Author: Tim Jarrett

A year ago today…

Today’s posts from a year ago:

  • “‘I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life – so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.’” (Matt Cartmill)
  • “I do have some nifty music that the E-52s will be performing shortly. We’re going to larn us some hol’day stuff if it kills us, hyuh!” We never learned that arrangement, sadly. It was an arrangement of “Let it Snow” that Jim Heaney wrote for his a cappella group in Washington that the Cheeselords subsequently performed.
  • … and of course, “Alison’s PantsCam: The best WebCam since the first one.” Which, frighteningly enough, still seems to be live.

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Somebody must have lied

… because the weather here is fine. Cold, maybe, but clear. For the third day in a row. Is this really Seattle in the wintertime?

I feel good this morning. I feel like I could really get some things done today. Unfortunately that makes me want to work on things around the house rather than at work. But I’ll persevere. To quote myself quoting Beck:

I’m a driver, I’m a winner. Things are gonna change, I can feel it.

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Greg Macs it up

Greg has finally made the move to Mac OS X. He asks for software recommendations. I would start with NetNewsWire Lite. If you like the new Sherlock keeping you from going to a ton of different web sites, you’ll love NetNewsWire bringing all the blogs you read daily to you. Including this one.

After that? Well, I might get an app writing to the Blogger API one of these days. After all, we’ve finished painting the house now!
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Say goodbye to painting

We painted trim last night and today (three window frames, two door frames, baseboards, five windows) in the front bedroom, and put a second coat of paint (“Washed Lemon”) on the walls. We also lost a little of the paint on the moldings to the masking tape. (Aside: when did masking tape become blue? And when did it start having an appetite for high gloss paint?)

In between, we painted the ceiling and the walls above the trim bar in the parlor (now called the Sun Room, owing to the color) a brighter white. And hung the shades. Gotta love Smith and Noble: mail order custom shades, thankyouverymuch. We’ll have pictures shortly, once we finish hanging the Italian china.

And once I finish touching up the damaged trim where some of the paint got taken off by the tape, we’re pretty much done with painting. At least until next year….

Salon: U2 chickened out

Annie Zaleski reviews the new U2 compilation, The Best of 1990-2000, with mixed emotions in Salon. “Revisionist history” isn’t a bad description. Certainly ten years ago I would have expected “The Fly” to make it onto a best-of compilation. With that throbbing bass line, nasty guitar hook, and curiously vulnerable chorus vocal, it was the pivot away from the wide-eyed Americana into which U2 had stooped in the late 80s, back into a defiant embrace of good old fashioned decadence. It’s not on the compilation, though. Neither is “Lemon” or “Elevation” or even “The Ground Beneath Her Feet.”

Okay, so the disc doesn’t live up to its title. (And the b-side disc is worse. The b-side disc for 1980-1990 was the best part of the package, lots of lost songs (like “Walk to the Water” and “Luminous Times”) that true believers cherished and no one else had heard. This one? Skanky disco remixes of tracks deserving and undeserving. I miss the original mix of “Lady with the Spinning Head” and “Salomé.”) But there are some things it does right. It lays claim to some good songs from the otherwise misbegotten Passengers album, for one. And it reminds me that Pop was a truly dark and magnificent album… in places.

I walk away from this compilation a little disappointed. It, like the new songs “Electrical Storm” and “The Hands That Built America,” is too safe. This isn’t the band that wrote

It’s no secret that a conscience can sometimes be a pest
It’s no secret ambition bites the nails of success
Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief
All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief

Morning fog

Driving into work this morning, someone had airbrushed the landscape away. A diffuse glow hung over the creek bordering the park. Seattle doesn’t like to be really cold during the fall, I think. It’s happier chilly and shrouded.

I vacuumed, cursed and picked up wet leaves with my hands last night in the dark. Patches of bare mud showing through our much abused lawn. The cherry tree conspires with the maple next door to rob the grass of light. Fall has its revenge though and both huddle naked now plotting their cloaks for spring.

Home improvement has never been so entertaining

Craig pointed to the Trading Spaces Drinking Game. I love the listing of items–I hope the show’s creators are looking at this too. Some of the joy of watching the show is getting to know the personalities, but I know that if I hear Vern talk about “leaving a penny on the table” one more time I’m gonna scream.

I do love that they pointed out the bit about tarps not being used while painting a room. How do they get away with that??? I always end up leaving our tarps looking like a Jackson Pollock painting.
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Apple Store coming to Seattle area??

Rumor has it that Apple will be opening a store in Bellevue, a few miles south of me–and a few miles west of Microsoft. That should be interesting–if it comes through.

As the source article says, there’s a sense that Apple will be doing the area a huge favor by opening a fairly high profile store in the middle of a real economic slump in the area. I hope they’ll take advantage of the presence of some pretty big Mac people in the area, such as Glenn, Brent, and even Adam Engst, to make some compelling Mac content available in the store’s theatre area.
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The sun! The sun!

When I was little, the first thing I ever heard about Seattle was a Bill Cosby routine (on I Started Out as a Child) that claimed that Seattleites liked the rainy weather–that we would stay out and get rain tans, that sort of thing, and that when the sun came out we would ask, “What have we done?”

This morning I’m awfully glad to see it. The cherry tree leaves might dry out enough today to be blowable and gatherable by the time I get home. Nothing like bagging leaves in the dark (the sun is pretty much setting by 4:30 pm these days).
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Brent: multiple weblog support harder than it looks

Brent points out that there’s a non-trivial cost to supporting multiple kinds of weblogs in a blog front end tool like NetNewsWire or Manila Envelope. Weblogs may look alike on the surface (and to an RSS aggregator), but they’re all different software platforms underneath and accordingly have different information needs. This is fine as long you don’t have to expose the mess to the user.

This is one of the reasons, I think, why the MetaWeblog API came about. Abstracting the common elements of the data elements into a new API layer is smart. Unfortunately not all the platforms support it…

I wish it had been a long weekend

…that would be a good reason to not have posted for three days. As it is, I can point to our mostly-finished front bedroom, which is finally losing its green and maroon color scheme, as justification for not having written.

I started a new job at the same company yesterday. I spent the day in training, so it’s hard to tell how it went. But I will have a meeting this morning to talk about my goals, and then things will get running. I feel in some ways like this fresh start is like coming home to a skill set that I thought I’d never get to use again. In other ways, of course, I feel like I’ve given up on the other job, and that’s something I’m going to have to continue to work through.

Found: history

Family history, to be exact. The unpacking has progressed to the point that I’ve found the box that had the pictures from my office and—more importantly—of my family. Pictures of the University, of the barn up the hill from my Grandmother Jarrett’s house, of the ancestral Brackbill farmhouse, of my Pop-pop and Grandma, my parents and my Aunt Marie. Plus some other odds and ends: a framed Glee Club poster that I designed, a signed Edward Gorey print, a framed photo of the Rotunda taken from the vicinity of my Lawn room door, an antique mirror. Plus some Legos, for some reason.

All this stuff has been in storage, not just since we moved from Boston, but from our move from Cambridge in the early spring of 2001. I’ve particularly missed having familiar images to hang in my office; not any more.