Redesign notes

Things definitely to come in the redesign:

  1. Less junk on the page. Somehow.
  2. Less crufty CSS.
  3. More elegant typography.
  4. More elegant design, period.
  5. New site logo and masthead.
  6. New navigational resources, including a greatest hits.

Things I’m thinking about:

  1. Dumping the news item department graphics, in favor of text links. On the plus side, they brighten up the page a bit; on the minus side, they’re not exactly coherent, design wise, and they’re probably a good deal less understandable (unless you’re in the habit of mousing over graphics) than a simple link to the department archives page would be.
  2. The blogroll. Well, not dumping it, exactly, but maybe getting smarter about how I show it, along the lines of Greg’s MORE link. It will definitely disappear from sublevel pages.
  3. The badges, unless required by some sort of reciprocal agreement.

Here are some of the extremely helpful resources I’ve been consulting:

QTN™: Harpoon Winter Warmer

Since I started making tasting notes on beer only after I moved to the west coast, I missed an opportunity to review one of my favorites. Fortunately, my loving wife informed my in-laws of my preference for Harpoon’s Winter Warmer before we got into town, and they had stocked up in anticipation of our arrival.

The beer, a seasonal spiced winter ale from this Boston brewery, is a dark caramel in color with notes of orange. The citrus notes carry on in the nose, which is spicy with orange peel, and the spice notes, predominantly cinnamon and nutmeg, carry through to the finish. The beer, as befits its kinship to the justly celebrated Harpoon IPA, is thoroughly hopped and spiced, but not so much as to overwhelm the well balanced malt which lends a delightful mouthfeel. Always recommended.

Continuing to pick up the pieces

Almost all the static site has rendered now and is once again available at http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com. Notable exceptions, all from 2003: the end of September (being rendered now) through October. Also missing until I upload it again: my genealogy records and some miscellaneous pictures from other old parts of the site.

A great dinner tonight, a minestrone with meatballs, with a Chianti Riserva from 2000 that was mellow but lively. As are the dogs, who are taken with the new digs here in New Jersey and, after a day, have settled back into their routines.

Lights slowly coming back on

It looks like the outage that has plagued my site over the last week is slowly clearing up. I have the ability to render pages to the static site on a one by one basis, so the front page has been posted. However, for some reason, I don’t seem to be able to execute Manila’s “render this site” command. Maybe I’ll try another time when traffic is lower. The bottom line is, while the site is coming back, there are still going to be a lot of broken links for a while.

The undeclared war between pant buttons and airline seats

I don’t have a large posterior. In fact, I recently had to punch a new hole in my belt after losing about twenty pounds. So why is it that each time I wear a pair of khakis with a rear pocket button, that the button catches on the arm of an airplane seat, pulls loose, and is lost?

I have two hypotheses. One is that there is a bitter undeclared war between airplane seats and pant buttons. The former, jealous of the latter’s freedom and mobility, scheme impotently for their destruction, and reach out to burst their threads and strike them loose at the first opportunity.

The second hypothesis is that there is an airborne Underground Railroad for pant pocket buttons seeking the quixotic pursuit of independence, and that through long hours of conversation with the airplane seats, they have converted the uncomfortable chairs to their cause. Now they whisper one to another about the fate of their peers, and urge hope to be kept alive. Someday, when the maintenance crew finds them, they will be free, and maybe go to Hawai’i.

Travels with Doggies

I should perhaps have mentioned that, in addition to the outage on my static server, my blogging is being slowed by travel today (originally written Thursday 12/17). Lisa and I are currently (9:20 AM Pacific time) on our way to New Jersey, on a non-stop flight through JFK. With two dogs.

The first few hours of our day have been as uneventful as possible under the circumstances. We awoke an hour later than planned (future note to self: to avoid turning on the wrong alarm, always turn on both the night before taking a cross country trip!), hurriedly showered and took the dogs outside, then tried to convince them to eat, and were just getting them in their travel bag when the airport shuttle arrived. The drive to the airport was uneventful along the HOV lanes.

At the airport, we checked in and tried unsuccessfully to get them to attend to business before boarding. By the time all that was done, Lisa had missed her opportunity for Starbucks, as she was in the first boarding. (First class for these dogs all the way!) As I was back in coach, I had a few minutes to pop off for an espresso and croissant before my row was called. Such is my compensation for the cramped seat in which I am spending the next four and a half hours across the country—alas, no exit row set this time.

We are perhaps half an hour into the flight. Already Lisa has come aft to get the second travel bag; apparently our puppies are growing too restless to share their travel kennel. Meanwhile I can do little, from ten rows and a bulkhead back, but attempt to catch up on my reading in Peterson’s Jefferson, watch the western country unfold below me in great ripples of snowy mountains and vast expanses of arid plains, and write. And maybe catch a nap.

Holiday songs: English Village Carols

english village carols

Remember how I said my family has weird taste in holiday music? English Village Carols is one of those recordings that proves the point: a field recording made in village pubs across England, with amateur choristers of varying age and ability (and, apparently, hearing), singing carols together as they’ve done for almost two centuries.

If you have low tolerance for enthusiastic but occasionally imprecise harmonies, eccentric vibratos, lots of dramatic rubratos, cheesy little pub organs, and carols that have been forgotten everywhere else but in these small village gatherings, you may want to steer away. But for me this recording is a breath of fresh air amidst the general seasonal miasma of “White Christmas” (as performed by Martina McBride, Rosemary Clooney, Elvis, Roomful of Blues, the Oak Ridge Boys, Clay Walker, Percy Faith, the Statler Brothers, Lee Ann Womack, the Chipmunks, and about 180 others, according to the iTunes Music Store). Recommended for the general rough beauty of the singing, and the clinking of pint glasses that accompanies most of the carols.

Bricolage

Other things going on in the news around the reports of Saddam Hussein’s capture:

Oops. Guess the last one slipped in…

The anxiety of dog-parenthood

I had a dream last night about our dogs. In the dream, we owned two more, including one with a litter of puppies, and I watched helplessly as a twelve year old dog walker let go the leashes of the mother and her puppies and they disappeared into the crowd. Later in the dream, a scorpion came out from the window in the ancient hotel room where we slept (really like a stone-lined closet) and stung one of the dogs.

Anxiety is weird that way. Tonight, watching them sleep, the dreams seem far away.

Still out

A quick update on the outages. It looks like a number of Weblogger hosted sites are similarly affected, including weblogger.com. If you’re reading this RSS feed, my discussion site at http://discuss.www.jarretthousenorth.com will at least let you read the text; my static site at http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com appears to be completely down. No word yet as to the cause of the outage.

In the interim, I’m writing more holiday reviews but will hold on posting them until I can get picture support working again. The Past Listening and Past Reading sections are similarly on hold.

This was kind of bad timing as I wanted to work on a new site design over the holidays. Hope the outage clears up soon.

Apologies for the mess

It looks like the server that hosts a lot of my static content, including my images and the real CSS stylesheet for this weblog, is offline. I’ve pinged tech support. In the meantime, please “enjoy” the extra weight of inline stylesheet on each page (the last backup I had), complete with extra nostalgic old text sizes and leading.

Halliburton in Iraq: How to spend $1.9 billion

I have a new long piece about DAAA09-02-D-0007, the Halliburton logistics support contract, which uses published DD-350s (reports of contract actions to Congress) to track the exact spending to date against the contract. Bottom line: through the end of the government’s fiscal year 2003 (September 30, 2003), about $1.9 billion was obligated on the contract, almost half in the months of August and September. Or, to put it another way:

cumulative obligations on halliburton logistics contract

Holiday songs: The Chieftains, The Bells of Dublin

chieftains the bells of dublin

Upon hearing the phrase Irish (or worse, Celtic) Christmas music, most people have one of two reactions: either they grab their families and their Claddagh rings and their shamrocks and their green scarves and they settle in for a long listen, or they head for the hills. The reason is simple: there are a lot of really bad Irish recordings out there, and the misty headed sentimentalism that often parades under the name of “Celtic” makes a lot of it worse.

Fortunately, the Chieftains mostly avoid this trap on their holiday album The Bells of Dublin. They are, after all, revered for having brought a sense of traditionalism and musicianship back to Irish music. Unfortunately in recent years they have fallen prey to the unfortunate “guest star syndrome,” familiar to many classical music listeners, where normally serious musicians bring in pop artists on recordings, often with disastrous results.

What makes this album so special is that for the most part the guest stars don’t get in the way of some really amazing playing. “Past Three o’Clock” features a nice jig around the traditional carol, and “St. Stephen’s Day Murders” is unabashedly fun as guest vocalist and co-writer Elvis Costello(!) sings about doing away with family members who’ve overstayed their welcome:

For that is the time to eat, drink, and be merry,
Til the beer is all spilled and the whiskey has flowed.
And the whole family tree you neglected to bury,
Are feeding their faces until they explode.

There’ll be laughter and tears over Tia Marias,
Mixed up with that drink made from girders.
’Cause it’s all we’ve got left as they draw their last breath,
Ah, it’s nice for the kids, as you finally get rid of them,
In the St Stephen’s Day Murders.

But the highlights of the disc are the two medleys that pull together traditional songs and airs into flowing sequences. The Carol Medley features some fine singing over a sprightly arrangement of “O the Holly She Bears a Berry,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and “The Boar’s Head.” And the absolute high point is the medley on “The Wren! The Wren!,” which pulls together a set of traditional Irish dances, reels, and hornpipes in a grand bit of craic. One can almost imagine the close walls of Matt Molloy’s pub getting just a little snugger as the incomparable Northumbrian pipes of guest Kathryn Tickell play over the bodhrain.

I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t mention the following nightmarish stretches of the disc: the French carols warbled by the McGarrigle sisters; Marianne Faithfull’s version of “I Saw Three Ships”; the weak “Rebel Jesus” with Jackson Browne; and the absolutely execrable version of “O Holy Night” by Rickie Lee Jones. But as Elvis Costello points out, “it’s nice for the kids as you finally get rid of them.”