Reactions, and clarification

George calls my new design “cleaner” and says the new graphic is “cool.” Greg tweaks me, pointing out in his “on the side link” that the site now, for the first time almost since its inception, “features [an] actual house.”

About that graphic (I’ll add this to the FAQ): the photo is not the Jarrett house, or even a Jarrett house. I took the picture in 1998 or 1999 on the Manassas battlefield in Northern Virginia. The house is a dwelling that survived the battle, despite heavy fire. Something about the day and the picture spoke to me, and I used it as the navigation graphic for the whole site in the previous iteration. When I was looking for a new site logo graphic, this one leapt out at me. I think the appeal of the graphic is a combination of nostalgia (I took the photo the fall before I left Virginia for business school) and aspiration (the desire for a house, and a family, that would last through war, fire, and time).

Redesign: heavy lifting done

I think that most of the work on the redesign is done. As you can see, the site now sports a new logo, new fonts, a different design, streamlined navigation, some new pages, and a bunch of other goodies.

So what’s left to do? There are always a few things. I think there may be some weirdnesses on IE Win that I need to fix. I need to fix a few graphics here and there.

But the biggest thing, ironically, is that I’ll have to repeat the rendering exercises that I did over the last two weeks all over again, so that all the static pages pick up the new design. Sigh.

Redesign, Phase 1

It’s time. I’m pulling the trigger on the site redesign. Doing it incrementally isn’t really possible, but I’m rolling out the first phase separately anyway: doing away with the news item department icons on each post. Their time is up.

New iPod, old iPod

A reader, Hartley Odwak, found my iPod Surgery photo album and reported that he found the same problem with his unit. He wrote:

My ipod charges, but neither of my macs will recognize it. I am certain that it is the port; hence why i dismantled mine!

What I see where my Firewire port attached to the logic board are (1) four larger connections at each corner of the port, all of which are loose (are these supposed to be soldered to the board?) and (2) Six very thin pins running parallel, and down from the port, conecting the port to the circuit board. Some of these are loose.

Should I make sure all 10 connections are soldered tight to the board? The thin ones may be too hard for me to solder, as I have never worked on such tiny connections, and as such may take it to a shop to have them do it.

His solution, which I would recommend to anyone over my experience, was to take the unit to a local independent Mac shop to get the soldering repairs done. It cost about $40 and the unit works again (unlike mine), so well worth the $.

Some notes on my new 10GB iPod to round out the story:

  • The backlight is very cool.
  • The solid state, no moving parts controls took virtually no time to get used to. I like the solid state wheel a lot better than the original moving one.
  • I did have to get used to the new button placement; having everything around the wheel was a little easier, I think.
  • One gripe: the new unit doesn’t work with the old remote control, so I’ll have to buy a new one.

Overall a slick little unit.

Longer than 4 hours 50 minutes? Oh my aching keister

A thread on Plastic collects pointers to news about Peter Jackson’s Return of the King, including a tip about the running length of the extended cut: “the DVD version of Return of the King will be longer than 4 hours and 50 minutes.”

Say what? I already had to split my viewing of the extended versions of the previous films over several nights. Looks like I’ll have to have a long weekend to actually watch the last one in a single sitting.

Catching up

We got in last night around 10 pm; Joy and Jefferson are ecstatic to be home. The trip was mostly uneventful, with two exceptions. Note: Dogs can be made to go to the bathroom in airport stalls, but not on their pee pads (no matter how hard you try), so put rubber gloves in your list of doggie carry-on supplies. Now dogs and Lisa are asleep on the sofa in our living room and I’m catching up.

I’ve been reading news feeds over the holiday, but didn’t get much of a chance to post anything about what was going on outside our own vacation. So here goes:

Back in the land of Mad Cows

It’s weird to be back in Washington State, knowing that there may be a sponge-brained mad cow lurking in my grocer’s freezer. Guess I’m crossing the Sunny Dene Ranch off my list of places to visit in Yakima.

Scary to read this article in the New York Times speculating on the probability of additional undiscovered mad cows. And funny to hear that the infected cow has been traced to a Canadian herd. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be the same “blame Canada” phenomenon that sought to put the blame for the August blackout on our Northern neighbors’ shoulders.

Christmas wrap-up

We’re leaving Lakewood in a few hours and driving back to JFK to start our long flight home (fortunately, it’s direct to Seattle. I don’t think I could handle connections with the dogs). My parents and Esta left yesterday for Pennsylvania.

It’s been simultaneously a relaxing and exhausting vacation. Relaxing because it was nice to get away from everything, out of the rain, and to spend time with family and with the dogs. Exhausting primarily because of the dogs. After this week we are finally ready to declare Stage 1 of Jefferson’s housebreaking complete (Stage 2 is getting him to go on command). Unfortunately, we weren’t at Stage 1 at the beginning of the week…

I managed during a Monday trip to Princeton to find time to get to the Princeton bookstore, where in 1990 as an early action admittee I bought a Princeton sweatshirt—and a T-shirt from Moscow University. This time my findings were more modest: remaindered books from Joseph Brodsky and Jerome McGann, and a British Library book about great books of the past 500 years. About which, more in time.

Christmas itself was unexpectedly generous: Esta gifted me with a hardbound Charles Addams collection and the Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics, both freebies from a professor of hers, as well as the Three Colors trilogy on DVD and a copy of “Have You Fed the Fish?” And my long-suffering wife replaced my broken 1st generation iPod with a brand new slim 10GB model.

And Jim Heaney came down from Mahwah for an afternoon yesterday, with pictures and the long awaited explanation of his Appalachian Trail nickname, “Mothman.” Apparently a week or so into the hike, he was holding a small flashlight in his mouth and washing dishes when a moth flew up his nose. There you have it.

The best present, of course, was the company. It’ll be hard to get back to real life.

Who needs history?

I’ve done my share of bashing the movie Cold Mountain (before it ever came out), but I do have to raise a point (without having seen the movie) with Stephanie Zacharek’s review in Salon. The review turns on the complaint that there are only “about 12 African-Americans” in the movie.

Not to be confused with a reactionary conservative, but I must point out that there weren’t a lot of African Americans in the part of North Carolina’s Appalachian mountains where the book and movie are set. Primarily because there isn’t a lot of anything there. The economic elite owned slaves, to be sure, but the farmers who worked the land weren’t slave owning planters; for the most part, they were poor farmers working poorer land. (My father, who grew up in Madison County, recalls plowing pasture land and watching the clods raised by the plow roll straight down hill—that is, when he wasn’t digging rocks out of the soil.)

I’m not saying that Minghella’s movie isn’t flawed. But there was always more to the South than plantations, and one of the book’s strengths to me was how it illuminated the lives of these farmers and mountain folk, who were drawn into the conflict more by geography than by economics. To argue that the movie should have focused on slavery shows an astonishing ignorance about the history of the Appalachians.

Drowning in pork

My in-laws decided to compensate me for my trip in coach with a special meal, so they purchased some pork tenderloins at Costco. (Because I eat pork chops, which she despises, Lisa thinks my favorite meat is pork.) We dumped them, still mostly frozen, into marinade (hoisin, soy, peanut oil, and sugar) after Monday night’s turkey dinner, and let them sit overnight.

Last night, we started putting them on racks to cook, and discovered the Immutable Law of Costco: things never come in manageable packages. What we had both assumed (and had seemed, when frozen) to be plastic packages containing a single tenderloin each contained two instead. So instead of three tenderloins, which would have fed seven, with enough left over for subsequent meals and dog-bribery besides, we had six.

But roasted for thirty to forty minutes in a 350° oven, with brown rice in broth with scallions and stir-fried broccoli with garlic and hot pepper, they were still excellent. Now we just have to figure out what to do with the leftovers.