Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

A day of work today as the sun came and went over the Berkshires. I spent the morning in a coffee shop and the afternoon in a hotel room. If I could have, I would have done all the work in the coffee shop, but giving demos and being on conference calls doesn’t lend itself [...]

I may owe my optometrist my vision.
I was running low on contacts and considered simply calling in an order, but thought maybe I should go and have my eyes checked. Normally I only change prescriptions every few years, but about a year ago I had an eye infection and a more indepth visit. While I [...]

There are about 150 people who have stumbled across the Ramagon tribute I wrote last year, one or two at a time. I finally stumbled across some photographic evidence of the toys when I was scanning an old photo album last night. Here are some out of focus close-ups of three things I made with [...]

This is my eighth birthday… since starting my blog in 2001.
Seems like it was an eternity ago. I didn’t even bother to blog on my birthday then–of course it was close to the end of my third semester of business school and I was going nuts. But then, I didn’t realize that I was starting [...]

After months of following the Democratic primaries and cheering for Barack Obama’s victory, did I watch his acceptance speech last night? Did I scour the crowd for signs of my friends Greg Greene and Jen Sorenson, who were both in the crowd? Did I relish a speech well done, a fight well fought, and clear [...]

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to work at an amazing company in the security space, wonder no more. Veracode is growing, and we’ve got quite a few openings in sales, engineering, QA, research, and even (particularly) in product management.
If you’ve read my posts about security and product management, if you’ve read [...]

Like Estaminet, I hope so. But I also fear that this motion in a General Assembly committee to recommend the deletion of G-6.0106b, the part of the Presbyterian Book of Order that requires “chastity in singleness” or “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman” of church officers, and therefore bans [...]

TechCrunch: Nokia Acquires Symbian – Goes 3. Hear that sound? That’s the sound of Fake Steve Jobs just itching to skewer somebody, but since he’s on vacation I’ll do it instead.
Make no mistake: this is a defensive move by Nokia in response to the iPhone and Android, not an offensive one. Five years ago, an [...]

Via Matthew Guerrieri, who writes “sometimes a clarinet is just a clarinet,” in reference to Woody asking Dick Cavett to hold his clarinet and then saying, “Don’t hurt it, because it affirms my Freudian totality.” <audience titter> “Should be playing the harmonica.”
What I love about this clip is how the first part makes him look [...]

… are the fun weeks, aren’t they? I feel like I’m up to my eyeballs in work and yet the week just started.
Miscellaneous notes:

I’m within striking distance of reaching zero unlistened to tracks in my iTunes library, after almost two years of dedicated listening to ensure that I listened to every track in the library [...]

A few weeks ago my eyes turned bright red. They didn’t hurt but something was clearly wrong. I stopped wearing my contacts for a few days and got rid of the infection that had settled in. In the meantime, I relearned what I already knew: my glasses prescription was woefully out of date. Like, when [...]

This is one of those days.
Nothing’s really wrong. I’m just weary of winter. The sun is out and I’m not out there. I really, really want to put my snowblower in the back of the garage and pull the grill to the front.

Every now and then, you lose one of the truly influential people in your life. Earlier this year, it was my grandfather. Last week, I got word that another one had passed on: Myrtle Talbott, who taught my once-a-week TAG class when I was in fourth and fifth grade, who was a longtime member of [...]

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 [...]

I was driving my 2003 Passat home from the office on Tuesday when something weird happened: the car started idling very rough at a stoplight. I haven’t had a car run that rough since the days when I was driving my 1977 MGB. I thought that perhaps I needed to get a tuneup. I did [...]