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Tomorrow marks the opening of the silly season here on Cape Cod. Already the roads are clogged, the grocery stores jammed, and all good year-rounders transition into a sullen mode of nocturnalism and native resentment.

The first rule is never, ever go to Hyannis on a rainy day. If the touristas can’t go to the beach, then they go to the mall. All transactions — parking stickers for the beach, clamming licenses, renewal of drivers licenses — must be completed by Memorial Day or bad things will happen.

The waterways are a parade of Fiberglas and exhaust. The water turns tepid and the red tide arrives. The beaches are clogged with sunburned whiners, giving rise to my favorite summertime entertainment, Beach Theater, in which one gets to watch children enact seaside dramas for the benefit of all. Swimming is a dodgy affair (see red tide) due to the toilet habits of said children. Fishing shuts down due to the nautical parade of people wearing too little clothing in boats with too big engines.

The good news is it lasts for eight weeks. Labor Day — once the saddest day of the year — is now my happiest. The bad news is my extended family, ex-roommates, and other people I am forced into jocular familiarity with due to circumstances beyond my control, all come knocking, ready to stir things up (“Wow, have you put on weight?”) and play in what my cousin has come to dub “Camp Alky-Smoky”; where everyone over-imbibes and begins to tell each other what they really think of each other.

When I was young the alarmists used to say that Cape Cod was on the road to overdeveloped ruin, soon to become a nightmare like Long Island. Guess what? It’s gone beyond that. It’s now a year round suburb of Boston and totaly over-romanticized as a summer destination. All the smart locals sold out years ago and moved to Nova Scotia. Those of us who remain just get grumpy and grind our teeth for two months.

So I post, an hour before driving to Hyannis on the Friday before the Fourth of July on a rainy morning. Pray for me.

Scenes de Ma Vie Bucolique » The Simple Life in Arlington, VT

Meredith Levinson at CXO has a blog about life in Vermont. She gets the joke.

Essentials, 2006 edition [dive into mark]

Mark Pilgrim’s (former Mac man, moved to Ubuntu on Lenovo Thinkpad) list of essential Ubuntu apps.

Naked Conversations: Why Support Matters
Shel Israel continues to confirm that customer support should be marketing driven and not regarded as just another cost of doing business:

“I go so far as to believe support should be a part of an enterprise marketing organization. It should not be treated as an ROI-depleting expense, but an opportunity to generate word-of-mouth marketing champions. For me this is an issue of emerging passion. In a world where companies and customers are having fewer and fewer face-to-face or voice-to-voice encounters, the imprint of the support line conversation is eclipsing the 30-second spot, the full-page ad and the ten city media tour in terms of perceptions and brand.”

Michael’s Thoughts: Sampson Kids, Powered by Lenovo

Thanks to Michael Sampson at Foldera for the nice plug:

“My boys asked for a new Windows-based computer so they could run some of their Lego software. I had purchased a Mac Mini last year, but it’s the variant that doesn’t run Windows. So I rang my reseller (Michael Burry at TLC) and asked what he would suggest. Lenovo, said he.”

[full disclosure, I sit on Foldera's advisory board and hold shares and options]

Response Source | Press Releases

LoveHoney.co.uk is advertising what could be the most unusual job ever.

[Tip o'the hat to Jim Forbes for the pointer]

Wow. It’s faster. It’s better looking and I like it.

Ubuntu rocks. This X41 is now a cooler machine. The question is what took me so long to get here.
Now to explore the wonders of wine and how to run Lotus Notes. If I crack that, the migration is underway. Otherwise I’ll be toting two laptops around.

Just in time for my presentation to the Lenovo OpenSource Committee!

Installing now. I went with the full distro but was unable to get into the Gnome U/I, so now I’m on the “safe” install with the hopes I can use it to establish a permanent install on the harddrive. Ahh … that’s better. I don’t do command line interfaces anymore — BASHing my way through the thickets of Linux is an exercise and futility — but the GUI loader is much more friendly to wanna-be Linux geeks like myself.

This is fun. Nice to see a new OS.

Why Ubuntu? SuSE was a massive drag — it isn’t moron friendly and insisted on DHCP configuration or IP configs which didn’t yield success. That said, Dan Lyons at Forbes has been playing with SuSE 10.1 and is happy with it, which is why I went that path in the first place.

Why am I doing this to myself? I want to know what the OOTBE (out of the box experience) would be for an average user trying to mess with an alternative OS. That’s all. I can predict that the install will utterly strand me in terms of productivity given Lenovo’s allegiance to Lotus Notes (the skin disease of productivity applications) and Lotus SameTime — the crack  cocaine of Lenovo communications.

Unless someone knows of a Notes port to Linux …. which, given IBM’s pledge of allegiance to opensource, might not be so far fetched ….

I have a perfectly servicable X41 Thinkpad begging to be linuxed. The question is: which Linux? Ubuntu? Debian? Fedora? SuSE?

Please comment your thoughts. Also, can I do an install on top of an existing XP install or do I need to wipe the disk, fdisk and repartition, and start clean?

TIA

Spotted limping under the bird feeders this morning. I am locked and loaded as they say in the Oliver Stone movies, ready for round two with Willard. Evidently he was wounded, crawled off for a few days, and is now back looking for sustenance. Die vermin! Die!

Reflections of a Newsosaur

Alan Mutter is the smartest person writing about the fate of the newspaper industry in a post-Web world. In 1984, at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, I lied my way into a job interview with him when he was the managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. He told me if I wanted to be a San Francisco newsman because I liked the weather I should go pound sand. He saw right through me.

Anyway, Alan’s in the blogroll, has been for a while, and seems to have a better finger on the fishwrapper pulse than anyone else blogging.

Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger » Peter says podcasting is inefficient

Scoble on the inefficiencies of podcasting. I have to agree. Maybe it was a confluence of iTunes embracing podcasting, a new Nano, and a commute long enough to want to fill the time with something other than the BBC and NPR — but I don’t listen to podcasts anymore.

With time the most inflexible commodity at all, multitasking mediums have a shot at succeeding — e.g. listening to music while reading. Serial mediums do not. While I can watch some forms of television and work on email, neither activity get full attention. Podcasts are useless while reading or emailing.

So, is podcasting hosed? I dunno. Anything that lets a user accelerate consumption through a skim is fine — e.g. a text blog. Anything that requires full attention better have enough impact to deserve it.

mann thoughts » Blog Archive » I’ve been found out!

Colleague Michael Mann is discovering his inability to read or write to his wordpress.com hosted blog within China. I am a Wordpress blogger — but host it on my own server and act as my own sysadmin — so apparently I am visible within the country. The good Wordpress folks at Automattic provide an excellent service, but for any blogger trying to work within the Great Firewall … forget about it.

When I posted that I figured out how to read blocked blogs within China — and then coyly said I wasn’t going to divulge the secret — I didn’t mean using IP anonymizers and other backflip moves. The secret is an acronym, has three letters, is the essence of blogs, and can be aggregated in a feed reader like Bloglines. Directly accessing a blocked blog is a futile effort.

ForbesOnTech

The esteemed Jim Forbes writes a good essay on how notebook vendors should use their online presences to drive web sales. The punchline: get away from spec sheets and speeds-and-feeds and talk to the customer in terms they understand, telling them, if you want to do this, in this environment, then you want this model. Hit them with legal disclaimers, engin-nerding, and what I call “drag-net” marketing (“Just the facts, mam”) and you will stun them in the headlights of too many choices. Jim says Apple is best, followed by HP.

“In today’s fast-paced notebook market, the way to turn clicks into sales is to move away from static data sheet based web pages and jump with both feet into online displays that show how a portable can be put to work immediately, solving real world problems by providing a useful and highly targeted out-of-the box experience.”

I became a major fan of Omniture SiteCatalyst while at IDG last year, driving a 30% increase in traffic just through simple blocking and tackling site operations and content management through the system’s excellent dashboard interface and sitemap overlay. Omniture, for those non-metrics weenies out there, is a web-hosted service that uses jscript tags to track the traffic patterns through a web site. It is waaaay more sophisticated than I have the time to be, but, it is an excellent tool for informing all design, content management, and strategic plays for a complex web site.

It always irked my sense of Yankee thriftiness that we at IDG were never exploiting the full power of SiteCatalyst — it’s commerce and cart tracking capabilities — now we can.

As I find time over the next weeks I’ll be building my own dashboards for monitoring the health of the site and especially path analyses for determing where the traffic is going. It’s one thing to drive traffic into a site, it’s another to know whether or not that traffic is bouncing off the homepage or following the paths set by our online promotions and content strategists.

One of my passions is mastering Italian cooking, specifically northern Italian cooking, specifically ragu (not the horrid stuff in a jar at the supermarket), specifically Bolognese. “Spag Bol” is a European staple. You can get a bowl of the stuff anywhere. But once upon a time, when I was in my James Bond/Robert Ludlum stage of my career, working for a Liechtenstein financier and commuting between Zurich and the shores of Lago Lugano, I was driving a rented Mini Cooper S at high speed along the shores of a magical alpine lake, pretending I was Sterling Moss winning the Mille Miglia, when I zipped past an outdoor trattoria — a shack with some picnic tables right on the waterside.

I backtracked, pulled in, and made it known that I wanted food. Not knowing what I wanted, I put myself in the hands of the owner, who returned with a bottle of beer and bowl of gnocchi covered in a meat sauce that was characterized by lots of orange grease.

From the first bite I knew it was the best thing I had ever eaten. Ten minutes later the owner returned to ask me how it was going. I held up two fingers. Do it again.

Ever since that lakeside lunch I have been in pursuit of the orange-greased meat sauce, aka a ragu, or, as the French would say, a ragout. I have, for years, been relying on Marcella Hazen’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking and her recipe for Bolognese. It’s a decent recipe, but never yields the perfection of the lakeside trattoria. This weekend I read Bill Buford’s account of his obessive Italian cooking quest, Heat and realized Hazen was for amateurs. Buford, like me, is a ragu fanatic, and throughout his account of his year in Mario Batali’s kitchen at Babbo in NYC, he focuses on two quests — the perfect ragu and the perfect pasta.

All I know and care about is that my experiments are relished by my family and friends, and nothing beats a bad weather weekend than trying to move one step closer to that Lugano lunch. Somehow, I know I’ll never get there, but trying is a lot of fun.

Last week’s return to Raleigh wiped me out — too many post-bike crash pills, too much heat, I spent my days looking for a place to fall down and take a nap — so I’m hanging back, with guilt, on the Cape the next two weeks to get this head injury thing over with once and for all. Last night my best buddy, a physician and fellow-cyclist, was over and asked how I was doing (he’s the one who came out of radiology on the day of the accident and told me my neck was broken in two place s ((it is not))). We got on the topic of medicines and not knowing their names I brought in the bottles.

He looked at them, he looked at me.

“I see the new ergometer in the garage. Are you exercising?” This is a physician-patient question where the patient usually needs to be evasive and dissemble. Not me.

“Yes I am,” I said. “30 minutes a day.”

“You moron. You’re taking a beta blocker that limits your heart rate. It wants to beat more when you exercise, but it can’t. Bet you feel real dizzy afterwards?”

So, I guess my neurologist never expected to have a patient who would be loony enough to try to go anaerobic on a daily basis while recovering from a concussion. I will stop taking that pill.

I will be working from home in Cotuit this week — no major face-to-face stuff scheduled in the land o’Lenovo — which is a mixed blessing as I have a ton o’ stuff going on and need to push my agenda forward. Last week’s experience with the tech support swat team was something that had to be experienced in person, and I wish I had had a DV video camera to capture some of their wizardry.

I’ll be on the cell phone all week. 508-360-6147. Then comes the dreaded Fourth of July weekend, the official kick off of the silly season here on the Cape.

So yesterday I spent most of the day with Lenovo’s top support engineers trying to figure how to pair a Motorola Bluetooth headset (the H700) with my new X60s.

Bottom line — the support team were wizards at reforming how my machine’s Bluetooth drivers are configured — but I am unable to achieve the goal of using the headset with Skype through the machine. Who is to blame? Well, we were able, after four hours of serious fiddling and diddling, to get the headset to work on a Skype call, but it was so problemmatic that we have to point the finger of blame at the headset after reading the Skype forum and other users’ negative experiences in getting this particular borg-set to work with any machine.

The eye opener for me, in light of my post last week about my philosophy on tech support, is that the complexity of peripheral compatibility with XP and any particular hardware platform is maddening and almost overwhelming. The support team — as I protested that I was killing their productivity — said they have to assume that there are other people out there like me, who, when they buy a Bluetooth enabled Thinkpad will come to expect that their Bluetooth headset will work with it. And not to listen to iTunes, but to use VOIP. I may be on the front lines of the problem, but gauging from the depth of technical analysis performed by users on the Skype and Thinkpads.com forum, there are a lot of people spending a lot of time trying to figure out what should, in theory, be a simple out of the box experience.

The other insight from this experience is that the intelligence and expertise is out in the user community. We need to figure out how to plug into that expertise, leverage it, and learn from it. Our tech gurus are googling outside of the internal knowledgebase to find solutions just like the “rest of us”, the challenge is how we can help enable that, contribute to it, and learn from it.

I’ll continue the Bluetooth-headset-Skype-X60s experiment later today with another Bluetooth headset (non-Motorola) to see if I can achieve success. If not, then my next move is to go to a Bluetooth dongle. Following that, it will be time to call Skype for a solution.

If anyone has sorted this one out, please speak out. I want to make sure we get this one right.

I received my beta account from Foldera and have just up my account. Excellent job on the part of the U/I team for building a sleek initialization process, help screens, and how-tos. Now to start playing. I won’t blog on the process and start posting screen shots, but as someone who was looking at the alpha three years ago, I am very impressed by the progress of the tool. Thanks to Michael Sampson for getting me set up.
[disclaimer: I am on Foldera's advisory board and have been since 2003. I hold shares and options in the company.]

As an ex-journalist inside of a corporation, I’ve been giving more thought lately to a concept I dubbed “corporate journalism” when I joined McKinsey & Co. six years ago. While my initial assignment was to create an online experience for the firm’s clients, a site focused on so-called “horizon” technologies, the popping of the dot.com bubble doomed that initiative — woefully named — TomorrowLab — and I soon found myself wondering if I’d have to crawl back to Forbes.com and debase myself to get my old job back.

One McKinsey partner, Lowell Bryan, evidently saw some value in keeping me and a former PC-Week colleague : Rob O’Regan on the payroll, so we were re-pointed in the direction of a problem that had been nagging the firm since Powerpoint overtook Word as the Firm’s preferred communications medium. In the good old days, a McKinsey consultant would share his or her learnings with the rest of the firm by writing up a white paper sanitized to keep any one specific client’s identity confidential. That document, which took several forms, could hold huge intrinsic value to the firm if it contained a framework or solution that could be reapplied to another client’s problem.

Alas, along came Powerpoint, which, when combined with McKinsey’s famous “up-or-out” policy, which gave the average consultant an expected tenure of little more than two years, meant a huge amount of the firm’s knowledge was being lost. Once the topic of admiring case studies by the Harvard Business School for its pioneering efforts in the new science of “knowledge management,” McKinsey was confronted with a huge loss in its institutional wisdom due to the pernicious evils of Powerpoint and the high degree of ongoing turnover. The expertise wasn’t getting written down — Powerpoint requires a presenter to narrate the pretty waterfall and boat charts — and moving to a horizontal, presentation formation meant the old vertical Word documents of old; those classic narrated case studies which could be read without the guidance of the original author, meant the firm was losing its edge.

Bryan understood this and stepped up to the plate to reform the system. My job (and O’Regan’s) was to provide some journalistic instincts to the process of figuring out how to “capture” (that was the verb) what was locked inside of the heads of the Firm’s partners and consultants before they made the transition to the real world as the CEO of a company like Enron or IBM. Continue Reading »