Month: April 2004

Like getting a whole new house

Well, six hours later, the tree guys have wrapped up and headed on out. They did a fantastic job. The trees actually seem to belong now. They actually ended up taking out a small spruce that was dead most of the way up and leaning back toward the house. Fortunately its small size (less than 4 inches in diameter) meant we didn’t need a permit to remove it. They were also able to give the small cherry tree a lot more room and light, so it should start growing stronger now.

And wow, it looks like a whole new house now. From the street you can easily see the whole house—which, since it stretches sideways across the lot, looks enormous. You can also see the lack of work we’ve done on the front landscaping, so I predict I’ll be giving that a fair amount of attention over the next few weekends. In fact, I think I’ll head outside now and do some cleanup, now that I can see what I’m doing.

Lisa and her mom are at Heronswood right now for the spring woodland garden showing, but when they get back with the camera I’ll post before and after shots.

Tree surgery for fun and profit

I’m working at home (WAH, in the inevitable Microsoft acronym) this morning so that I can answer questions from Davey Tree as they trim up the overgrown pines in our front yard. They’ve already done the heavy lifting of the removal of branches up to about eight feet from the sidewalk and removing the small spruce that was dead most of the way up and growing back toward the house. Now they’re doing the finesse work: pruning the deodora cedar so that it doesn’t overshadow the cherry tree, getting some of the deadwood off the cherry, handling any remaining thinning on the pines.

The dogs have been mostly good, though there’s been a bit more barking than is ideal. But when a chainsaw and a tree chipper (and two strange men) are in the driveway and the front yard, who can blame them for a little bark every now and again?

Thurston Moore on Nirvana

Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) in the New York Times: “When the Edge Moved to the Middle.” A practitioner’s view of the importance of Nirvana in shaping the music industry of the 90s, and Kurt Cobain’s refusal to be swept up in that massive change.

I didn’t write a “ten years after” post about Kurt’s suicide for precisely that reason. Kurt’s suicide, even then, was no surprise to anyone who could see the pain that Kurt’s fame caused him. I had no reason to want to remember the pain I felt that Saturday morning in April when I woke up at a college friend’s parents’ house in northern Virginia and saw the headlines. (Besides, Tony Pierce has, as always, said a lot of things that I wanted to say and some I didn’t think to say, far more eloquently than I would have.)

But Thurston’s point is well worth thinking about. I don’t know how much of the coarsening and cheapening of alternative rock you can pin on Nirvana’s influence—however misunderstood and misheard—but surely it is no coincidence that the rush to find angry young men with guitars started at this time. I’ve been looking over the past few days for music from some late-80s alternative artists. It’s stuff that’s a little hard to find on the online sources because the bands are gone, largely unlistened.

But how could the gentler REM-influenced sounds of the Connells, the Brandos, or Dreams So Real, or the more experimental and nuanced sounds of Art of Noise, PiL, Love and Rockets, or even the Pixies survive against the one two punch of the incredible bass and guitar work and angry lyrics of “Come As You Are”? But the kids only listened to the surface. I’m pretty sure that only a few heard the lyrics of “In Bloom”—He’s the one/he likes all our pretty songs/and he likes to sing along/and he loves to shoot his gun/but he don’t know what it means—and recognized themselves in Kurt’s acid portrait of his fair-weather fans. And what the music industry did was worse yet.

When Kurt died, a lot of the capitalized froth of alternative rock fizzled. Mainstream rock lost its kingpin group, an unlikely one imbued with avant-garde genius, and contemporary rock became harder and meaner, more aggressive and dumbed down and sexist. Rage and aggression were elements for Kurt to play with as an artist, but he was profoundly gentle and intelligent. He was sincere in his distaste for bullyboy music – always pronouncing his love for queer culture, feminism and the punk rock do-it-yourself ideal. Most people who adapt punk as a lifestyle represent these ideals, but with one of the finest rock voices ever heard, Kurt got to represent them to an attentive world. Whatever contact he made was really his most valued success.

Darwin is sometimes ugly, and it isn’t Kurt’s fault that his band was leading that sea change. Just once, though, it would be nice if the sea change allowed all the rich and strange things to thrive, rather than the plain and ugly ones.

Channel 9

Channel 9 is on MSDN and not from Outer Space, to begin with. See comments from Dave Winer, Slashdot, and Channel 9 co-conspirator Robert Scoble.

As a Microsoft.com product manager, I ought to be saying something about how Channel 9 doesn’t look like the corporate site. But I think that’s a strength. It’s pretty clear that these are real people inside the company communicating with the customer, not “the voice of the company.” Which is, I think, rather the point of blogging in general.

Mixed blessings from Wilco

Tom Harpel at Tandoku points to the new Wilco album, A Ghost is Born, available via QuickTime 6 stream at WilcoWorld. Quoth Tom: “Jim O’Rourke is a genius, Jeff Tweedy, a god.”

Alas, a god in rehab. Rolling Stone says that he checked into a clinic to kick his addiction to prescription painkillers, which he was taking to treat migraines. The album release will be delayed two weeks but the group is still planning to tour. Good luck, Jeff.

And in final Tweedy note, I found a free promotional EP at a local store the other day in honor of the expanded reissues of all the Uncle Tupelo back catalog. And when I say “EP,” I mean 45. That’s right, vinyl. Now I just have to see if I can find that funny little ring adapter to fit the really big hole in the middle of the record…

In-laws in-town

Lisa’s folks arrived last night from New Jersey, somewhat stiff but otherwise no worse the wear for their six hour flight. The dogs had not forgotten them from Christmas and were in such a transport of ecstasy to see them again that it was very hard to get them to go to bed.

It’s quiet this morning, but I know that won’t last. I don’t know what Lisa has planned for her folks today, but it probably has something to do with gardening…

In other family news, my father appears to be making a good recovery, and my aunt has successfully made it through her second knee replacement surgery. I think I still have a sister in seminary, but as she hasn’t blogged in over a month it’s hard to tell. sideways smiley

Mac Office 2004 on the way

Looks like Mac Office 2004 has been released to manufacturing. Congratulations to Rick Schaut, fellow Sloanie Angela Liao, and the other folks in the MacBU for completing this release.

Rick notes that there have been some advances in how Mac Word 2004 handles Unicode text, support for table styles, line layout across platforms, and (yes) long file names. Still no XML support, though.

For more info on Mac Office 2004, see MacWorld, our own Mac information site, and MacNN.

Announcing Sloanblogs

I have put together an aggregated list of known bloggers who are either students at or graduates of the MIT Sloan School of Management. The listing, modeled after Hooblogs (my list of UVA bloggers), is currently rather short; my hope is that having a home will encourage more Sloan folks to send me their blog address (or even start blogging!).

New feature for Sloanblogs, to be added to Hooblogs shortly: an aggregated view of all Sloanblogs activity courtesy of Kinja. You can get updates via RSS as new Sloan bloggers are added to the list, and you can add a Sloanblogs blogroll to your site courtesy of Blogrolling.com (see the Sloanblogs page for details).

A cold day where? Windows Installer Toolset on SourceForge

Slashdot has just posted a pointer to the Shared Source release of the Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolset, now available on SourceForge. The code was released under IBM’s Common Public License (CPL). This is the first Microsoft source to be released under an OSS approved open source license.

Yep. Catch your breath. Microsoft code on SourceForge. The sound of a locked trunk opening?

Details on Rob Mensching’s blog, including both technical details of what WiX does and a description of its path to open source.

Bill, meet Ingvar

News story: Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of knuckle-barking (and Pavement inspiring) furniture store IKEA, has passed Bill Gates as the world’s richest man, at $53 billion vs. Bill’s estimated $47 billion, according to Swedish business weekly Veckans Affarer and Swedish television.

Note 1: The main culprit in Kamprad’s ascendancy was the dollar’s slide in value against other currencies. See Oliver Willis’s comments here.

Note 2: The company denies the claim, noting that Ingvar does not actually own the company: he donated it to a foundation 22 years ago.

Note 3: Scoble points out that writing about IKEA and Bill Gates brings lots of traffic. Heh.

Weekend

I had a long weekend, pretty exhausting. It started out well, with a good lunch with Tom Harpel. He covered our discussion pretty well (clarification: my site is run on Manila, but I use NetNewsWire as my primary posting tool). If it’s any consolation, Tom, I get lost at RedWest all the time. In addition to Tom’s commentary, we discussed his experience as an “embedded” ops guy on a product team.

The concert went well. UPC organist Joanne Stremmler proved that Bach is still the master with her organ rendition of “Come, Sweet Death,” which set up the Brahms perfectly.

From time to time, I forget how emotionally and physically taxing singing can be, particularly the “warhorse” masterworks. The Brahms is particularly insidious in this way, because while the music is not especially complicated (the fugues, while tricky, are nothing compared to the nightmares in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis), it’s emotionally so powerful that I was drained after three movements and totally exhausted after the seventh and last.

Saturday the dinner party went well—our new stove did meatballs, meat sauce, lasagna, eggplant sandwiches, and sugar syrup for lemon granita without breaking a sweat. We, on the other hand, sweated.

Today I had three services this morning, performing the Robert Shaw/Alice Parker arrangement of “Ride On, King Jesus.” Then home to collapse for a while before I went out to get a nail puncture in my tire patched. It turns out I waited too long to do it—I had driven on the underinflated tire (though I diligently kept it topped up with air) too far, and had damaged the sidewall. Plus the rear tires were too worn to go too much further. So I’m now hundreds of dollars poorer but with four new tires.

You know, I think the week actually might be more restful than the weekend was.

Day of Brahms

Tonight at University Presbyterian Church my choir and I sing the Brahms Requiem. Should be a really good show.

The dress rehearsal last night went quite well, I thought, though our director clearly has a preference for minimizing vocal strain rather than polishing every last rough edge during dress rehearsal. Considering the directors I’ve had who have erred way too far in the other direction, I rather appreciated his restraint.

Killer Outlook tips from horse’s mouth

Another Microsoft blogger that I should have known about before: K.C. Lemson, a Program Manager on Exchange, who has been blogging since September 2003 about Exchange, Outlook, and other parts of the Office System.

Among her valuable posts for end users:

…and those are just on her front page. Among the rest of the posts: insights into life at Microsoft, being a PM, being married to a fellow Microsoftie, etc., all really personable and highly readable. Subscribed.