Still going after all these years.
Everyone’s favorite local independent software development house, Ranchero Software (otherwise known as Brent and Sheila Simmons), won a MacWorld Editor’s Choice Award for their NetNewsWire product. NetNewsWire is my favorite RSS aggregator on any platform, and I can write blog posts in it too!
Congrats to Brent and Sheila, who are truly living the dream.
Thanks to all for the birthday shoutouts, including Esta, Craig, and Tony Pierce.
It’s going to be a pretty mellow birthday. I’m not the same guy I was ten years ago, when I was bemoaning the fact that a stomach ulcer was keeping me from going out for my first adult beverage in a bar upon my legal majority. It’ll be a nice quiet night at home with my wife.
Of course, I’ll be out Saturday at the company Christmas party, and plan to do some singing (as part of the entertainment, not spontaneously) and some dancing (spontaneously, not intentionally as part of the entertainment), but that’s a whole ’nother story…
Update: Thanks also to George and Becky for the CD and the kind thoughts.
I finally picked up Merrill Peterson’s biography of Jefferson again after putting it aside for almost a year. I’m glad I waited to start reading it again. The words Peterson wrote about Jefferson and his colleagues in the revolution are even more relevant today:
Jefferson’s progress from Virginia burgess to American revolutionist in seven years followed the main road of the patriot cause, beginning with the protective defense of traditional rights and liberties and ending with the radical ideology that became the birth-right and creed of a new nation. … In the course of asserting their claims within the empire, the colonists became increasingly disenchanted with the home government, distrustful of its designs, and anxious for the security of their own polities. They began to think for themselves and to search out their own identity …
If there are better words out there to describe what is happening in the blogosphere today, I don’t know them.
I’m using my long-neglected status as contributing editor at JHN to jump in and wish my brother an unmitigatedly happy birthday. All the best, Tim; you deserve it. In the words of Ogden Nash:
Year swallows year and licks its lips,
Then down the gullet of next year slips.
Interesting example of the fine art of FUD from pseudonymous columnist Robert X. Cringely. He takes a reader email about a problem searching TechNet, then extrapolates to say that Microsoft is removing value from TechNet to hobble small IT consultants so it can extract more revenue from that part of the market.
Um. Interesting theory, Mr. Cringely. Care to pass the tin foil?
All joking aside, Cringely’s fundamental argument stems from a badly constructed straw man. He claims that “TechNet appears to be broken.” What he actually says is that TechNet returns no results for a particular search string: "1010"+"perfctrs.dll"+"perflib". What he does not say is that if you search without the quotation marks or the pluses, the search returns some very relevant results, namely articles in the Knowledge Base at support.microsoft.com about the relevant events in the error log.
There is also a factual error. Cringely implies that we just recently changed the search engine behind TechNet, and that this was a move intended to “hobble TechNet and in so doing hurt its small to medium sized customers.” In fact, the new search engine has been in place since July, and provides search results for all of Microsoft.com.
The confusion about the search is forgiveable. We used to expose the big seams in our corporate web site by scoping searches by default, so that if you searched for something in a site (say the Windows site), you only got results if the content lived in the Windows site. TechNet’s scope happened to extend to the Knowledge Base, hence the customer’s statement that we used to return results. The big change from the customer perspective is that if you search anywhere on the site, you get results from everywhere on the site by default, broken down into categories. But we don’t interpret quotation marks and plus signs the same way Google does, so if you use the same search string in both search engines, you get different results.
But taking this misunderstanding about search functionality and blowing it up to say we’re out to screw our customers is fearmongering, at best.
Here are a few tips for searching Microsoft.com effectively so that you don’t fall prey to the same problems that Cringely had:
Finally, if all else fails, it’s possible we don’t have the content—but one of our partners does. In that case, you could do worse than to use the Microsoft-focused search at Google.
A whole bunch of memes collided on NPR the day before Thanksgiving. Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing and Wired was on talking about phonecams and Jones Turkey and Gravy Soda, among other things. On the show, NPR plugged the SENT exhibit of phonecam art, and announced a challenge to submit your favorite phonecam pix. Needless to say, I couldn’t resist sending in a slew of my own, including some from the Museum of Glass, the iPod Autopsy, and fall in Kirkland.
Regarding the Jones Turkey and Gravy Soda, I am sorry to report that I was too slow on the draw to actually find said soda before it disappeared from the store shelves, both on line and locally. Maybe next year, if they repeat the promotion. Judging from the prices of the soda on eBay, they definitely should.
At Shel’s wedding, I asked several of her friends, who were also Virginia Tech alums, if anyone had seen the score of the annual Virginia-Virginia Tech football game. The consensus was, “No, but I bet Tech won.”
What a pleasant surprise, then, to see on CNN in the hotel lobby this morning: Virginia 35, former #21 Virginia Tech 21. After a really difficult season, this must have been like winning the lottery. And finally some vindication for Matt Schaub, who tied the only remaining quarterback record that he didn’t own outright by tying Shawn Moore’s career record, 55 touchdown passes.
And the team is going back to the Continental Tire Bowl, against Pittsburgh, in Charlotte on December 27. Too bad I’ll already have flown back to the west coast by then.
Nothing says “happy ending” to a vacation quite like a wedding—or at least a celebration of one. We got back an hour or so ago from the celebration of Shel’s wedding to Eric “Vik” Gamble (which happened with a small group of family the day before Thanksgiving). Shel was radiant even four days after the wedding and the reception was great fun. Here’s hoping that the happy occasion is a beginning to many more happy years.
Deliberately old fashioned lead in. Did it ever strike anyone else as odd that it takes a corps of bloggers that is growing at a rate of at least 8,000 to 9,000 blogs a day to keep track of everything that’s interesting on the Internet as it comes on line? What does that say about the overall rate of growth of the Internet? If we’re the surface of the sphere, what does the inside look like?
It has been a lazy holiday day—well, lazy if you don’t count housecleaning and some desultory day-after-Thanksgiving shopping (at Lowes, so I’m not sure it really counts).
Tonight I repeated the sautéed duck breast recipe from last night (when I bought the breasts from Larry’s, I didn’t realize the package had four breasts, not two. It made me feel slightly better about paying more that $25 for duck breasts). I made one change: instead of doing the apricot sauce, I did a pan sauce with drippings from the cooked duck, onion, fresh herbs (sage, rosemary, and thyme) from our garden, salt, pepper, veal stock, white wine, and a little butter. It was much better.
We had the duck with some steamed green beans dressed with olive oil, lemon, and sea salt, and the rest of the bottle of the 1993 CastelGiocondo Brunello di Montalcino (link goes to the 1994 vintage) that we opened yesterday to taste with the duck teaser. Omiofriggin’dio. So fabulous.
We said goodbye to Ed and Gina a few hours ago; this was the second Thanksgiving holiday we’ve had with them in as many years. Partly this is because they’re the only ones of our friends who don’t head back to their respective families for the holiday, but mostly it’s because they’re such great company.
While I was putting Thanksgiving dinner together (aside: 14 pound brined turkey, bouquet garni and onion inside, with pan gravy made with prosciutto, veal glacé, and Calvados; the Changs brought garlic mashed potatoes, green beans, candied yams, and salad; and Lisa made a killer apple Charlotte; and after all that I cooked a duck breast with apricot sauce for a kind of lagniappe), I started thinking about everything I was thankful for. This year it’s easy to break it down:
Augusto Pinochet claimed on Tuesday, during an interview on the occasion of his 88th birthday, that he was a democratic leader, a “patriotic angel” with nothing to apologize for.
On Monday, new court testimonies were published giving details of how at least 400 of the thousands of Pinochet opponents who were “disappeared” during his regime (I believe Mr. Pinochet has the dubious distinction of verbing that particularly ominous adjective) were “dumped into the ocean strapped to pieces of railroad track to make them sink.”
Yes, of course, there is nothing to apologize for. In a world where the opposition does not exist and therefore has no rights.
In retrospect, Sting’s “Cueca Solo (They Dance Alone),” written in 1987, seems grossly inadequate in its description of the effects of the Pinochet regime’s atrocities. But it’s also the humane response to the horrors that the regime brokered:
They’re dancing with the missing
They’re dancing with the dead
They dance with the invisible ones
Their anguish is unsaid
They’re dancing with their fathers
They’re dancing with their sons
They’re dancing with their husbands
They dance alone
They dance alone
Last year at about this time I had my rock and roll debut at the EMP’s Liquid Lounge. I’m returning with some of the same musicians this year for additional holiday party musical jam goodness. I get to go a little further afield this year, doing backing vocals on a bunch of rockabilly, Motown, and country/bluegrass tunes. And then some lead vocals, this year on a cover of Led Zeppelin’s version of “Nobody’s Fault But Mine.”
“Nobody’s Fault” is a really old song that I am still coming to terms with. The earliest recording I’m aware of is the Blind Willie Johnson version from 1927, which is a straightforward gospel lyric (“I have a Bible I can read/If I don’t read then my soul be lost/Nobody’s fault but mine) given a growling, urgent delivery with a slashing slide guitar accompaniment. When Page and Plant turned their attention to the song in the mid-seventies, the instrumentals were turned up to 11, and Page wrote new lyrics that describe a battle with… what? Addiction, possibly, or the life of excess he was leading in general. Add to that the controversy in the traditional blues world about Zep’s refusal to credit Johnson for the song (on Presence, it’s credited to Page and Plant, and Plant has said that the song was “public domain because he’s been dead so long”), and there are about a million ways you could go in performing this song.
So there are going to be some challenges, but I think it should be tremendous. I’m working with two fantastic guitarists with George Bullock and Don Chappell, and if I can just get some rehearsal time so I don’t shred my vocal chords going for the high A on every chorus I’ll be all set.
I spoke too soon when I mentioned that the Washington Weather Alert RSS feed showed no active watches, warnings, or advisories. For the past few days, there have been winter storm warnings throughout the Cascades and Olympics.
As a consequence of all the snow that has fallen this month, several of the ski areas are opening early. My local fave Stevens Pass is actually open today, with 48″ of base and 7″ having fallen in the last 24 hours. Whistler is holding the line and will officially open on Thanksgiving, Snoqualmie opens on Friday (with 26″ at the West Summit, they’re definitely getting the short end of the snow stick yet again), and Mt. Baker (which we never got to last season) is open today with the biggest opening day snow base in a decade—70 to 80 inches!
Sadly, I don’t think we are going to be able to take advantage of any of the early skiing, at least this week. But that’s a story for another day.
Funny article in the Washington Post yesterday about the Foo Fighters’ remake of the infamous “Darling Nikki” (from Prince’s Purple Rain). I think this was the moment when we all knew Prince had Arrived: on the schoolbus, on the way to middle school, a chorus of white suburban kids gleefully singing along, “I met her in the hotel lobby…”
(The rest of the lyrics are in the Blogcritics article through which I discovered the Washington Post story.)
