Poor Robert Parker

NYT: Decanting Robert Parker. The premise of the article is that Robert Parker, whose 100 point wine rating system and apparent love of big wines has revolutionized the industry, feels that he’s being made a scapegoat for everything that is wrong with the wine industry today.

Oh well. The price of fame.

Still, among the self pity, there are some interesting notes: that it would be a full time job for one wine reviewer to cover the wines of Italy (I think it would require at least two FTEs myself); that the variety available in the wine market today is greater than it has ever been in modern memory, and “we see evidence in southern Italy with the reclamation and resurrection of all these indigenous varietals that had long been sold off to co-ops”; that the apparent sameness of taste that many critics argue is a negative result of Parker’s influence is because “most wines are being tasted when they are too young”; that he wants to do a book on value wines, “Just a little pocket book. I think it would establish the fact that I’m not just a guy who is used by speculators to drive up prices.”

Sounds good. Let’s see it. I for one would welcome the reversal of one modern wine trend: that value wines nearly double in price within three years of their discovery (see southern Italy, Spain, and Chile for three recent examples).

Harmonia Mundi on eMusic, plus more Radiohead covers

Don’t know how I missed this one, but DRM-free download service eMusic has quietly added vast swatches of the Harmonia Mundi catalog, including Anonymous 4, Theatre of Voices (including their sublime Arvo Pärt collection De Profundis), the Baltic Voices compilations (including a Górecki composition I’ve never heard)…

Oh man. Good good stuff. If you have a jones for modern “classical” vocal music and you haven’t signed up for eMusic yet, it might be worth your while just for these recordings alone.

And for something completely different: Exit Music: Songs with Radio Heads, the compilation containing the R&B reworking of “Just” that I pointed to earlier, has also dropped (and is also available at eMusic). And the tracks I’ve heard so far, including a supremely jazzy take on “High and Dry” which is now my favorite track from the comp so far and a somber “Blow Out,” are superb. Good music day all around, I think.

Happy Mac text geeking

Via MacOSXHints, a great article about Cocoa’s text bindings and the Amazingly Cool Things you can do with them—like, implement a standard keystroke to wrap a piece of text in some HTML formatting in every Cocoa text field in your whole system. Also a list of default bindings as shipped in Mac OS X, and a list of all the usable selectors that you can combine with keystrokes to get some really cool things to happen.

Meme of fours: the all-link edition

Having been tagged by Fury, I thought I might share four things about a bunch of more or less useless personal information categories with you:

Four Jobs I’ve Had

  1. Microsoft Blog Product Manager
  2. Electronic text transcriber
  3. Particle accelerator signal wiring guy
  4. Junior comic book guy

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over Again

  1. Raising Arizona
  2. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
  3. White
  4. Garden State

Four Places I’ve Lived

  1. The Lawn
  2. The News
  3. The Hill
  4. The Other Hill

Four TV Shows I Love

  1. The West Wing
  2. Law and Order: CI
  3. This Old House
  4. Supernatural

Four Highly Regarded and Recommended TV Shows I Haven’t Seen

  1. The Sopranos
  2. Sex in the City
  3. Lost
  4. American Idol

Four Places I’ve Vacationed

  1. Brussels
  2. Florence
  3. Westport
  4. Positano

Four of My Favorite Dishes

  1. Risotto
  2. Unagi nigiri
  3. Sammiches
  4. Dal

Four Sites I Visit Daily

  1. Bloglines
  2. Questionable Content
  3. New York Times
  4. Lists of Bests

Four Places I’d Rather Be Right Now

See list of vacation spots

Four New Bloggers I’m Tagging

  1. Zalm
  2. Blogorelli
  3. Tin Man
  4. JP

Sony at it again: DVD based rootkit

I hadn’t been actively looking for Sony DRM links since putting the Sony Boycott blog on pause, so this one came as a surprise: an advisory from F-Secure that a recent Sony DVD (the apparently not completely execrable Mr. and Mrs. Smith) has rootkit-like behavior. The DVD contains DRM from Settec, which is designed to hide itself on the hard disk of anyone who plays the DVD on a Windows computer.

F-Secure posted this back in February; I found it from a few blog links. The usual suspects never commented on this as far as I know—perhaps because the DVD in question was only released in Germany.

Still. This is Not Good.

Begorrah, TK421, why aren’t you at your post?

Thanks to Universal Hub, I made two wonderfully bizarre discoveries yesterday. One is that there are enough übergeeks in the greater Boston area to field a marching detachment of Imperial Stormtroopers in the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The linked photo shows everything from regulation general purpose Stormtroopers to an AT-AT driver, a Scout Trooper from Return of the Jedi, to a black-armored TIE pilot and a bounty hunter. Of course, how Stormtroopers get to march in the Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade when gay people can’t march there or New York is anyone’s guess.

The thorny question of deep irrational unChristian institutional homophobia among Boston’s Roman Catholic population aside, the other wonderful thing I found was the 501st Legion aka Vader’s Fist, a worldwide organization of part-time Imperial Stormtroopers of whom the Boston marching contigent is a mere portion of a garrison.

Which Old House?

The Boston Globe ran an article today about four finalists for the next This Old House house. There’s even an online vote (after all the pictures)—not that it will decide which house Our Heroes spend 13 weeks or more fixing up, but it will at least generate some interest in the show (which after two seasons of multimillion-dollar renovations, I suspect, is the point).

And the attention thing may be working. Currently the low-budget multifamily project in East Boston is leading, with 40.4% of the vote. I think, as much as I’d like to see the guys in Arlington Center, that it will be EaBo that wins.

Dogs in the strand

ActionDog.jpg

Last weekend Lisa and I took the dogs and the new hybrid back to Crane Beach for a late winter stroll along the beach. We were hoping to repeat the trip today, but where last Saturday was sunny and warm, today is sunny and hovering around freezing—not ideal beach weather.

Anyway, I brought the camera and took the first decent photos I’ve taken in a few months, including documentation of Joy’s first view of a horse as well as proof that she is a hyper little thing (see thumbnail, right).

(Incidentally, relative to my gripe last night, at least the FlickrExport people have made their nifty iPhoto plugin a universal one.)

Hmm. Or, the downside of Mac on Intel.

I have a very brief report on the quality of the PowerPC emulation layer (Rosetta) built into the new Intel based Macs, like the MacBook Pro. It’s good—it’s very good. I haven’t found any native Mac OS X apps that didn’t run correctly with it.

Except. There is a small catch, which is that plug-ins that are not written to support Intel based Macs won’t load if an application is started in Intel native mode. Apparently the Rosetta functionality only applies to the main process, not plug-ins. This means that productivity plug-ins like Keyword Assistant in iPhoto and (apparently) Sogudi, the search enabler for Safari, won’t work until new Intel versions are released.

Ah well. This has been a small price to pay. There have been Universal binary versions of other important Mac applications, such as MarsEdit 1.1.2 (with which I’m blogging this) and the public beta of NetNewsWire 2.1 that was released today. Now all I need is Office and I’m good to go.

Honestly, though, there have been enough pleasant surprises with the machine that I’m not going to complain at all. For one thing, Spotlight and the Dashboard work and are really fast. For another, so does Quicksilver. I finally see why Merlin thinks it’s the best thing since sliced bread. It was unbearably slow to invoke or operate on my 1GHz, 512 MB PowerBook G4. Amazing what an extra half-gig of memory, 0.83 GHz of processor, plus a new processor architecture will do.

The elements of (online) Typographic Style

I’ve meant to blog The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web for quite a while but now (thanks to a sick day while I fight off the remnants of this cold) am finally getting around to it. The site is just what it says, a work in progress that takes each of the lessons of good typography in Robert Bringhurst’s classic Elements of Typographic Style and shows how to address them online. Some fairly advanced topics like kerning with CSS are covered, and the whole thing is pretty darned cool—and a beautiful site, as you would expect.

QTN™: Harpoon Oatmeal Stout (100 Barrel Series)

The Harpoon 100 Barrel series has been one of the bright lights on the local beer horizon here, with new experimental offerings every few months—a pretty bold step for a local micro-becoming-mini-brewer whose offerings used to be as predictable as the seasons (IPA and the UFO hefeweizen, mostly, with Munich Dark and Ale generally only available in multipacks, plus the Winter Warmer, Hibernian, Summer, and Oktoberfest available seasonally). In the past I’ve only reviewed the Scotch Ale (Wee Heavy) and the Alt, so it’s high time I added to the list. Fortunately Harpoon is helping out by reissuing their very first 100 Barrel offering, the Oatmeal Stout.

If Harpoon doesn’t add this to their standard line-up, they’re dumb. Not only is it a good beer, it’s a good oatmeal stout, a style that’s pretty damned hard to pull off. It’s malty with a touch of sweetness in the nose (even through my cold-stuffed sinuses). The mouthfeel is appropriately weighty without being overwhelming, and the overall impression is very very pleasing. Even Lisa, who feels about stout the same way that society matrons feel about someone passing gas in public, feels it’s an astoundingly good beer. If you are in the distribution area, snap it up before it goes away again.

A Batman Mag Porn Sot

mbta anagram map

That’s an anagram for “Boston T Anagram Map.” Some ingenious soul has anagrammed almost every T stop on the Boston MBTA on this handy map. Exceptions: most of the innumerable stops on the Green Line’s B and C branches, and Harvard, which rather than the lame “Hard Var” sports the rather spiffier name of “Yale.”

Note: This somehow got stuck and never published from three weeks ago, when anagrams of subway maps were hot.