Churbuck.com

Ben at Walking the Berkshires and the Cape Cod Times (and its excreble daily video show CapeCast) are sounding the tocsin over that-which-should-not-be-eaten, Tomalley, or the vile green goo found inside the bodies of lobsters.

Apparently lobsters, who personify the term, “bottom feeder”  are utter scavengers who dine on whatever lands on the bottom, store a lot of toxic crud in their tomalley, which is essentially a two-organs-in-one deal for the lobster, playing the role of both liver and pancreas.

Lobsters lying in state

Sorry, but I don’t know about you, but I tend to use my liver to deal with stuff like toxins. Indeed, back in my glory years when tequila shots were my bane, anyone who ate my liver, Prometheus style, would have been struck dead faster than a spy biting on the cyanide molar implanted in their jaw.

My mother, a native of the New Hampshire sea coast, gets more mileage out of a lobster than a parasite. We’re talking Outer Limits/Twilight Zone sort of behavior — with much meticulous sucking and picking away until there is nothing but a red husk on the plate. She is one of those whack jobs that declare “tomalley” and its nasty red twin, “coral”or the roe, to be a delicacy. Ben’s mom apparently is the same way. Me, I believe tomalley is a soft, meconium sort of substance that one usually finds on a dock after a flock of sea gulls meets the fleet on a hot day.

So when the State of Maine health department and then the Massachusetts BOH declare tomalley to be bad for you, I’ve got to ask: “Who in their right mind ate it anyway?”

Check out the photo on this Cape Cod Times story. Hungry? And my respects to anybody who would brush their teeth with tomalley, you are my hero.

… to mess with Cisco VPN clients throwing of IP forwarding table errors.  VPN’s are the evil afterbirth of Lotus Notes — I swear the two go hand-in-hand down the toilet together.

I leave for a Beijing a week from Monday. I have my credentials – a big plastic placard that will hang around my neck; a new PC, pretty much configured, debugged, and ready to go; a high end digital camera; a FlipCam, a QIK phone (on its way), and hopes that all of my online life – from this blog to Flickr, YouTube to FriendFeed, are all accessible from my hotel, our command center, and the Olympic venues.

I’ll figure out WAN access when I get there. Right now this X200 is without an integrated WAN card, which is just as well. I figure I’ll buy a PC Card for my domestic Verizon EVDO, and do the same in China for a GRPS provider. I’m tempted to go buy an AT&T card but I worry about China’s mobile standards and figure it best to work that out in China in ten days.

I’m heading over to Beijing on August 4 for the duration of the Olympics, supporting our Olympic sponsorship team, helping out wherever I can, but focusing my attention on our Olympic athlete blogging program, the culmination of more than 18 months of intense planning and execution in what has been one of the more exciting but complex launches I’ve been involved with. I expect whatever challenges I face in blogging from the scene will also be faced by the athletes, who, for the first time, are permitted to blog during the Games by the International Olympic Committee. I have not had any direct interactions with the IOC or the Beijing Olympic Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG), but I have tormented our liason to those committee – Yan An – by pushing the IOC and BOCOG’s limits on what is in and out of bounds for our sponsorship. Blogging is a touchy topic for the IOC, but credit goes to them for relaxing the strictures that silenced the athletes in Torino.

These are (to my slight buzzword discomfort) the first Web 2.0 Olympics. If Athens in 1996 was the first Web 1.0 Games – thanks to IBM’s launch of the first Olympic website – then Beijing is going to mark another significant technical milestone thanks to blogging athletes, broadcasters grappling with control over video, DVR/Tivo timeshifting across a significant time zone gap between the venue and the audience in the West, and fans and athletes doing what they will with what they see. Putting this in perspective has been David Maraniss’s Rome:1960, a good account of the first televised Olympiad, one where an antiquated IOC under the draconian leadership of Avery Brundage made its last stand for an Olympic movement that transcended nationalism, forbade any hint of professionalism, and was beginning to grapple with issues such as doping and sponsorship.

Less than 50 years later and the Games are a massive media circus. Rome had no cute mascot or jaunty logo. The entertainment wasn’t choreographed by Steven Spielberg or Andrew Lloyd Weber but was a four-hour performance of Aida and a blessing from the Pope. Sponsorship was minimal and instead of marketers like me crawling over the athletes, Rome was the scene of frantic Cold War posturing and maneuvering between America and the Soviet Union.

So here we are in 2008 and I want to take some credit for pushing the limits on Olympic media, starting with the notion of who owns the content. In the Olympic media model beginning in 1960, the IOC sold the broadcast rights to a select number of well-heeled broadcasters. NBC paid under $500,000 for Rome. Wordlwide rights went for a reported $1.7 billion, more than $800 million for the US alone! NBC is taking some minor heat for its online video strategy – withholding the hot primetime sports from online until they have been broadcast. NBC is also partnering with Microsoft to make that video only available through Microsoft’s SilverLight player – the new high-def standard for online video. The question for the broadcasters and the IOC is how long can they hold onto the exclusive rights to the images coming from the events. The athletes are prohibited from filming or blogging about their performances, their competitors, or inside of the venues.

Lenovo has equipped 100 athletes with laptops and video cameras. About half are using our new consumer PC, the IdeaPad Y510, the others are using an assortment of ThinkPads. All of them have been given Lenovo-logoed FlipCams from PureDigital. We’re building audience for the athletes by aggregating their feeds and buying lots of ad impressions. We’ve asked, but not required, the addition of a Lenovo Olympic Blogger badge on their blogs. We’re not running ads on their blogs, we are not hosting or administering their blogs, we don’t approve what they write, we don’t manage their comments. The only rules governing the athletes are Rule 41 of the IOC.

Some big questions are going to develop over the next few weeks.

1. Web access. Will the leading social media tools and platforms be accessible?
2. Will the athletes push the limits of Rule 41? How hard a line is the IOC going to take against athletes who capture and share an actual event?
3. Will the broadcasters have to police instances of pirated video showing up on the video sites?
4. How will the Chinese public follow the Games online? Will any Chinese athletes blog? (We’re sponsoring one Chinese Olympic blogger, Yang Yang, a veteran speedskating medalist but not a competitor in these Games)

I think I am very fortunate to have a front row seat to these sorts of issues. This goes beyond Social Media 101 and is the ultimate “how I spent my summer” story, my first Olympics, and doubtlessly a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I intend to make the most of it.

Back to the blogging program. First off, I am eating my hat on the efficacy of Federated Media and Facebook. I acerbically squinted at Federated’s FaceBook plays for Dell, and blogged a “we’ll see” note after listening to Federated’s founder, John Battelle, espouse the wonders of his ad network at an Ogilvy conference. Well, we’re just a month into the program and I can attest that it is working as planned. Big credit due to our partners at Intel – Megan McDonagh and David Meffe really pushed the program and helped us figure out how to design and pay for it. Intel CMO (and fellow sculler) Sean Maloney’s drive to transform PC marketing through innovative digital tactics is transforming PC marketing and the promotional plan for the Lenovo Olympic Blogger program has benefited from Intel’s insights. I won’t divulge numbers, but we’re more than 50% of the way to our target and the Games haven’t even started yet. The surprise? Iceland, the second highest country in terms of fans on the Facebook app developed for us by Citizen Sports.

Second: metrics of success. These sorts of programs in social media marketing desperately need to earn their stripes if they’re going to fulfill the promise that has the analysts and pundits, pardon the pun, all-a-Twitter. I told AdWeek in a piece that ran this week that I wasn’t going to use the Olympics as a billboard for gross impressions of Lenovo. Our TV buy, heck, our double-decker buses, will take care of that. I am looking for a couple things out of this program.

1. I want some manifestation of interest and commitment from the audience to the athletes. Do they click through to the athlete’s blog? Leave a comment? Subscribe to a feed? Send a cheer on Facebook?
2. I want some PR recognition for Lenovo. We’re the technology sponsor. I want us to be acknowledged for our technical expertise and innovation. Running an online sweepstakes to win an all expense paid trip for two to the Games is decidedly uninnovative.
3. I want to raise the bar on interactive Olympic sponsorships. I will not slag any other sponsors on their efforts, but let’s keep in mind from 1996 to the present no sponsor has exactly done anything memorable online. There have been beautiful websites produced and launched. Programs initiated which met their goals. But who can remember a cool sponsor web experience from Salt Lake City?

Third: post-Games. We need to figure out how to continue to support and activate the audience we’re spending so much time and money to develop. Three weeks is a blip on our marketing calendar. How do I take this audience and sustain it after the Games? That’s the next big question and I have no easy answers right now.

So, tell me what you think. The feedback we’ve received – from the SEO community on how to improve the ranking of the main blog page, from fans who want things we hadn’t considered, from our partners at Ogilvy PR’s 360 Digital Influence Project (who have done an outstanding job helping us recruit and manage our 100 athletes in 29 out of the 32 Olympic sports from 25 countries) – has shaped this project into directions we hadn’t considered when we started planning the play a year ago.

Acknowledgments are in order.

From Lenovo, Alan White is the project manager who has made this all happen on time, under budget, and at a degree of quality above my high standards. Our technical talent, Esteban Agustin Panzeri, has sacrificed his health and personal life to design, code, and launch this. Tim Supples, who manages Lenovoblogs.com, has chased athletes from Italy to the Philippines trying to get hardware into their hands. In China, Sheji Ho and Yan An have been explaining this program to the officials and getting us permission to do what we need to do with total tenacity. On the agency side, Rohit Bhargava and John Bell’s team pulled off a complete miracle in identifying and recruiting 100 athletes in 90 days. Kaitlyn Wilkins and Megan Padilla have been magnificent. Intel is an awesome partner when it comes to doing cool stuff online. Megan and David are really into this stuff and it’s nice to work with someone who gets it as opposed to someone who goes skeptical on every new idea. Neo@Ogilvy has managed the Federated/Facebook program with great precision, and at Federated, James Gross and Peter Spande have made believers out of me.

Finally, Deepak Advani, Lenovo’s CMO, really had my back on this one. He has been unflagging in his support for this play, in taking the chance that it would collapse and turn into a ghost town. When others disparaged it, when the crabs in the bucket tried to drag it back down, Deepak stood tall and made it happen.

Ben Worthen at the WSJ blogs on a Deloitte study about how businesses overinvest in tech when building communities.

1. Going out with the claim that 60% of businesses invest over $1 million in online communities thanks to a Deloitte typo that should have stated 6% is not a great way to get off on the right credibility foot. Worthen does the correction, but …

2. The comments on the post are cluttered with community vendors, imagine that.

3. “Community” as a term, is tired and over-fraught with implications of good will, social good, and cooperation among customers and companies.

4. This is bad research on a tired topic.

“One of the hot investments for businesses these days is online communities that help customers feel connected to a brand. But most of these efforts produce fancy Web sites that few people ever visit. The problem: Businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.”

Business Technology : Why Most Online Communities Fail.

Dan Lyons ends a couple weeks of silence after pulling down the shutters on the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, quitting Forbes, and joining Newsweek as their new Steve-Levy-Tech-Eminence.

The new blog is The Real Dan

“So I wanted to get out and stay out. I really did. I wanted at least to have the summer off. But stuff keeps happening and I can’t resist. Jerry Yang and Carl Icahn and Steve Ballmer continue doing their frigtarded three-way monkey dance. It’s getting to be like one of those Ricky Gervais bits in the original Office (the funny one) where he lets the scene go on too long and it goes from being funny to being painful … and he still won’t stop. He makes you watch. It’s terrible but you can’t look away. And, if you’re me, you can’t help rushing to the computer to make fun of it. So thanks a lot, Ballmer-Icahn-Yang, for not letting me getting any rest. Just when I thought I was out, you pull me back in. Bastards!

Plus look at the ridiculous shit happening in the rest of the Valley.”

Good to have him back, I was missing my daily dose.

Hope springs eternal and so I filed my application to scull in this fall’s Head of the Charles Regatta. Having turned 50 in May, this would be my first year in the elder statesman category of Grand Master, but first i need to have my application accepted as it is a tough ticket to get into the Head unless one competes and finishes within 5% of the winning sculler’s time. My last time racing the HOCR was in 2003 — my first time as a sculler — and I performed horribly, coming in third from last with a terrible time and twenty seconds in penalties. The low light of that October morning was hitting the Weeks Footbridge in front of the Harvard Business School and being urged to capsize by drunken frat boys there for the WASP equivalent of NASCAR crashes.

That's the bridge I am about to hit in the background ...

Whatever, I rowed my first Head of the Charles in the early 70s when I was rowing in prep school, kept doing it through college, and a couple of other times in my college alumni boat. I’ve done the Head when no one but a couple hundred rowers were participating, and I’ve done it as a parent watching my daughter row it for my alma mater.

But, application acceptance or not, I did file my forms for the Green Mountain Head, which according to my good friend Charlie Clapp (silver medal, US Men’s 8, 1984), is the best of the fall regattas because it is so darn pretty, has no spectators, and the prizes are a bag of apples, a block of Vermont cheddar, or a jug of maple syrup. I’ve rowed only one GMH and thought it a most wonderful experience.

So — all this time in the garage gym working off the excess poundage now has an immediate goal. Don’t hit the Week’s Footbridge and try to do better than 2003.

Yeah, so I got scoped today — but not through the netherlands — but an endoscopy to check out my upper G/I tract. Nice doctor put me to sleep, waving a menacing hose with decimeter marks on it before I nodded off, I woke up an hour later feeling most soporific. I went in with symptoms of GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) , came out diagnosed with NERD. (something like Non-Erosive reflux disorder) When I got home I fell asleep for five hours.

The big ugly is this fall for those of you faithful who have inquired.

Major admission made by me last week — that while I work for a frigging PC company I had yet to experience (for any extended period of time) Microsoft Vista. Having spent the early part of my geek career as a reporter covering Microsoft, I used to get semi-aroused by new operating systems, and indeed still own a copy of the first version of Windows as well as IBM’s failed bid for GUI dominance, TopView. However, given my decline into the ranks of management in the mid-90s, the last significant OS I cared about was Windows 95 (Rolling Stones, Start Me Up).

Vista just never made it on the radar. I never felt compelled to upgrade the home machines with it, and the company hasn’t made the switch. So I did. Last week, when I took delivery of this new X200, it configured with Vista Business. “I’m screwed,” I thought. “Must send this back to IT and get downgraded to XP.”

Ah, but what a shame to take the best piece of hardware I have used and stick ancient software on it. So I resolved to figure out how to get the three essentials of life at Lenovo installed and running — SameTime — our Lotus/IBM instant message client, the Cisco Web VPN for getting into the internal systems securely, and Lotus Notes, the productivity equivalent of the heartbreak of seborrhea and psorasis.

Well, one week later and Notes stirred itself, found its server, and replicated, making me and my X200 members of the corporate network via Vista.

Yes, imagine that. Instead of being a bad man and hacking Ubuntu or OS/X onto the hardware and then onto the network, I took our default OS that we ship to customers and got it to work ….. (end of irony).

First impressions of Vista:

1. It is paranoid. Anytime I do anything it wants permission. Not once. Not twice. But three times.

2. It is pretty. Aero is good eye candy. I like the animated windows, the transparency of the menu bars, the bling bling is good.

3. It is pretty stable. Not a lot of lockups to report.

4. It is incremental to XP — sure the kernel may be all new, who cares?, magic smoke as far as I am concerned — but the U/I is an improvement. (The window switcher-thingy is most cool). Vista may not tie my shoes and walk the dog, but I like it and I am not going back.

The trees look skanky around here. Now I know why. The cicadas. They are gone, not to return for 17 years, but they left their mark.

The cicadas have come and gone, but not without leaving their mark on Cape Cod. The insects have caused more damage to area trees than anyone expected, marring thousands of oak trees from parts of Centerville to Mashpee.

The trees in Cotuit, Sandwich, Bourne and East Falmouth look like they are diseased and dying.

Cicada Problem on Cape Cod Sure to Have Lasting Effects | ABC 6 | South Eastern Massachusetts.

Monday - Cotuit

Tuesday - Personal Medical Day (getting the scope you-know-where)

Wednesday - Cotuit

Thursday - Morrisville to present the Olympic Blogger Program

Friday - Cotuit, start of 10 day vacation prior to Beijing

The kids have been bitching the boat is running weird when they drag each other around on a tube (we used water skiis) and claimed engine trouble. I knew what the problem was — barnacles on the bottom because I had been too impetuous in launching in March without repainting with antifouling paint.

Cotuit Skiffs on the run before the wind

The barnacles cause a lot of friction, are disgusting to look at, are a hazard if you try to climb aboard from the water, and make the propellor cavitate — or lose its bite in the water — because they disrupt the flow into the prop. So, out of the water came the boat, into the backyard, out came the pressure washer, and for an hour I whittled away at a pervasive mass of univalve parasites.

“Did you know barnacles have the longest penis of any organism on earth, relative to their size?” Asked number one son. (That makes two references to the male organ in one week on this blog, damning it to some netnanny filter for eternity).

Did he ask to help? Did he get down and dirty with the scraper? Did he smell like barnacle guts as the sun set in the west and my favorite question: “What’s for dinner?” was asked by number two son.

This morning I woke early, dragged the de-barnacled hull over the grass, and started looking for a can of green bottom paint. I really don’t want to drive to Hyannis this time of year — bad things happen there involving drivers from Quebec and lefthand turns. I found a can of green Woolsey copper paint — a relic from the 1950s that would definitely get the EPA and people in hazmat suits here if they knew I owned it. This was the real deal — stuff from my grandfather’s era, when smoking was good for you and exercise was bad because it enlarged your heart.

On it went, a gorgeous hue of green and then I discovered the keelson under the bow was severely worn down from too many groundings on the beach, so back into the shop I went to mix up a pot of WEST System epoxy. That went on, was smoothed down with wax paper and tacked into place while I finished the paint job by moving onto the boottop (see earlier post on waterlines and boot tops).

By this point its 90 degrees out, I am covered in green and red paint, have it in my hair, am sweating into my eyes which makes them ren, and up drives my step-sister with some Chinese VIPs.  After a hearty round of introductions and vague promises to go on a boat ride, I went back to Project Nautical, finished up, and by noon was ready for my workout. I sponged myself off with a rag soaked in paint thinner and set out in my garage gym/boat shop to row 10,000 meters on the erg. Wrong. The man/air moisture transfer equilibrium was waaaay out of whack and I easily dropped a gallon of sweat in the first 2,500 meters, and being sicked by the fumes and the smell of the bottom paint, I bagged it, came in side, showered and discovered one can actually continue to perspire in the shower.

Boat was launched, brief ride, but I was too fried to go to the beach, so I went to the grocery store with the other senior citizens and walked around in the air conditioning for an hour.

So ends a summer Saturday.

Today’s WOD (Workout of the Day) for Crossfit is my new favorite thing to do — essentially picking up heavy stuff.  Crossfit, for the unitiated, is a fitness program developed by a guy named Greg Glassman which combined elements of gymnastics, Olympic weight lifting, and “functional movements” to build a definition of fitness which is pretty primal and controversial. CrossFit is used by the military, police departments, fire fighters, to build “elite” fitness (whatever that means). Me, I am trying to prep myself for old age and retain what dwindling muscle I have left before I enter that danger zone of elderly falls, broken hips, and nursing homes.

I started doing it in April at the suggestion of my rowing coach, Tom Bohrer, who occasionally contributes to the CrossFit Journal on rowing (CrossFit favors the Concept2 ergometer for building anaerobic fitness). Since then I’ve lost twenty pounds and developed some some serious upper body strength thanks to the first big weight workouts since I was on the heavyweight crew in college. It has taken a lot of time and ugly effort, but in a weird way it appeals to the sense of rower’s masochism which generally has propelled me.

My favorite exercise is the ominous sounding “deadlift.” As Coach Glassman says in his inimitable way: “this movement is baked into our DNA.” I guess cavemen practiced it by picking up big rocks.

You bend over a bar, you grab it, one hand gripping in, one gripping out, you curve your lower lumbar, and then you stand up. That’s it. Grab weight. Stand up. Put it down.

Having had my share of back problems in the past, I approach the lifting of anything with great care and trepidation. I was once bedridden for two weeks after lifting a television set. One bad move and twang, I’m down for the count. Years of rowing — a decidely back unfriendly sport — have set me up for issues, so when CrossFit put me back behind a weight lifting bar, I was terrified of the consequences.

Fortunately CrossFit’s site is loaded with good demonstration videos and coaching advice. The inhouse lifting coach — Mark Rippetoe — has a great book called Starting Strength which focuses on the technique used in Olympic lifting. I bought a copy, watched the videos, and set myself up in the garage gym.

The result? Well, let’s say I am not going to lift 1,000 pounds ever in my lifetime, but I am happy to say I can now pick up, and set back down, without injuring myself, over 300 pounds (I think I can do more, but I ran out of weight and need to buy more) And I don’t feel like one of those body builder meatheads with a big leather belt around my waist when I do it.

As my old cycling buddy Marta puts it — “Strength is about three things. Pick heavy stuff up. Pick heavy stuff up and push it over your head. Pick heavy stuff up and carry it around.”

The net result of three months of hard work with the CrossFit program is a total vanishing of my lower back pain. The return to very elemental movements — true situps, pushups, pullups — and the emphasis on back-to-basics exercise based on lifting one’s own body weight has been a revelation. There’s no membership, no gym, no machine. No fad. Just stuff our grandparents did  like the Walter Camp Daily Dozen — only more evil because a lot of CrossFit is done against the clock to make it interesting.

This is all inspired by today’s NYT article on the great benchmark of fitness — the simple pushup. I’d include in the mix the humiliating pull-up, and now my new fave, the dead lift.

I’ve been a massive fan of the software that drives this blog — Wordpress — since first installing it in the fall of 2004 at the recommendation of Om Malik. As I’ve blogged in the past, this open source tool has the potential to disrupt the content management system market, as I believe it is now capable for most any content publisher to use and adapt Wordpress to provide CMS services at a level that would have easily cost $100,000 in site licenses a year ago.

Full disclosure, I am a major Interwoven Teamsite fan as well. I’ve advocated Teamsite into two big implementations and believe it, and other enterprise strength CMSs will always have a role in the large global enterprise. Put simply, the probability of a site as complex and critical as Lenovo.com converting to Wordpress or Drupal is nil at this point in time.

But Wordpress — the list of sites that have adopted the software as their primary CMS backs up my contention that the power of the “blog movement” is not the trackback/RSS/notification environment, nor the citizen journalist side, but that it opens the realm of dynamic and frictionless content management to the masses. Indeed, not only the countless numbers blogging for free on hosted servives like Wordpress.com and Blogger, but serious sites such as AllThingsD (Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at the WSJ), and CNN’s main politics blog (which doesn’t feel so much a blog as a really crisp site.)

Anyway, Mark Cahill upgraded me this morning to the latest and greatest version –2.6– and as he notes, the power of this version is not only it’s CMS capabilities (he formally annoints the version as a CMS and he should know coming out of Atex), but it’s auto-update capabilities for self-hosted morons like myself.

The single biggest feature though, is one that will come in handy for the lone gunman blogger: they will now be able to do an automatic (single click) update for Wordpress when a new version comes out. That’s a huge feature, and will help the less technical stay up to date and secure

Jim Forbes blogs about how the wireless capabilities of the Intel Centrino 2 chipset should be marketed.

“If I were working in PR today for Intel or one of its portable computer marketing partners, I would have set up tables with new notebooks that incorporate the new technology in a parking lot or field. Each of the tables would also have an older notebook with legacy wireless networking chipsets. And each of the tables would set in front of as range marker listing the distance between it and the WiFi router.

The very visible point of the demonstration is that the new chipsets free notebook users from being close to a WiFi access point.

Now let’s think a minute about Intel’s WiMax WAN technology. Want a fun way to demonstrate it? Set up a test network along Amtrak’s Oakland, CA to Sacramento right of way. Now load up 15 reporters, editors or industry luminaries in several of the cars on a train’s consist ( the term used to describe an engine and cars expressed as a single unit). Let them experience true persistent mobile connectivity, sit back and wait an hour or so for the rave reviews to appear.

Mobile persistent connectivity is a transformational experience for most users.”

Jim and I worked together at PC Week in the mid-80s. He has seen it all when it comes to PC marketing and I think he’s right. Users need to see this stuff in the field to grasp the impact of what we marketers try to embody in the speeds and feeds that characterize “spec pod” marketing.

I ordinarily don’t rant about Lenovo products on this blog. Old journalistic allergies to conflicts of interest, subjectivity and public relations sort of chills any professional promotional instincts. But I’m making an exception here because new technology has come into my life and, well, of the dozens of PCs that I’ve used (beginning, technically, with a Wang dedicated word processor in the spring of 1980), this one, by far is the most impressive and “personal” in the sense of strong ergonomics and usability.

I’ll get the punchline of this post over early: the X200 is the best ultraportable notebook computer I’ve ever owned. I’ve gone super ultraportable for the most part in my PC choices — avoiding anything above a 12″ screen and using external monitors and keyboards for extended desk use.  Weight is important, but having gone too small, I’ve come to realize that in order to function happily, I need a serious keyboard and a crisp screen. This is my first widescreen PC, and the increased screen turf is appreciated. It isn’t the lightest ultraportable, but I don’t quibble about a half a pound difference at this point in life. I want something that is sturdy, and the X200’s magnesium frame makes this feel more hefty than my old X60s and X61. The screen is far crisper than my old X61 tablet, and the Intel Core Duo P8600 2.4 GHz processor is the fastest by far. As Computer Reseller News notes in its review, this sucker isn’t quiet, it’s silent.

Thin? Very, not as skinny as our former flagship, the X300, but definitely a sleek notebook and not a brick. I think for hardcore ThinkPad users, the machine will be appealing because a) it is Trackpoint only with no touchpad to mess with your head and b) since optical is (in my opinion) going the way of the floppy, you need the UltraBase dock to get a DVD rolling. I take both omissions from the system — touchpad and optical — to be a big plus. But, it does have three USBs, a SD slot, and the usual port stuff happening.

I’ve put about four hours into it, and the port layout, the keyboard, the wireless, everything is working like a charm on this Centrino 2 machine, our first. I need to dig, but not sure if this has a WAN card. I know it has the new  N standard 802.11 wireless and potentially Wimax, but I need to dig into the system config to see what’s inside.

Oh, and it is the first time I’ve used Vista.

Can you believe that? I work for a PC company and have never used Vista? Weird. Anyway, that will be short lived as I need to send this back to IT to get the Lenovo VPN and usual Lenovo specific apps installed and will most likely get re-imaged with XP (I can connect to the VPN, I just can’t download the apps from the LANdesk service until IT gets their hands on it.)

The X200 is out next month, until then we need to do something about pre-orders because I get the feeling that while this may not make the cover of Businessweek like the X300 did, it definitely is going to be a very high demand laptop.

Here’s PC Mag’s take. “The ThinkPad X200 soars to the top of the performance charts, while delivering battery life well into the 6-hour range. It maintains many of the classic ThinkPad qualities, like the industry-leading keyboard and a wide range of wireless connectivity options.”

And here’s CRN’s. “In fact, the X200 is now giving the X300 a run for its money for the title of year’s best notebook.”

Notebookreview

Trust me, best PC I’ve ever used.

If these people can try, I should too ….

This ought to be more fun than owning a police scanner — guess which neighbor is battering the spouse, where’s the peeping tom, and watch as the world gets closer and closer to invading my backyard.

Barnstable gets crime maps.

This would have been porn for my grandmother.

Summer reading and then some. Thank heavens I speed read. I blew through two expensive airport procured hardcovers (a bad habit I need to break) to and from Japan:

• Mark Kurlansky’s latest  — The Last Fish Tale — (see my review of his Oyster tome here) about the fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts. An okay read, not as cool as his cod or oyster books, but okay if a little ADHD. This is the home port of the Perfect Storm crew, one of the last (along with New Bedford and a little bit of Chatham) of the working fishing ports in Massachusetts. I’ve visited the place a few times, it’s gritty, it’s North Shore. The book … skip it. He seems to have phoned it in and tap dances between a history of the artist colonies of Cape Ann to fishing regulatory policies amongst the Basque.
• David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Hated it. Sorry, this is Forrest Gump humor. No intelligence whatsoever. Okay, he’s gay, he grew up in North Carolina and has a place in Paris, Tokyo, New York. I get it.  Finds funny things in the mundane. Quits smoking. Describes food as tasting “slightly like penis” — yuck yuck.  I will not read him again.

Still in progress, The Wind-up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami. After just being in Japan, this book is really captivating me. I would say it is one of the better foreign author works I’ve read in some time (the last being the wonderful Blindness by Jose Saramago. Murakami does a wonderful job with the mundane, describing ennui better than anybody since Saul Bellow in Dangling Man, but mixes it up with one of the most gruesome war scenes since Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

The Cotuit Library’s annual summer book sale went down Saturday morning. Eliot my eldest and I took advantage of abuttor’s first rights and hit the tables before the vacationing vultures could crowd in. Came away with about twenty titles ranging from a Cruising Guide to the New England Coast (you never know) to some Cervantes. The wife is getting allergic to books due to constrained shelf space.

And, I just committed Sunday book lust and ordered Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World and  The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa.

Let’s see, other random titles. A re-read of Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain because a) I like to eat at Les Halles (best charcroute garni in America) and b) have taken to his TV show, No Reservations thanks to the miracle known as DVR. And … that’s about it. Some stuff on SEO and landing page optimization for the usual professional reasons.

Hazen-san posts this incriminating evidence that I ate horse in Japan.

Alas, poor Trigger, I knew him well

Cotuit this weekend

Monday through Wednesday — Raleigh.

Thursday through whenever — Cotuit. One more NC trip on the 24th, then maybe some vacation before August 5 flight to Beijing for the Games. Getting excited.