Churbuck.com

Alan Greenspan hung it up today, ending a run as chairman of the Federal Reserve that started in August 1987. What an amazing career, there was a time when I actually stopped work to watch the man present his Humphrey Hawkins testimony to a pack of clueless congressmen, laughing when he answered inane grandstanding questions with the measured, calm, engimatic replies that were so …. Greenspan.

This is a man who could say volumes without saying anything. I met him in 1992 at a breakfast at the Willard Hotel in Washingon. Howard Banks, Forbes’ Washington bureau chief, somehow finagled Greenspan into being the breakfast quest, not an easy thing as the occasion was a semi-annial editorial board meeting of Forbes editors and reporters, all of whom were determined to get the Sphinx to utter some profundity.

For an hour, Greenspan, sligfhtly preoccupied, even grumpy, put up with our questions, said some seemingly sagacious words, then vanished into the morning.

"Did he actually say anything?" I asked Jim Michaels, the editor in chief. 

I guess not, even though the discussion was off th record, there was nothing to put on the record.

Anyway, I’ll miss him. His record of being the economic helmsman of this country, was, in my non-economic opinion, steady and stable. Let’s hope Bernanke is half as effective.

Two nice bike rides, a warm reunion with the dogs, and two nights sleep in my own bed. What could be finer?

Seeing the crocuses starting to bloom at the edge of the rose garden. 

Personal Appeal – Wikimedia Foundation

Give your money to Wikipedia, the best deal on the Internet. You know you use it, now cough up!

The arrival of the LL Bean Spring 2006 Fishing Catalogue is aways cause for some celebration in my mailbox. I like looking at the new year’s selection of stuff I shouldn’t be buying.

Anyway, some poor soul in Freeport, ME has a lot of explaining to do. The second page of the catalogue invites customers to "Talk to Our Experts at Our FISHING HOTLINE"

The 800 number, which is "800-LLB-FIS_" (to find out why I’ve omitted the last digit, read on) offers some "experts" alright. But not the kind of experts most people want to contact. DO NOT DIAL THE NUMBER IN THE PRESENCE OF ANYONE! THIS IS NOT WORK SAFE!

After being told about this Royal Snafu last night, and after hearing the first five seconds, all I can say, is DIAL ALL PHONE NUMBERS before publishing them. I pity poor Bean, they are an excellent company and don’t need people like me blogging their embarassments.

Update: 1.31.06 – Kennebec Journal reported on 1.28 that the number should have been 1-800-FISHLLB. "A most regrettable mistake," sayeth the flack.

I am a big bow-tie wearer. Have been since the early years at Forbes, driven in part by a Cotuit cultural gestalt — reinforced by Boston Yankees in general — that bowties are de rigeur.

Led by the estimable Hon. Charles B. Swartwood III, aka Brownie, and emulated by other stalwart Cotuit Skiff sailors such as Phil Odence and Lincoln Jackson, and seen elsewhere around the neck of my daughter’s godfather, Charles Clapp III (roman numerals are an essential accessory to bowties), I joined the fad and learned how to tie a bowtie.

Tying a bowtie is the big barrier to entry for most would be tyers. I just laid on a bed, closed my eyes, and pretended my head was a shoe and I was tying the laces. The result was the Elephant Man of bowties (I am not an animal, I am a human being …), but with some careful adjustment and tuning it began to resemble something like those worn by George Will and the late Sen. Patrick Moynihan.

Now bowties are the middle-finger of male fashion. They provoke violent reactions of hatred from certain quarters. While interviewing for a job with a Wall Street investment firm, I was told bluntly that the bowtie had to go, that it represented invidualism and eccentricity that was not going to wash with clients.

I didn’t take that job.

Another time I was riding on an elevator in New York with a friend and his Danish girlfriend. Danes apparently are the most multi-lingual people on the planet (I will check that factoid). Our fellow passengers began to speak and then laugh in an undetermined Scandanvian language.

At the conclusion of the elevator ride the Danish girlfriend sharply (heatedly) addressed the strangers in their own tongue. Their faces went from surprise to total horror.

"What did you just say to them?" I asked.

"I told them to be careful about what they say in elevators because they never know who is listening," she said.

"And what did they say?"

"They said you look like an utter geek with that bowtie."

Nice. I felt good about myself.

My wife, who dresses me the way my mother dressed me when I was four … in ways I don’t agree with, but put up with because all of my taste is in my mouth … decided to equip me with a high end selection of bowties (favoring Hermes no less) for what the French call a papillion.

Wearing one piece of high fashion as opposed to Gap or Brooks Brother makes me feel special, but what really makes bow tie wearing special is that they are the world’s best "a$%hole" detectors. They are like Geiger counters in this regard. If someone gives you grief about bowties, then they are, ergo, a complete butt head.

I have not worn a bowtie lately. Arriving at a new job with a bowtie is a very risky manuever and sets the stage for a long, long time. Last night I met with the buddy who’s Danish (now-ex) girlfriend came to my elevator defense. He was shocked, stunned and angered to see without my trademark and accused me of bad brand management.

Tell you the truth, bowties lost a lot of their appeal the day I saw that utter loser Tucker Carlson get taken down by the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart.  The most visible bow tie wearer in the world got slapped down and I wanted no part of it.

Anyway, this post was inspired by the following justification for bow tie wearing: 

Mid-Iowa Newspapers – NEWS – 01/25/2006 – Outrage and passion

"For one woman, the thought of Gartner first conjures up the image of his signature bowtie, a feature that is only accentuated on the jacket of his new book, colored all in red against an otherwise black and white headshot.

"Gartner began wearing a bowtie when he started raising his sons almost 25 years ago.

""They will pee all over your tie if you have a regular tie on while you are changing their diaper,""as Gartner tells it. ""It occurred to me that it was a risky business, so I started wearing (bowties) and never got out of the habit.""

Google, Sun, and Lenovo are against "badware"

 An interesting alliance to knock down spyware in partnership with Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and the Oxford Internet Institute.

Esther Dyson is involved.

www.stopbadware.org 

writing from the lobby of the Harbor Court Hotel in San Francisco on the hotel’s wireless network. The company VPN can’t make a connection for inexplicable reasons, so I decamped earlier to a local Starbucks where their t-Mobile WAN was able to support the connect and I could pull down my Notes mail and get onto the corporate IM client.

Further frustration over the lack of internal IT support for my Treo 650. I had used Pylon at IDG to remotely fetch Notes mail and synch, but alas, only the Blackberry is supported and I am not keen on transferring to RIM while their future remains in question thanks to the NTP suit. Also don’t want to lose my number, take the hardware hit for dumping the Treo (which I am not a big fan of due to software issues), and then try to learn the Blackberry interface. But, that’s the deal and that’s how it will have to be.

Good discussion yesterday with David Berlind at ZDNet over his frustrations into the new-PC migration process and how that is a barrier to purchase for many potential new owners. He had some innovation suggestions for solving the problem, and having gone through the transfer process myself last week, I completely empathize, particularly in migrating my stable of extensions, widgets, bookmarks, subscriptions, passwords, and other personal detritus over to the new machine. Berlind is very passionate about the Think brand and his most telling insight was the effect that a missed keystroke onto the Thinkpad’s "back and forward" keys can have on a Wordpress blogger. Having blown away a big post through the same mistake, I once again was empathetic.

Cotuit Dry Toilets: self-contained, composting, waterless, airtight, integral-urinal toilets

These are made by my friend, Conrad Geyser, a remarkable individual who lives a few houses away from me in Cotuit.

Conrad, in addition to making composting toilets, builds fast Cotuit Skiffs and has an aquaculture grant off of Cotuit’s Sampson Island where he raises quahogs. He also installs solar panels. A very cool person.

I bought this radio — the Grundig YB400PE — in 1995  at the Circuit City in Union Square, NYC when I was starting Forbes.com and needed some tunes in the evening while studying Latin in my room at the Yale Club (don’t ask …).

I fell in love with the design. It was so Germanic, so functional that I had to have it despite its steep price — $150 — for a radio. Ah, but what a radio.  Ten years later and I’m still listening it, typing away while it plays the wonderful public radio station WUNC (I think the best public radio station I’ve heard, and Boston has two giants, WGBH and WBUR). This is the radio I’d take on safari, the one I’d listen to during my solo circumnavigation or while holed up in the bar of the Intercontinental during the next military coup.

AM, FM and Shortwave, it came with a retractable 30-foot shortwave antenna. Now I have no great interest in shortwave, and the radio won’t find any stations without the antenna draped over the room and over the window sill, but the tuning on the unit is entirely digital — you punch in the frequency on a dial pad like a phone, press "Freq" and bang, there you are. It saves 40 pre-sets, has a great alarm clock, and is small enough to tuck into a garment bag. This is truly a classic piece of global traveller equipment.

The model has been discontinued and replaced with a newer one, and Grundig, a 50-year old company, was acquired a few years ago by Eton. For an interesting history of Grundig, click here. 

The sound quality is excellent, and I’ve used it for years as a shop radio while I work on my boats or bikes. The funny thing that I realize is that despite the presence of a sleek black Nano iPod in my rucksack, it’s the Yacht Boy that gets used the most. 

America, United States, Times Online, The Times, Sunday Times

 Google is taking a stand at a very interesting time when privacy and basic rights are under assault. I admire a corporation, especially one that isn’t journalistic (who are expected to take these kinds of stands, but seem to do so less often these days), that can do the right thing for its customers.

The Sunday business section of the New York Times carries a good examination by Tom Zeller of the "Millennial Generation", those born between 1980 and 2000 (the first generation to be born into a world where PCs were assumed, not introduced, unlike my generation which used typewriters in college and adopted PCs in our 20s). The piece is somewhat pedantic in discussing this new demographic’s infatuation with digital media, instant messaging, social networks, gadgets, etc..

Yet it is worth a read because of the insight that in four years this group will outnumber boomers and GenX.

The good quote from Vicki Cohen,vp at market researcher Frank Magid Associates:

"…every time you turn around there’s something new on the horizon. And this group, as we’ve been noticing, is kind of the arbiter, quickly determining whether things are hot or not." 

The question, for marketing, is the influence of this group on promulgating discoveries to the other demographics. Will a Facebook ever emerge for boomers and seniors? Will Flickr become the favorite of grandparents seeking pictures of the grandchildren? Will text messaging catch on with executives the way instant messaging has permeated corporate communication channels? 

Apologies in advance to non-Times Select members trying to find the piece.

I’m not a barbeque addict — waxing passionately about dry rub vs. wet, Memphis vs. K.C. — so figuring out Carolina BBQ is probably wasted on me. However, being the obsessive compulsive that I am when it comes to diving into the local experience and being Roman while in Rome, I did a Google Map search for BBQ near my office, found a joint a couple miles away, and decided to launch the BBQ boat before exploring for an apartment.

The place was Lewis Bar-Be-Que on NC 55. The place was empty which I didn’t take as a great sign (to be fair it was after 2 pm, so the lunch rush was over) , but the place felt funky which was a nice break from the complete barrage of fast food that surrounds me down here. Papa John’s, Chick-N-Fil, The Colonel, and fancy versions of McDonald’s called "McCafes". The menu at Lewis’s wasn’t very complicated, so I figured I’d go in and say, "Hey, I have no clue what to order. What should I get? I’m from the North and I’m an alien" or just go for it.

I kept it simple and went for: "A barbecue sandwich please."
 

The lady found a hamburger bun, went to the steam table, scooped some pulled pork (essentially pork shoulder stewed a looong time until it falls apart) and asked me if I wanted "slaw."

Sure. Coleslaw. My side dish. She plopped a big green blob on top of the pork, put the lid on it, and wrapped it up. Okay. So the coleslaw is on the sandwich, not next to it. No big deal. So I squirted extra sauce on the thing and sure enough, the unique attribute of Carolina BBQ made itself known — it’s vinegar based, not tomato. So a ton of the stuff soaked in, but that’s not a bad thing.

" Nor is it about the heavy BBQ sauces found elsewhere.  Carolina barbecue is splashed with a thin, vinegar based sauce.  There are three regional sauces, actually.  Eastern North Carolina for the basic sauce, western North Carolina for the basic sauce with a bit of tomato added and South Carolina style, spiked with mustard."

HollyEats.com

I scarfed it in the parking lot while reading the map for my next destination. It was very good. Not earthshattering, like the Hunan smoked ham at Brandy Ho’s in San Francisco, but not bad. Good enough to do again and good enough to blog about.

Apartment hunting

Tomorrow I continue the apartment-and-best BBQ search. The apartment situation is … well … put it this way, I haven’t lived in an apartment since I was 34. The landscape down here — and to be fair, it is winter — is sort of like Nashua, NH without snow (and my nickname for Nashua is Nausea). Lots and lots of pine trees. Big pine trees. Brown grass, swampy little creeks, no real hills, certainly no vistas. So, one doesn’t shop on the basis of view, but amenities. I looked at very new "planned" communities around Brier Creek, places that have seen better days around Lake Lynn, and places that are possibilities. The whole affair is tedious. Furnish or unfurnished? Spartan for just me, or sumptious for my wife and son? The prospect of furnishing a place is discouraging. I need a tent with Internet as far as my creature comforts are concerned. I need to build a decision tree for what I need an apartment and why. Other than sleeping, bathing, and eating, the primary attribute is a closet I can park my stuff in. On a cost basis, I can continue the itinerant life-style in extended-stay studios such as the one I am in now, but that builds in some stress in moving my stuff back and forth every weekend.

I need to drive out of the suburban areas and find the country side. I’ve never been a fan of the angry suburbs. -I need some funk, so tomorrow I go to the college town of Chapel Hill to look for people who prize a good cup of coffee, a decent bicycle mechanic, and a big bookstore.

 The tools for finding a place are actually kind of interesting. I found Rent.com (an Ebay company) which is sort of a apartment management company listing service that is slick and shows all sorts of great living experiences in a nice search engine. Then I run the marketing version through apartmentreviews.com and discover that one lakeside complex I visited had a murder occur on its premises last month. Nice.

The reviews people leave are funny at first, but after a while it’s all complaints about the management, the missing maintainance men, the dog poop, the loud music, the guy downstairs who smokes.

Oh well, short lease, furnished if possible, and be done with it.

Do not stay in a hotel that backs up to the loading dock of a Sam’s Club (Studio Plus, Weston Parkway, Cary, NC). The trucks get unloaded at four a.m .by forklifts with back-up beepers and trolls who throw dumpsters filled with Yoohoo bottles off the roof into the parking lot.

I would open the window and scream, but they’d never hear me.  

Lowell Bryan, one of the greater presences at McKinsey, was a source of great management aphorisms during my stay at The Firm. One that I won’t forget was his observation that no executive is completely integrated until six months on the job. I chafed at that sweeping statement. Who wouldn’t? I’d assimilate in three months. Heck, give me a month and I’ll be up to speed, on the same page, getting the joke. I think he was right, not in the sense of effectiveness, Lowell was indicating that half a year is what it takes until someone is completely familiar with the system, the culture, and the goals.

Those lists of stressful life events and their effect on one’s health and mental well-being must include drastic career change somewhere in the top rankings. Divorce, grieving, moving homes … the new gig ranks up there for sure as one of life’s stress peaks.

There’s plenty of self-help out there. Jim Citrin, the prolific Spencer Stuart headhunter wrote, You’re In Charge: Now What, which I read last spring upon arrival at CXO Media. It was helpful, providing a rational framework for the first 90 days. Getting into Citrin’s work and letting Amazon do its job and recommending another title, I also read

The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels. That plowed the same ground, was less useful, but had some impact.

The upshot is similar to a McKinsey engagement, go in as well prepared as possible, ask the right questions, don’t arrive swinging a business plan, make the hard HR decisions sooner than later, establish the communications protocols with the boss or client, and then seek a quick win to establish some credibility.

The key thing I learned this week, having gone through four "first weeks" in six years is this: the sense of helplessness and dislocation fades and fades quickly. Any disruption in the psychic Force is mostly due to doubt and being sharply jolted out of the comfortable. It passes, and if you can tuck the panic attacks away and focus on structuring the learning and absorbing, then the facts will settle you down. That and keeping close to a support network of former colleagues and friends.

The worst new-guy experience I endured was when I took on Switzerland in 2002. Throw some jet lag, a new language, and a grim corporate apartment (in Wipkingen, a neighborhood of Zurich) together and you have grim. A couple months later and I was literally and figuratively hiking up mountains. The cultural adaptation is tough one to finesse. Jim Michaels, the venerable former editor in chief of Forbes, despised the term "corporate culture," but every organization has its own cadence, language and demeanor. It’s tempting to chafe against it, but it will pervade, ultimately. For example — a great indicator of a corporate culture is its Powerpoint templates. McKinsey was black and white and all business. The Swiss were incredibly focused on corporate identity and would howl if a foreign font polluted the template. Journalists? Well, journalists despise Powerpoint and are fond of citing Scott McNealy’s quip that powerpoint was the worst blow to corporate productivity ever invented. But look at the presentation style of an organization and you’ll soon determine how buttoned up it is, how entrepreneurial, how analytical, quantitative or verbal.

The concept of being pushed and stretched to grow is familiar to anyone who has seriously trained for an aerobic sport.  The same holds for careers. One can sit in place in a comfortable slot for years or you can seek out some scar tissue. It may be ugly, but it is usually stronger. Being new, while unpleasant, has its upside — variety builds perspective and, one is never as clean of sin as one is the first day on the job.

PodDater.com

Took less than three months and already there’s a business model built around the video iPod — pod dating. Think Match.com but with video. I am glad I am married.

Tip of the hat to Michael Laskoff at The Brand Asset Management Group for the pointer.

Lunch over IP

Thanks to a Boingboing pointer I discovered Bruno Giussani’s very thoughtful blog. Having worked for two years in his region — specifically Ticino — it’s refreshing to get such smart insights into the European tech and entreprenurial community.

I need to spend more time seeking out things like this. Bruno’s post on the WEF’s decision to edit blog postings at Davos this coming week was what drew me into his feed in the first place.

My Weblog: Notebook Makers’ Greatest Assets: R&D

Jim Forbes on why R&D matters in notebooks.

"What do best selling notebook brands have in common (I mean besides healthy sales figures)? The answer is simple: they share a common trait– they’ve spring from companies that have portable specific research,development and design  projects.

The best example of this is the ThinkPad brand. For the last decade of the 20th Century I watched IBM fuel and compound the growth of  ThinkPad by adding features that came from its R&D labs and design centers.  Some of the products weren’t so successful– the Butterfly expanding keyboard on the ThinkPad 701, for example. But others propelled the brand into a name that not only had above average recognition, but which carried with an implied cachet of reliability, durability and innovation.

When IBM sold ThinkPad to Lenovo, i sincerely hoped that the vast body of ThinkPad R&D as well as related experimental design was part of the sale. Judging by the ThinkPad X- compact notebook brand, I think the R&D DNA it was transferred to Lenovo. My one big fear about Lenovo ThinkPad was that the brand would go bland, becoming yet just another notebook cranked out in Taiwan or the People’s Republic that was based on a bland formula driven by spread sheet economics. If that happens, then ThinkPad will end up joining a list of products sold at membership department store and unloaded on west coast docks from high speed ocean freighters that make the Pacific crossing in seven days. And that’s not good."

 Friday I get to tour Lenovo’s Design Center. This is going to be a candystore experience for me.

Arrived Sunday night on Southwest with the realization that at $75, the fare made the flight cheaper than a train, indeed, making Southwest essentially a bus with wings. No complaints here.

Day two in the Research Triangle coming to a close with a new X41 Thinkpad. Always nice to unwrap a new PC. Someone needs to come up with an easy transfer system — especially for moving browsers and extensions, etc. etc. over without a hitch. Six hours in, and I still have a stack of stuff to install and move over.

That said, total FNG experience I am living in, trying to remember names, figure out passwords, find the printer, the men’s room, the coffee, and then returning in the evening to the throughly depressing extended stay suite in Cary, NC.

Will blog more in the days to come.  Cell is the way to best find me, that or the usual emails.

Took a nice hour-long, 18 mile spin with the good Dr. Dan yesterday afternoon, overdressing as it turned out for the 55-degree spring temps. The man is on fire after losing 15 pounds over the fall, so it was a hammer-fest the entire ride.

Riding in January is a bit insane — the drivers aren’t used to seeing cyclists on the road so one has to be extra, extra careful not to be taken out by a roaring pickup truck driven by a hungover nailbanger pissed off that someone has the time and wherewithal to get on a $4,000 bike wearing day-glo spandex. But, as the Scandavians say, "There is no bad weather, just bad clothing.’ Dress right, put up with the snot production that comes with rolling along at 20 mph in the winter air, and as they say, the "Tour de France is won in January."

More in later post on the cycling goals of 2006. 

Walter Brooks, a Cape Cod publisher, evidently technorati’d my "Dangling Man post" and sent this email:

"I ran into you (I hope it was thee) today reading

 

…all ending with a sad and final thud as I drove out of Manhattan to Cape Cod with a car filled with mementos and my Herman Miller Aeron chair, a totem of the dot.bomb if there ever was one.

 

at http://www.churbuck.com/wordpress/. Do you have a Cape Connection? Am I addressing the correct writer? What is the real meaning of existence… forget the last.

 

If you do ever have thought about our sand spit held together by package stores" please past them along and I’ll feature that post on http://CapeCodTODAY.com.

 

All the best….

 

Walter Brooks, Editor & Publisher, 

900 Rt 134, South Dennis, MA 02660  ( 

Newspaper; http://CapeCodTODAY.com

Magazine; http://CapeCodTRAVEL.com

Network; http://BestReadGuide.com"

Funny – I hadn’t seen any local blog of blogs before. The concept of regional blogging seems strongest with Jonathan Weber’s community publishing experiment in the west. Good concept whereever it lands.