Churbuck.com

Among the annoyances of using a PC is the “Floater” — some weird graphical artifact that sticks on the screen like a spot on your retina after you stare at the sun too long. I’ve had two in the last day — need to reboot to clear them, but I’m literally too busy to even do that.

See it? “New_england_map_1677?”

Here is again

It’s one of those, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t things and it is driving me nuts.

Dan Lyons Fake Steve Jobs liveblogs — make that twitters — from Macworld. Pretty funny stream of consciousness.

This post could rapidly turn into a massive digressionary polemic and I have no time, so let me expel this bit of brain flatulence:

My first Google registration was for Gmail in its earliest beta incarnation (back in the day when people sold invites on eBay, got mine from Jim Forbes). I used it to set up a spam catcher — an anonymous address for those times when I didn’t want to part with my personal addresses in online registration forms. Other Google products used that mail address — Google News, Google Reader, iGoogle, even the mobile suite of Google apps on my Blackberry — and as they gradually took over more of my screen time they gradually became more important, enough so that were it not for corporate enterprise demands like Lotus Notes, I would probably run my life through Google.

Doing so under a registration designed to trap erectile dysfunction spam was becoming an issue.  I had to transition to a sensible account such as david.churbuck, not sexypapa123 ….
The transition has not been pretty, but the promise — especially if I can create a parallel computing environment that compliments Lenovo’s (cross calendar conflict resolution, email forwarding) — is very compelling.

So, surprising how a personal beta of a beta product turns into a headache after two years because I considered it too experimental to run under my primary identity.

Ford: Car owners are pirates if they distribute pictures of their own cars – Boing Boing
Fester points at this legal head-scratcher on Boing Boing.

“Josh sez, “The folks at BMC (Black Mustang Club) automotive forum wanted to put together a calendar featuring members’ cars, and print it through CafePress. Photos were submitted, the layout was set, and… CafePress notifies the site admin that pictures of Ford cars cannot be printed. Not just Ford logos, not just Mustang logos, the car -as a whole- is a Ford trademark and its image can’t be reproduced without permission. So even though Ford has a lineup of enthusiasts who want to show off their Ford cars, the company is bent on alienating them. ‘Them’ being some of the most loyal owners and future buyers that they have. Or rather, that they had, because many have decided that they will not be doing business with Ford again if this matter isn’t resolved.”"

I’d send 8 x 10 glossies of laptops, keyboards and towers to Lenovo’s fans if they wanted to have a calendar printer. Better yet, go to our Flicker stream and take what you need.

Monday-Wednesday: RTP

Thursday-Sunday: Cotuit

Mourt’s Relation — arguably the first piece of American literature –  the first first-hand account of the first year of the Pilgrim’s after their landing on Cape Cod and Plymouth in 1620, and the basis for most stories that have followed. Samoset and Squanto, theft of the Indian corn at Corn Hill in Truro, first meeting with Massasoit, herring/shad to fertilize the corn, the first Thanksgiving — and a ton of other detail not usually taught in the elementary school Thanksgiving mythology most of us were fed as kids.

Written by Edward Winslow and William Bradford, but published by a George Morton, hence the “Mourt” — a “relation” is a retelling, as in “he related the story of how the Nauset tribe attacked them at First Encounter Beach.” Again, thanks to N. Philbrick’s Mayflower for getting me on the early colonial history thing. I had a great dinner conversation Saturday night with Ross Kerber from the Boston Globe about the book and we both geeked out over stuff like the Great Swamp Fight.

In full pack and panic mode to make a 5 pm direct to Raleigh tonight ahead of what the National Weather Service is saying will be a nasty winter storm. half-a-foot to ten inches predicted for Boston, which means my morning flight won’t be happening.

Off I scurry to the land of cotton.

update: I landed, turned on my blackberry, and got this from JetBlue: “Due to weather in the Northeast, we are unable to complete your travel as scheduled.  Your flight #1223 on January 14, 2008 for travel from Boston has been cancelled”

Mark Cahill points to the final blog post of his high school buddy — the late Major Andrew Olmsted — a soldier in Iraq and blogger. Very stunning.

The freakishly mild winter continues — thunderstorms in January sent the dogs fleeing for the slot under my home office desk yesterday and made both of them seriously incontinent on the oriental rugs — and this morning, when padding down the quahog shell driveway looking for the Times, I looked up at the anemometer and it wasn’t spinning, a sure indication there was flat water down on the harbor.

I went back indoors, saw the thermometer proclaim a balmy 51 degrees at 7 am, and announced to Daphne: “I think I’m going for a row.”

Ordinarily the poor woman would express some fear that I was off to kill myself (a reasonable fear given her pleas that I not go for a bike ride the morning I went head-on into a Ford Focus), but she thought a row was a grand idea, and encouraged me to risk hypothermia and cardiac arrest.

Winter rowing is sufficiently weird that I can’t begin to talk with any expertise about it. When I rowed competitively in college the winter was the time to hunker down inside a gym and lift weights, row on ergometers, run up and down staircases and suffer on the indoor rowing tanks. Most years it is so cold that Cotuit Bay freezes over hard enough to walk across, and rowing isn’t conceivable. This year is a different story altogether.
I usually aim for St. Pat’s day for the first water row of the year, but the opportunity presented itself two months early, so off into mye closet I went looking for microfiber tights, longsleeved shirts, and the other winter workout gear I have for crosscountry skiing, winter cycling, and sculling. As the Scandavians have said: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.”
My boat was still on its outdoor rack, left there because I’m lazy and figured I couldn’t take advantage of a opportunity like this morning’s should one present itself. I picked the broken twigs and leaves off the hull, pulled the wine cork out of the drain hole, and swung the 40-pound, 25-foot long plastic spear onto my head, forgetting the first rule of sculling — don’t carry a boat on your head while wearing a baseball cap — the weight of the boat on the little rivet on the top of the hat presses into the soft spot, or fontanelle, on one’s skull, causing immediate agony and the hassle of having to put the boat back into the rack, take off the hat, fold it in half, jam it into the back of one’s rowing shorts.

I carried the boat (named the Arschclown ((there is an umlaut over the “o”)) in deference to its German manufacturer, Empacher, my fondness for Office Space and empathy with all the “talentless assclowns” of the world, especially those who think they can relive their athletic youth on skinny little boats that tip over if you look at them funny) on my head, down the street and down Old Shore Road to the boat ramp at the bottom of the hill. The morning dog walkers, Dunkin Donuts drinkers, and hungover guys in their pickup trucks shook their heads at the sight of an over-weight guy in tights and clogs slapping down the road with a boat on his head, and pulled over to watch me launch in -45 degree (Kelvin) water in bare feet.

There was ice on the water this time last week, so who knows how cold it really is, but as I got the oars into their oarlocks and climbed onto the rolling seat I had to wonder at the intelligence of a row on a body of water with no other boats out there to save my butt should I flip over — which has been known to happen about two to three times a summer when I space out and run into a channel marker or mooring buoy because sculling is a sport when one goes backwards and has to look over one’s shoulder with paranoid regularity.

Hypothermia is not funny. Society’s fascination with the stupid ritual of the New Year’s swim is some sort of tribal shock ritual meant to remind its participants to stay out of the water from November to May. I used to go for a New Year’s swim back in the day, staggering out of Gerry Henderson’s house at midnight to fling myself en masse with other drunken Cotusions into Nantucket Sound and then instantly regret such stupidity when my head shrank, my reproductive organs vanished, andI had to run back to the only shower on amputated jagged leg stumps on a dirt road rutted with frozen mud puddles.

Tipping over while sculling in January is not an option.

I have a wonderful route I usually follow from March to November that circumnavigates the wealthy isle of Oyster Harbor — home to the superduper rich — down scenic saltwater rivers like the Narrows and Seapuit, past the historic boatyards of Osterville where the famous Cape Cod catboat was invented, a nice 9,000 meter row that I would hold up as one of the best circuits in all of New England.

Not today. I wimped out and decided to row no more than 50 feet from the beach, in the lee of the north wind, so if I did flip I could get of of the water as soon as possible rather than spend some terrifying time in the middle of the bay trying to reboard the boat. Getting back into a flipped shell is an ordeal in warm water. The capsize itself is a complete shock — a terrible moment of no return when one side of the boat plunges down because of a “crab” when the oar on that side enters the water at an angle and slices downward — and a very wet corkscrewing experience follows, usually when one is in full anerobic hell with a heart rate over 150 beats per minute, breathing in and out twice every stroke.

Blub-blub.

Having that occur in January, with a 49-year old heart, is up there on the actuarial tables for stupid life-ending events, and since I like life, I stayed close to the beach and did eight 750 meter pieces, stopping at the end of each to catch by breath and turn around wheelchair style, pushing with one oar and pulling with the other. I have a speedometer thingy called a stroke coach that magically receives a signal from a little underwater propellor and tells me my distance, speed, strokes per minute. I kept an eye on that until a half-hour had elapsed and called it a day at 6,000 meters. Wimpy, but sufficient for the first row of 2008.

By the 20 minute mark the nervousness fell away, the stroke started to swing, and I realized why rowing is such a nice familiar part of my life. I am a very lucky guy to be able to walk 500 feet, launch a nice German rowing shell, and take my exercise, sitting down, on a spectacularly balmy morning in the middle of the New England winter. Last year’s first row was in April.
Now off to the Moonakis Cafe in Waquoit for a stack of blueberry pancakes and a side of homemade corned beef hash, I earned it.

The smug guy sitting next to me on the 7 pm Acela to Providence, yakking into his iPhone and reading my screen is now a little confused because I started flipping through my Tivo and watched a Russian movie on IFC before channel surfing to the episode of South Park where Cartman learns how to eat with his butt.

I love Wireless WAN (especially when someone else pays for it) and Slingbox.

It’s magic! There’s no wires! How does he do it? Why is he now writing about me?

I wish the Boeing Connexion internet service still was offered on airplanes, I’d try to watch my tube on the way to Beijing at the end of the month.

This week’s meetings in New York City gave me a gradual glimpse into the evolution of online media and its total separation from browser/web delivery to one that includes video screens in the back seats of taxis to the massive digital billboards that crane over the approach into the Midtown tunnel.

This new media is unique in that there is no action that can be taken by the audience other than a pure impression. The billboards cycle relentlessly through four to six-second spots, doubtlessly trafficked intelligently to show the right message at the right time to the thousands of cars flowing underneath them, but there is no clickthrough action that can verify the connection between message and audience, no way their effectiveness can be measured other than a count of the number of cars that pass underneath it and some wild-ass demographic guess about the income of the people in those cars.

In today’s taxis, in those back seats that Travis Bickle cleaned out every night, are video screens, blaring away celebrity news, movie reviews, weather, Zagat’s. The cabbies don’t like them – not for the content, but because they carry GPSs and enable credit cards which means their tips are taxable. But focus on those screens (the first thing I do it hit the mute button and wonder how many microbes I’ve just picked up) long enough and you realize that they are just a dumb browser, there’s no way to click through and buy, to sign up for the newsletter or sub to the RSS, but the messages are there, pounding away at a captive audience as relentlessly as the screens in some elevators … all trafficked, all timed with a mysterious backstage logic that could be saying: “Passenger climbed into taxi at corner of 49^th and 8^th and now is moving downtown. Logic says passenger could be heading to Port Authority or Penn Station, logic says direction and time of day could indicate commuter, look in ad pool and serve ad for Panasonic Toughbook out of “portability” pool.”

Even if it doesn’t happen, it could, and as a semi-obsessive compulsive optimizer who believes in stuff like behavioral targeting, day parting, re-targeting, campaign stacking, path analysis and the such, I think it’s pretty cool and leading us back into a world where there is no accountability expected from media (of course there will be those Quixotes who will try, the old hand grenade marketing gang that measures crap like “pass-alongs” and cars per hour under the old six-panel billboard). The old world of half-my-advertising-works-but-I-don’t-know-which-half, a world of media where messages get blared out there but there’s never any explicit attribution or tieback to the tactic. It’s coming back

We just ran a very interesting experiment with classic television advertising. The ads were bought and trafficked online, and while they ran there were some interesting and measurable effects that we could measure with our web analytic tools – all positive, but not as explicitly and precisely trackable as an AdSense campaign where a bid on a search term went out, was won, served a text link which got clicked, and which resulted in an order for a $1395 laptop at 3 am on Tuesday from customer in Duluth. The TV worked, we know it because there was little other media out there to clutter the controlled aspect of the experiment, but we detected its effects through web tools, e.g. show television commercials about a tablet computer and suddenly the “tablet PC” keywords starts to perform. I think we’re entering a renaissance of advertising for advertising’s sake where some digital media gets cut some major slack for not being attributable but for just being there.

“Smart” digital marketing is about reaching a state of metric bliss where every penny is squeezed until it shrieks. “Dumb” digital marketing is throwing a message out into the ether, aiming at the side of the barn and hoping it sticks. Unaccountable media could be coming back.

Good news? In some ways the mental pollution of brand messages, buy now, logos, and other insidious messages are probably contributing the overall decline in modern IQ and mental health, but … as an academic exercise in some sort of weird statistical driven sociology … it’s a lot of fun to play with.

One of the top annoyances of working for a global company is the tendency for big conference calls to take place at 7 am and 7 pm to accommodate people’s schedules in China and the East Coast of the US. Aside from crushing my morning rowing sessions (which need to happen early because that’s when the water is flat and calm), the calls are tough because I travel a lot and tend to travel early in the morning in order to make morning meetings in North Carolina or New York.

Wednesday’s is a particularly big morning for global phone calls, and today is no exception as I have to present a big project related to the summer Olympics. I also need to be in NYC for meetings. So — no airplane as the phone doesn’t work on the Delta Shuttle, and the car is a tedious affair that doesn’t work if I need to present off of a powerpoint.

So, here I am on the Acela, somewhere west of Stamford, ready to present and the anxiety is killing me.

Facebook followers have seen me declare, in uppercase “I AM NOT GOING TO CES”, and indeed, I write this from balmy Cape Cod on the eve of a two-day trip to NYC. Last week, in advance of the Consumer Electronics Show, we wisely announced our entry into consumer PCs, the fastest growing segment of the PC industry.

David Berlind at TechWeb files a report on the new machines and includes a video of our competitive analyst and uber blogger, Matt Kohut. I thought I would share.

These are exciting and uncertain times for the country — a presidential election without an incumbent on the ballot and without a sitting vice-president running to replace him. It’s a jump ball, anyone’s to win or lose, and the next three months will test the candidates’ endurance and mettle in a system designed to expose the weak and winnow out the uncommitted.

I am a committed Independent and a former bartender who never discloses personal political, religious or spiritual preferences, so this post is not about who I favor or disfavor. I cast my votes across party lines and have voted in the past eight presidential elections, beginning with my first, in 1976, when Ford lost to Carter.

New Hampshire holds a special place in my heart from the 1984 primary, when I was a young reporter at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, a medium-circulation daily newspaper (60,000 circ. at the time) that covered a territory along the Merrimack River Valley including the New Hampshire border towns in Rockingham County. Those towns — Salem, Derry, Pelham, Plaistow, etc. — were very important to the candidates as they carried a relatively dense population, were serviced by the Boston television markets, and therefore easy to reach during the campaign as opposed to the seriously rural votes in northern New Hampshire in towns like Berlin, Conway, and Franconia.

For a few months I got to cover national politics in the shadow of the biggest names in political journalism, rubbing elbows with the likes of Curtis Wilkie, Jules Witcover, and David Broder as the candidates rushed from coffee shop to nursing homes, VFWs and hazardous waste sites, giving the same stump speeches so repetitive that the camera men and sound techs from the networks would lip synch along in perfect harmony.

The experience of being invited to ride in the back seat of a limo with a candidate as the caravan rushed from Portsmouth to Rochester, talking one-on-one with George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, Ronald Reagan, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, was electrifying for a shy 26 year-old who was working in journalism for overly noble reasons such as Watergate and the amazing Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. They paid attention to me because I reached the voters they wanted, but it was nice to pretend, for a few weeks, that I was semi-important.
And then it was over. The campaigns moved on to other states and I was back to covering local town hall politics and the occasional state house debate. One year later and I was at PC Week trying to figure out local area networking protocols like StarLAN and Token Ring, but for a few short months I was indeed, a “boy on the bus.”

Journalism becoming a consumer product – 01/07/2008 – MiamiHerald.com

Thanks to Romensko for pointing out today that Edward Wasserman writes in the Miami Herald:

Taken in the light of the bonus structure at blog-based journalism enterprises such as Gawker, and the purported obsession with bylines and pageviews at Forbes.com, the tyranny of metrics has firmly spilled into the newsroom. This is bad. This pushes enterprise reporting into the realm of chasing traffic.

Going to the registry of motor vehicles to renew the registration of the boat trailer, receiving a new registration and plate decal and finding the plate has fallen off somewhere — probably on the boat ramp. Have sticker, have registration, have trailer, have no plate.

Hit the Harvard Coop yesterday (best bookstore in Massachusetts, fiction section is out of this world) and loaded up on some January reading. Have a lot ongoing, and more in the wings, but I couldn’t pass these up.

The Big Oyster, Mark Kurlansky. Well, this is a blog about clamming strategies, so I had to get this from one of the best food historians (Cod, Salt, etc.) writing today.

 The Mayflower Papers, Nathaniel and Thomas Philbrick. Primary source companion to The Mayflower, spied this as I was about to buy William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation. All in keeping with my recent early Massachusetts history binge. I love primary source history — having had it shoved down my throat in college by history professors who would have it no other way. Sort of opens your eyes to a new perspective on things to hear from the first hand witnesses to events versus the commercial pap foisted on school children about the love affair between the Pilgrims and the Indians and the first Thanksgiving.

Stars and Bars, William Boyd. Contemporary English author, introduced to me by Charles Dubow. One of my favorites. Recommend a newcomer start with The New Confessions

PS: Hey Amazon, stop mucking up book covers with the fricking “Search Inside!” logo. It ruins a good thing.

My son Eliot the film student and film blogger, was in a fever to see the lastest by his favorite living American director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), There Will Be Blood, and having to drop his sister off at the airport in Boston yesterday, we decided to make an afternoon of it and catch a showing in Harvard Square.

I tend to over-indulge in superlatives, but this film just made it into my top five list of films, a hallowed quintet that holds room only for Ordet, Apocalypse Now, Godfather II, Barry Lyndon, and now this, the best, most swaggering, gripping account of American capitalism and rugged invididualism I’ve ever read or seen.

The cinematography, particularly during the well fire scene, is pure art.

I can’t predict commercial success for this, it is a challenging movie to watch and the title will put a lot of mainstream viewers off, but I suspect this is going to gain an audience over time like no other film in the past twenty years.

Daniel Day-Lewis is at the top of his form. Some of the closeups on his face are satanic.

A Heart-to-Heart with GigaOM Readers – GigaOM

“I had a heart attack on Dec. 28. I was able to walk into the hospital for treatment that night and have been recovering here ever since. With the support of my family and my team, I am on the road to a full recovery. I am going to be OK.”

Get better Om, and stay off the fun stuff for a while.