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Wynton and Branford hit the boards at the White House for a jazz clinic with young musicians. Looks like Delfeayo is there on trombone as well. Nice perk for the music.
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Good way to kick off Bloomsday.
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Universal Edition has a Mahler blog covering the anniversary year.
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Oh my. Yes, Weird Al can still bring the parody. I always dug his “in the style of” parodies as much as specific song parodies–his take on the Police, “Velvet Elvis,” taught me not to take Sting so seriously.
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SalesForce becomes a cloud computing platform, alongside Amazon and (I guess) Google. This is what recognizing a distinctive competency looks like.
Day: June 16, 2009
Eight years and counting
True to form for this year, I’m almost a week late with this anniversary observance, but June 11 marked the eighth year of Jarrett House North as a blog. My site, originally started as an occasionally updated static vanity page on March 14, 2000, morphed into a blog during my summer internship at Microsoft in 2001, picked up steam as I finished my MBA, got embroiled in online metrics during my first year at Microsoft then got deep into blogging practice in 2004, did serious houseblogging in 2005, recovered from the aftermath of running the Sony Boycott blog in 2006, kept the pace going in 2007, and crunched the numbers in 2008.
So here’s a retrospective in quantity and quality:
- Quantity #1: up to 4,595 posts, more or less, from last year’s 4,100, plus 170 longer form pieces.
- Quantity #2: Last year’s hits that keep coming back include tips on using a Google Maps Gadget in Google Sites (almost 7000 hits over the last year–methinks Google needs to improve their docs around this feature); working around a MobileMe breakage with a popular Mozilla experimental feature; integrating AirPort Express and Verizon FiOS; and problems with WebEx and Outlook 2007. Yes, there’s a definite theme; my how-to pieces around working with computer hardware and software and web services are definitely the big hit drawers, with seven posts in the top 10. The non-tech pieces in the top 10 include my poor experience with the coil packs in my Passat, my love note to Ramagon, and my About page.
- Quality: I wrote some prose I was genuinely proud of this year, including my mash note to Shannon Worrell and review of her Honey Guide album, my experience singing the Brahms Requiem with the TFC (later released on CD), my observance of 9/11, and a slew of Virginia Glee Club historical articles, including the identity of the Glee Club’s first conductor, locating their original namesake boarding house, reviewing the 1972 record, and, sadly obituaries for two Club men, Gilly Sullivan and Steve Bognaski.
- Quality, continued: Plus, finally all my URLs point the same place. Only took me a year to get that straightened out after the WordPress migration.
Plus, I half feared that getting engaged with Twitter and Facebook in a serious way would kill this blog, but so far it hasn’t.
Not bad for an eight year old blog. That’s like an 80 year old in blog years.