Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

It was one of those concerts where you had to wait for the review to see how it came out.
William Bolcom’s Symphony #8 is an enormously complex work compressed into less than 40 minutes of polychromatic, muscular, dense writing, in which the chorus is singing for approximately 35 of those minutes. And the chorus runs [...]

The tagline for Mofuse is a little overhyped. As far as I can tell, they provide a nifty self-provisioning capability to take an RSS feed and turn it into a mobile device optimized page—kind of a turnkey version of Dave Winer’s NYTimesRiver. Of course I’m oversimplifying and it’s more than that, like the ability to [...]

I think that at the beginning of the campaign season, I was quite happy to handicap the field of candidates by their typography and logo decisions. Now that we’re down to three, an article on the typography of the 2008 presidential candidates seems a day late and a dollar short—not to mention, didn’t the Boston [...]

Here’s a hypothetical. You are one of two firms in a duopoly for a critical service. You are accused of abusing your position to give your firm a competitive advantage by making it selectively harder for competing products to work across the Internet. You are given an opportunity to explain yourself in a public forum. [...]

Yes, LinkedIn has released an iPhone optimized UI, about six months after Facebook did. Anyone else think that LinkedIn could have used those six months to come up with an iPhone UI that looked more innovative and less like a direct clone of what Facebook did in a weekend?
Still, it’s nice to be that much [...]

When Talking Points Memo started its investigation of the US Attorney firings, I knew Josh Marshall and his team were onto something big. When readers poured in with local press coverage and TPM started stitching the pieces together to show a pattern of politically motivated gutting of the judiciary, I knew that we were seeing [...]

I am in awe of another product manager: the Cranky Product Manager. She posts infrequently but many of her posts are brilliant.
One from last year on “how to say no” to customer or sales feature requests caught my attention. Many of the comments on the post were insightful and mirrored my experience with dealing with [...]

If I don’t want to get morbid and maudlin, I suppose I should stop reading the “In Memoriam” section of the UVA Alumni Magazine. But then I would never know when I was impoverished by the death of a friend or acquaintance.
Today I learned that Nora McGillivray was killed, or killed herself, last September; [...]

CNET: Disk encryption may not be secure enough, new research finds. It’s one thing to read about theoretical ways to get access to secure data, it’s another to watch it on a slide show.
For those that don’t want to read the article, the upshot is: a laptop thief who knows enough can pick the secret [...]

Heh…

Really not much more to say, honestly. (Though I am kind of tickled over the series of strips that my friend Jen Sorensen is running in Slowpoke right now. Oballary and the current Mr. P’s Civics Reader are current favorites.

While there are whole blogs devoted to the topic of good product management, I don’t think anyone has a good answer for how to interview for a good product manager that doesn’t boil down to “it depends.” There are sound reasons for that: There is a continuum of roles that a “product manager” can play, [...]

Couldn’t resist pointing to this article about Sharper Image’s bankruptcy filing. I remember back in the 1980s when they were the coolest thing around, at least to a 12 year old boy. Tons of gadgets and insanely expensive lifestyle gizmos.
What changed? Well, for one thing, fewer yuppies. For another, their target audience got older. You [...]

An article in the Globe last week about composer William Bolcom’s new string octet, given its Boston premiere on Friday, spilled the beans about Bolcom’s new Symphony No. 8, commissioned by James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra and dedicated to the BSO and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. It’s a monumental work in four movements, [...]

I’m probably the last person in the world to hop onto del.icio.us, and now I’m wondering how I avoided it all this time. Especially now that my time is too scarce to blog every interesting link I find—it’s much faster just to post it to del.icio.us, then come back later and skim the cream of [...]

Interesting choice of campaign destination for Hillary Clinton on Monday: she spent an hour with Larry Sabato’s PLAP 101 class at the University of Virginia (via the Tin Man). It appears, from last night’s election returns, that it didn’t help, since Obama swept Virginia (and Maryland, and DC) by a healthy margin.
What surprises me a [...]