Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus – Here Comes Everybody Old but good article positing that socially constructed media comes out of the social surplus created when people stop watching so much TV. (tags: internet media wikipedia web)

Five Things You Can Do With This New Facebook RSS App – ReadWriteWeb Dead simple: a new Facebook app that takes your news feed from Facebook and republishes it as RSS. (tags: rss facebook) It May Be Cheap, But It’s Also Tasty – NYTimes.com Alternative cuts of meat for recessionary times. (tags: cucina)

Happy Hour Thread: Biden Had Fourteen Conversations With Specter This Year | The Plum Line Aaand Biden has some connection to Specter’s switch too. (tags: specter gop biden) How Hillary Clinton Got Specter To Switch An interesting thread–how Hillary’s continued candidacy helped bring about the shift in Pennsylvania voting patterns that led to Specter’s change [...]

Adjix has a breakthrough idea in URL shorteners (Scripting News) Interesting if retroactively obvious way to future-proof URL shortener links. (tags: twitter) Decoding the Verizon DBIR 2009 Cover Chris Eng shows how crypto is done. Finishing in the top 3 isn’t too bad and whoever dreamed up the cipher in the cover clearly had a [...]

Last Friday’s Billboard classical chart featured the debut of the two BSO CDs on which I performed, the Brahms Requiem and Ravel Daphnis et Chloé. (A third BSO recording in which I participated, Bolcom’s Symphony No. 8, is only available as a download.) The Ravel was at number 8 on the top 10, and the [...]

The Hardware Aisle: Sharp of mind, body, and mower So that’s how it’s done. Using a mill bastard file to sharpen a lawnmower blade. Probably a good idea before the season starts in earnest. (tags: houseblog)

James Taylor’s 60th Birthday Celebration (CaroleKing.com) From last summer, Carole King’s thoughts on hearing the TFC in rehearsals last summer. Awesome. (tags: music tfc review) Hollywood group asks judge to seal courtroom in DVD-copying case | Politics and Law – CNET News And what, exactly, are they going to keep secret? 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0? (tags: mpaa dvd [...]

I’ve had three iPod-like devices since 2001, four if you count my iPhone. The first one was the classic iPod 5GB with the mechanical clickwheel (that was a happy Christmas day). The FireWire port famously broke on it, and I picked up a 10GB model in time for my cross-country drive. I bought a 30GB [...]

Poll: Texas Republicans Approve Of Rick Perry’s Secession Remarks | TPMDC I say, if Texas wants to secede, we should let them. Provided, of course, that they allow Austin to be an independent city-state (like the Vatican), and that they pay us back all the federal tax dollars that have flowed down there year after [...]

Cruft: Homemade Bacon How to cure and cold smoke your pork bellies to get delicious Vitamin B. (tags: food recipes bacon) Congress API Additions: Bills and Floor Appearances – Open Blog – NYTimes.com The New York Times’s API for fetching data about Congress is bounding along. Very nicely done way to think about what “the [...]

Cassini’s continued mission – The Big Picture – Boston.com Incredible photo essay of Saturn from the Cassini probe. (tags: nasa photo saturn space photography)

Since my budget doesn’t move as fast as the hard disk industry increases capacity, I periodically use OmniDiskSweeper to go through and clean a few gigabytes of dross off my MacBook Pro’s 80 GB drive. It’s necessary, because without going through the exercise, I end up with less than a gig of free drive space [...]

Obamanomics – Redefining Capitalism After the Fall – NYTimes.com Interesting outline of the direction that Obama would like to take with the American economy. It is probably a little premature to speculate about post-recession economic policy. (tags: economy obama) Announcing IE6 Update – Help kill Internet Explorer 6 – Almost Done A fairly brilliant hack [...]

Short URL Auto-Discovery ‎(wiki)‎ A spec proposal for tying short URLs in a persistent way to an HTML document. (tags: web usability) The WHATWG Blog » Blog Archive » The Road to HTML 5: Link Relations HTML 5 introduces additional link relations to enrich documents. (tags: webdesign html5) Bacon: the Other White Heat | Popular [...]

Anti-Obama Taxpayer Tea Parties steeped in insanity – Los Angeles Times Protesting taxation with representation. (tags: obama economy gop) How to “radiate” status by showing burndown and iteration charts outside Rally (Agile Commons) The specific URL format for Rally burndown charts is provided for mashing with other web sites. (tags: rally productmanagement) Rands In Repose: [...]