Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

It’s time for the Thanksgiving menu, and not a moment too soon. I managed to get to Wilson Farms today in the nick of time to pick up my turkey, came home early, and boiled my customary Alton Brown brine (1 gallon vegetable broth, a cup of salt, a half-cup mixed brown and white sugar [...]

Lately it seems I spend more time on Facebook and Twitter than on the blog. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it just reminds me that I need to make an effort occasionally to write longer form content, as fun and entertaining as it is to write bite-sized summaries of links on Delicious.
But when [...]

I got an email forward from a relative today pointing to a pair of YouTube clips, one a part of a Barack Obama speech about sex ed, one an anti-abortion film, that included the tag line:
This is what’s going on in America.  This truth will make you bawl, and hopefully this truth will help everyone [...]

Tonight we’re singing Beethoven’s Mass in C, which is one of those undeservedly underperformed works — at least, compared to the rest of the Beethoven corpus. Compared to the average early English sacred work, it’s practically ubiquitous.
It’s an interesting setting of the work for an interesting time. Beethoven wrote the work in 1807, and it’s [...]

I leave Berlioz’s massive magnum opus, which we gave our final Tanglewood performance this weekend, with reluctance. It’s such a tremendous work, full of enormous dimensions of art, drama, mythology, and humanity.
As I bid my farewell (aside from the reviews, which are rolling in and will show up in my daily links), a few thoughts [...]

This has felt like summer, for the first time in recent memory. Why? The last few days, we’ve had high humidity and thunderstorms. Bam. Takes me right back to Newport News or even DC. Mowing the lawn Saturday morning was a real Proustian moment: cloudless sky but with steadily climbing temps and thickening air. By [...]

I’ve gone through and documented as much of Manila’s sitePref command as I can figure out by making SOAP calls and writing the response down. The result is here.

Cell phones: Finally giving up on my old Motorola StarTac. It did well for me for a few years, but a year in MIT Sloan of running out of battery before 6 pm every day (even with frequent recharging) and of having no signal all the time made me decide there’s got to be a [...]

UPDATE 1:45 PM EDT: A few links are surfacing that are pretty authentic about Apple’s new digital device, the iPod: a Firewire capable, ultraslim, hard disk based digital music player. Plus version 2 of my favorite Mac application, iTunes… Here’s the MacCentral coverage. Finally Apple’s page on the device is [...]

Today was the first day I broke out my tweed jacket. Jim’s ex-girlfriend used to say that she knew when fall arrived, because I would be wearing my tweed. It’ll only be in the fifties today, so I suppose this counts as fall.
The tweed was a souvenir from our trip to Ireland a few years [...]

Busy day today. Waiting for phone calls, working on an end of the semester project and a major assignment, and trying to get other things done as well.
Anthrax scare at MIT yesterday. Still trying to find out whether it’s for real. For the record, this is at the other end of the campus from where [...]

Apologies to anyone who saw the mess that was my homepage this morning. I updated the template yesterday to include Blogrolling links in the left hand nav, and found this morning that the page didn’t appear–except for the print friendly links. I looked at it and saw that my HTML syntax for the comments I [...]

It was a nice weekend. I’m in danger of getting into a risotto rut: I made a kind of unusual one this weekend. Instead of using onion in the base, this one used pancetta, garlic, sage, rosemary, and beef shoulder cut into 1/2 inch dice, with a reduction of Spanna (a Nebbiolo based wine, distantly [...]

Sing along with me now: “I’m back in Seattle again”… Blogging in my bathrobe drinking Starbucks. Gotta love civilization, even if you’re scared to death about what’s happening half a world away. There will be some tense shifts in this piece. That’s one drawback about writing offline–it’s less spontaneous and therefore either requires [...]

So at long last I finally got our laser printer working on our wireless network. It was a little bit of a pain in the butt, so I thought I’d share the process with you.
The architecture of the solution, when all was said and done, was pretty simple. LaserJet with JetDirect card, connected via Ethernet [...]