Churbuck.com

Fester is the media economist and will have smarter things to say about this news, but the decision to launch Jackass 2.5 direct to web, with an ad version as well as an iTunes download play — I think is very cool and a major wrench in the works for the distributors who just had their legs cut out from beneath them.

Gotta love the money quote:

““There’s more vomiting, nudity and defecation,” one executive said, speaking more candidly than the companies involved had agreed to and on condition of anonymity. “The stuff that consumers really want.””

Trying to do an hour long call and a person near and dear to me decides it is time to impart important news over the phone. Call waiting kicks in on the cell phone. Always annoying. I hit ignore and 10 seconds later the home phone kicks in. This is one of those wireless base station set ups with four handsets floating around the house (and never one around when you need it).

I put the cellphone on mute, answer the home phone to shut it up, and hiss “I am on an important call. I will call you back.” I hang up on the person (my wife). She calls back. The house starts ringing like the belfry of Notre Dame at noon on Sunday. Blood pressure gets to aneurysm levels. I answer and hang up in one quick sequence of button pushing.

It rings again.

I need a master cut off switch, a big throw switch like in a Frankenstein movie, something I can heave amidst a big ball of sparks when I want to be alone ……

Now I have to mend fences with the wife or face divorce court for scroogish behavior.

Sorry for late notice, but on a teleconference with Francois Gossieux and SAP’s Mike Prosceno for the next hour (1 to 2 EST)

1-605-475-8590, Conference Room Number is : 5785861
Topic is “view from the trenches”

No, I have installed the 1995 Hypermail BBS theme on top of WordPress. Something hiccupped somewhere and now I can’t see (you may be able to see) the blog in anything other than HTML 1.0 formatting. Oh well, too slammed to go root around in the CSS I can’t understand.

more posts later. snowstorm on the way — I guess Cape Cod’s farewell to the storm that messed up the midwest. No snow days for the work-at-home.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: A Routine Traffic Stop Can Change Everything in an Instant.

From McSweeney’s:

“I turned on siren and increased speed in the left lane and came abreast of vehicle, noticing a large numeral “5″ painted on the side. Driver was Caucasian male in his mid-20s, wearing racing helmet and leaning forward over steering wheel. I eventually pulled slightly in front of his vehicle and forced it to the side of the road. As I approached the open window, driver began speaking very rapidly and incoherently about a volcano and a mountain crack that was closing. Upon request, he produced license identifying himself as SPEED RACER”.

Guess what the officer found in the trunk?

Monday, Dec 10: Cotuit

Tuesday-Wed, Dec 11-12: NYC

Thursday-Sunday, Dec 12-16: Cotuit

Busy week due to budget planning, Olympics, end of year stuff. Quick NYC trip for agency talks, RTP next week, then holiday break.

Sunday is always the day for my big ergometer effort of the week — usually an hour of power — and today was one of those days of total erg nirvana.

Sixty minutes is a long time to sit on a rolling seat and roll back and forth on a five-foot I-beam staring out the open bay of the boat shop at the bare branches and a bruised looking November sky. An iPod will only cut the monotony so much, so it all comes down to meditation, focusing on everything and nothing at the same time while repeating, like a transcendental mantra, the same repetitious four-count stroke.

As a crew coach once told me, “Rowing is easy. What other sport lets you sit down and work only half of the time?”

By “half the time” he was referring to the “recovery” or the part of the stroke when the seat rolls back to the start, or catch, and in theory, you aren’t doing anything. The drive — when legs-back-arms all fire in one big burst to pull the oar handle — is where the work happens.

What’s interesting in an hour-long piece is first, how rare it is to do something mindlessly repetitious for sixty minutes. The only thing, technically, I do in a 24-hour period that is more repetitive is probably sleeping.
The other interesting thing is what happens physiologically to my body over the course of sixty minutes. I can track the progress from the heart monitor and the split times. Interestingly, the first 15 minutes or 25%, are often the worst in terms of total performance, as my body warms up and moves quickly over the first eight minutes from a starting heart rate of 75 beats per minutes to the magic moment at 8:00 when something kicks in and the sweat really starts to flow. By ten minutes my heart rate is 140 bpm and I’ve settled down into a 26 stroke per minute cadence, averaging 1 minutes and 59 seconds for every 500 meter split.

That 500 meter split is the number you focus on during an ergometer session. Anything sustained under a 2 minute split is pretty good. A racing rate, or sprint, is often under 1:40. In the last 30 days I’ve seen my average splits decline from 2:07 when I was a fat, out of shape whale, to 1:59, an eight second improvement. That average rate is what is termed my “steady state” — the rate at which I can cruise along without putting my heart rate over 170 bpm and dive into lactic acid hell. I should be cruising at 1:55 before I consider myself in good shape.
Anyway, erging is about mental arithmetic. Every session has to be approached with a goal in mind. Mine this morning was to row 15,000 meters in 60 minutes, meaning, I had to row an even 2 minute split for every 500 meters. Not impossible, but the mental torture one has to endure whenever the split slips to 2:02 and the next stroke tries to buy back those 2 seconds with a 1:58 …..

I start thinking about quitting about 25 minutes in. My back hurts. I ate too much last night. I really should rake leaves or pay bills. I’ll stop at 30 minutes with 7,500 meters. That’s a decent amount for the day. Then 30 minutes arrive and my conscience says, “dude, you quit halfway then you will feel like an incomplete loser all day” and the negotiation starts again. Every 5 minute mark is calculated as a percentage and then a fraction of the effort. 15 minutes in — 25% done. 30 minutes in — 50% done. Etc. Etc.

At 45 minutes or 75% of the way through the piece, the fun begins. Heart rate is at 155 and I’m soaked in sweat and have to keep wiping my hands on my shirt so I can maintain a grip on the handle. I am officially bored out of my nut. Every stroke is an effort to keep the pace under 2:00 and the damn monitor shows a projected finish of 14,800 meters. I start bumming out that I’ll miss the 15,000 goal I set out to accomplish, and loserness begins to settle in. Every minute is a struggle, every stroke equals 10 meters, each stroke takes 2 seconds. More math, more arithmatic. I start giving up, “it’s the hour that counts, not the meters, this isn’t a race”, and the splits slip to 2:05, a loser’s pace. Oh well, I tried. I’ll crack 15,000 some other time.

(sidenote, in the 90s I was fifth in the world on the Concept2 online rankings for the hour with 17,500 meters, so the hour is my distance of choice, the rankings list everything from 500 meters to 100,000)

It all comes down to the iPod. The right mix will save the day. Today my iPod was dead on arrival, I forgot to charge it, so I grabbed my son’s and hit play. He had migrated one of my playlists over and fortunately it was perfect over the last ten minutes, with Fugazi’s Repeater kicking in right when I needed it the most.

The projected meter count was still at 14,800, so with five minutes to go I started the mental negotiations and tried to psyche myself into a desperate, valiant effort to take back all those slacked off quitter meters I wasted around 13 minutes to go.

With one minute to go it was do or die. I had 30 strokes to spend and nothing to lose, so I took the stroke rate over 33 and started to thrash, head flipping back and forth, animal grunts, the whole mess. Thoughts of the Battle of Thermopylae, Ben Hur, Glover ferrying Washington back to Manhattan from Brooklyn, Washington crossing the Delaware, Blackburn rowing his dory with hands frozen to the handle …..

The split went from 1:58 to 1:32 — I’m-gonna-need-a-defibrillator-rate — and with five seconds to go the meter counter passed 15,000. Victory!
I ended the piece at 15,003 and felt like I just won the Boston Marathon. Of such small triumphs in a garage, basement, gym or boat shop is the sport of indoor rowing made.

What is interesting, at least to me, in the end, is the competitive aspect of human nature. Some people are content to just do something for the pleasure of the act, others have to do it faster and better … what started out as an effort to lose some weight is suddenly a desire to get higher in the online rankings, to climb a notch above the next person ….

Anyway, only a rower would understand the psychosis I suppose.

Here’s a link to a video of Concept2 founder Peter Dreissigacker rowing a very studly 500 meter piece.

Blogging this from the Fujitsu running Ubuntu while the ThinkPad is being rebuilt from the ground up. I used Rescue & Recovery to create the product restore discs, and on first pass things went beautifully, the machine asking for one CD after another. I loaded the fifth, and last, let it get eaten by the machine and then the prompt I didn’t want to see popped up.

“Insert Product Recovery Disc 6 into Drive D:”

Um, there are only five discs, at least that’s how many were produced when I made the discs. Pray for me. I am attempting it a second time but am so bummed out by the whole ordeal that I may just hang it up, drag the mess to RTP and start from the beginning with a new machine. Operating without formal IT support just sucks.

Then again, this may be the sign from the heavens to go Ubuntu and never look back.

update: yup, I’m boned. only solution is to go buy a copy of XP knowing full well I’ll never find tablet edition at retail.

update2: I blue buttoned and restored from an external drive, but am back to my indigestion state. Will create another set of recovery discs later today and try try again.

Yuletide Zeppelin

Turn it up! Thanks to Jeff Briss at Cutting Edge Audio Group for the pointer.

“Big Business “Blog Council” created, business world yawns” from The Intuitive Life Business Blog
Dave Taylor nails it. I don’t need to spend money and time commiserating with JAMS (Just Another Marketing Suit) about corporate blogging or word of mouth marketing. When are blogs going to cease being two-headed chickens? Do PR people have associations devoted to discussion of press releases? This isn’t rocket science people, so wake up.

Anyway, Taylor says it better than I. And no, I wasn’t invited to join. Then again, I don’t own an island in Second Life either.

“I woke up this morning to a lot of fawning messages from people in the blogosphere about the new Blog Council, founded by a dozen big companies that generally just don’t have a clue about modern customer relations and marketing: AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo.

“Let’s read their press release (press release about a blogging group?) to get a sense of what they’re doing:

“The Blog Council exists as a forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs.”

Okay, ready for ten totally off-the-cuff (let me reach around the back of my chair, dig around, and pull something out of my pants) tenets of corporate blogging?

1. Don’t join a committee devoted to corporate blogging
2. Don’t read a book about corporate blogging
3. Start a blog
4. Start the blog on WordPress, enable comments, and post full text, not excerpts
5. Be a half-way decent writer with something interesting to say (Read Strunk & White’s Elements of Style annually)
6. Don’t use the “Royal We”
7. Don’t bullshit or dissemble
8. Don’t let your CEO blog unless he already has a blog or really likes to write and has the time to do it
9. Avoid corporate blogging policies over a page long
10. Don’t make promises to pissed off customers you can’t keep
11. and bonus suggestion, you don’t need to pay anyone to monitor blogs for you, just figure out Technorati, Google Blog Search and Google Reader or Bloglines and do it yourself

Seriously, want to talk about corporate blogging? Ping me. I give free advice to anyone who asks.

With the need to rebuild my tablet becoming more dire, I hied to Best Buy and consumed a Western Digital “MyBook” World Edition — a simple, cheap ($379) NAS device with one terabyte of storage — and some decent remote control software built on MioNet.

Obligatory Churbuck-marketing-digression: standing in a massive line at Best Buy, in the middle of a busy work day, in a high state of impatience, with a single clerk at the register, the old gent in front of me turned around and said, “About enough to make you shop online. These idiots rather show you an iPod than take your money for one” and with that he ditched his stuff on an in-store display of two DVDs for $6 and walked out the door.

Any way, back to the NAS. Dumb name aside, it’s a simple white box with a power cable and an ethernet port you cable into the router. Let it power up, get settled on the home network, then off to the PC with a CD to install the stuff. That took some time — drive wouldn’t mount, so I went through the online trouble shooter, waved a dead chicken, RTFM, and got it working in three hours.

Wife’s notebook is backing up now. Mine is getting started. Issue is configuring the ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery to do a network backup versus the bundled EMS Retrospective software. Wife is running EMC, I want to stay with the TVT because it’s native to the ThinkPad.

When that’s all finished, then it’s time to strip the X61 down to the bare metal and rebuild a new with the product recovery discs (yes Stephen O’Grady, the ones you didn’t make before your drive crashed making it impossible to make them when you needed them. I feel your pain).

Crossed 100,000 today with a mighty 10K in the boatshop in 25 degree chill. Definitely getting in better shape and that’s, as Martha Stewart would say, a good thing.

Working out in Dallas was a labor of love. Up at 5 am, get a day pass from the desk, troop a couple blocks to the Texas Club, erg for an hour amidst the elliptical and stair climbers (preferred music these days is the stoner-metal band Fu Manchu  but definitely need some new noise on the iPod), build up a bodacious pool of sweat, then endure the usual flesh eating virus creepiness I feel in any public gym.

But what a difference for the rest of the day …

So, 93,000 meters to go before Dec. 24th. Piece of cake. 18 days … that’s 5167 meters per day — heck, old men can do that. The mad men are the loonies who do all 200,000 meters on November 24th — seriously — that’s like an 18 hour marathon on the wheel of pain.

That’s the epitaph my spiritual mentor, the late Rev. George Vought of The Brooks School, wanted carved on his gravestone. I can attest to the first two, and wish I could say the same about committee work. When I first moved to Cotuit full-time I was a 30 year-old sitting duck with a strong back and a weak mind, and within a year was sitting on the board of the local library, was secretary to the yacht club’s parents association, and spending a night every other week on the local historic preservation district planning board.

Running the annual July book fair for the library was the killer and within two years I was off of all boards, panels, and committees and haven’t sat on one since.

The same goes for professional awards, contests, and industry associations. My college advisor, the late John Hersey, told me writing contests were especially pernicious and said anyone who wrote fiction with a prize in mind was doomed to never receive one. Apparently Thomas Pynchon felt the same way, when the rarely photographed author’s publisher hired Professor Irwin Corey to accept the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1972.

Industry associations are the real killer these days. I won’t name names, but there has been an increasing number of bureaus, boards and associations — most with membership fees — crossing my radar, none of which are worth attending for free (in my snobbish opinion) let alone pay for. Hey, if it’s an international standards committee and the company needs to engage in arm wrestling to establish some tech spec as the de factor or de jure standard, great, sign us up. But if it’s the Society of Corporate Underachieving Marketers (SCUM), devoted to “a knowledge exchange between like-minded individuals in a secure community environment” I rather contract a case of jock itch (and why do I despise the term “like minded?” Perhaps its because of a former Teutonic boss, the perfect James Bond villain — up there with Blofeld — who used the phrase in every other speech and pronounced it “wike-minded”) or join the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes.

So, save the invite. I am not going to my boss to ask for $5,000 to join a dinner club to discuss stuff I know about with other people who may not know the same stuff. I keep my recipes to myself or blog about them here.

Five days of sweating the big Powerpoint for the industry analysts. Step up to the podium plug in the projector cable, stick in the USB thingy for the wireless pointer, hit FN-F7 to pull up the presentation manager, output to projector and ….

Major lock up.  We’re talking Han Solo in Carbonite. Total freeze. I know, immediately, given squirrely nature of machine, that this powerpoint is not happening. So ….

I start the tapdance, remember Mister Gifford’s Fifth Form class on public speaking and my days on the debate team, and go totally extemporaneous.

No William Jennings Bryan, no Cross of Gold, I just stood in front of a dark screen in front of 50 analysts and colleagues and winged it.

It was fun. Better than talking through the slides, showing the graphs, the charts, the screen shots. I just yakked and had a nice conversation with the crowd. I won’t say it was my best presentation ever, and it sucked to burn so many psychic karma points obsessing over the slides …. there is some recycle potential and this fricking machine gets the Uncle Fester Wipe Out next week in Raleigh.

Dinner last night with some very smart Gartner analysts who talked about the relative watt drain of different screen savers. Seriously, these guys are quantifying the power consumption of 3-D Pipes and Starfield. Average burden is 3 watts …..

They also slammed the claim stated last week at the CMO Summit that an unnamed Wall Street financial institution consumes as much electricity as the entire state of Connecticut — total albino alligator. They did say a rack in a data center does consume as much juice as three typical households.

Cool stuff ….

ForbesOnTech: Blog Monitoring; Its Understood by Soon to Graduate Students

Former colleague Jim Forbes on his discussions with college students about the impact of Social Media Marketing and Corporate Journalism on the customer-corporate relationship:

“Not one of the students I talked to suggested or seemed to seriously consider countering negative blog posts with counter attacks. I suspect that there’s an instinctive awareness of basic public opinion among young people that have grown up with social media that helps them understand that exchanges of bodily fluids with online polecats is a wasted effort.”

From Your Councilor Precinct 7 Richard Barry – Cotuit – The Barnstable Patriot – Cape Cod & Islands

“In an attempt to help resolve water quality issues, there is a movement afoot to remove 425 feet of sand from the point of Sampson’s Island. The dredged material would be used to create a wider beach at the new point. This would benefit bathers, the beloved piping plover and water quality. Permitting alone is estimated to be in the ballpark of $250,000. This is in the early stages and I’ll keep you informed.”

Wow. I’m ambivalent about this news. On the one hand, bigger entrance to bay means better flushing. On the other — this is a big environmental impact, one needed because of other human actions (building the Osterville Cut, etc.”

I have sold dozens of Concept 2 ergometers over the past 15 years. Best rowing machine in the world, will deliver more exercise bang for the buck than any other piece of gym equipment, and actually have a competitive sport associated with it: indoor rowing.

The problem is when I’m on the road I need to find one of the machines. Luckily Concept2 has a database of ergs that helps me identify hotels and gyms that have one. The problem is when I get there I usually find a machine that is unmaintained, beaten to death, the electronic monitor is dead, etc.. The biggest problem, especially with health clubs, is that they never upgrade the machines, and at $900, it is definitely not the most expensive piece of iron on the premises.

So here’s my suggestion — give users like me stickers to apply to the erg — with a suggestion that the erg needs a makeover, and include Concept 2′s 800 number. I hate the ergs I run across (Gold’s Gym is a veritable erg museum) and wish I could do something other than tell an uncomprehending employee at the front desk that they need to upgrade from a Model B to a Model D.

Anything to activate one’s promoters — e.g. people like me, people who hangout at ThinkPads.com — is probably the biggest bang for the buck a marketer can deploy.

Give me a roll of stickers and I will be sure to stick them in my gym bag.

My X61 is taking forever and day to boot up and I suspect it ate something that disagreed with it. Uncle Fester and I took a crack at the start-up folder on Thursday night, but it is still acting piggish, so I took advantage of the ThinkVantage System Update utility to load all new drivers, bios, etc. in the hopes it will regain its vim and vigor. Skype upgrade?  Google Updater? Post-It applet? Something is killing me here. Anyway, off to Dallas, time to do some airplane powerpoint.

The past week’s discussions of Amazon’s $400 e-book reader, the Kindle, puts me in the mood to talk about my tired, needs-to-be-replaced, Eastern Mountain Sports backback with the removable padded laptop sleeve.

This blue bag was bought in 2000 before a McKinsey trip to London. The gang at Forbes.com pitched in and bought me a new leather Coach briefcase, but I guiltily returned it and took the $$$ to buy something from EMS that I could strap across my back and march through the world’s airports with.

Eight years later and the bag is going strong. Some zipper and buckle failure — one is permanently sealed thanks to a SuperGlue accident when I was stupid enough to actually try to tie saltwater fishing flies on the road — but for the most part it does the job of carrying everything thing from a spare set of contact lenses to Pepto-Bismol, trackpoint cap replacements, business cards, index cards, pen refills, phone and notebook chargers, sleeping pills, ear plugs, eye shades, iPod, ear buds, pencils, paperclips, most of the world’s currencies in change format, old weird PCMCIA cards for media no longer cared about, bills, bank statements, magazines, ThinkPad, etc. etc.

I would estimate, fully loaded, that it weighs about 30 pounds and consumes as much space as your average roller-bag.

It also carries books. Lots of books. I read very quickly (I can burn through a single cheesy paperback in a cross-country flight), and need three to four books with me at all times. For me — an e-reader like the Kindle — comes down to a volume/mass equation. Will it take up less room that the usual mini-library (I ditch the lower end books in the seat back pouches for the next guy) and is there a cost savings over the massive gouging one receives for a paperback in an airport bookshop (crap paperbacks are easily $8 when they should be $3!).

Hardcovers are not an option. Dragging Pynchon’s latest around the world is like packing the Manhattan white pages.

Sure, the Kindle has great electronic ink, has a free-WAN for downloading, but, in the end, will it take up less share of backpack? At $400 I will likely pass but I would love to try it.