Getting a little behind

As Esta graciously pointed out in an email, I’m behind in my reading. I didn’t realize that Thacker had bowed out from his nomination after a storm broke about his statements. Still, I think the bulk of my earlier comment stands. The proposed money for AIDS relief is promising. I just hope that the administration’s wobbly grasp of reality doesn’t turn it into a massive campaign to promote abstince in sub-Saharan Africa.

Small ray of light

I got home too late to watch the State of the Union address, but I’m reading the transcript now. Along with my expected knee-jerk reaction to the administration playing the partial-birth abortion card, continuing to insist on Saddam’s WoMD and vaguely linking him to 9/11, there was one thing that pleasantly surprised me: Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief:

…tonight I propose the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa. … I ask the Congress to commit 15 billion dollars over the next five years, including nearly ten billion dollars in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.

What will be interesting to see is how the Administration reconciles “turning the tide against AIDS” with their war on the condom. And their appointment of Jerry Thacker, the Bob Jones University employee and “AIDS is a gay plague/homosexuality is a deathstyle” blowhard, to the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and AIDS.

Odd random linkage from Australia

The Age, the newspaper of Melbourne, Australia, published a link to my blog in a listing of “home improvement weblogs” back in December. The fact that I never saw the referral suggests some things about their readership’s web literacy; still, it was funny to see my name in print on an .au site. God only knows what the readers made of the description:

Just reading about Tim Jarrett’s Christmas decorations is enough to make one go politically correct and not “do” Christmas….Jarrett’s blog is not all about settling into his new house but he has window contractors to deal with, boxes to unpack and plenty of plans to look forward to. The rest of the time he’s singing nonsense carols and wondering where his funk went.

The quotation was in reference to a post from December 1 about getting the Christmas tree in place. Apparently the article showed up in a few other sites, all Australian as far as I can tell, including the Sydney Morning Herald. The author, Jenny Sinclair, apparently writes a column called Blogon that reviews a handful of weblogs each week.

Get well soon, Dad

A quick shout out to my father. As Esta reported, he went in for carpal tunnel surgery today. The preliminary news is that he came through the surgery well and is okay to travel. This is actually the second time he’s had surgery for the same condition, which gives me lots of confidence in the procedure… Carpal tunnel syndrome appears to be another one of those conditions that runs in the family. I have at various times felt stirrings of the distinctive pain, and Lisa has had fairly severe bouts with it at various times. Here’s best wishes that Dad’s surgery is a complete success and that he’ll be back to painless wrenching on the MG’s twin carburetors soon.

Busy day; lots of list markup

Things have been pretty crazy at our office owing to the SQL Slammer worm. We’re just starting to settle back to normal, but I expect to continue to have an impacted blog for another day or so.

In the meantime, go take a look at the much faster loading Weblogs.com. Dave updated the page design this morning, based on some seriously heavy CSS lifting by Douglas Bowman at StopDesign. There are some really good lessons to be learned about list coding in this redesign. The big table was turned into an ordered list; each entry in the list has a blog name and an update time. “But wait!” you cry. “How did he get the time to float to the right?” Very simple. He surrounded each time with emphasis markup (em>) and defined a rule for emphasis inside an ordered list that floated the emphasis all the way to the right hand side of the bounding box.

Semantic? No. Tricky lightweight code? Absolutely.

Cheeselords recording now available

Run, don’t walk, to your nearest web browser and place your order at Amazon for the first recording by the Suspicious Cheese Lords, Maestro di Capella: Music of Elzear Genet. Being a huge fan (and former member), I had to post a review. Here’s what I said:

Elzear Genet, also known as Carpentras, was a prolific composer in his day who is relatively little known and little recorded these days. Hopefully this recording will help to change that. The Cheese Lords have selected a program of a never before recorded mass (Missa “Se mieulx ne vient”) and previously unrecorded motets to inaugurate their recording series.

The recording, made at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington, DC, is spacious and resonant, but the ensemble’s precision and nuanced dynamics are in evidence throughout. The motets show off several facets of Genet’s musical style, from chant-influenced polyphony to the rhythmic, almost dancelike “Jubilate Deo” and the haunting “Haec est illa dulcis rosa.” The mass is largely without the contrasts in tempo or style that a Josquin or Byrd would have brought to the form, but the prismatic unfolding of the music from the stately Kyrie through the more urgent Credo into the resolute Agnus dei is still a glorious exemplar of the art. Highly recommended for a window into the music of this era.

(Disclaimer: I am a former member of the group, but have not sung with them for quite some time.)

One degree of separation

It’s a little humbling to realize you’re in the presence of someone great. Even one degree of separation from greatness can sometimes be intimidating. I just found out that one of my co-worker musicians from the pick-up band that played our holiday party is a recognized harmonica authority who once met Howlin’ Wolf. So not only do I know a world authority on the harp, I’m now only one degree removed from Howlin’ Wolf. Kind of a comforting thought.

QTN™: New Belgium Frambozen

So a while back I was talking about fruit lambics, and I said something to the effect that the beer was better when it didn’t taste overwhelmingly like the fruit it came from. Well, the Frambozen from New Belgium Brewing Company is not overpowered by the taste of raspberries. The bit that’s awkward is that it could actually use a bit more raspberry flavor, or something. Great brown ale, but I think the lambic flavor—the natural yeast—would have brought out the raspberry a bit more. Still quite pleasant and drinkable, but as New Belgium have had a history of putting out beers that approach the highest Belgian standard this one doesn’t quite hit the mark.

NetNewsWire got categories.

Brent’s done it again. The new beta release of the pro version of NetNewsWire not only supports categories, it now reliably downloads recent posts for editing on Manila (as confirmed by the release notes). Also some very nice minor “fit and finish” enhancements, such as the anchor tag window now putting the cursor directly into the input field.

There’s now no reason for my Manila Envelope software to continue to exist, at least in its current form.

Maybe. One thing that I do notice posting to my weblog through NNW is that it seems to take much more time than using Manila Envelope. This may be because NNW uses the MetaWeblog API, which is kind of a second-level API that probably turns around and calls the native Manila API. Manila Envelope, on the other hand, calls the Manila API directly, as its name implies. And there’s a ton of stuff in the Manila API that isn’t in any other blogging API, such as controlling templates and taglines. Maybe it’s time to think about repurposing the app to be the ultimate Manila client.

Ow. Ow. Ow.

Finally went skiing today, at Summit West. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. There are muscles along the outside edges of both legs that I didn’t know I had, and that are eager for me to renew acquaintance with them. It was a pretty good time, though, at least until the rain started in earnest.

It’s Friday. Why are you reading this blog?

Okay, so that was just slightly defensive for not having posted anything today, but I had good reason: I was at an all-day off site marketing seminar, being talked to by the likes of our CEO, Kellogg professor Mohan Sawhney (who had some worthwhile things to say in spite of inventing B2B), and Tom Peters. Lots of things that I won’t discuss on the weblog, but it was fun.

Oh, and I see George got the scrapple I sent. Hopefully Becky will still speak to me. Oh, and this site is now link #4 (and site #3) if you Google for Stoltzfus scrapple.

Parallel lives

I was sitting in my office one day last week when someone stopped by to ask the way to Building 4. This isn’t uncommon, as our buildings are a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. But something about this guy seemed familiar. I could see he had a contractor badge but not his name. What was it? Joe something.

I hit the company directory and found the answer. There was the name I remembered, apparently now working for McKinsey. And in Redmond.

This was so uncanny. Joe and I had been at Virginia’s Governors School for Science and Math together in the summer of 1989; had gone to the University of Virginia together; and had started work at American Management Systems at the same time. Now, a year and a half after completing his MBA at Michigan, he was in Redmond on a consulting engagement.

Parallel lives. Really parallel: Joe and I never hung out much in college, he was in a different business unit at AMS and spent much of his time in Germany, he did his MBA at a different school a year earlier, and he won’t be in Redmond after next week.

But the final coincidence is that he was at Michigan with my friend and former AMS co-worker and teammate Larry Weyer. If three coincidences are a conspiracy, what are four???

Pennyroyal Tea


nirvana - cover art to in utero

Nirvana

In Utero

Geffen, 1993

Pennyroyal Tea
(Kurt Cobain)

I’m on my time with everyone
I have very bad posture

Sit and drink Pennyroyal Tea
Distill the life that’s inside of me
Sit and drink Pennyroyal tea
I’m anemic royalty

Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld
So I can sigh eternally

I’m so tired I can’t sleep
I’m a liar and a thief
Sit and drink pennyroyal Tea
I’m anemic royalty

I’m on warm milk and laxatives
Cherry-flavored antacids

Knowing the Dog

I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently exploring the Black Dog, on the theory that (a) one should know one’s enemy and (b) familiarity breeds contempt. It’s been especially helpful to reconstruct my emotional history, knowing what I know now about the Dog. Even during my first years out of school, when in naïve retrospect I was on top of the world, I can clearly see his footprints. If nothing else, my mix tape explorations have taught me that.

I don’t think of this part of my work as a dance with the Dog, though. Mostly it’s about acknowledging my own emotions, something which my rational brain doesn’t let me do too often.