first years of his post-college life and of his marriage. The family has always known where the mill was—right around the corner from the Brackbill farm—but not what has become of it in its post-mill existence.
This [...]

A few days off from the blog were really necessary this week for me to recharge. My silence here belies the work that I was doing elsewhere, though I’m not quite ready to take that work public yet.
It’s been pretty quiet all around, though, and I’m definitely ready to start a new challenge tomorrow in [...]

There are three texts that have been in my mind since my grandfather’s funeral service today. One, the morbidly funny Laurie Anderson line from “Gravity’s Angel”:

And at his funeral all his friends stood around looking said. But they were really thinking of all the ham and cheese sandwiches in the next room. And everybody used [...]

Career news: I am leaving iET Solutions to pursue other opportunities. It’s been a great ride, and I’ve learned a lot about the enterprise software business, from working with analysts to managing cross-market requirements and building roadmaps for complex suites of technology.
My favorite project is the one that we just shipped: we took the old, [...]

Only natural, I suppose, that my thoughts are drawn to the past this week. A new online image collection at the University of Virginia Library, the Frances Benjamin Johnston Photograph Collection is helping to foster that nostalgia with a series of photos of vernacular Virginia buildings taken between 1929 and 1935. The buildings, ranging from [...]