Author: Tim Jarrett

Master of Vaguely Arty Noise Rock

A while back I wrote about the Open Music Directory project, MusicMoz. I figured it was time for an update.

The good news is that I’ve become editor of a few categories, including Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore, the Pixies, Gastr Del Sol, and the Velvet Underground. (Thus securing myself the title of “Master of Vaguely Arty Noise Rock.” At least in my own mind.) The bad news, or the opportunity as we positivists like to call it, is that the project still needs volunteers. There are some choice categories open, including Pavement, Liz Phair, the Police, Porno for Pyros, the Psychedelic Furs, Parliament, Public Enemy. And that’s just in the Ps.

Think of becoming an editor at MusicMoz as the equivalent of being a library volunteer. You’re spending your time working with things you love, making it possible for other people to learn about the music that fascinates you, and contributing to the overall usefulness of the Internet. How many opportunities like that are there? Well, I mean, other than blogging in general…
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Link and Think 2002

As last year, this year I’ll be participating in Link and Think, an “observance of World AIDS Day [December 1] in the personal web publishing communities.” The idea is simple. Rather than blogging about technology, music, or what have you, for a day each participating blogger will blog about AIDS. Last year it was a great opportunity for me to educate myself about what the MIT community was doing with respect to the epidemic. This year I’ll stay with the community focus but look at what the state of Washington will be doing.

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I hope some of my readers will choose to participate; I hope others will just read my page and those of other participants and inform themselves.
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Quick update

It looks like things are moving along with the new site pretty well. A few people have updated their blogrolls, Google has started to crawl it, and I think all the navigational kinks have been worked out.

This is good. I may have something worthwhile to talk about soon.

I wasn’t going to post…

…until I got the new site set up. But I’ll be in training today and won’t have a chance to finish the setup, so a quick update.

I’m touched by the support I’ve gotten since posting Monday about the Black Dog. I wanted to assure all of you that this is nothing sudden or intensely scary. I’m reaching the realization that there are some things that it’s better to discuss and write down than not. And I’m discovering some things about myself that I never acknowledged before. I’m going to come out of this stronger and better and that’s the important thing.

And in the meantime it’s not raining here (yet) today, and I’m going to take that as the good sign that it is and get on with this day.
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Hanging in there

Regarding what I wrote last night: I think I need to stop blogging before bed. Not that I regret what I wrote, but it honestly sounds bleaker than I meant it to. It’s honestly raining today, and somehow that makes me feel better (though it also made me get up later).

I think some small portion of this is just loneliness. Knowing that others are dealing with similar issues does make it easier to sort through it.

I should run to work now. I’ve been promised comp leave, but I have a class tomorrow so I need to do my best to clear my plate today. Then maybe Thursday or Friday I can just lay about.

Oh, my new site is almost up and running. There are a few things left to sort out, but when all is done I’ll post here with the new address. I’m so excited. The new site looks like it will actually stay running in the middle of the day….

Back on the late night schedule

I haven’t been writing much lately. It’s a combination of a few things. When my site finally moves to a new home, I don’t want to have to recreate a lot of work.

I’ve had some things to write about. But some of them, like things at work, I’ve been reluctant to discuss. Others, like my depression, I’ve been struggling to understand well enough to write about. I don’t know that makes me feel better to know that others, including, apparently, Moxie (whose depression is discussed by Dawn), go through the same thing. For a while writing helped, but I’ve realized I’ve been writing around my thoughts and feelings, not getting them down.

Now it’s harder to write much of anything meaningful. I might take a few days off from blogging to work through some of this. Partly it’s work. My group made a big presentation today, but it’s too early to tell whether it went well or not. And through the rest of the week I’ll be wrapping ends up in this job and moving to a sister team in my organization. Some things should improve after I make the switch. Others will still be there. And I have to figure out how to work through them.

If you read my blog for things about the Mac, or scripting, or even food, you may want to watch those categories rather than the whole blog for a while why I figure things out. If you’re getting this stuff through the RSS feed, and you want to unsubscribe, I understand, but I hope you’ll stick around. If all goes well, things will get better here soon.
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Bachelor chow

No, not the Futurama kind, though I’m sure it will strike many as close enough.

Lisa is back east for training this week. Unlike past weeks where I got super ambitious with food, I thought I’d make it simple tonight. Bratwurst and leftover mashed potatoes.

Except after browning the brats I decided to make gravy. With beer. Bert Grant’s Fresh Hop Ale, to be exact. I let the brats cook down in the beer, then added mustard for flavor and flour for thickness. As Neko Case sings, “It looks a lot like engine oil and tastes a lot like being small.” Except it’s like nothing I ever had when I was growing up. I think I had to wait till my first trip to London to taste it.

Yes, I’ve now mastered pub cuisine…

Performing quickly

The Cascadian Singers did a guest spot at a Saturday night Mass at St. James Cathedral in Seattle tonight. This was mostly interesting because it was only two weeks since our last show and we hadn’t had much time to to learn new music. So we did the show on one and a half rehearsals through about seven pieces. It was, I thought, overall a good show, though there were a few places where things were a little rough. But pulling off the Duruflé “Ubi Caritas“ made it a lot more worthwhile.
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Small world after all

Random coincidence of the day: fellow 2002 Sloanie Mike Parduhn was born in Newport News, Virginia, my home town. He says he doesn’t remember much since he moved to Chicago in pre-school years. In my cynical days, I think that I don’t remember much about it because I moved out after high school and never looked back. But it’s not true. Comic books, bicycle rides, the drive along Rt. 60 from Denbigh to Colonial Williamsburg, all the good and bad school days, leaves burning in the fall, the Methodist Church’s autumnal brunswick stew sale, listening to …Nothing Like the Sun… through headphones for the first time, bike skidding out in gravel on Sylvia Court, waiting for the bus, learning about Violent Femmes, Ronnie and his mohawk, singing in the church choir next to my dad, learning about music theory from my mom in her basement studio, devouring the library one book at a time, learning about the wonders of college libraries at William and Mary…

Sorry, rainy days do this to me. It’s either nostalgia or look for a small, warm, close pub.
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Jumpstarting

I know it’s been quiet here at the JH North for the last week or two. I assure you it’s been in good cause.

As I alluded last night, I’ve been a bit busy with work. The bigger picture is that I’m working on this enormous project in between switching jobs. My first position at the company was a combination of online strategy and media campaign execution. I have no experience at the latter, and learned that I’m not too good at the former when the area in question has no connection to our group’s current business and I’m working on the analysis in a vacuum. So between that, the enormous psychic upheaval of our move and my graduation, and past history, I was about due for a massive attack of the black dog. This one put me in a funk so deep that it was affecting my job performance.

I’m taking steps to correct it. I found a new position in a sister team doing media analysis, which is a combination of hardcore quant, web metrics, and product planning–much more up my alley. And I’m talking about what I’m going through. Esta, Greg, and Anil were right. It doesn’t get any better otherwise.

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Today I stopped at the gas station on my way in to work. The VW Microbus (there are quite a few still on the road around here in Seattle) ahead of me had his rear engine door open and jumper cables strewn about. Ah, I thought, wet weather and old Volkswagens. Sure enough, he asked me for a jump. It took me a few minutes to find the battery under the hood of my car (give me a break, I don’t have 5,000 miles on it yet!), but we hooked it up. On the second turn of the key, his van roared back to life. I drove off to work in search of coffee. It’s not such a bad day.

I’m alive

I’d love to say I’ve been incommunicado leading up to the first product launch I’ve been involved with at my company, but it’s not really true. My involvement is for real, but my piece was done weeks ago.

I’m almost finished helping a cross-group team put together a deck on a high visibility project to be presented at pretty high levels in the company. The presentation is Monday, November 11. This is a date with positive and negative memories for me: the anniversary of my first date with Lisa eight years ago, and the anniversary of a particularly ugly party I attended nine years ago in my last year of college. I’m hoping the presentation is more karmically similar to the former than the latter.
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