Churbuck.com

For work …

Well, if it from O’Reilly and it has the word Linux on the cover. I am reading it.

I thought about a CSS primer, but then I snapped to my senses and realized I don’t need to learn a new page description language. Learning Linux is nasty enough.

One of these days I’m going to read a business self-help book, such as “Who Cut the Cheese?” etc. I can’t believe people read such dreck.

For recreation ….

Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons”, a Robert Stone I somehow overlooked — “Bay of Souls”, and an old John McPhee which is amazingly relevant to anyone who wants to understand why Katrina trashed New Orleans, “The Control of Nature.”

Dvorak Reveals Old Formula, Panic Ensues

I love John Dvorak. One of the driest, caustic, funniest and smartest men ever to write about technology. I love him so much we hired him as a columnist at Forbes. We had a rollicking good evening drinking Forbes wine on the Forbes yacht one balmy summer evening long ago while on a three-hour tour around Manhattan, and he made me laugh. A lot.

Having managed to thoroughly antagonize the Mac-goons a couple times myself in my day, I started spotting my boxer shorts reading his formula at PCMag.com for how to call in the Mac Marines (his classic was calling a Mac “girly”) and then milking the assault for another column or two.

“The Mac itself is apparently the moral equivalent of their mom. I’m surprised that some of these people actually do not weep reading these columns: “Oh! Why does he say such things?”"

“The worst of the mob all tell the others to stop reading me and linking to me (a boycott was recently proposed), but they never stop. They are just encouraging it, and they all know it. Then come the personal attacks, as if I were an abortion clinic in Pensacola.”

I especially loved his final zinger at the new black MacBook:

“And just so you know: Yes, I do think the new MacBook is pretty jazzy. And hey, it’s black, just like my ThinkPad! Cool!”

[update: Jim Forbes has discovered the third leg of Dvorak's Rule of Mac Baiting. 1. Get 'em mad. 2. Do a column on their ire. 3. Occasionally admit you were wrong and get more mileage.]

Testing why I can’t blog photos out of Flickr into WordPress anymore. I see a little black frame but nofoto.

Shame, it was a cool foto too. Ah, I see the problem, it doesn’t like to live flush right for some reason.

canalsteamer

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

In case anybody cares. It’s been a little more than a month since I was last here — trip to Europe and then bicycle crash have kept me away from the mothership.

Southwest — the Greyhound of the skies — boned me by boarding me onto a flight from Providence to Baltimore that was predestined to miss its connection to Raleigh. I found myself wandering the halls of BWI looking for a hotel room but none were to be found. Southwest’s response to my predicament was a shrug and a little green slip with an 800 number on it. I called the 800 number and the person said, “Nope. No rooms around Baltimore.” So I kept at it, made friends with Matt at the Holiday Inn Express in nearby Arundel, buttered him up using the Jim Forbes technique of being nice to those most under siege, and finally snagged a last minute cancellation. In bed at 1 am and back up at 5 for the shuttle ride back to the airport. I paid $30 an hour for the mattress time and the shower.
Business travel utterly, absolutely, positively sucks. Wheeled luggage, headset borgs, USA Today, the aftershave stench of hazelnut flavored coffee … I feel horrible, as if I rushed back to work too soon, find that brain medications like Fioricet do not mix well with spreadsheets … whine, whine, whine.

Foldera Adds TechCrunch Editor and Web 2.0 Authority J. Michael Arrington to Board of Directors: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

Dang, I missed this one from the PR newswire on Friday: TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington joins Foldera’s board. Good stuff for Foldera — founder Richard Lusk is building an all-star team. This is the big week for the company — the beta goes public, Richard et al are in Boston at the CMP Collaboration conference — and me, I’m still waiting for my fricking beta invite (you’d think being on the advisory board would count for something … just kidding Richard, just kidding).

VentureBlog: Who Owns Scobleizer?
David Hornik asks the question of whether or not Microsoft got screwed when Scoble bailed for PodTech, taking with him their “intellectual property.” (and Scoble deftly tosses me under the bus by citing Hornik’s post in a post of his own titled “Who owns Churbuck’s blog?”)
Hornik cites one of those hysterical pieces of boiler plate that the attorneys sneak into the Human Resources Welcome Pack which essentially say “all your base belong to us” and anything you create, think of, ruminate over, or otherwise concoct during business hours is the property of the Man.

“Ever since Scoble left Microsoft, I’ve been thinking about the question of who owns Scobleizer. After all, didn’t Robert write Scobleizer during work hours, using Microsoft’s computers? In fact, wasn’t it Robert’s job at Microsoft to write Scobleizer? Didn’t Microsoft pay him thousands of dollars in salary, and thousands more in travel expenses, to represent Microsoft in the blogging world and to do so, at least in part, by writing Scobleizer?”

David raises a valid point. I am blogging on a piece of company property, (a nice one too, a sweet Lenovo x60s Thinkpad with EVDO wireless.(note the shameless advert))  Since I am presently 300 miles from the time card machine, (you know, the bird-punch model that Fred Flintstone used when he clocked it at the quarry) I guess I am blogging off the clock. Of course, one must understand I only work Monday through Friday from nine to five with a half-hour lunch break. I never work during non-work hours. I never check my email on weekends.

Sheesh,  I don’t blog at work. I have too much other stuff to get done and blogging for the company is not on my list of to-dos. I will, from time to time, mention my employer’s name, but not a lot, because I have no interest in going down in history as the “guy at XYZ corp. who blogs about customer service.” I’d prefer to be known as the guy who wrote a great book about technology standards, or that guy on Cape Cod who blogs about clamming. But, dreams of literary immortality aside, I am resigned to be just a guy who blogs because he misses being a full-time writer. I suffer from the malady caoecethes scribendi and this is my cure.
I do have a reasonably healthy obsession with my professional life — it keeps the wolf from the door after all — and our professional lives are — at least on a time basis — the bulk of our lives. But assigning ownership of a blog to one’s employer on the basis that the employer’s brand enhances the brand of the blogging employee? Or that the blogger used precious CPU cycles on a company machine?
It was always 100 percent clear to me during Scoble’s Microsoft tenure that his gig was at Channel 9 videotaping geeks and that Scobleizer was his and his alone. He blogged about whatever the heck he felt like, and if that turned out to be Microsoft …. well, sure, he’ll go down as the Microsoft blogger.

Bloggers are bylines. Nothing more. Bylines move around. If my employer were to say, “please don’t blog about us” then I’d never blog about them.  For now, Churbuck.com lives off of my employer’s servers, is managed by me, designed by me, the domain name is renewed and paid by me, and predates my relationship with my employer by about three years. So there.

Imagethief is Will Moss. A PR pro in China. I like his blog a lot. So does, CNET, which recently picked him up for CNET’s Asia editions. Anyway, the whole American Internet companies operating in China ethical debate thing? He writes an excellent post which puts it all into great, speculative, perspective:

“So far, US Internet companies have been scrupulous in not suggesting that their prime benefit to Chinese users is access to controversial material, a move that would likely be poorly received by the Chinese government. But nor have they done a good job of articulating what benefits they do bring to Chinese users. Combined with their failure to adequately address the moral conundrum of operating in China –as opposed to the legal conundrum, which has been beaten to death– they have left a nifty vacuum for for their detractors to fill. They do not, nor have they ever, controlled this debate.”

It’s high season for the striped bass (I like how the old timers pronounce it “stripe-ed”) on Cape Cod, so at a Friday night family cookout the cellphone call came from a buddy fishing at a UDL (undisclosed location) with the news that he had just landed a large fish and there were more where that one came from. After making social with the wives and kids, the men-folk went into stealth preparation mode, everyone running to garages to dust off fishing rods and dig out rusty lures.

My brother Henry, besieged father of a 10-month old who has the bewildered look of a man who wonders if diaper pails last forever, wanted to go, but needed to check for permission first. I swung into big brother duty and asked for him, secured the yard pass, and off we went, bouncing down a dirt road in a truck loaded with rods, beer and eels.

Henry was under-equipped, had ancient line on his reel, but made his way out into the darkness and out onto the end a stone jetty. The rest of us hung back at the truck, drinking beer and rigging up, telling fish stories and admiring our buddy’s first fish, the one which drew us there in the first place. It was a perfect night, lights winking on the horizon of Nantucket Sound, just enough wind to keep the no-see’ums away.

“Yee-haw!”

We stopped talking and looked out towards Henry. Another “yee-haw”. Then another.

I walked down to the waterside with my youngest son.

“Look at the size of this fish. I think it’s the biggest I’ve ever caught.”

Henry was bent over the fish on the beach beside the jetty. He had indeed caught himself a nice bass.

There was much posing for the camera and fish for the family dinner.

Technical support has always been an oxymoron for most owners and users of anything electronic. The dreaded process of dialing an 800 number, navigating the voice prompts, and then being told there is a 45 minute wait before a person can help you has made tech support a universally deplored experience. The oxymoron part is the doomed belief that there will be no support at the end of the whole tedious affair. As someone who has been tangentially involved with the tech industries since 1984, and who has spent his fair share of time on hold, I can empathize with anyone who rants off on a blog about how vendor X’s products suck.

When my microwave died last month, there was no inclination on my part or my wife’s to dredge out the documentation and call Sharp’s 800-number. There was no way the machine was going to get fixed through the kitchen version of CTRL-ALT-DEL, one is not encouraged to pop the screws and start messing with jumpers, and the price point is low enough that in our minds, after a few years of hard use, its failure was marked down to old age and the cost of living.

But when a notebook or desktop computer dies, the stakes are incalculable for the profound reason that these things are our lives. Deadlines live in these things, works of immeasurable creative genius, MP3 collections stolen over years of Napster downloading; it all lives in these things. If the machine dies, that stuff dies with it, and I don’t care how obsessive you are, no one backs their stuff up enough. Continue Reading »

The Weekend of the Rat Continues … Day Two update
First, I am not a gun owner in the firearm sense of the word, but I do have a brother who is a former Green Beret who is an avid gun owner and was more than well equipped to help me with the rat in the rose bushes. While a .50 caliber Barrett Sniper rifle is uncalled for, this Walther Nighthawk, gas powered pellet pistol with “red-dot” scope is proving to be quite the anti-rat weapon of destruction.

I was at the window overlooking the rodent hang-out this morning, doing some email and drinking coffee when the brown monster emerged from its den and went for a piece of sweaty provolone. I slowly picked up the Walther, thumbed off the safety, turned on the scope, got the red on Willard’s back, and BANG, hit it, made it squeal most rat-like, and then it fled through the flower beds, me trying to smack it with a second shop. So, there is now a wounded rat somewhere on the premises. Given its morning activity levels, I am going for it in a big way tomorrow.

My wife has moved into a deranged Annie Oakley mode where she’s talking in a West Virginian accent (she lived there for two years when she was a toddler) and plinking tin cans in the garden with my vast arsenal of pellet guns.

Day One …

Rat reappeared during morning coffee. I went into sniper mode but had to drive junior to work, leaving my wife to play Annie Oakley. I come home. She’s “hit it” but it ran away. Now we’re at DEFCON 1 and waiting …. I need to take the morning off to get a “bone scan” — radioactive dye, etc. to see where the fractures are in my neck. Then to the bike shop to get an accounting of the cash I’ve squandered on my cycling habit so I can get a new set of wheels. So endeth the Cotuit-phase with a return to RTP next week. Rat must be exterminated before then.

I’ve had the pleasure to interviw Bill Gates a few times, usually under very controlled circumstances, under the watchful eye of a Waggener-Edstrom flak, interviewing him for PC Week a lot in the mid-80s, and then a few times, under much more controlled circumstances, when I was Forbes.

We aren’t buddies, I used to have his phone number, I never called it. I haven’t sat down and had the pleasure of a talk with him since an PC Forum in the early 90s in Palm Springs or something, when the PC business was boring as can be and there wasn’t much to talk about except “client server” and CD-ROM publishing.

When I was at Forbes, there was different interest in Gates than there was at PC Week, where we obsessed about NETBEUI and SNA and kernel architectures. Forbes is the magazine of wealth — Malcolm Forbes staked out that turf with the Forbes Rich List — the annual ranking of the 400 richest Americans that has sprawled over the years to include everything including the richest Chinese. There was never a big Gates obsession at Forbes. It was somewhat predictable that the top slots on the list would be owned and retained forever by him, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer, with Sam Walton and Warren Buffett moving up and down a few notches every year. But Gates was so far in front that there wasn’t anything new to say year to year. He wasn’t an aggregator of assets — you couldn’t watch with fascination his machinations like a Buffet or say Marvin Davis — people who kicked tires and did deals. Nope, Bill was sort of boring with his wealth. He made an immense stack of dough by winning big once, consolidated it, didn’t blow it early, and most importantly — and this is where I’m burying the lead of this post — he stayed engaged.

Think about it. I used to be on the general assignment desk at a little city newspaper and whenever someone one the lottery I’d get sent out to interview them, take their picture, and ask them: “What are you going to do with the money?”

No one, to my dismay, said anything remotely along the lines of: “I’m going to Vegas, gonna hire three showgirls, hunker down with a case of Johnny Walker Red, a bag of scag, and a Tibetan masseuse …” Nope. Each and everyone said they were going to buy a Winnebago, a home for their mom, and a new microwave.

And keep working.

There, that’s it. No one wants to stop working. You can be Scrooge McDuck/Bill Gates loaded, and still you’re going to want to work. Why? Isn’t the fantasy to do the hammock thing on Tahiti? Hit the snooze button forever and call it quits?
Bill Ziff once gave me a great quote in a story I wrote about his retirement: “Business saved me from a life of abstraction.”

So Gates decides to stop the day to day, focus on the foundation, and do what he pretty much is best at: which is put a face on Microsoft. For the past twenty years I’ve been pissed off at the demonizing of the man — he’s a decent person, smartest guy in the room, fierce competitor — but the Idi Amin treatment he got from the Slashdot ilk and his competitors was always way, way off-base. Windows may suck, Microsoft may have stepped over the boundaries, but Gates as a man, well, let’s just say he doesn’t have horns growing out of the top of his head.
Look at the accomplishments: he provided a de facto standard to an industry marked by incompatibility. That standard drove prices down to the point where PCs are truly accessible by nearly any one who wants one. He then took a ton of the profits and focused it on distributing medication through Africa. Not a bad life.

Ah, the joys of working from home. One gets to hear one’s wife announce: “There is a rat in the rose garden.”

Yep. Big one too. Strolling around without a care in the world. So it is time to dust off the old pellet gun or encourage the two terriers to earn their keep. I don’t want to trap, because we’ve got a thriving population of chipmunks, and they don’t elicit the same reactions of disgust that Mister Rat does.

I’d pay good money to watch a Skye Terrier’s base instincts kick in, but alas, I’m afraid mine is solidly a couch potato. These things were bred to hunt down Scottish varmints along the rocky shores of the Isle of Skye. Basically big, hairy torpedoes that are dachsunds covered with hair.

The other terrier? It wears clothing for crying out loud. This is not the face of a rat killer.

I love this caption, found elsewhere, of a picture of a Yorkshire Terrier staring at a cute little hamster: “Zoe the terrier’s unforeseen ratting instincts resulted in the loss of Rocky the Siberian Hamster. A year later, and after much careful introduction, Zoe is friends with Couscous and several other hedgehogs.”
I need something that does this — the whole Dickensian – Hogarth, back-alleys of Olde London act.

Which leaves it up to me. John Wayne Churbuck and his trusty pellet gun.

I’ve been a DV geek for a year and want to mess around with some embedded video on Churbuck.com to trial here some efforts for Lenovo. The question is which WordPress plug-in to enable to make this happen, and whether or not to use Google Video or YouTube as the host — the way I use Flickr for image hosting — so I don’t utterly hose my ISP bills moving video torrents through Churbuck.com.

I need to do more research, but any quick and dirty display options would be appreciated. I have the camera, I know how to firewire the capture into Adobe Premiere, now I want to figure out how to rapidly post it.

Collaborative Technologies Conference to Showcase Collaborative Technology Industry’s Latest Product and News Announcements

“Foldera will release the beta of its long-anticipated work organization and collaboration service for individuals, teams and businesses, which automatically organizes work in the context of key activities, and enables collaboration with others.”

Next week, at a CMP Collaboration Conference, Foldera opens the beta of its online collab tool. I am looking forward to the launch and think people are going to be pretty impressed. When CEO Richard Lusk walked me through an Alpha-demo in early April, I was stunned.

[ Full disclosure: I am on Foldera's advisory board and hold shares and options in the company]

So the ultimate exercise tool arrived yesterday, was assembled in five minutes, and immediately I could tell the Dreissegacker Brothers have made some major innovations in their rowing machines. Not only is it quieter, but the performance monitor is a big, big improvement, including a USB cable and a CD so I can drive a laptop with it, and in theory, via my Lenovo X60s WAN antenna, race virtually against other indoor rowers.

It comes with a smart card so I can save workout records, displays a force curve, and does all sorts of geeky things that only a sweaty geek can appreciate. I did a mere 15 minutes this morning, low and slow, and will work up over time to my usual 60 minute slug-fest while listening to thrash music.

Just post some Chinese characters from a China blog in a quoted post, and bang, up fills the spam queue with more Chinese character spam. There are interesting waves to blog spam. Last week it was mobile phone offers (if someone decides to kill of affiliate web marketing programs, then blog spammers lose all economic incentive to get click throughs. If someone captured one of these fine spammer and slowly sliced them from the soles of their feet upwards with a deli meatslicer set on the thinnest setting, one slice per night, on national television …. I’d watch.

Why isn’t there is great online dictionary? Wikipedia is a great online encyclopedia, but there just isn’t a great dictionary, at least, nothing on the order of the OED in terms of total coverage, but also, most important, that capability to explore randomly and discover cool new stuff. True, there is dictionary.com and ObjectGraph has a nice and convenient Ajax dictionary, but I want something that can quickly find words such as these:

• Propinquity: proximity, nearness
• Facinorous: atrociously wicked
• Saponaceous: having the qualities of soap
• Treuhand: German trust officer
• Obnubliate: to obscure
• Autochthonous: originating where found, indigenous
• Procellous: stormy
• Fisc: the treasury of a kingdom

I’ve subscribed to the Word of the Day email list for ten years, and every so often it delivers a good one, and I’ve long been in the habit of maintaining a list on my Treo or Palm device of words I come across (such as the list above) that deserve a lookup. In prep school, in Mr. Ward’s English class, we played Word of the Day, and everyone was expected to come in armed with a submission that the rest of the class would discuss, consider, and vote to the exalted position of WOTD. I appealed to my classmate’s baser instincts (all 15 year-old’s sense of humors are centered in their groin) and introduced them to such schoolboy classics as smegma, merkin, coprolite, and meconium (cheesy substance found you-know-where; pubic wig; fossilized feces; and an infant’s first bowel movement). The last term was so wildly popular that it became, in shortened form, my nickname for a while: Mec. Classmates who arrived bearing good words such as sedulous (Persevering and constant in effort or application; assiduous) never stood a chance, so Mr. Ward had to ban medical terms and excuse me from further participation. That, and I was caught making up the definition to a word, tampion, which in reality is the plug stuck in the end of a cannon to keep dirt and water out of it, but which I provided a new definition for, being a ball of dirt and spit used by hibernating bears to keep ants and other insects from climbing inside of their bums while they slept. Lacking Google in 1974 to settle the argument, I was unable to prove this variation, and was banned from further participation. Then, this morning, I found the wonderful Uterine Fury Records which is so kind as to provide a cartoon strip of how a bear constructs and deploys a tampion.

But being of the habit of reading with a pen or pencil in my hand, I have a hard and fast rule of never glossing past a word I don’t know. Down it goes, into the flyleaf or the Treo list,to be retrieved later. Never to be used in conversation, but just filed away for future reference and the appropriately pompous sesquipedalian moment (given to the use of overly long words). Now I will never rise to the level of a William F. Buckley, the god of vocabulary, and I wouldn’t dare throw one of these tongue twisters into a conversation, let alone a written sentence, but it was kind of fun to fire off a letter to the editor of the Barnstable Patriot yesterday, the kind of grumpy-old-man screed one writes when someone threatens to erect a brothel next door to a church, and drop in the word eleemosynary (related to charity) just to let them know I had some big punches in my word arsenal.

My current favorite word, and a pretty one, is petrichor, which describes the way the world smells after it rains.

Yes, I read the dictionary cover to cover as a kid. And yes, I ate paste.

Man, I need to see a therapist about my work-ethic-guilt issues. I have an accident, work at home for three weeks, and feel most comfortable talking on the phone while swinging in the hammock looking at my bearded irises. But it still feels wrong. Very wrong. Like why am I not in a suit and a bowtie acting over-caffinated and official? I have to say personal productivity is soaring, I finally have an office with a view, and it’s awfully nice to be able to recharge the batteries after a pretty hectic five months of weekly Raleigh commuting, overseas expeditions, and hanging out in the coolest company on the planet.

(I grew this)
I had just had the most pleasant call with Mitch Ratcliffe, watched an osprey fly by with a fat fish in its talons, had a half-dozen hummingbirds come visit, and solved all sorts of intellectually stimulating problems in the June twilight on Cape Cod.  That and fielded Forbes.com alumni calls about Om’s move. Look, I don’t know how much money he raised, I don’t know how he plans on spending it, but I do know he is hatching a very cool scheme. For the rest of the story, bug Om, who has been off of IM all day and with good reason.

GigaOM : » Its Time To Transition

Good buddy and former colleague Om Malik takes a deep breath and steps into the world of his own startup, accepting VC dough to make a business out of GigaOM while remaining on the Business 2.0 masthead as a contributing editor. It’s a shame he couldn’t release the news on his own terms, but he got Valleywagged in a big way, which sort of adds to the fun, so what the hell.

Om and I have been discussing his career possibilities for a long time, and I am proud of him for finally making a stab at realizing his vision — one which will surprise a lot of people when it emerges. This is more than stepping up AdSense on a blog, far more, and is the kind of transformative media play he helped put in place in 1995 at Forbes.com. This is the one guy who you want on your team when it comes to doing the right thing with online media.
I see no surprise that Om’s news is breaking so close to Scoble’s. The top bloggers are realizing the promise of decentralized media — that the byline can be the business — and each of them, in their own way, is doing something few can stomach or imagine. Call it “bloggerpreneurship” but it’s happening and going to happen more and more.

So the New York Times this morning is splashing a front page photo of American face-painters looking despondent over Team USA getting knocked out of the losing its first World Cup game. [thx to Totalbike for the correction] I chalk this one up as a non-event. Indeed, soccer, aka Football, may be the most global of games, but other than soccer moms and hordes of shin kicking American children, the game is not, despite repeated predictions of optimism, taken off to the manic extent it has everywhere else in the world.

Me, I am totally fixated on professional cycling — bicycling — and my favorite game these days is to instant message with my biking buddies to talk trash about our favorites going into the first non-Lance Tour de France in many years. Who will emerge as the “patrone” of the peleton?

I’ll be rooting for three riders. They are:

1. Chris Horner — great American rider for Saunier-Duval. Shows great heart and had a great Tour last year.

2. Ivan Basso. Italian climber. Only man to hold his own on the climbs against Lance. Winner of the Giro d’Italia and poised to be the main man in my opinion.

3. George Hincapie. I’ll go out on a limb, but this is Hincapie’s year to emerge from beneath Lance’s shadow and go all the way.

Why do I love the Tour de France? Imagine running 20 consecutive marathons. That’s why. There’s nothing so grueling nor so noble.