Beagle

The line of 3G-hopefuls outside of Boston's Apple Store:The fervor Apple instills in their customers, particularly compared to their competitor, is impressive.Incidentally, down the street, the line outside of the decidedly-less cool AT&T Store was only ten or so folks deep.

Consumerist (a must-read blog) has a link today to a New York Times article about CSAs, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

To date, clearly poised to surpass $1 billion before the cycle is over, the campaigns have spent a whopping $900 million. The New York Times, again proving that their core competency is in producing remarkably-informative graphics, has this rad ... [More] little interactive visualization:$4.3m to Verizon for cell phones!See also the related article, Cashing In on Obama and McCain . [Less]

Tell my wife I love her.

Like Havoc, Brette and I are members of a CSA in which we pick up our veggies once a week from a truck in a parking lot in Central Square. I just picked up this weeks share, and we have some great beets, carrots, mustard greens, and the best ... [More] strawberries I’ve ever had. In addition to the veggie CSA, we’re also members of a meat CSA, Chestnut Farms. The meat is local — raised in western Massachusetts and slaughtered nearby — and I pick it up once a month. It comes frozen, but I think it’s done so quickly after slaughter that the meat is still incredibly fresh when thawed… it never tastes like a freezer, it never has freezer burn, and it’s never tough. They offer different cuts of grass-fed beef, pork, lamb, and free range chicken every month and often have eggs for sale at an additional cost. We’re not big lamb eaters so we don’t get any, but the rest of the food is some of the best stuff I’ve ever tasted. The pork in particular has a much richer flavor than anything you can get in the store (including Whole Foods)… those factory farms just can’t make tasty pork. We get 10 lbs every month for $70. A quick survey of the freezer shows me that have: ground beef, ground pork, country-style spare ribs, pork chops, pork tenderloin, pork breakfast sausage, chicken legs and thighs, chicken breast, smoked bacon, and beef round eye roast. If you’re a meat lover and live in Massachusetts, I suggest signing up even though there’s now a waiting list. If you’re elsewhere, meat CSAs are becoming increasingly popular (Results 1 - 10 of about 643,000 for meat csa.) and well worth it. [Less]

The weather here this week has been awesome. It’s too bad Jacob moved away just as it was getting good. :( These kinds of storms remind me of my childhood. When I was six, I remember sitting on the front porch of my grandparents’ house with them ... [More] and listening to a battery-powered radio. The power had gone out, and a tornado had touched down about halfway between where my parents and grandparents lived — about 30 miles apart. Good times. [Less]

Collected by the Boston Globe, these photos of Martian skies are without peer. There is a romance to exploring the unexplored, about going somewhere new simply because that's what's next.It reminds me of President Reagan's speech, quoting from the ... [More] poem High Flight, later cribbed by The West Wing, on the night of the "Challenger" disaster. Scheduled to give his state of the union, he spoke in lieu from the West Wing:For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, "Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy." They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.And I want to say something to the school children of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."Slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.Anyhow, beautiful pictures. [Less]

I am keeping a food blog, Food Tastes Good. It is mostly recipes, such as,Curried Split Pea SoupGnocchi with Butternut Squash, Sage, and Browned ButterStrawberry Rhubarb SauceRed Wine SangriaDo check it out, if that sort of thing interests you.

This article by Ted T’so is an excellent commentary on the controversy around Nokia’s Dr. Ari Jaaksi (one of the bigshots behind the amazing Nokia N770/800/810 internet tablets) recent comments (1, 2) on the need for open source developers to ... [More] understand business constraints. Extremely well-balanced. Bruce Perens also wrote an interesting piece on it. [Less]

From the Tri-State Observer: Our concern is not that we are using the remainder of our strategic grain reserves for humanitarian relief. AAM fully supports the action and all humanitarian food relief. Our concern is that the U.S. has nothing else in ... [More] our emergency food pantry. There is no cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or anything else left in reserve. The only thing left in the entire CCC inventory will be 2.7 million bushels of wheat, which is about enough wheat to make 1⁄2 of a loaf of bread for each of the 300 million people in America. Wait. We had a strategic cheese reserve and nobody told me about this? Because my strategy is to eat as much cheese as I can when my wife is not around. I have a cheese-eating strategy. On an unrelated note, congratulations to Bockover, Gabriel, and the rest of the Banshee team for their 1.0 release. These guys are amazing hackers, and Banshee has really matured into a fantastic piece of software. And having a new website up and packages for several distros available on release day? These guys have their shit together. [Less]