Ch-ch-ch-changes

Our work continues. By now it has probably become apparent to readers of our houseblog that we are doing very little of the renovation work on the house at this stage ourselves. We really wanted to do more of it, but I know my limits and they don’t include plumbing, framing (other than demolition), or electrical work. So we have a lot of contractors around these days.

Good news is our heating upgrade is totally complete. Our oil furnace is gone, and the oil tank was removed yesterday. After hearing some of the horror stories of accidental oil deliveries filling basements after a tank was removed, we decided that the fill pipes had to go as well, and the tank removal contractor filled in the foundation holes as part of the job. Great work and a very low price. So that’s one project that has gone to 100% complete.

Another that is close is window replacement. After struggling with storm windows and drafty main windows, we closed our eyes and opted to replace all the windows in the house with vinyl-clad wood replacements from Harvey. The windows all went in yesterday, and the final trim work was completed this morning. We need to prime and paint everything, but hope to hold off on the final paint coat until we can strip the moldings, which badly need repainting but have years and years of build-up. We considered the Silent Paint Remover but are looking at a gel-based ecologically safe paint stripper called Removall.

The new windows are really nice—though the as-yet-unprimed frames have me doing a double-take every time I see one out of the corner of my eye. And it will be nice not to have to struggle with cleaning the storm windows this year. Of course, now we have to replace the window shades too (sigh).

The last change isn’t even one that we instituted, but we’re certainly the beneficiary. The chain link fence along our driveway is being removed! Since our driveway has a choke point about halfway down where the distance between the fence and the wall is very narrow, having the fence gone is a Very Good Thing for the paint on the side of my car. Plus, our neighbor is having a bed put in with some flowering shrubs in place of the fence. Bonus!

Site DNS changes

A quick note of apology if you see visual weirdnesses with the site (style sheets or graphics not loading, site not updating). My host changed the location and IP of my static server, www.www.jarretthousenorth.com, and it is taking a while for the change to propagate through DNS.

Allchin: moving out

As long as I’m shooting my mouth off about the industry: will anyone miss Jim Allchin? The news that he’s retiring next year draws a major chapter in Microsoft’s history to a close. Allchin presided over both high and low points in Windows’s history, including Vista (f.k.a. Longhorn), which can’t decide if it wants to be the coolest thing since sliced bread or the most troubled Windows since version 3.0.

Allchin is known to be a ferocious competitor, and questions about his tactics, including the infamous Burst.com email deletion flap, have surfaced throughout his tenure. The insistence on tying Internet Explorer to Windows and “leveraging” the Windows monopoly into control of the Internet comes to mind as a less civilized moment, as does his admission in Congressional testimony that release of Windows source code would endanger national security due to flaws in the code.

Paradoxically enough, that’s one thing I will miss about Allchin: his willingness to speak up. In an industry where there are too many press release mouthers, his calling open source software an “intellectual property destroyer” was entertaining, if not as entertaining as Steve Ballmer calling it a cancer.

I only ever was in one meeting with Jim Allchin, and all I can say about him is that he was very intelligent and very hard on his people when their ideas weren’t crisply defined and clearly thought out.

New phase for Peregrine

News.com: HP to buy Peregrine for $425 million. That HP is building out its IT Service Management toolset is unsurprising; most of the company’s ITIL strength is in service delivery with availability and capacity monitoring, while its core service desk capabilities are weak or nonexistent. That’s a problem in this market, where the service desk is increasingly becoming a process center of excellence for IT Service Management and is an important part of any ITSM offering.

But that they would acquire Peregrine? Word on the street was that Peregrine was coming out of its near-death experience after its 2002 accounting scandals. But the company has still essentially lost much of its former market leadership. HP has gone into a lot of deals with Peregrine, so they must be pretty comfortable with their technology. The deal price is about 2.2 times annual earnings, so while not a bargain, it’s not a rip-off either. And the deal puts HP eyeball to eyeball with BMC, who purchased the other market leader, Remedy, from Peregrine three years ago. What a weird market.

Disclosure: My firm, iETSolutions, is another major player in this market, and my comments don’t reflect the opinions of the firm.

I thought something looked different

CNet: Apple takes on Yahoo with .Mac makeover. When I hit the login page at .Mac today I noticed a different look and feel. The mail client hasn’t been updated, but there’s now a gig of storage by default and there are new group offerings as well (hence the CNet article title).

Will the group offerings dethrone Yahoo? No, but the UI is cleaner than Yahoo Groups, even if the offering isn’t as robust. I’d like to see browsable group listings, for instance, and there’s no way to add a picture to the group from a member’s .Mac Pictures folder. Then again, there’s no integration yet between Yahoo Groups and Flickr, either.

Lordy, lordy, look who’s…

esta

…No, Esta isn’t 40, but today is one of those other big milestone birthdays for my kid sister. What a long strange ride it’s been: a ballerina, cellist, artist, writer, Wahoo, archaeologist, financial analyst, sometime blogger, preacher, and all around great person. I’d be happy to recommend her as one of the finest people I know… odd incriminating bandana’d pictures notwithstanding. And she’s just entering the best years of her life, whether she knows it or not.

By way of present, I offer these words from a better writer than I:

you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young,whatever life you wear
   
it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.

Feel free to send her happy birthday wishes using this handy spam-free form. Or check out her 2001 proto-blog on this site (her personal blog is no longer available).

On tech support and 240-volt shorts

As I noted this morning, my luggage didn’t accompany me across the Atlantic yesterday—in fact, the Lufthansa representative at the baggage claim noted unapologetically that “more than half the bags on this flight didn’t make it aboard.” I’m not entirely sure how that happens, but in my case it might be because I checked into Terminal 1 at the Flüghafen in München rather than Terminal 2 where my flight departed. In my defense, I had no idea that I was in Terminal 1 at the time—there was no signage indicating the fact when I came up from the S-bahn.

At any rate, my luggage is here now, and about damned time as my only cell phone charger is in the suitcase. On to other problems: my laptop.

As previously written, my work laptop let its smoke out last week owing to an accident with a high-voltage outlet. Today Dell’s tech support came to fix it—as I watched, the guy took apart the laptop screw by screw, removed the CPU and all other removable parts, put in the new motherboard, and booted it up. It worked, except for the video, which was screwy—black bands across the bottom, image spanning off the right side and wrapping around to the left. But otherwise, I was able to boot the machine, get files off to a USB drive, connect the network—pretty much everything.

After he left—having ordered some additional parts for tomorrow, I thought to check the laptop connected to an external monitor. Sure enough, the image was completely normal. So despite having been immersed in a magnificent high voltage short circuit, the laptop was working after some fairly straightforward fieldwork—no damage to the RAM or the hard disk.

The point is this: before today, I don’t know that I would have given you 2 cents for Dell’s tech support. After today, they get big points from me. The guy, from a local subcontractor, was knowledgeable, funny, experienced, and personable—we compared notes about local singing groups, as he’s in a barbershop group in Worcester. It might have been that I was re-reading The Cluetrain Manifesto before his visit, but the difference between Dell’s tech support line, which gave us misinformation about the international support policy and showed no common sense about how to solve the problem—proposing to take three to six weeks in Germany to fix the problem when I was going to be there only a week—and the hands-on brilliance of the support guy I met today could not be more pronounced. It is, in fact, all about the conversation.

Back

I’m going to be busy today catching up, so this is just a quick note to say that I made it back, even if my luggage didn’t.

More later.

Do You Know What It Means (To Miss New Orleans)

I haven’t really been able to write about New Orleans. Part of it is that I’ve been on the road. But that’s an excuse. I haven’t wanted to think about it. New Orleans, even though I only visited once, figures so deeply in my growth as a young man that I can’t bear to think of what has happened to it.

I’ve written a little about my discovery of jazz. In the year or two afterwards I started diving in deeper—broadening my listening to many of the 60s-era greats, developing an appreciation for the avant garde. But I didn’t understand the roots of the music. (And I certainly wasn’t going to learn listening to Wynton Marsalis, who, though he was pretty well grounded in the traditions, was compositionally just as avant garde as his brother, in an extremely traditionalist sort of way.) So I was completely unprepared for what I found when we rolled into New Orleans and stumbled into the back of Preservation Hall.

To set the context, this was the same trip as our nocturnal visit to William Faulkner’s house. So, by the time we rolled into New Orleans we had been on the road for four days and several thousand miles, all on a bus and a small minivan, and were looking and smelling and feeling awful. We had a gig that first night, a concert at the Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus (aka Holy Name) at Loyola, which is a story in and of itself, and then a reception hosted by the local alumni club with liquid refreshments, followed by a mass exodus to a local student watering hole. It was there that I had my first (and last, I think) Hurricane. But I still hadn’t really seen the city.

The next morning I walked with friends to the Café du Monde, through the French Quarter, past a voudoun shop or two, into a storefront for a po’ boy, out and along a levee. I particularly remember the levee, as the heat and humidity were really getting to me, but I was still awestruck by the scale of the thing. It didn’t look like something that could be broken apart like a cracker.

But the jazz? That night I don’t remember where we ate or anything else, just lining up with Poulson Reed and John McLaughlin outside Preservation Hall, where there was a crowd—despite the lack of drinks, or anything else that might pass for conventional tourist New Orleans, inside. What there was, was the band. Percy and Willie Humphrey were still there, in their 70s or 80s but still playing. A big sign behind the band said, “Requests $2. ‘Saints’ $10,” suggesting that perhaps they had been asked to play “When The Saints Go Marching In” one too many times. The music was rough, unpolished, sloppy in some ways, but amazingly compelling. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. This was both stranger and more wonderful than I could have expected.

The night ended some hours later in Pat O’Brien’s, but for me, it was over when we left Preservation Hall. A seed had been planted in me that led to my exploring not only older jazz but also other American musical experiences—the “old, weird America” that shared the roughness and power of the seven septuagenarians in a rundown old unpainted hall playing for a rapt audience on wooden benches.

And now, it’s gone.

Update: Greg points me to a story that suggests there is a happier ending.

Google Blog Search: No keywords on referrals

Does this bug anyone else? It’s possible with referrals from major search engines to get the search keywords that were used to find the page, which helps you to understand why people read your blog. But referrals from the Google Blog Search strip the keywords off.

A referral string from a regular Google search for “tim jarrett” looks like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22tim+jarrett%22&btnG=Google+Search

However, if you run the same search against Google Blog Search and click through a result, the referrer just shows what page was targeted:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com/

This is annoying for me, because I like to know why Google users find my site interesting. I understand technically why it happens—the redirect page, google.com/url, causes it because it loads in the user’s browser before loading the destination. But why does Google use the redirects on the search results in the first place? Is it to gather click statistics? If so, there are other, less intrusive ways. Or are they doing something else with the redirects, maybe something to do with stopping blog spam?

Some input from Google would be welcomed here.

500 errors = teh suck.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably not using Bloglines. As I wrote a few days ago, I’ve been having problems with my feed in their service. Yesterday one of their support people left a comment on the post:

It appears that your server is blocking the Bloglines crawlers. When we try to fetch your feed, we receive a HTTP 500 error. If we receive a permanent error like this for 14 consecutive days, we assume the feed is dead and we remove it from the system. My guess is that this is what happened to your feed.

Sure enough, my site has the dreaded Bloglines [!] next to it in my list of feeds again.

And I’ve been having 500 errors accessing the site from my hotel, which is why I’ve been updating so infrequently this week—well, that and the fact that our coworkers have been extremely hospitable.

If someone is reading this site from www.www.jarretthousenorth.com, please try reading it at discuss.www.jarretthousenorth.com and let me know if you run into any problems.

Fiber is good for you.

WSJ: Verizon’s Fios Service Moves US Internet Beyond a Snail’s Pace. Um, me please. Though the economics are a bit tricky. Even at $45 for bundled Fios and local phone, we would still be paying more, net-net, when considering the impact on our Comcast cable prices without the Internet bundle.

Damn it, though. Getting higher throughput on the internal wireless network and 15 mbps wired?? I wan’ it. Sniff.

Google Blog Search

Google’s Blog Search is now live in beta. (As you can see from the link, it’s also localized in German.)

So far I’m the first Jarrett blog that shows up. That might change at some point.

Interesting: there seem to be a large number of spam blogs that appear pretty high in the rankings. Try searching on iET Solutions (my company’s name) and see the spam weight loss blogs that float up because of the search term solutions.

Rauchlaptop

I have a new motto for traveling, and it is this: Be careful with plug adapters when you are traveling in a country that is on 240 volts current. My work laptop’s power adapter is dual voltage, but its power plug has a grounding prong and my plug adapter, which allows it to use the German outlets, leaves the grounding prong exposed. Turns out that there is a nontrivial chance of shorting the grounding plug inside the outlet, and one of my colleagues (not me, thank goodness) managed to create the short.

Bam. The lights went out, a pop came from my laptop. And I smelled smoke.

Fortunately we have a good international support contract with our vendor, and the laptop should be fixed tomorrow.

But in the meantime I’m learning how to type on a German keyboard, and understanding how “Copy” and “Paste” are translated in the German version of Windows, thanks to the loaner laptop that our IT manager provided.

(PS: Rauch, in German, means smoke.)

Arrived

Well, I made it and I’m feeling better now, thankyouverymuch. But it was a long trip. I left Boston at 10 pm Saturday and flew into Frankfurt at 10:50 am Sunday local time, then ran through passport control to make my 12:30 connection to Munich. Then I took more than an hour and a half to take the train system (which is really wonderful here in Munich, by the way, no complaints) to my hotel.

After that, I took a shower, and things started looking up. Then my coworker Bob and I went out walking in the city center, and somehow (how does this happen to me?) ended up at the Augustiner brewery where we had dinner in their very excellent, very traditional “brästuben.” And when I say “very traditional,” I mean we sat at a table with a bunch of strangers, facing the oompah band in one direction and the horse stables in the other. Really. The traditional brewery horses had been brought in from their pastures to become accustomed to the city noises and traffic in preparation for Oktoberfest next weekend, and we could see them through a glass window. unfortunately, Bob got some other benefits—somehow some very persistent flies were making it over into the dining room and attempting to monopolize his attention.

Our company was excellent, too: two German speaking couples who were very kind with our lack of the language, and one pair of college age sisters from Ohio State—one new graduate and one freshman getting a head start on her beer drinking. We could probably get them into trouble, or at least embarrass them by mentioning how the younger one was drinking the older sister under the table, if we had gotten their names.