Jarrett House North

100 Barrels of fun

Boston.com: For Harpoon brewers, it’s all a barrel of fun. An article on Harpoon’s series of limited duration beers reveals that they are all made at the former Catamount brewery in Vermont (which increasingly sounds like a good place to visit). Seems like an odd

Interesting point that Harpoon has taken such care to separate these experiments from its brand, from the different bottle sizes to the new label artwork. (I seem to recall that, except for the maple-syrupy super-premium Triple Bock in the blue glass bottle, their major local competition hasn’t always been so careful.) Harpoon also hasn’t been doing any publicity for these beers at all, as evidenced by the fact that this is the first mainstream press coverage the beers have received in the two years that they’ve been on the market. Apparently they have been working on building word of mouth prior to going wider.

The Sanity Pills blog has a slightly more acerbic take on why we’re just now hearing about these beers from the Globe: “The Boston Globe is quickly becoming the saddest major daily in the nation.”

Saddle the chickens, we’re riding out.

Through some fortuitous and entirely accidental timing (at least on my part), it appears I’ll have my first visit to my company’s European office in Munich in September. I will be there for a week, starting September 12.

Oktoberfest begins the Saturday of that week, September 17.

As Bob Dylan once wrote, “I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”

There is more information about the festival at Wikipedia, including descriptions of the traditional menu and a pointer to information about the traditional beer style of the event, Märzen.

Mostly Mozart

My inlaws are visiting this weekend, and we were debating whether another trip to Tanglewood was in order, since it rained for their previous visit. I checked the performance calendar. Friday will be Weber, Mahler, Carter, and Stravinsky—which would be perfect for me but would probably either terrify or irritate the rest of the family. Ah well. But Saturday?

All Mozart Program. Sir Neville Marriner conducting. Overture to The Marriage of Figaro; two Italian concert arias; Piano Concerto No.23 in A; and Symphony No. 39.

Aw yeah.

Plus it will be only 80° F and sunny in Lenox that day. Sounds like a plan.

Spacewalking boss

My dad called me last night and said, “What about our boy Steve?” I was confused, and so he had to point out that the astronaut who successfully performed the spacewalk to remove the dangling filler cloth on Discovery is none other than Steve Robinson, former chief of the Experimental Flow Physics Branch at NASA’s Langley Research Center—and my dad’s and my former boss.

My dad worked at NASA Langley for over 30 years and had his last research experience working in combustion flow diagnostics. Meanwhile, in the summer of 1992 I was a summer intern in Steve’s branch. I can’t claim to have been exceptionally successful at it, other than discovering a latent affinity for information technology, but I did learn a fair amount that summer and remember meeting Steve.

This is the definition of a small world: you turn on the TV and your former boss is spacewalking to rip off small pieces of cloth from the space shuttle.

Multi-button Apple mouse? Hell freezes over

Steve Jobs must be getting a kickback from air conditioning manufacturers, because someone is making a lot of money off hell freezing over: First Mac on Intel, now a multi-button Apple mouse. The Mighty Mouse, as it is known (and for once, Apple has apparently fully licensed the name), doesn’t actually have physical buttons on the top, but you can click the left and right sides of the top to get a left and right click. There’s an embedded trackball for scrolling and left and right side buttons, and everything is customizable.

It’s totally unnecessary, but I ordered one anyway. 🙂

Checking in with Mac OPML

The Mac version of Dave Winer’s OPML Editor got released over the weekend. So far it’s avoiding the main problem that Radio Userland had, the inability to edit a weblog from multiple locations. I logged into the editor with my existing account information and it didn’t create a new blog. It wasn’t obvious, however, that the blog was the same—it’s hard to figure out how to get to previous blog information, such as the outline for the first day of the blog.

You are in an open field west of a big white house…

This could be good for all sorts of time waste: a PHP version of Zork. Actually, judging from the leaflet in the mailbox (you did open mailbox and take leaflet, didn’t you?), it’s a port of Dungeon, the predecessor to Zork, but who’s splitting hairs? As long as it has grues, it’s all good.

See also my previous mini-post about an implementation of Zork (and other Infocom games) over AIM. Judging from the comment thread, the bots are still a-runnin’.

Progress report: no radiators; livable master

Last week initiated the second half of our first major systems overhaul project on the house. We had completed our AC work with two working cooling zones; last week work started on the heating side with the removal of our old steam radiators and the demolition of the big steam pipes throughout the house, wherever they were visible. Our HVAC contractor did a great job removing almost all vestiges of the radiators with minimal damage to walls, floors, and ceilings.

The contractors deposited the radiators and steam pipes in the bottom of a eight-yard roll-off dumpster, which I then filled about halfway to the top with miscellaneous debris from the garage and the storage space under the stairs, including a rusted solid reel lawnmower and lawn spreader, a manual snowplow, four rusted apart metal lawn chairs, fifty-year-old trim, thirty-year-old spare shingles from the previous roof, broken storm windows (which are going to be replaced during the next major project), and all kinds of other odds and ends. Heap strong back, heap sore back.

The next step in that process will be the installation of the new boiler and connecting it to the radiant heating coils in the blowers. That project is slated for two weeks from now, so no exciting machine-room pix today.

Next: the bedroom. While I mucked out our storage areas, Lisa started painting our bedroom. This was a relief because we finally got rid of the bland cream color that was previously everywhere in the house, but it was also necessary thanks to our wall-opening escapades. I helped her finish that work on Saturday. The room is now a cool blue-grey called Yarmouth Blue, and looks much nicer.

On Sunday, we finally figured out how to rearrange our space to make room for more storage. We have had our eyes, like Aaron and Jeannie, on PAX wardrobes from Ikea. We have very limited closet space and desperately need to get some more room in a hurry; only problem was, with our cool sloping rooflines (visible in some of the photos from the beginnning of our AC installation), we didn’t have enough room to get the full 78 inches of the wardrobes in without standing the wardrobes in the middle of the floor. Fortunately, once the radiator was gone from the room, it suddenly became apparent where we should move the bed to gain the extra headroom. Bottom line, our wardrobes should be on the way shortly.

And the work continues… as always…

Finding beer bliss

After almost a year back in the Boston suburbs, I finally made the pilgrimage today to Downtown Wine & Spirits in Somerville. And I’m not going to tell you how much I spent, but I bought nearly a dozen different kinds of beer there.

To back up: it’s been a really nice vacation day. Lisa and I drove up to Devereaux Beach at Marblehead on the North Shore and enjoyed a quiet day on the beach and in and out of the water—mostly out, since the water was about 62°F. While there, we popped in at Flynnie’s at the Beach, and had an OK lunch—I suppose it would have been better if we had more than $10 cash to spend. We had a reasonable lunch for that price, though it is worth remembering that a “seafood salad roll” is likely to fail on two of those three descriptions at $4.95 for the roll. (In this case, the “seafood” was mock crab, and the “roll,” like all New England seafood rolls, was made in a piece of white bread (AKA New England style hot dog buns) rather than any sort of roll.)

After we came home, I decided to check out the beer store at Davis Square that I had heard so much about. I was really glad I did. In addition to the expected Northeast beers (Magic Hat twelve-packs, Dogfish, even the most recent Harpoon 100 Barrel Series beer, Triticus), I found a bunch of Belgians, including a whole shelf-full of different guezes, a number of different French bieres de garde, some unusual British beers (the familiar Entire Butt Porter), and some spectacular American beers (Stone’s Vertical Epic Ale, 2005 issue). I think we’ll be busy for a bit.

Yet another reason to upgrade my Manila back end

UserLand Blog: Another Manila 9.6 Teaser. Finally multiple category support. What’s cool about that is that I can really see using categories as something closer to tags now. I also like Jake Savin’s comment on Scott Greiff’s blog that there will also be support for no category at all on news items, even after categories have been defined. Coooool. Hope that the “no category” thing is carried forward into the XML API. I always hated having to enforce a default category in my Manila-related posting apps.

Actual, usable microformats example

Usable Type: Usable Microformats. An actual real life example of a microformat in action, in a place where it actually makes sense to have one. I might have to hack this into the blog just to check it out.

Apple creates Syndication-dev mailing list

bbum’s weblog-o-mat: Apple creates Syndication-dev mailing list. This is a surprisingly clueful move given the degree of crap people are having to go through to get their podcast feeds on the iTunes directory. Hopefully now that Apple will be talking we’ll see some changes in that area.

Closing chapters

BuzzMachine: No more AO-Hell. An elegant, well-written elegy… well, not really, what’s the opposite of an elegy?—anyway, Jeff Jarvis kisses AOL goodbye as he kicks it to the curb and in the process writes a really nice summary of the Internet experience pre-Mosaic.

For the record, I was lucky enough to avoid getting hooked into any of the walled gardens, primarily because I went online first through my school and the Unix shell, then through Mosaic at the end of my fourth year. Never looked back.

I become a case study: Business Blogs

I keep forgetting to mention that I have two case studies in Bill Ives and Amanda Watlington’s new Business Blogs: A Practical Guide, one about me as a general blogger and one about the work we did at Microsoft on the Blog Portal. The book is full of practical advice about using blogs in the enterprise for reasons ranging from knowledge management to product management. Thanks to Bill and Amanda for including my experiences. (It’s kind of funny being in the same book, in the same section, as Robert Scoble.)