Author: Tim Jarrett

Craig: Post-Christmas shopping hostage-taking

I’m still catching up with weblog updates from the last week. Craig has what I think must be the funniest take on post-holiday-shopping ever:

…they are a people ripe for revolution. There’s so many shoppers, and so few staff members, that all it would take is one khaki and mock turtleneck sweater-clad minivan driving suburbanite spartacus to throw off their recipts and original product packaging of bondage, rally the spirits of their brothers and sisters that are being kept down by The Man (r)(tm)(c) and rise up against their oppressors. Surely they can find a better way to run things. I was waiting for someone on the edge to just totally snap and take a hostage with a pricing gun. “Don’t come near me! I’ll mark her down 50%! I’ll mark you all down 50%! You’ll never take me at full retail value!”

New Years’ cuisine

Feels funny to be back at the office today. No one is around. It’s very quiet. I want to go out in the hallway and make some kind of loud sound just to see if anyone is awake.

My in-laws are still in town. Lisa will likely be taking them all over Seattle today and tomorrow in a search for a traditional Italian New Years sausage called cotechino. The usual recipe, which we cooked last year but I inexplicably failed to comment on, is cotechino with lentils. Because the cotechino sausage is so large, it looks like a coin when sliced, and the meal is supposed to bring good luck for the New Year. I don’t know the symbolic meaning of the lentils, but having them is for me a nod to my uncle’s traditional New Years Day dish, Hoppin’ John, which features black-eyed peas rather than lentils.

I hope they find the cotechino. I remember the recipe as tasting much better than Hoppin’ John. Given the dubious existence of good Italian butchers in greater Seattle, though, we may be stuck…

Site update

I’ve added a few new items to the site navigation. A few new old items to be exact. I’ve finished migrating the content from my MIT web site, which will disappear in a few days, or a month if the guys at MIT are gracious.

Here’s what’s new on the site, and where:

A lot of this content originated on my first website, which was run out of Frontier on my old Power Mac 7200/90. The content was created in Frontier’s outliner and rendered to disk, then served by Personal Web Sharing in Mac OS (Classic) 8.0. You can still see the first site in the Internet Archive. The content was subsequently republished using a template designed in Adobe GoLive, with very non-standard HTML, according to a design by Jan Tschichold: the results are here.

Now all the content has come full circle; it’s back in a Frontier database, on this Manila site. The irony.

Good customer relationship management

We decided to do a night in tonight, so I went to the Blockbuster at the bottom of the hill for the first time. This in and of itself wasn’t so amazing. What was amazing was:

  1. I had my old membership card, originally gotten in the late 1980s in Newport News, VA, in my wallet, and subsequently added to membership databases in Charlottesville and Fairfax;
  2. The clerk was able to use the global Blockbuster customer database to import me into the store’s local customer database with a single scan of that card, despite the fact that I hadn’t used the card since sometime in 1995.

Now that is Customer Relationship Management.

Reputation worth 7.6% of price, UMich sez

Howard Rheingold caught this University of Michigan paper: “The Value of Reputation on eBay: A Controlled Experiment.” The authors find in controlled experiments that a high reputation score on eBay is worth about a 7.6% price premium. This is pretty low when you compare it to the price premium that eBay itself commands over other auction sites, such as Yahoo! (at least in the US), but it’s an interesting finding anyway.

Final score: Virginia, 48-22

What a game. After the third quarter, I figured there were no more surprises, but a few last minute rallies by both teams kept the excitement up all the way. Unbelievable running game by Virginia, particularly Wali Lundy, who had 301 all-purpose yards and four touchdowns in the game. A first year, thank you very much.

Up early for football

So what could get me out of bed and blogging at 8 AM on a vacation Saturday morning, anyway? Why, the Continental Tire Bowl, of course! The inaugural game features Virginia vs. West Virginia. So far Virginia has scored three touchdowns—one as I was writing these words with an amazing interception and 69-yard run, one on fourth and inches, one on a double pass trick play. Heck of a game so far and well worth the sleepiness.

Social commentary at SAM

Stuffed after an ill advised dessert, we headed to the Seattle Art Museum for a quick turn around the permanent exhibits. I was excited to find they had a Cheri Samba painting in the “Hero/Antihero” exhibit. Ever since Samba’s appearance in the late lamented Raw comic magazine, I’ve been fascinated by his work, which calls out social issues in Africa, including the spread of AIDS.

Appropriately enough, on the floor below the permanent exhibits of African art were darkened in memory of the millions of people around the world, especially in Africa, who have died from AIDS.

Catch-up

Yesterday was kind of fun, in an all-American “burn lots of gas for the holidays” kind of way. We wanted to take my oenophile in-laws to one of the local wineries. Unfortunately Chateau Ste Michelle was a victim of the morning’s high winds and was on emergency power.

We took a quick vote and decided that if the winds were still this high, it was time to go have lunch in downtown Seattle somewhere where we could see high water in Elliott Bay. After realizing the 520 floating bridge was clogged, we made the long pilgrimage around to I-90, which was experiencing some high water on the eastbound lanes, and made our way down to Anthony’s Pier 66. I had to drop them off, park the car, then walk down to a Starbucks (thank God for Starbucks) to get change for the meter. Anthony’s was good—decent shrimp gumbo (though more soup than stew) with an Orchard Street Jingle Ale on draft.

George: “Whackos in Minivans”

George writes about his and Becky’s experience driving back from Vermont to Massachusetts in the middle of the Christmas snowstorm last night:

We started the morbid road game of tracking the whackos passing us at 50+ mph.  Not just SUVs, add minivan drivers to that list.  We watched a minivan fly by, only to see them off the road in the median about 10 minutes later.  A 3-4 hour trip turned out to be 7, but we made it home.

I’ve had a few trips like that one. One with my parents from southeast Virginia up to Lancaster County, PA, and one a few years back from northern Virginia to Lakewood, New Jersey. What should have been a four hour trip was about twelve hours, starting with two hours to travel fifteen miles on the beltway. Needless to say, I was quite happy not to be driving anywhere in snow this year. We’ve even had respite from the rain out here.

Presentses, my precious

Almost forgot. I gave Lisa a few presents this year to make up for a couple B-school Christmases without: an All-Clad 8 quart pot, a Cuisinart mini-prep, and a couple books on dogs to make up for the fact that we didn’t manage to get any puppies under the tree. We’re still working on finding a breeder for the Bichon Frise puppies she wants to get.

Emptier house

I just got back from taking my parents and sister to the airport. It feels weird not having a totally full house. Lisa’s folks will be here for another week, so we’ll be able to taper off slowly.

Now that our five-guest experiment is back to two, I can report it was mostly a success. One thing we figured out a few days in is that it’s a lot harder to get seven people moving in the morning than two or four. We had a long list of activities, but each morning by the time everyone ate breakfast and showered it was almost time for lunch.

We’re off to do a bit of after-Christmas shopping. Should be fun, he said grimly.

Happy holidays from Jarrett House North

I probably won’t do a whole lot of blogging for a while. Michele is stopping by later today, and then begins the Christmas traditions—seafood dinner Christmas eve, big meal and presents Christmas day, and general stupor in the afternoon. Y’all have a good time and remember to love one another.

Brent: NetNewsWire Pro Beta

Brent: “The NetNewsWire Pro public beta is up.”

If you like NNW Lite as much as I do—and you know you do—you owe it to yourself to check out the pro version. The weblog editor is a work of art, if still a work in progress (still waiting on news item categories, for instance—but it does have multiple blog posting capabilities and supports MetaWeblog, Blogger, and Blosxom APIs).

In case you were wondering, I’ve done about half the posts in the last two weeks using NNW Pro. The other half were done through the browser or using my own Manila Envelope. The future for that tool? Another day…