Churbuck.com

Date: 05-13-2007
Distance: 10000 meters
Time: 42:13.00
Split: 2:06.65
Comments: another slow and smooth piece in the garage, still babying the lower back

MapMyRide.com – Map your Cycling and Mountain Biking Routes. Topo Maps, Elevation Profiles, GPS Support.

Interesting tool i saw advertised in this week’s VeloNews. I’ve been a fan of the
GMAP Pedometer — a Google Maps mashup. But this one is more social for ride sharing and appears to have more bells, if not whistles. Useless to me, as it is close to a year since the Memorial Day Bike Crash when I stopped cycling, but that hasn’t prevented me from being a fan — albeit a sad fan given today’s New York Times obituary of pro cycling amidst a massive defection of fans in the face of the doping scandals. The news that the Championship of Zurich has been cancelled for lack of sponsorship after 100 years … well, something had to happen and it has. Now, as the Times points out, take a look at baseball, for that is where the fans are likely to say “enough is enough” next.

5.13 – Cotuit to TARAH (RTP)

5.14 – TARAH HQ (take a right at hooter’s)
5.15 – 5.17 NYC

5.18 – Washington, DC

5.19-20 – Cotuit

When the subject of reincarnation is raised, and the question is put to me: “What do you think you will come back as?” I am always jealous of my dissolute friend Peter’s answer, which, due to his high cigarette, alcohol, and caffeine consumption makes his answer — “A garbage dumpster” — highly humorous. Me, I have to pick the mighty Bluefish, aka Pomatomus saltatrix, mostly because I usually catch the first one of the season on or around today, May 13th, my birthday.

I have a strong affinity for the bluefish. My college writing teacher and mentor, John Hersey, wrote a fantastic book devoted just to the bluefish, Blues, in which he expressed his deep respect for this voracious, sporting, bulldog of a fish, one of the most ubiquitous in the world, and a star or villain of any Cape Cod fisherman.

The blues return to Cotuit in early May to ravage the schools of spawning squid. They come in close to shore and sun themselves on the sand flats, where they fin and lay stationary in the sunlight, waiting to attack anything that invades their space.

Off I went this morning, straight from bed, solo with no company, out to the boat and out of the harbor to the flats off of Sub Rock off of Sampson’s Island. There I casted the great Ballistic Missile, a fluorescent orange lure, and then reeled it back as fast as I could, causing it to splash and skip over the surface.

On the second cast my heart gladdened at the tell-tale swirl of a fin behind the skittering plug. With a firm pull the fish was hooked and began to run, vigorously shaking its head.

I got it aboard, avoided its toothy snapping jaws, slipped the barbless hook from its lower lip, and then gave it a big smooch before tossing it back in.

That was it. Birthday present delivered I motored home.

I want to come back as a bluefish. I hope John Hersey did.

UPDATE:

Due to overwhelming reader demand for what to do in the event they are presented with a bluefish to cook, here is my favorite recipe”

“Honey, the Dog Is Eating Grass Again Bluefish”

Take one bluefish, preferably one caught early in the morning and then thrown into the stern of the motorboat back by the scupper plugs where it can curl, get stiff in the sun and baste in rainbow patina of gasoline and two-stroke outboard oil.

Filet with a rusty knife, taking care to leave scales and the rib bones in the flesh.

Leave the dark meat in the fish. For that is where the PCBs are most concentrated.

Take a cookie sheet. Preferably the kind that warps with a loud “thwang” when heated. Cover with aluminum foil. I don’t know if the shiny or dull side up matters or not.

Do not grease the foil. The fish must stick to the foil so your guests will have the electric thrill of finding out what happens when foil meets one of their fillings.

With the meat side up: cover the bluefish with a one-inch thick layer of Miracle Whip, the evil stepsister of Hellman’s Mayo.

Bake or broil (it just doesn’t matter) until the Miracle Whip is kind of browned like meringue.

Serve, and then remember you forgot to make any kind of side dish. Find Tater Tots and bake in oven until lukewarm while the fish gets cold.

Eat. Feel bad. Then start drinking. Get angry at nothing in particular and call your nearest relation “a leech who contributes nothing” or “an oxygen thief” and then start a mallet fight with the kids’ croquet set on the lawn in front of the horrified neighbors.  Ask them what they are looking at.

Date: 05-11-2007
Distance: 10000 meters
Time: 45:00.00
Split: 2:15.00
Comments: Low and slow, damper on 1. First post-back spasm row done at low to know pressure, with BPM below 130.

A year ago I put my cellphone number on the Internet. If Scoble could do it, so could I, and I did, and yes it rings, but not as much as you would think.

Why is my cellphone on the Internet? Because it gives disappointed, frustrated, and otherwise freaked-out customers a neck to choke when they need one to throttle.

Just now the phone rang. I answered. The gentleman caller wanted to know if I could fix spyware. Um. Okay. Back up a second. What’s the problem? I ask.

I can’t connect to the internet. There’s no icon.

What icon? I ask.

There’s no Microsoft icon.

Back up some more. What model PC are you using?

I have no idea. You sold it to me. You should know.

Sir, can you tell me if it is a notebook or a desktop?

All I know is it is a Dell.

A Dell? Do you know you are calling Lenovo?

Leno-who? Do you sell security systems?

Lenovo. We sell ThinkPads and ThinkCentres

Can you fix my problem or not?

Sorry. I can’t help you. Call Dell.

I did. They said to call you.

Are you at the PC right now?

Yes.

What color is it?

Silver.

What does it say?

It doesn’t say anything.

What word is on the cover or inside.

Word? It says Dell!

Sorry. I can’t help you. I wish I could. But this number is for people with problems with Lenovo products.

I know this game. Microsoft. Dell. Whoever you are. You all pass the buck!

(At this point I am tempted to help the poor guy and walk him through Dave’s Blind-Leading-the-Blind Service Experience, but I am too busy) I wish him good luck as I hear an argument break out in the background.

Linked-In may have figured out a way to induce people to pay for the perfectly adequate free service.

“See who has viewed your profile”

If that doesn’t appeal to one’s paranoid vanity, what else would? I know a “General Manager” at Thomson, and someone at Solon Management Consulting (probably Hubertus von Wulffen in Munich), and two Lenovo colleagues took a look. But the other 15?

That will cost me $20 a month. No thanks.

PC World – Editor in Chief Harry McCracken Returns to PC World

“In a surprise announcement, Robert Carrigan, president of IDG Communications, told PC World’s staff today that “Harry McCracken has decided to remain with PC World as vice-president, editor in chief.”

“[CEO] Colin Crawford will be rejoining the IDG management team as executive vice president, online. In this role, he will be responsible for driving IDG’s online strategy and initiatives in support of our Web-centric business focus,” Carrigan said. “We will conduct a search for a new CEO to lead PC World and Macworld.”

This is a big deal for the PC press because none of the major tech publishers can withstand any reduction in their audience, and certainly no aspersions on their ethics. The trade press had a terrible rep back in the 80s when I was at PC Week — I was grilled by a Wall Street Journal reporter in ’89 about rumored excesses and whispers of graft, advertiser pressure, etc.. Truth is, I never saw it happen, or was to naive to notice.
I never had a story outright croaked by a publisher or someone on the ad side. I caused some massive pain to the sales side, especially at Forbes, and that was fun, and the late Malcolm Forbes took some grief for allegedly stifling stories, but I never ever saw evidence of that in my 13 years. In fact, Malcolm’s son, Tim, my boss during the dot.com days, said something that has hung with me and that was to the effect that journalistic integrity takes years to earn and seconds to squander.

Inside Intel’s New Centrino Duo and Centrino Pro (Santa Rosa) – Lenovo ThinkPad T61 Widescreen: Full Review – Review by PC Magazine

Nice to the lead the pack with this week’s new Santa Rosa announcements. Thanks PC Mag:

“Another year, another Intel launch, and another Editors’ Choice awarded to the Lenovo ThinkPad T61 Widescreen. Its main appeal is the outstanding performance ThinkPad users have come to expect (just be sure to upgrade your battery when you order a system). Overall performance and this laptop’s usability will keep businesses coming back for a long time.”

Cotuit has one church — the Federated Church. I think it’s a merger of two faiths from back in the days when the population was too small to support two parishes and it was decided to “federate” or create one church shared by two faiths: Methodist and Congregationalist. Even though I was confirmed as an Episcopalian, I was married there and my father’s funeral was conducted there, and many other significant events have taken place there over the years. So it’s a important thing to the Churbucks, but more in a convenient than a pious way.

Every day at 6 pm, the PA system in the belfry plays a recording of bells, which is nice to hear on a quiet evening. In the 50s my father swapped the recording with an early rock-and-roll record.

But I digress.

The main thing about me and the church is that the Parsonage — the house owned by the Church for the use of the minister — is next door to my house to the south. I could shoot a bottle rocket and hit it (which I have done).

When I was a little boy the minister was Reverend Kraft. He and my grandfather were friends, and our yard sort of morphed into his yard, and the Krafts were held in high regard by the family as Reverend Kraft had been there for a very long time.

Then there were a series of different ministers starting in the late 1960s — one transcribed my Great-Great-Grandfather’s Civil War letters. Another was an avid gardener. One — Reverend Wilson — was from The Cameroon and had two wonderful little girls, Hannah and Olyenka. It’s been an interesting experience living next door to the minister, sort of like a built-in governor for excessive behavior. Which never stopped any excessive behavior from occurring, but the fact that the minister lived right across the yard always gave one pause before calling a sibling a bad word or lighting an M-80 at 2 am..

For the past few years there has been a lapse in ministerial occupancy of the parsonage. The house was dark and quiet for a couple years, then the church began to rent the parsonage to random tenants. But no ministerial presence.

Then the news came that a new minister is on her way.

In the spirit of being a good neighbor I provide you this link. Scroll down. My new neighbor is there. She is not the cheerleader.

If They Write It, Will They Come? – Forbes.com

Lincoln Millstein — head interactive honcho at Hearst, founder of the Boston Globe’s, Boston.com, on getting rid of the ink-stained wretches and doing the old Tom Sawyer move with the readers.

No erg for a while. My back collapsed on Saturday while I was rummaging in the garage for fishing gear. One mis-step and … twang. I was walking like an S-curve, lying on the floor trying to pop my sacrum back into place, doing weird stretches, and making everyone around me wince. Better today, but no erg for a few days I think.

Sacroiliitis sucks. 

What is the threshold for a person in charge of blog monitoring to step into a comment string and try to contact an aggrieved customer?

The notion of influence and “rank” has been used in the past to differentiate between bloggers, but for some online marketers, any negative comment from an upset customer can represent a permanent scar in the search index, something which, if left unanswered can linger, or, if ignored, flare into something more significant than the initial detection might predict based on the user’s Technorati rank or known influence.
Yet, what are the rules of thumb for engaging or ignoring?  If one takes the approach that all expressions of unhappiness – be it from a blogger on their blog, or from a commenter on another blog, or a commenter on an official corporate blog — are bad, then one can quickly project an extremely busy, extremely challenged operation trying to respond to all inquiries or complaints. Extend that to a multi-language operation and the challenge compounds quickly.

Triage, that emergency room cliche, carries a huge amount of risk. Some incidents, left untended, will flare into something dramatic. And, there is the Heisenberg principle of measurement — that detection and measurement of online community sentiment leads to a change in the nature of that sentiment, and indeed, encourages it to bloom as users quickly understand that a blogged comment can expedite resolution faster than the anonymity of a service phone call.

Just some random challenges I’m wrestling with these days.

The fish weir is working off of the Wianno Club in Osterville, inshore of Collier’s Ledge. Fisher, Pete and me motored up to it on Saturday afternoon, keeping clear of the mooring lines that angled away from the fyke to temporary anchors. A flapping little American flag was tied to the sapling branch that held up its corner of the netted pen.

The weir goes up every May, right when the squid are spawning off the 20 foot line in Nantucker Sound. It catches scup, squid, mackerel and sea bass for a few weeks, but stops when the voracious bluefish arrive around May 13th.

“Think they have to fly that flag by law?” asked Pete as we motored past the 50×100 foot oval pen or fyke. There was a line of grey saplings — pounded into the sandy bottom in 15 feet of water — running off to the north for a quarter-mile, a black rope tied with turk’s heads running like a phone wire from tree to tree. I guess there was another net below the surface, making the weir look like lollipop with the end about a mile off the beach, and the fyke, or fish pen, directly south like the candy.

Painting by Christina Allen

This is probably the most, if not one of the most ancient forms of fishing. Archaeologists have found vestiges of river weirs, generally made of stone with reeds woven between poles to deflect the fish to a pen where they could be harvested by hand.

There are only a few weirs left on the Cape, one near me in Wianno, the others past Point Gammon towards Harwich and Chatham. I’ve never seen one emptied, but they are very temporary looking affairs that go up for a few weeks every spring and come down long before the summer folk arrive.

We jigged up a dozen squid in the middle of a huge fleet of fellow squidders. Every boat’s hull was mottled black from the squirting ink. Pete and I fried the squid into calamari. They sucked.

In 1867 the Barnstable Patriot reported:

“(Advt.) NOTICE. The Centerville Fish Weir Co. having completed their Weir at Squaw’s island near Hyannis Port, are now able to supply Fishermen with FRESH BAIT. The signals, when they have Bait, is a White Flag on the Weir, and an American Flag hoisted on the shore. Apply at the weir.”

Links

• There is an Amazon listing for a video on weir fishing in Nantucket Sound
• A video of a Cape Cod weir being worked is here.

5.7 – Monday: NYC to get son at NYU — flip turn 250 miles down/250 back

5.8-5.11 – TARAH (Take A Right At Hooters, Aka Lenovo, Morrisville, NC)

5.12 – 13 – Cotuit

Workout Name:Half-Hour-of-Power
Date: 05-04-2007
Interval #1: 7326 meters/ 30:00.00/ 2:02.85
Comments: nasty ugly Claritin/pollen/allergy hell row. Feel like an old man who smokes crack.

…and so my brother the former Green Beret/Delta Force man would start one story after another after splitting a bottle of scotch. I quote him as I realize I haven’t been exactly loquacious lately about interactive marketing and mostly because the stuff I am working on is too proprietary to share at large. Weird, I thought if anything I’d develop a case of overly-loose lips, but instead I’m starting to clam.

So, tomorrow expect a post about squid fishing and not behavioral target or campaign dashboards. Terrible stuff to talk about over a sunny spring weekend anyway.

ErgScores.com | Welcome

I’ve started to get into this interesting site for tracking and mapping ergometer scores. What’s most impressive is the guy behind the site, Jeff Wagner, redefines great blog marketing. He detected I was erg blogging, invited me to check out Ergscores.com, then … and this is cool, wrote a widget that permits me to auto-publish my scores from the site to this blog every day, and a gadget for iGoogle.
What is ErgScores.com?

ErgScores.com is a free online indoor rowing management application. With ErgScores.com you can:

* New! Daily Erg Blogging
* New! Team Accounts
* Classifieds. Search for rowing equipment from classifieds across the web.
* My Community mashup of rowers by distance.
* Calendar support for scores and workouts
* Support for Google Gadgets
* Create and manage goals
* Manage your erg scores, daily workouts and graph your progress over time
* Export your scores into a variety of formats for sharing with others
* Team data management with graphs, reports and lineup comparison for coaches
* Access your scores from anywhere
* High School rowers can release scores to college coaches
* ….more features are being added daily. Comments welcome

Here’s what Jeff wrote me recently as an example of total mash-up passion:

“The biggest obstacle is getting the data into ErgScores.com.  I have not used RowPerfect, but I believe they have an auto-sync method that uploads the data directly to C2.  Unfortunately, C2 has no public APIs for their log book (that I know of anyway). So you would have to input your data into ErgScores.com directly.  Perhaps, I could make data entry easier for you by writing a Google Desktop widget for data entry or something of that nature.

Let me know what you think.

FYI: I book marked that erg finder you were looking for this morning for you ( http://del.icio.us/jwagner/for:dchurbuck). I’d love to mash that up as well..”

I pulled into the Mobil station on Aviation Boulevard this afternoon to top off the tank on my rental car (and spare myself the $8.86 per gallon gouging by the rental agency). I did what I always do when I arrive at the gas station. I stopped by the tire inflator, got out, looked for which side the gas cap was on, and then pulled up to the pump for the fill up. I kicked myself for not checking before I climbed into the car, but hey, good intentions never go remembered, and as I watched, another guy pulled into, to the same spot by the air hose, got out, looked, and then climbed back in to pull up on the appropriate side.

Why can’t the auto industry come up with a simple indicator on the dashboard to denote which side the gas cap is on? My buddy Lincoln Jackson had a rule of thumb that whichever side of the dashboard the gauge was on, so would be the gas cap.

Wrong.

Akismet burped and 333 pieces of spam clogged up the befukticator, causing the defraginator to fart, rendering Churbuck.com dead in the water for most of the day.