Churbuck.com

I think I like these ads (I’m seeing them in airports) because right now, on the train to NYC, Willy Loman is selling routers with “Gee-BIX” in a loud backslapping voice in the seat behind me.

Driving around Boston this morning to escape the rush hour I passed the old headquarters for Wang, then the exit for DEC, then past where Data General used to be ….

And I wondered, what happened to the tech sector in Eastern Massachusetts? It’s gone. Poof. Sure, there are some pockets here and there, but the dot.com era seems to have passed the region by (CMGI and Lycos were hot in their day, but aren’t a shadow of their former selves), hardware is long gone, software sort of became irrelevant after IBM did its hostile takeover of Lotus.

Just weird to realize with the exception of EMC, there just isn’t a lot going on in what was one of the richest tech corridors in the country. Old news I know, but still, sort of an indication of why I fly to RTP these day and don’t drive to a marketing gig outside of Boston.

Boat trailers are this morning’s topic as they were yesterday’s obsession.

I am a very “un-handy” person, wreaking damage on myself and my victims whenever I put a tool in my hands, something Cousin Pete finds very funny whenever he witnesses me employing a tool in a wrong-headed manner, e.g. whacking a screw like it was a nail with a wrench like it was a hammer.

Having resolved to be street-legal in the trailer department this year (after years of semi-renegade/scofflaw status with an expired license plate, and a broken light), I renewed my trailer registration so I could trailer the boat around Cape Cod this spring and launch in new and foreign waters for pure exploration purposes. Step one was a plate renewal, step two was lighting (which I accomplished to my great satisfaction yesterday in a world of slush and mud) and step three is getting a professional to replace the wheel bearings so I don’t suffer the ultimate in auto-nautical disasters, the loss of a trailer wheel due to a seized hub bearing.

As we once sang during one trailer wheel loss, to the tune of Kenny Roger’s Lucille:

“You picked a fine time to leave me, loose wheel …Over the shoulder, and into the field … You picked a fine time to leave me, loose wheel….”

Town Dock, Cotuit
I have seen massive trailer malfunctions on several occasions, typically involving Cotuit Skiffs, which only see a trailer twice a year — once when launched, and again when pulled — hence the trailers tend to be antiques known more for their flat tires and lack of license plates than anything else. One year someone lost a trailer wheel coming up Putnam Ave. near the cemetery with a 40-year old Skiff aboard, and just kept going, dragging the sucker another half-mile as the axle gouged a scar through the pavement which is still there today. When I was a kid the household’s skiff trailer was made out of an old car axle and homemade wooden frame. That lasted until the early 70s when it collapsed from corrosion. In the old days, some people put their boats on a wooden cradle and dragged them, wheel-free, down the street behind the Studebaker.

With visions of poking around the back waters of Barnstable Harbor, Pleasant and Waquoit Bays, and even launching up in Truro in the Pamet River, I am determined to get my trailer in obsessive-compulsive condition, so for once I can drive down Route 6 without a weird feeling in the back of my pants that utter disaster is about to befall me, or a state trooper will notice a registration sticker from the last century and write me up a big ticket.

Of such stuff are weekends in March spent, obsessing about life’s perpetual to-do list before better weather inclines me to be flaky.

3.19 – Cotuit

3.20 – Cotuit to NYC

3.21 – NYC

3.22 – NYC

3.23-25 – Cotuit

3.26 – RTP

Farch is back so I awoke with vows to undo the damage and crank off some calories on the wheel of pain. This morning was a low and slow 6K with a 500m warmup and cool down — about 24 strokes per minutes, loafing at a 2:04.3 pace and a 150-160 hr.

Still watching out for the back and not pulling any power-tens on the “fives” — a power-ten is an extra-special, tasmanian devil effort for ten strokes, usually invoked by a coxswain during a race in the name of something inspirational, like: “Power-ten for Coach Smith!” — which usually backfires in the minds of the people pulling the oars and performing the power-ten who think Coach Smith is a douche. Tens-on-the-fives, means cranking for ten strokes ever 500 meters or increment of 5 minutes. So … you pull like no tomorrow at 1,500 meters and at 15 minutes … anyway, I am not doing that now.

The scale in the Vegas hotel room told of the horror to come. I am fatter than I have been in the last ten years, so it is time to look at very long erg pieces (10K to 60 minutes) and really low paces to start burning the fat. Can you say boring?

(actually wrote this on the erg, while cooling down my heart rate to 100 bpm, connected wirelessly from the garage. Thankfully the ThinkPad X60 has a spill resistant keyboard, as I am dripping dave-juice into it)

does it suck?

This is my favorite brand sentiment tool in the entire world. Probably because it is free. And fun to play with.
Enter in a brand name and see how it fares. A ten means the brand “rocks.” A one designates utter suckage. This works by going out into the Interweb and looking for keywords and designations of rockitude or suckiture adjacent to them. My music example probably sucks as one can imagine the word “rock” is adjacent to everyone of these names. Same probably holds true for geology brand names ….

A mooring is a semi-permanent anchor for securing a boat in a harbor. It looks like an iron mushroom, has a long length of chain, and a rope pennant to a float. It is also the one thing that makes me more paranoid than bird flu, an IRS audit, or turning into a collector of Hummel figurines.

Paranoid? I’m not paranoid about my mooring dragging during a storm, I’m paranoid about forgetting to renew my permit some year and finding myself completely hosed. The waiting list for a mooring is something like two hundred names long and turns over at slower-than-a-glacial pace. My cousin Pete was on the list for something like ten years and only just last year got a slot. I’ve got family members who didn’t get their moorings when the town went to a permit system and they are still angry and screwed, especially over out-of-towners having permits when they don’t. I predict acts of maritime violence some day.

Miss the March 30th deadline and you lose your mooring.

That thought keeps me awake for most of February and early March until I do the same annual  ritual. I find the renewal forms, I find the documentation for the boats (I have three moorings), I find the excise tax bills, I find my checkbook, I buy three stamped legal envelopes and self-address them. I drive to town hall and pay my excise tax — in person — and take the receipt on to the Division of Natural Resources where the mooring officer checks off all the required documents, takes my $70 check, and tells me the magic words: “You’re all set. The tags will come in the mail.”

To celebrate I write another $20 check for a new clam license. Instead of 007, my license to kill clams this year is number 0403. I need to check Capetides.com to figure out when the low tides are and sally forth to the super-secret-early-season clam beds that get closed on May 1 and make hay while the tide falls. Spring is upon me and I am positively giddy. Now to just get my taxes out of the way … pay three tuitions … at least the moorings are renewed.

I need to go clamming.

Chris Murray and Mark Cahill can attest to my propensity for shooting my blog in the foot everytime I decide to “enhance” it with a sidebar widget and end up nuking the cascading style sheets.

From Flickr Galleries to del.icio.us posts, I love to junk myself up with new stuff. Some of them are utterly useless (Plazes comes to mind)
At Las Vegas earlier this week, Lee LeFever from CommonCraft told me over lunch that Twitter was all the rage at SxSW, and that I should give it a try. I didn’t quite get it, but have noticed it showing up in the sidebar of other blogs … so, sheep that I am, I have done it with mine. Sort of like Blog Instant Messaging — apparently (and I haven’t tried it) you can update people on what your current activity/state-of-mind is via text messaging on a phone, or indeed even instant messaging.

Coreperform Concept2 Seat adapter

Xeno Mueller is promoting an interesting upgrade for Concept2 ergs that makes the seat yaw and roll, mimicking the set-up physics of an actual shell. This would be great for developing core strength, but I cannot believe the shipping is nearly as much as the product.

“CP1 is a stability adjustable rowing seat attachment designed for Concept 2™ “C” and “D” model ergometers that attaches underneath the Concept 2™ factory seat.

The first ever adjustable stability seat, CP1 is designed to optimize athletes’ ergometer training by incorporating the multi-planar movements that challenge athletes during (on the water) rowing.”

So the mini-bar in my Las Vegas hotel room is demonic. When I checked in the front desk lady told me that “if you lift something in the refrigerator or the rack your account will be charged automatically.”

Actually, if I lift something for more than 45 seconds my account will get charged. That is sinister.

Like all mini-bars, this one is home to the 6.78 ounce bottle of four-dollar Coke which absolutely-positively cannot be replaced with an off-site, less expensive alternative. It is also home to a $12 box of cashews — which one would need to be … nuts [rimshot] to lift out of the rack.

There is a $15 disposable camera, and a “martini set” for $8 (I imagine you get one olive and a spear), but the winner is …

The $25 “Intimacy Kit.”

I fear the “Intimacy Kit.” It is a white box with three lipstick kisses on it. What lies within? There is no information on the box and I sure as hell am not going to pick it up to trigger the magic sensor that will put a blinking $25 charge on my room bill that I would have to explain to accounting. The $14 first aid kit one can justify on grounds of an emergency: “I cut my jugular shaving and needed to stop myself from desanguinating.”

But a $25 Intimacy Kit? What excuse do you dream up for that one? “I was lonely. I needed a hug…..”

This blogger also got an Intimacy Kit, but it in a clear box with a table of contents. Mine is more mysterious.

Shawn Gold, CMO of MySpace, is on stage talking about the MySpace phenomenon. I go on at 1:45 to talk about “lessons from the trenches” from a corporate point of view.

I can’t put my finger on it, but the term “community” hasn’t sat well for me since a Jerry Michalski retreat in 1995 when one woman said the word made her think of community gardens, hemp clothing, and socialism. Indeed, “social” came along in Web 2.0 and things like MySpace and LinkedIn are cited as embodiments of the concept. I don’t know why it doesn’t sit well. John Bell cites David Weinberger’s redefinition last week in San Francisco: something to the effect that communities are places where people care more than is normal about something. [I need to find the backchannel transcript for the accurate quote, it's lost somewhere in Google Reader].

Found it thanks to Lee LeFever by way of Chris Heuer’s post at the Future of Communities : Weinberger said: “I want it to mean a group of people who care about one another more than they have to.”

Back to Shawn Gold — basically a history of MySpace — I don’t have an accurate read on the audience as I missed yesterday and have yet to hear any questions, but the participant roster shows a heavy dose of corporate attendees from the likes of Microsoft, Levi Strauss, PetSmart, State Street, etc. etc. and few community vendors — so Shawn is giving a good backgrounder on what is erroneously assumed to be a teenager phenomenon.

“MySpace made it a great time to be lonely on the internet,” Gold.

“Digital cameras changed the face of self-expression on the Internet.” Gold

Chris Heuer — he of the Social Media Club — just introduced himself and asked me to define “community 2.0″ into his podcast capture device. I babbled I fear.

This place is packed. I just turned around and nearly every seat is taken. 500 people? I stink at crowd estimates.

Max Kalehoff just nailed it — communities represent the most loyal customers around a brand yet those customers are generally served by service organizations judged on how fast they can spin people “through the revolving door.”

Community ROI track

I am such a metrics geek, therefore I am listening to metrics and roi.
Matthew Lees from the Patricia Seybold Group is presenting on ROI and metrics — topics dear to my heart. Smart presentation where he lays out some good, sensible KPIs to follow. He cites Cingular, which is a case example I am fond of.

Thanks to Lee LeFever for pointing me at the backchannel transcript noted above.

Bill Johnston, from Forum One Communications, is presenting on Autodesk’s approach to community/forum metrics. Interesting hybrid of quantitative and qualitative analysis with moderators tagging and scoring threads and resolution. He is a Hitbox guy. Interesting how he used Hitbox to count stuff like signups, referrals, posts, comments, tagging, networks and tag clouds — all great manifestations of engagement (citing a community site called Area which featured users creative efforts). Zero to 100,000 members (not users) in nine months.

“As we were able to communicate value we were able to convince stakeholders to write us bigger and bigger checks.”

Anders Nancke-Krogh from Nokia is presenting. He heads the online gaming community N-Gage.

Great Q&A on the topic. I am dying to ask a question about blog metrics, most of the discussion has been about forum measurement and business metrics. Looks like I won’t get a shot — want to know what these guys think are the KPIs for blogs.

Size of community and activity of community are key to Anders. I call these “gross tonnage” metrics. Innovation coming from the community — that’s a provocative KPI to say the least.

Customer “Self” Service

An area close to my priorities — Patricia Seybold and Scott Wilder from Intuit talking about the creation of self-service communities.

Intuit has their act together in a major way. I was just on a panel with George Jaquette, and Wilder confirms Intuit is doing customer community the right way with a big commitment.

Have to cut things short to get on the phone with Asia. Good conference.

Whoa, one of the gods of the single scull, Xeno Mueller, gold medalist in the 1996 Olympic games is in the comments of my erg blogging post.

I actually met him, for about a minute, at the boathouse at Newport Beach, California when I was rowing out of there in the winter of 2003-2004. He runs an erg training service out of a Costa Mesa storefront and is an inspiration to a lot of indoor rowers.

His blog is here.

I just blew $16.50 on a chicken caesar, a bag of trail mix, and a bottle of water … and left them under the bench when I boarded this packed-to-the-gills, foodless flight to Vegas. I have negative seat-room.

Rowers are obsessive counters. From strokes per minute to the breakdown of the four-component stroke (catch, drive, finish, recover), a lot of rowers spend most of their mental effort counting through the agony. Combine that with the PM II monitor on the Concept2 erg, and a typical workout becomes a major exercise in Distance=Rate x Time.

Today I stepped up the first week’s average training distance of 5K to 6K. The focus for me now is weight loss (I don’t have a scale, so I can’t express my current fatitude). Weight loss is a function of time as a low heart rate. Low heart rate means the body goes after fat for fuel. Therefore, I need to work up to 45 to 60 minute pieces. Going for speed and trying to set records over shorter distance comes later in the training cycle.

The good news is after 8 days I can maintain a sub 2:00 split, coming down 5 seconds in a week. Anything over 2:00 is a grandmotherly pace for me. I know I’m in shape when I can cruise at a sub 1:55 pace.

Yesterday broke the back of winter (knock on wood), so I put the boat battery on the trickle charger, bought six gallons of high-test, hitched the trailer to the car, put on my waders, and launched the Tashmoo with crossed fingers. Fisher and I paddled it out to Bob Jensen’s mooring barge, tied up, and got ready to crank the motor over for the first time since November.

First try and we were in business! A Churbuck first! I let the motor idle for five minutes, varying the throttle to clean out the carburetors, then off we went for a fast blast at full throttle through a few acres of crackling skim ice in the cove. A full-speed boat jaunt in early March is an excellent demonstration of the concept of wind chill.

We tied up to the town dock and walked to the house to rouse the rest of the family into putting on boots, locating the camera, and donning windbreakers.

We circumperambulated Dead Neck. The dogs had fun and everyone got a little tanned. Home for the extra hour of daylight, dog baths, a fast dinner, then a trip to the movies for “The 300″ (which was gory and over the top).

Whereabouts this week:

3.12 – Cotuit-Vegas

3.13 – Vegas, Community 2.0 conference

3.14 – Vegas-Cotuit

3.15-18 – Cotuit

BuzzLogic — the pretty awesome blog tracking/mapping/influence measurement tool that was started by my buddy Mitch Ratcliffe — has some great press in the current issue of Fortune (most admired companies). I’d like to link it, but I can’t find it on fortune.com. Your’s truly is mentioned — thanks to Krista Summitt for pointing that out.

The company is bringing its product out of beta soon. We’ve been testers for over a year, and have used it to help identify customers with problems. The Fortune article recounts the first effort in our so-called Proactive Support program when I used BL to identify that Rick Klau at Feedburner had a dead ThinkPad. We fixed him. He thanked us. The rest is history.

It is very weird and almost traitorous to see my name in Fortune after 13 years at the other business magazine that begins with F…O…R…

Today is the sixth row since getting back on the erg following 120 days of recovery from a trashed sacroilliac performed while sculling in early November. Easy-does-it is the rule for the first week — with the usual sore shoulder and back muscles as my body gets back into the unique cycle of rowing.

Yesterday was a rest day — NYC and travel — so coming off the rest I was a lot faster and set my personal best for the week, 20 minutes, 20 seconds for the 5,000 meter segment, averaging 2:01 minutes per 500 meter split. Not bad for week one, and a four second split improvement from my 2:05 on day one. Keep in mind that in full shape I am generally cruising in the 1:45-1:55 range (think of splits as the basis “mile per hour” measure in indoor rowing.
I do a 500 meter warm up at a very easy pace, loosening up for the most part. The 5,000 is when I turn on the iPod and crank at a loping 24 stroke per minute pace, focusing on length, a long recovery (the return part of the stroke) and a solid drive, taking great pains to focus on posture and back alignment. I program the RowPro to keep me in a 25 spm band, and a 150 heart beat per minute band, that generally sees me peak around 170-180 bpm during the final sprint.
Feels good to be back on the wheel of pain.

The Daily Erg – Rowing Science
Rowing Blogs – Weekend Reading Anyone?

“Technorati … lists 168 blogs with rowing as one of their topics! Of course not many of those have rowing as their main topic. Here are a few of the blogs that I have had the pleasure of reading over the past six months or so. If you have a chance please take a look at the work of other rowing bloggers”

Rowing Science has a list of rowing blogs I need to check out.

Okay — no erg today for me as I am in NYC and not staying at a hotel with an ergometer. Concept2 used to provide an “erg-finder” database, but it’s always a pain to locate, and I need to del.icio.us the location. I did get a ping from Jeff Wagner at ergscores.com offering to help me with a WordPress plug-in to send my scores to his service: “If you get those scores into ErgScores.com we’ll develop a WordPress plug-in to make you Erg Blogging a lot easier.”
Jeff — I’d be into it. WordPress is the center of my online life these days.

The plan for the forthcoming week of erg is to let my neck and shoulder muscles recover from week one, then get back on it on Saturday with another 5,000 meter piece (5K is a good piece as it lines up with the regular testing interval used by coaches of 20 minutes, and is a close approximation of a head race, ie The Head of the Charles. It’s long enough to hurt, but short enough not to be boring.).

The plan is to build up from 5K to 30 minutes to 10k to 60 minute at a low (18-22 stroke per minute ((SPM)) pace and a low heart-rate, say 120 beats per minute (bpm) or less so I can start burning fat. A tedious month of that, mixed in with on-the-water rowing commencing the weekend after next on my annual return to the water date of St. Patrick’s Day, and I may be able to consider some mid-spring racing at Narragansett Boat Club or the Charles.

Location Context « Cheaper than therapy

“Location is one of the most basic yet important discoveries man has ever strived to make.”

Benjamin Lipman makes a strong case for why GPS-enabled electronics represent the next phase of consumer electronics. I agree, having regrets over getting the non-GPS BlackBerry Pearl, and having used the Garmin StreetPilot C330 that Ben advocates (and gave to me as a gift) last weekend to explore the Westport, Mass. area — an adventure that would have been impossible without the device.

Location-aware applications could be huge, with initial impact and experiments coming from “friend-finder” models, as well as “what’s your Twenty, Big-Buddy” questions, as Ben points out: “where r u?”

Jason Calacanis is “fat-blogging” — chronicling his diet.

Debt bloggers talk about how they are reducing their credit card debt.

I’m thinking of “erg blogging” — a combination of a fat-blog and a training-blog to chronicle my attempt to get into mega-shape on the rowing machine and single scull. Following three months of crippling back pain brought on by a bad row in early November, I am back on the erg, doing about 6,000 meters a day, using my Lenovo x60s ThinkPad and RowPro 2.0 software to log my stats (speed, splits, calories, heart rate, etc.) and uploading them to the online rankings hosted by the erg’s manufacturer, Concept2.

Given that erging is about the worst thing in the world — total mechanical self-flagellation — and that most reasonable people would regard an erg as a modern torture device, I am sure erg-blogging will have all the drama of listening to someone talk about their weight.

Anyway, what got me on the erg topic was a couple random things.

First, Concept2 has a great user video contest going on. The finalists can be viewed here. This will give you a sense of how weird rowers are.

Second, I missed the recent CRASH-B Sprints, the world indoor rowing championships, but my best-buddy, Doctor D. did not. The goal of an erg-blog will be to place in the top ten in the 2008 CRASH-B’s. My personal best is a 6′ 28″

So, I don’t know what an erg-blog will do every day. For instance.

I erged this morning before taking the train to NYC. I try to erg six days a week, with one day for muscle recovery. Since I won’t get home until tomorrow night, I will consider Friday to be my rest day.

I erged for 5000 meters and finished in about 20 minutes, 30 seconds. A terrible time, but this is the fifth straight day of erging and I have a bad sacroilliac to be careful about. I should be doing 5,000 meters in, oh, 18.30.

I listened to my iPod –

• Pixies: Where is my Mind?
• Mission of Burma: That’s When I Reach for My Revolver
• Soundgarden: Rusty Cage
• Dead Kennedy’s: Too Drunk to F$%K
• Scissorfight: Kancamangus Mangler
• Deftones: My Own Summer
• Rob Zombie: Scum of the Earth
• B$%^hole SurfersMinistry: Jesus Built My Hotrod
• B$%^hole Surfers: Who Was In My Room Last Night?
• Ministry: New World Order

I dunno, erg blogging, could be a non-starter, could be a public humiliation. I will need to confess all sins of fatness to make it work. Time to drag out a scale and tell the tale of the Toledo.