NetNewsGatorWire

The rumors were true: NewsGator is acquiring NetNewsWire from Brent Simmons’ Ranchero Software—and hiring Brent as a product architect. Big congrats to Brent. I look forward to the day when my NNW subscriptions sync seamlessly with every aggregator under the sun—though I want to see support for Bloglines continue in something more robust than “bug fix” mode.

Like some of the commenters on Brent’s post, I’m also concerned about the future of some of the other Ranchero work, particularly MarsEdit. You can’t let that one go, Brent!!! I still haven’t seen a blog editor on either platform that compares for usability and actual operation. Most of the ones I’ve tried on Windows can’t even connect to my Manila server (with the obvious exception of Radio). Hopefully Brent is able to find a good “other home” for it.

Happy anniversary to us

I don’t do it publicly nearly often enough, but I would like to thank my very patient wife Lisa today and wish her a very happy anniversary. (For the record, this is apparently the bronze/pottery/linen/lace anniversary, none of which are going to fit in my carry-on bags, alas.)

When we got married back in McLean, Virginia, and left the service for the reception, sleepless and getting slightly punchy, and left the church for that awful limo with the skanky Persian rug and the lingering cigarette smell, I turned to her and said, “It’s all uphill from here.” And you know? It really has been.

Good week for free music

Item number 1: Seattle band Harvey Danger, of “Flagpole Sitta” fame, has released its newest album as free MP3 downloads from its website and via Bittorrent. Should be good stuff. (Via Slashdot)

Item number 2: Indie stalwarts Steadman have released their major label albums for free download from their website. (Via BoingBoing)

Finally, the 31 tossed-off-in-an-afternoon tracks of Van Morrison’s contractual obligation album, featuring such fine songs as “Ring Worm,” “Blow In Your Nose,” “Want a Danish,” “The Big Royalty Check,” and “Here Comes Dumb George,” are available for download at WFMU. Go nuts. (Again, via BoingBoing)

Virginia football: too good to be true

Well, Virginia was off to a strong start. Too bad about Saturday’s game: 45-33 is an ugly loss by anyone’s standards. I DVR’d the game but missed the last five minutes, thanks to the game going over three hours, and consequently missed the last scoring drives from both teams. It really looks like there wasn’t a heckuva a lot of defense going on, though. The polls seem to agree, as we’ve dropped out of the top 25.

Oh well. Maybe I can get to Saturday’s game at Boston College and watch the Cavaliers make up for it.

Disney is around here somewhere, isn’t it

In the light of day, the Gaylord Palms looks like the sort of resort that makes you say, “Now I know what Disney’s contractors do on their days off from the Magic Kingdom.” The central atrium has a kind of Disneyfied view of Florida architecture, from a mock Everglades to a faux spanish castle to multiple fake Mission-style buildings. Not to mention the alligators. It’s all very theme park and all very subtly wrong. Gibson’s Cayce would convulse in a massive allergic reaction to all the not-quite-reality.

The show floor is about 80° and humid. If that doesn’t get better by the time the day is over, I’m going to be dripping wet. That makes for an attractive sales experience.

Drinking candy

I had an unspeakably foul beverage this morning at Starbucks that made me think, hard, about food, about what we choose to eat and drink and what it says about us. And it called to mind some uncomfortable thoughts that have been rattling around in my mind since reading the excerpts from Cory Doctorow’s latest novel on Salon.

I have long maintained that Starbucks is fundamentally a milk company rather than a coffee company. It was around the time that coffee took one of its periodic jumps in price that Starbucks introduced Frappuchinos, after all. Even at the time it struck me as a canny way to react to a coffee supply disruption: create demand for a product that is mostly not coffee. By volume, certainly, Starbucks sells far more milk than coffee.

None of this has ever bothered me, primarily because I stick to drip coffee, Americanos, and “poisonously strong” double espressos. But this week I got a mailer from Starbucks informing me that they had loaded my card with an extra $5, and, since the weather is getting colder, would I like to try a Pumpkin Spice Latte? This morning it was colder—44 degrees when I walked the dogs—so I thought, why not.

Why not is that Pumpkin Spice Latte tastes like ass. Worse, it tastes like sweet ass, and not in a good way. As Cory Doctorow wrote in the second installment of Themepunks about another ubiquitous American institution, IHOP:

Caramel pancakes with whipped cream, maple syrup and canned strawberries. When I was a kid, we called that candy. These people will sell you an eight dollar, 18-ounce plate of candy …

Or a $4, 16 ounce cup of it.

Despite my need for coffee, I tossed the latte after a few sips. It was vile and I’m back to espressos.

But it made me think: what is it that makes us crave this stuff? People, to all appearances, eat lots of candy. (You can certainly tell if you fly with Americans, particularly in the Midwest, particularly when you’re in a middle seat and a couple of 350 pound guys are on either side of you.) Is it that we never grew up? Were we denied candy as kids? Or did we never find out that there was something better?

The CD Project Update: about 1/3 of the way there

I bet you thought the CD Project was done or abandoned, didn’t you? No such luck. As the title says, I’m only about a third of the way through, and it just keeps going and going.

The milestone this week was finally completing ripping the contents of the first drawer of my CD cabinet. (I would have been there much sooner except for the fact that I’m simultaneously ripping the jazz in the third drawer.) This is the first visible sign of progress I’ve made to date, other than the mounting stats in iTunes. To wit:

  • 180 artists
  • 230 albums
  • 2745 tracks
  • 9:09:01:06 total time
  • 61.49 GB

As before, this does not include the existing contents of my library. It also includes the removal of a small number of duplicates—apparently iTunes doesn’t recognize that a track has already been ripped if title, artist, or album name have changed since the track was first imported. As in, removing the word “the” from an artist’s name. Sigh. Fortunately only a few playcounts were lost when I went back and deleted the duplicate track.

Annoyances? The classical metadata problems also continue. This week, it’s going in, sorting by composer, and learning how many CDDB submitters think that Aaron Copland is Stewart Copeland’s brother. No e, people.

This Old Houseblog: meeting Norm and Tom

tom silva wanna be

Lisa and I went to the studio where Ask This Old House is filmed last night and met Norm Abram and Tom Silva, who for most of us housebloggers almost need no last names, much less the mention that they are the carpenter and general contractor for This Old House. It was a fun evening and a good fundraiser for WGBH.

Alas, my cameraphone got only blurry photos (as you can see). But we heard plenty of great stories and one liners, such as Norm’s confession that he and producer Russell Morash keep the furniture that Norm builds on the New Yankee Workshop (“There are two copies of each piece, the prototype and the one that I build during the show. Russell gets one and I get the other. Sometimes a family member will get one — on loan.”) and, answering a subsequent question about how Norm chooses his projects for that show, “I look around the house and ask myself, what do I need?”

Tom Silva fielded a wide variety of questions, most (for some reason) having to do with insulation. In particular, he told Lisa that to seal the gaps left in our garage walls and ceiling when our ducts were run for the Unico system, we need to use an expanding caulk called “fire caulk”—primarily because of the garage location.

I also got a chance to shake Norm’s hand and thank him, on behalf of all us housebloggers, for the content on the This Old House website, which I told him fills the role of the New York Times for an authoritative link site for housebloggers. His eyes glazed a little when I said the word blog, but he was very polite. So there you go.

Julie & Julia

julie and julia

Yesterday morning, in a fit of serendipity, my iPod shuffled its way over to Christopher Lydon’s 2003 proto-podcast interview of Julie Powell, the Julie of the Julie/Julia Project. By that same fit of serendipity, Julie’s new (first) book, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, had arrived from Amazon a week or so before. I had been waiting for the right moment to read it; the shuffle play of the interview felt like an invitation.

The title is somewhat misleading. The claimed premise for the book, as for the Julie/Julia Project, is The Project: cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s landmark Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 in a year. In the book, however, the focus is more on how a frustrated writer and temp administrative assistant in New York City came to start the project, and the lessons she learned from Julia Child’s towering example. The shift in focus was welcome, frankly: as much as I would have loved to have a hardcover copy of every blog post that Julie made in the course of that year, getting the perspective on Julie’s life effectively shifts the focus to the wonder of food and cooking and how it can rescue otherwise lost souls.

Interesting, too, that in this book the “Julia” of the project is revealed to be essentially a literary construct, born straight from Julie’s reading of MTAOFC. Julie and Julia never met, and the eventual revelation of the Grande Dame’s position on The Project is a traumatic anticlimax to the Project. But Julie’s constructed Julia is a genius, in the Greek sense: a guiding household spirit who takes Julie’s agonizingly unfulfilling life and turns it into something rich and wonderful through the medium of sauce veloute and calf’s liver and bone marrow.

This, I think, is the genius (in the modern sense) of The Project and of Julie’s book. We all could use a Julia to steer us in the direction of joie de vivre and fulfillment. In the meantime, I’m going to have to go back to our copy of MTAOFC and dive into some of the more ambitious chapters. Kidneys, anyone?

CSS bonanza

A trifecta of interesting CSS links in my aggregator this morning. First, Luke Melia points to an interesting post about maintainable CSS, and proposes modular CSS and Dave Hyatt’s rules for CSS use in Mozilla skins as possible solutions. For myself, I lean toward the former approach; I separated structural markup (the definition of header and sidebar boxes) from presentation markup (type and colors) within different sections of my stylesheet when I was doing the first round of design improvements. Other interesting solutions in the comments to Simon’s post, including this article from Digital Web Magazine about Architecting CSS.

Second, A List Apart provides six methods, of varying degrees of semantic correctness and coolness, for achieving multi-column lists with various combinations of XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Third, ALA also talks about the multi-column module in CSS3, and introduces a Javascript parser for the CSS syntax that helps bootstrap the new capabilities in browsers that don’t yet support the extensions. You have to see some of the examples, particularly numbers 2 and 5, to get why this is so cool, but once you do it’ll make you swear off long scrolling layouts forever.

A note on Bavarian food

I regret making a crack about Bavarian food last night without putting it in context. One of the most spectacular things about Oktoberfest was the smell of the food—primarily the spit-roasted chickens for sheer olfactory pleasure, but with contributions from sausages, potatoes and other delights. In fact, I ate well all week.

Too well. I gained five pounds in the seven days I spent on the ground, and would have kept going had it not been for a mounting sense of bloat. Which is only natural, really. I don’t think that even the locals eat Bavarian cuisine all the time. It’s not possible. To see what I mean, here’s a rundown of some of the meals I had:

  • Schweinshaxe (crackled pig’s leg): The first joint of a pig’s leg, grilled until the skin crackles; served with kraut and potatoes. The meat was exquisitely flavorful and unbelievably greasy.
  • A dish of rahmschwammerl (meatballs) and button mushrooms with spätzle. The meatballs were airy but huge, and the sauce on the spätzle was deceptively deadly. I couldn’t finish the plate.
  • Chunks of deer meat in a brown sauce with potatoes and a salad. This was one of the lighter meals.
  • On Saturday the four of us went to the Nuernberger Bratwurst Gloeckl am Dom (an Augustiner restaurant, naturally) and ate a platter of 25 grilled bratwursts (which mercifully are small, about the size of a breakfast link), along with a few Münchner Stadwürste, on a bed of sauerkraut with horseradish and the most sublime warm potato salad I’ve ever eaten.

Add to that a beer or two—generally hefeweizen, dunkel, or the Oktoberfest wies’n beer—and the effect is total gastric paralysis. Not to be too graphic here, but when I got home it took a week of intensive fiber before I felt even close to normal.

But God, it was worth it. Oh those bratwurst! Oh that beer!

Bonus links: Beyond brez’n and bratwurst; Oktoberfest at Epicurious; and threads about relocating to Munich, eating in the city, and general tips for Bavarian food from eGullet.

Oktoberfest

beermaids waiting to pick up their liters

Just realized I never posted anything about Oktoberfest. Probably because of lack of sleep—coupled with my dead laptop (which is now completely resurrected, btw). Or because on the first day of Oktoberfest, I almost couldn’t get a beer.

It was wet. In the morning, anyway. My German coworker Peter, bless him, hopped straight off his red-eye back from Boston and came with his wife to our hotel to take us over. And it was pouring. Have I mentioned that?

Anyway. Oktoberfest, which originated as a wedding feast, has grown into something halfway between a themepark and a kegger. On steroids. Walking into the southeast entrance, the biggest thing you notice are the rides—roller coaster, Ferris wheel, haunted tunnel. Which, I think, would be a big mistake after a bellyful of Bavarian cuisine and a couple Mas (the menu word for one-liter mugs of Märzen). I’m imagining staying away from the base of the Ferris wheel is a really good idea.

And the funniest part was, I didn’t even think I was going to be able to get a beer. Even with twelve beer halls there. Each of them had outdoor seating for extra capacity—none of which could be opened with the pouring rain. So all the halls were full to the brim. We finally got into one, the Paulaner hall, where I snapped a few shots, including the one here of the beerfrauën waiting to pick up their mugs. (My coworker’s wife, Beata, says that the number of beers that they can hold at one time ranges from eight to 12—depending on cup size. The size of the beers is always one liter; it’s apparently the size of the server’s anatomy that is the deciding factor.)

We went away and took in the sights of Munich, returning later after the rain had stopped. By this time my coworker Peter was jetlagged hard, so we sent him and Beata home and explored on our own—and found a free table outside the Paulaner tent.

You know what? Those big 1 liter beers, for about €4.50 each, were worth every cent.

—A note on the photos: this set was taken with my new phone. 1.3 megapixels—respectable but not ideal, so forgive the fuzziness.

God(casting) Part II: Old South sermons

Following up on the Godcasting meme, my church, Old South in Boston, has started making MP3s of sermons available for download. No RSS feed—the website has no back end publishing system aside from an overworked webmaster—but the content is there.

In fact, I went ahead and scratch-built an RSS file for the content using FeedForAll, so subscribe away: XML. If/when the file moves off this server to Old South’s, I’ll post a standard RSS redirect there instead.

Update: As of 4 pm on Monday afternoon, there’s a big ol’ XML link on the Sermons page. My feed now redirects to the official one. Cheers to Evan, the Old South webmaster, for acting so quickly.

Get your eerie unsettling country blues fix

Salon’s Audiofile free download today is a pointer to a pair of classic Dock Boggs tracks from the late 1920s, “Pretty Polly” and “Country Blues.” More than any other track on the Anthology of American Folk Music, the latter earns Greil Marcus’s nickname for this old pre-genre music: the old, weird America. And yet it’s a blues, through and through. If you double the first line of every couplet and drop the “good people/poor boy” interjections, you can sing it to just about any twelve bar blues. My favorite is to take it against Bob Dylan’ “Meet Me in the Morning.”

And I disagree with the assessment that Dock’s 1960s recordings are better. Yes, Dock going back after 40 years in the coal mine and picking up his banjo to revisit some nearly forgotten songs is impressive, but not as impressive as Dock leaving the coal mines to go and do something totally alien and then being forgotten for 40 years. Plus there’s more menace, for me, in the earlier recordings.

I wrote my woman a letter, good people
I told her I’s in jail
She wrote me back an answer
Saying “Honey, I’m a-coming to go your bail”

All around this old jailhouse is haunted, good people
Forty dollars won’t pay my fine
Corn whisky has surrounded my body, poor boy
Pretty women is a-troubling my mind