Category: Website

So I was looking at my website and wondering: why do I still have a blogroll? And does anyone care that I still have a blogroll?

Used to be that blogrolls were what everyone did. There were bitter discussions about being linked or unlinked. Now? It’s probably just a measure of my declining time spent in blogs, because I haven’t updated it in a long time. I’m lucky if I see one or two blogs (besides BoingBoing) on the blogroll that are actually updating in a 24 hour period.

So drop me a line if you still want to be on the blogroll, but I’ll be taking most of the items off in the next day or so. It’s time.

I’ve been offline for a really long time, in terms of this blog’s history, and thought I’d surface for air to post a brief update.

It’s been a quiet Christmas here at Jarrett House North. My mom came up to spend Christmas with Lisa and me, and we’ve had some nice gift giving and some really excellent meals. With only two cooks at any given time, we had to simplify the feast of seven fishes for Christmas Eve—instead, we just did pasta aio i olio with shrimp covered in breadcrumb with parsley and garlic and baked. On Christmas Day we did a beef tenderloin studded with pancetta with a nice red wine and shallot sauce.

Christmas Eve services at Old South were nice this year, a ceremony of lessons and carols. The opening, as in the Anglican service, was “Once in Royal David’s City”; for us, the opening verse was intoned from the back balcony of the church as the rest of the choir stood in the aisles with lit candles, then sang the second verse a cappella before the organ and congregation joined the final verse. The choir was good, despite the last minute addition of a substitute tenor (and one other tenor—me—being exceptionally sleep deprived).

What else? We have upgraded the photo equipment here at the Jarrett House, trading our old sturdy Nikon for a Canon PowerShot SD600. (I wanted something with higher resolution so I could print photos larger than 3″x4″; to my delight, the PowerShot is also faster, simpler, and generally better. Proof eventually to come once I get a chance to take some serious photos with it.)

And my old trusty 10GB iPod has been upgraded for a 30GB video iPod, thanks to a slew of gift certificates to Apple from my family. Now I have more room for music—I can fit at least 20 playlists on the thing alongside my standard rotating roster of unlistened-to music, plus photos, plus videos, and the screen is beautiful, bright, colorful, and shows album art. Special bonus: it fits in the car cradle I bought prior to the cross-country trip for the old one.

Today: a trip to the North End to get cotechino, a little light housework, and maybe even a nap.

I’ve touched on the problem of comment spam before, but this weekend I’ve decided to call a halt. Starting right now, I’m disabling access to the comments and discussion features on this site. If you have something to say, write about me in your own blog and I’ll read it in Technorati, or use the contact form to email me.

I hate having to do this; after all, this is supposed to be the two-way web. But I can’t keep up with an army of unpatched zombie PCs sending unsolicited spam comments. I had to delete over 900 spam comments last night, and there were 150 more when I checked this afternoon.

This will be a temporary measure until I can move this blog and its existing content over to a WordPress host, or to some other modern hosting system. But for right now I don’t have any other choice.

I guess this is the future of technology. Once it was only big players like Dave Winer who had enough comment grief that they had to disable comments. Now, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, everyone can experience what Dave was going through four years ago.

I’m getting buried alive under an avalanche of spam. Most of the offending items appear to start with the nonsense word piskasosiska, plus a unique numeric code that appears to correspond to the contents of the spam message. Presumably this is to make it easier to verify the spread of a particular unsolicited spam comment.

Anyone got any idea which bot network is sending these messages? I want them gone, and I’m about a heartbeat away from shutting comments down on this site entirely.

This should be the 10,000th post on my Manila blog. Will time end? Will the calendar still work? Let’s roll over the odometer.

… Oh well, the spammers win again. This was actually message 10,013. Messages 9995 through 10012 are all spam comments.

I finally turned off trackback on this blog. For a while there have been certain posts that were trackback magnets, and I was dealing with those through a manual review process. In the last month, though, just about every post started to collect trackback spam within a day or so of being posted. The version of Manila that my host supports doesn’t really provide any mechanisms for managing Trackback spam—there is no notification mechanism and no facility for centrally reviewing pings. So it’s gone as of last night, and good riddance.

I’ll continue to send out pings when I post, but given my experience with Trackback I don’t know if anyone will be receiving them.

…but I’m currently drowning in comment spam. I don’t even want to think about what the trackback spam picture looks like right now, too…

I’m about this close (holds fingers together) to turning off trackback on this blog entirely. I can’t remember the last time I saw a meaningful trackback ping.

One year ago today, I blogged about my new job with iET Solutions. It’s been a busy year, and we’ve done a lot: launched two brand new product lines; built a product management capability from the ground up; started hitting our release dates; even gotten ink in some fairly serious industry journals (check out this roundtable with our CEO).

I feel like I’ve grown a lot in the last year too. My writing on the blog may have fallen off, but my professional skills and experience have grown immeasurably, and I appreciate all of you who have stayed along for the ride.

I managed to get one of the last flights out of Boston tonight, after the storm passed by. Only JetBlue was still flying — just barely, as we had to wait for them to rustle up a flight crew before we could take off — but there were no problems getting off the ground. Which makes me wonder: why couldn’t any other carrier get it together long enough today to get any flights moving? You would think, since they’re practically all in receivership, that the threat of losing paying seats would motivate them to start flying again as soon as the storm passed through.

Anyway, I’m at the Bellagio right now, and we’re off to a roaring start. $10.95/day for Internet and only one electrical outlet that’s accessible without moving furniture. Plus I had to take a “smoking permitted” room. Hard to believe that in a hotel this size they could run completely out of nonsmoking rooms. Maybe I can switch in the morning.

Egolinking

The process of linking to things you find when you egosurf.

Today’s egolinks are to two unlikely sources. The first is to an interview in a Sloan School of Management publication about Sloan bloggers. Which reminds me: I need to add the other folks in that article to the Sloanblogs list.

The second is to my first mention in the New York Times—or more properly on the New York Times website. Not because of the Boycott Sony initiative, as one might think; this is as an addendum to an article about authors reading what bloggers say about them. My blog is linked from a page that summarizes bloggers’ discussions of Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. Ah well. Cool to see one’s name associated with the Grey Lady, no matter how it got there.

FWIW, I don’t think I invented the term egolink, but there aren’t many people using it. Spread the word!

1. I got a job. This is actually numbers 1 – 5, because through that job I got to bring a really cool set of products to market, liveblog the Gartner IT conference, and visit our German subsidiary. But more importantly I got a chance to confirm my value as a marketer and product manager and enabled us to have the financial capital to do a ton of stuff on the house. Which leads me to…
2. We fixed our house. Or a lot of things with it, including: air conditioning, heat, got rid of the oil burning boiler, media wiring, new windows and front door, insulation, rejuvenated bathrooms, improved storage, closed up walls, fixed the back lawn… Also found my way into a community of like minded individuals from whom I’ve learned a lot about home improvement projects.
3. Before I started the job, I learned a lot about myself through teaching SAT prep. I didn’t write about this experience too much at the time, but I think getting in front of people—especially high school kids—two or three times a week was just the kick in the pants I needed to get my self confidence back to secure a job.
4. I got to listen to some really good music—and review a lot of it, thanks to my association with Blogcritics.
5. Speaking of music, Sony BMG’s DRM mess wasn’t a great thing about the year, but the way the blogosphere, the public, the press, and the legal establishment responded to it, including the response to my Boycott Sony blog, was. I’m very grateful to all my readers on that blog for their contributions to the story.
6. And speaking about music again, I’ve had a chance to sing with two great musical groups, the choir at Old South Church and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Between the sublime moments like singing Mahler’s 8th at Tanglewood opening night and the semi-ridiculous ones like the Pops Christmas shows, it’s been a lot of fun.
7. I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with family, including one big road trip to my parents and a wonderful holiday (my inlaws were here through a few days after Christmas, my parents arrived on the 26th and left on Saturday, Esta took off this morning). And I’ve had the pleasure of another year with my loving and wonderful wife and our dogs, which is the best thing of all.
8. Lastly, I’m grateful to you, my readers. I am always surprised and humbled to realize how many people read this thing, and am frequently astonished when old friends contact me because they found the blog on Google. Here’s hoping that next year will be just as great as this one was.

Over at BusinessWeek Online, there’s an article about the effect of the customer boycott efforts against Sony. I’m quoted about the Sony Boycott Blog. See my followup there for my reaction to the article.

I only wish they had actually linked the blog. That would have been an even nicer birthday present.

I’m going to occasionally post stuff here about the Sony Boycott that doesn’t seem appropriate for that site. Since this site is allowed to be as narcissistic as it has to, these things will end up here…

• The Baltimore Sun name checked me on Sunday, citing both the Sony Boycott Blog and my original post on the topic as evidence of the role of bloggers in keeping the Sony DRM story alive. Nice to be cited in company with Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing and Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals.
• Our old friends at the Guardian also cited the blog in their discussion of the case as an indication of how badly things are going for Sony BMG.
• An MSNBC column that appears to be a list of random links clicked on while surfing Slashdot and Digg pointed to the boycott.
• Finally, Home Theatre Magazine cited the boycott blog as part of its analysis of how this fiasco is damaging its reputation with customers.

I’ve previously cited cases where the BBC, the Toronto Star, and others have pointed to me, as well.

Sometimes I forget how long I’ve been writing this blog: over four years, going on five. Four years ago today, in 2001, I pointed to my friend John Vick’s band Hello Swindon. Four years later, Vick is a family man—congrats, John, on your recent marriage.

Three years ago today, in 2002, I disclosed my struggles with depression for the first time. I won’t lie and say that that is no longer a problem, but I’m certainly a lot better off than I was then, thanks largely to the support of family and friends.

Two years (and a day) ago today, in 2003, I had just returned from Santa Rosa where we tasted some great wine and I got my picture taken with a famous round-headed kid.

And a year ago today, in 2004, I announced my job search. Happily, that one turned out well. I love what I do and wouldn’t be anywhere else right now.