Still going after all these years.
Following up last week’s non-denial denial of its plans to purchase Universal, it’s interesting to see the reports about next week’s unveiling of Apple “announcements that will be music to your ears.” Could this be Apple’s long awaited music service?
I hope so. I looked at Listen.com and a few others once and went away shaking my head. I can’t use the downloaded file on my iPod? Buh-bye.
All griping about being pigeonholed aside, I had a pretty typical weekend—which, here at JHN, means home improvement.
Friday night was the hardest working part. I came home early to investigate an apparent washing machine meltdown. Sure enough, the machine is leaking lubricant out from under the drum and reliably leaving oil spots on part of just about every load. Given that it’s old (i.e. came with the house) and cheap, I think we could probably get a new one for not much more than it would take to repair it. Sigh. Guess we’re off to do some shopping this week.
Anyway, after our washing machine diagnosis, we spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening in the garden, digging up the last three garden boxes and planting herbs (three kinds of thyme, savory, marjoram, rosemary, dill, oregano (in its own pot in the garden box), mint (in its own pot on the patio, far away from everything else), and camomile. Basil will wait in our indoor greenhouse until warmer weather comes; ditto parsley and cilantro. Our sage plant survived the winter, and the existing rosemary is positively thriving), Walla Walla onions (which appear to be the Pacific Northwest’s answer to Vidalias), and rhubarb. In the other beds, we have spinach, peas, and fava beans emerging. Our tomato seedlings continue to worry us inside, but with something like 30 seedlings we will probably have a few hardy volunteers to plant before too long.
Saturday, we tore up the turf inside the new bed under the cherry tree, trying not to tear up the cherry’s roots at the same time. We’ll start ground cover in the bed soon, and probably fill in the rest with pea gravel so we don’t have to worry about decaying bark mulch turning the soil too acidic or providing a haven for weeds. We also assembled landscaping ties in our front bed: two ties high to keep dogs from wandering onto the bed and defecating (sadly, a repeat occurrence). Two ties high means we had to fasten them together. I wanted to use steel bracing plates, but the gentleman at Home Depot suggested long landscape tie screws. “Sounds good,” I said. Heh. —Two stripped sockets (5/16″ and 10 mm), one nearly stripped box wrench, and a new drill later, I finally got all but one of them in. I managed to get the last one worked in halfway, but so tightly that I can’t loosen or tighten it any more. I think I’m going to just get a bolt cutter or a file and lop off the part still showing above the wood.
Thus endeth your Houseblog update for today.
Scott Knowles name-checks me in Corporate Blogs Make Personal Connection, talking about how corporations could improve their customer communication by connecting to related blogs:
A hypothetical example: Take Lowe’s, the home improvement store. Why not create an entire section of their website dedicated to stories their customers tell about home improvement? Mom at Home, Creating Home Decor, Jarrett House North and other blogs discussing home improvement projects could be integrated into the Lowe’s site. Not only would Lowe’s engage their customers but will help build their own network of blogs. It’s not a closed system, but capitalizing on an existing one and helping to build upon it. Of course Lowe’s should hop in the game with a couple blogs of their own from their experts.
The advantage to Lowe’s: They not only become associated with their customers, but they become highly entrenched with them. The more they are honestly engaged, the better their brand equity… or brand value.
Huh. So what’s the advantage to me? I’m not sure I’m ready to shill for a home warehouse. And, after all, in addition to being a homeblogger, I’m also a peaceblogger. Wouldn’t Lowe’s think twice about pointing to me?
Maybe I’m just grumpy about being hypothetically co-opted by a home improvement store’s marketing plans. But I think that there are real risks to any corporation that would reach out to include their customers’ words and thoughts in this way. Are they prepared for potential backlash if a customer Googles me and discovers that I’m a slightly left of center liberal who doesn’t think the administration is doing the right thing? Or even that I can’t lay bricks?
Philip Greenspun lent his digital camera to Peter Menzel for a trip to Kuwait and Iraq. Menzel came back with a vial of Iraqi crude oil for Philip (prompting the one-liner, “I’m thus one of the very few Americans who can truly say that he got what the U.S. Army went to Iraq for!”), and some amazing pictures of the work done to extinguish the oil well fires, complete with unexploded (and exploded!) cluster bombs, Halliburton subsidiaries (Boots and Coots, not Brown and Root), camels, and drowning wildlife.
US News and World Report gets an RSS feed, including the now ubiquitous white on orange XML button (
) and an explanation. Their old content (> 14 days) will live behind a pay wall, so be careful with your links, but still, it’s nice to see another major content provider hop the bandwagon. Thanks to Jenny the Shifted Librarian for the link, who also helpfully points out that many libraries will help route around the pay wall by providing the older content for free.
Listened to the family-and-friends-only CD that the Suspicious Cheese Lords made (back when I was in the group), Incipit, on the way in this morning. It’s a schizoid disc, half devoted to a bunch of new music members of the group wrote for a theater production of Romeo and Juliet that we recorded but which was never used, half to new and old lamentations. The centerpiece and title piece of the album is Thomas Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah, which was the musical work the group was originally formed to perform and which is still in my head. A fascinatingly complex work, with intricate five voice polyphony and loads of double meanings. The text, Jeremiah’s lament for the fall of Jerusalem, can be read as Tallis’s lament for the suppression and demise of Catholicism, his tradition of faith, in England.
We performed this piece many times, but almost always during Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter, as part of Tenebrae and Holy Friday services. Here the Lamentations would take on additional meaning in the Christian context of lamenting the sinfulness of man and the attendant sacrifice of Christ. But despite all the lamenting, these were always happy times. The group would perform two or three times during the week, steep itself in the religious tradition, and get to be part of some truly moving observances of faith. And spend a lot of time together as friends.
The Lamentations have a double meaning for me as well, since I first sang them with the Virginia Glee Club under John Liepold in his first season. Favorite memories of performing the piece: a morning performance on a spring break trip after a night in New Orleans at a private school with an, um, impaired group (during the course of the fifteen minute work, we sank a full minor third under pitch); and performing it with seven or eight good friends in resonant stairwells and arcades in academic buildings and on the Lawn.
So this piece with its deep message of despair came to be a familiar friend and a comfort to me over the years. There is, I think, something to be said for the liturgical emphasis during Lent of recognizing grief as a key part of the church year, and as a necessary precursor to the joy of Easter.
CrazyAppleRumors has been having a field day with the Apple/Universal thing, starting Monday with “Apple Talks with Universal Not Substantive. Really Not Substantive,” and proceeding through Tuesday’s “Apple Considers Buying Telemundo.” But they’ve outdone themselves (or beat the joke into the ground) with yesterday’s “Apple Acquires Sandwich.” My favorite part (’cause it reminds me of me) is the analyst reaction section:
Marcus Gregory, Chief Investment Strategist for the State of California Teacher’s Pension Plan, said “Our holding in Apple is predicated on the company’s large cash reserves. I would hate to see those reserves frittered away on sandwich acquisitions.
“Now, granted, at the $5.75 purchase price of the tuna fish sandwich, Apple would need to acquire… five plus… carry the… well, a whole hell of a lot of sandwiches to make a dent in $5 billion, but it’s the principle of thing.”
The New York Times’ David Pogue was bullish on the move.
“I myself enjoyed a tuna fish sammich, I call ’em ‘sammiches,’ just the other day,” Pogue said.
“And, you know, they’re damn tasty.”
In more serious news, the balance sheet and statement of cash flows accompanying Apple’s latest quarterly earnings statement peg the company’s cash and short term investments at $4.53 billion, up from $4.4 billion at the end of the last quarter. But the company posted a $4 million operating loss, which turned into $14 million profit after interest income. Cutting it close, Fred.
I wanted to add a new CD to the “Current Listening” section below (see my actual home page, all you RSS viewers who are missing this feature), but I was stymied because Amazon doesn’t list it. But go check out Michael, the Athens, GA emo-pop band, and PayPal the album. It’s pretty damned good.
Regarding the persisting rumors that, despite all fiscal evidence to the contrary, it is in talks to buy Universal Music: Apple broke its long standing policy of not commenting on rumors yesterday to offer this gem (annotated by yours truly):
“Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has never made any offer to invest in or acquire a major music company. The press statements this morning attributed to Vivendi board member Claude Bebear are untrue, as Mr. Bebear has confirmed in a later report,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Beyond these comments, we will abide by Apple’s policy of not commenting on rumors.”
In other words, yeah, guys, do your math next time. Reported via Macintouch, which has RSS but no permalinks, so you have to scroll down—and the information disappears tomorrow. One step at a time, I guess.
My good friend Craig Pfeifer moved his blog over the last week or two. (What does this have to do with the subject line? Work with me for a minute.) I didn’t notice until today because I was working too much to do any surfing, and because I moved to using an aggregator at work instead of manually clicking through my blogroll. So Craig’s kissoff to Blogspot went unnoticed for a few days.
Craig has RSS now. Of the folks in the Friends section of my blogroll, six of the ten syndicate their content via RSS. (Two of the four remaining are on Blogspot, a third is actually a newspaper column.) In all, of the 44 sites on my blogroll, 31 offer an RSS feed.
And these are mostly friends and random acquaintances.
RSS. Coming soon to a blog near you.
Correction 4/24: Greg has an RSS feed and had it when I posted this. Sorry for my brain lapse.
My friends in the group in which I sang in Washington, DC, the Suspicious Cheese Lords, will make their satellite radio debut on Sirius XM this Sunday (scroll to the bottom), in promotion of their new album
Maestro di Capella. Go listen.
Suspicious Cheese Lords In Concert
Vox – XM 112
Noon ET
The early-music ensemble Suspicious Cheese Lords join us live at the XM Studios for a special performance of sacred music.
For those scratching their heads and wondering whether Lisa and I have lost our minds, what with the bricklaying and so on, I would like to report that we don’t always do everything ourselves. Case in point: yesterday we had a tree surgeon out to remove some damaged branches from the enormous evergreen in our back yard. The branch removal mostly got the lowest hanging branches, which has the not entirely coincidental effect of making the back yard a lot brighter.
So the second public beta of Apple’s new browser, Safari, has been released. I was curious to see if any of the display glitches it showed on my site had been fixed.
As you can see from the adjoining image, the answer is “not quite.” Still outstanding: my date titles should render in small caps, and my post titles should render in a larger sans serif font. I’m starting to think that the post title problem is my fault, though, for using a misplaced DIV to trick Internet Explorer into rendering my page correctly. At least my page renders completely in Safari now.
I’ve only been posting in fits and spurts for the past week, and I think I know why: I’ve had a ton of deadlines that have kept me from writing anything good (even when I wanted to); and whenever I want to write something in the morning, the specter of the war raises its head and makes me want to write something else. Anything else.
I need to write something most days to jump start my brain, but writing about the war, or about the domestic and international politics that surround it, either enrages or depresses me most days. I’ll keep working on it. If history is any indication, I’ll suddenly have a bunch to say after I finish my next deadline.
New addition to Hooblogs: Kim Everitt, a student in the College of Arts and Sciences graduating this year, whose blog goes by a certain shade of [green]. This is of course interesting for two reasons: not only is it, like Mr. Greene’s blog, another Blogspot blog with “green” in the URL, but it also features brackets ([]) in the title.
Of course, her more compelling claim to fame is being linked by Dave Barry. You’ll have to take her word for it, as Dave’s archives (being hosted by Blogspot) are not working, and you’ll have to go to her home page and scroll to April 1 to take her word for it, as her permalinks (also hosted by Blogspot) aren’t working quite right either.
Somewhere in here there’s a lesson about getting what you pay for, but I’m not quite sure what it is.
Anyway, welcome aboard, Kim.
