Churbuck.com

Personal Technology – WSJ.com

Quote of the day, from Walt Mossberg: “In my experience, the top brands for technology and reliability are Apple and Lenovo’s ThinkPad line, but various models from Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba and Dell are also worth investigating.”

Around Barnstable – Barnstable, MA – Wicked Local Barnstable
It’s a start:

“Barnstable town councilors unanimously approved a shellfish overlay district for areas of Cotuit Bay, West Bay, North Bay and Nantucket Sound. The approval finally came after many months of discussions and many amendments were made to the original proposal. The proposed ad hoc committee to be appointed by the town manager will stay in the approved ordinance. Bulkheads will not be affected by the 18-month pier ban. A sunset clause proposed by councilor Greg Milne was defeated. The new ordinance also requests review and simultaneous comparison of the coastal management study that was completed in 1990.”

Drew Ginn

This has been an interesting week to be an Olympic sponsor, but nobody has more of a stake in the Games than the athletes. Drew Ginn, the Australian rower, put it into perspective on Monday when he responded to a comment on his blog on why he was going to Beijing:

“This is an opportunity for all of us to realise the World is bigger than our back yard. People live in different ways and countries have operated in different ways. The impact of the Games will have both positive and negative outcomes. Hopefully there’s more of the former occurring and what I do feel strongly about is that as an athlete I will perform in the spirit that the Games was intended.”

Carter made the decision to block American athletes from participating in the 1980 Moscow Games, and some good friends of mine had their lives seriously messed up by that decision to block them from competing because of Soviet geopolitics. Politics and sport don’t mix well, but they try, and the Olympics is the most political pulpit in sport.

So, as I try to make sense of it all, I read Drew’s most recent post, about a training ride on bicycles. It’s pretty powerful:

“With each pedal stroke I tried to maintain the unsustainable speed and bit by bit my heart was pounding and attempting to keep up with the demand. At this stage I realised I could not go any quicker but was resolved to keep my speed as high as I could and with this came the deep heaving breathes that were a final indicator of being right on the limit. The last section we caught the traffic lights and as we braked I had the wonderful sense of that strange dynamic between ecstasy and agony. A twilight zone of sorts and as we continued up to the meeting point the sheer bliss was remarkable. We all chatted away and made comments about the various things that took place and all of us where very much on the limit which is why we love going out for these types of rides.”

Yahoo to roll out a new ad system. Ok.

Yahoo to run Google ads. Weird.

Yahoo to get into bed with AOL to stave off Microsoft. Weirder.

Microsoft to get into bed with News Corp. to really gang up on Yahoo. Weirder still.

It’s all wrong. I went to the Microsoft digital upfront last week in New York and the emphasis was on shows. Not technology. Not context. Not apps in the clouds. But shows. Celebrity gossip, funny home improvement, stressed out moms, and college music festivals. Great stuff for the right brand — but it’s like the early days of Microsoft when Microsoft seemed to be taking the content-is-king thing seriously. Yahoo — remember Lloyd Braun? — also used to be into shows. So I guess there’s synergy going there.

I guess.

cookies on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

This is a good thing. I like Flickr. I like my FlipCam. I like my pictures — still and moving — in the same place.

Here’s the first one I’ve seen yet. Now to find a way to embed em in WordPress and life is good.

Yahoo finally gets something to make parity with YouTube.

Traffic into the city was brutal late morning (writing this from Logan on my way to RTP), I guess because its Opening Day for the Sox and they get their World Series rings for last fall’s victory.

I hope I won’t be blocked from watching this afternoon on MLB.com. I dropped $75 for the service and suspect it is not going to be of much help during home games.

Anyway, play ball!

In the arts, (aka: books) this year’s crop is completely unknown to me:

Fiction: “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” by Junot Diaz (Riverhead Books)

Drama: “August: Osage County,” by Tracy Letts

History: “What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of America, 1815-1848,” by Daniel Walker Howe (Oxford University Press)

Biography: “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father,” by John Matteson (W.W. Norton)

Poetry: “Time and Materials,” by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins) and “Failure,” by Philip Schultz (Harcourt)

General Nonfiction: “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945,” by Saul Friedlander (HarperCollins)

I guess I read more than the average person, but not one of these crossed my lap in 2007.

Guess who gave Twitter a second chance?

Courtest of TweetStats 

Toast is now the hottest thing in product design « Collateral Damage

Why I read Constantine von Hoffman and you should too. This is a masterful treatise on a personally favorite topic — toast.

“It’s true. There’s something about turning things that aren’t toast into toast that seems to appeal to designers right now. A thumb-sucking trend-spotter (GUILTY!) might say this is because toast is warm and comfortable which makes it especially appealing in these unsettled times. However what I really say is pass the marmalade.”

Bullshit. Classic piece of sensationalized make-news on the front page this morning.

Synopsis.: Two bloggers died recently and one had a heart attack due to the always-on nature, every-minute-is-a-deadline world of blogging.

First off, as Dan Warner, the nasty editor in chief of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune told a roomful of rebellious reporters (myself included) in 1984: “You want stress? I’ll show you stress. Go work in air traffic control or be a single mother on food stamps.” (He then turned the room over to a “stress consultant” who told us to close our eyes and relax our muscles beginning at our toes, moving up to the follicles of our hair).

I know and knew two of the bloggers in Richtel’s piece. Om Malik is a good friend to me, but not to the gym. The fact the guy had a heart attack earlier this year is not because he ignored the surgeon general’s warning on the side of his blog: GigaOm. Marc Orchant died in December. I knew Marc from our work with Foldera, the SaaS collaboration play. Did his blog do him in? Did it contribute to his untimely death at 50? Cmon.
And Arrington gains 30 pounds. Welcome to the club. I packed on an extra 25 in the last year myself and it was more due to being a fat ass without a bicycle than anything else.

And so some Gizmodo bloggers fall asleep at their desks. Every afternoon half of America’s office rats nod off in meetings about next month’s meeting about the TPS report meeting after they get around a Bacon Lover’s Triple-Pounder and a supersized fries at lunch.

If the point is that life is one constant deadline, okay, I’ll buy that. But this blog-as-sweatshop meme that has been percolating around the Gawker/Forbes.com world of Manhattan indentured 20-something servitude for the last five years is the same crap fact checkers went through in the magazine world in the 1980s: long hours, party till you drop, and nutrition via ramen.

Does anyone care anymore who got it first?

Monday, 4/7: Cotuit

Tuesday, 4/8: Cotuit to RTO

Wednesday-Thursday 4/9-10: RTP

Friday: Miami-Cotuit (~) not confirmed

Welcome to the first week of a new fiscal year. The Olympic Torch is moving, making its way through the EU this week. Lenovo Olympic Bloggers, 09 media plans, and Social Media Marketing monitoring remain top of mind — pretty much my big three: blogging, advertising and metrics …..

I just came off the water from a perfect early morning row around Grand Island, loafing along at a two-breaths-per-stroke pace on perfectly smooth water. I’m fat, very fat, so the poor shell ran low in the water and wasn’t having an easy time running between strokes, slowing down on the recovery like it was dragging a wet sweatshirt. Still, with no one on the water or shore save the owner of the Cotuit Oyster Company loading his skiff for a morning’s work on the beds and a couple unseen carpenters in the woods putting the final touches on a winter project on a summer house, it was nice to be able to row on flat water with nary a morning motorboat to throw a wake in my path or to feel self-conscious as I sculled under the Osterville draw bridge and past the docks of Crosby’s and Oyster Harbors Marine.

Soon enough, in less than two months, mornings will be a lot less solitary, and I hope to then to be rowing in a thinner condition than I am today.

As I circled Grand Island I thought about some interesting stuff I’ve been reading lately about local native history and the Wampanoag tribe. I didn’t know, until last weekend, that Grand Island (Oyster Harbors) was the primary Wampanoag village in the area, Cotachesset, and was located close to the site of the present Oyster Harbors Club, an exclusive country club/beach club. Lots of questions went through my mind this morning about how the Wampanoag’s (led by Poupmunnuck, from which the modern name Pocknett is derived) moved from island to mainland and whydid they establish the village on an island for protection, and if so, from whom.

Cotachesset & the Oyster Harbors Club

 

Whatever, nice row on a grey morning (morning rows are nearly impossible to do during the week due to 7 am China Olympic calls) Now to do some paperwork and get ahead of the week to come.

Corporate employee blogs: Lawsuits waiting to happen? | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Tip of the hat to Chris Kobran for this del.icio.us link to a recent CNET story about a Cisco patent dude getting sued by some patent attorneys after the Cisco guy uncloaked his anonymous authorship of a personal blog about patent stuff:

“Cisco said it still believes “common sense” should be a guiding force for employees sharing information online, but it also added the following rule to its three-year-old Internet postings policy: “If you comment on any aspect of the company’s business or any policy issue the company is involved in where you have responsibility for Cisco’s engagement, you must clearly identify yourself as a Cisco employee in your postings or blog site(s) and include a disclaimer that the views are your own and not those of Cisco.”

Seems pretty clear to me what the dominant rule is: blog about whatever you want on your own time, but if you talk about the company you identify yourself as an employee. Sames goes for company related comments on other blogs, editing of corporate, competitor or industry related Wiki entries, forum postings, bathroom graffiti …..

I was twittering with Sam Flemming at CIC (Chinese buzz/WOM monitoring consultancy) a couple weeks ago. He was singing karaoke someplace in China, and posted the tweet that he just sang “Sweet Home Alabama” — which sounded like enough of a cultural disconnect that I had to reply that here in Cotuit, I have heard “Sweet Home Clamabama” sung at drunken boatshop parties. Then John Dodge, former colleague from PC Week, send along this beauty.

The Russian Red Army Men’s Choir doing their best Lynryd cover: with the well coiffed Leningrad Cowboys

IOC Exec Warns China Against Internet Censorship During Olympics – washingtonpost.com

From Staci Kramer at Paidcontent.org:

“With the Beijing Olympics roughly four months away, Kevan Gosper, vice chairman of the IOC coordinating commission, is warning organizers that the internet must be open during the games and that restrictions “would reflect very poorly” on China. AP quotes Gosper about raising the issue during the last official organizing meeting before the Beijing Olympics: “This morning we discussed and insisted again. … Our concern is that the press (should be) able to operate as it has at previous games. … There was some criticism that the Internet closed down during events relating to Tibet in previous weeks.” Gosper added: “I’m satisfied that the Chinese understand the need for this and they will do it.”"

I remain optimistic that there will be open access to the critical tools need to enable our Lenovo Olympic Blogger program and that is Google’s Blogger and YouTube platforms, both of which have been particularly problematic from time to time due to the capricious nature of the “connection has been reset” phenomenon known as the Great Firewall. With the IOC permitting athlete blogs during the Games for the first time, there will be a great deal of pressure to maintain an open conduit of internet communications. With the world’s press on the scene as well as hundreds of thousands of spectators from around the world, I don’t see a tightening of access, but a relaxation.

Or at least so I hope. Fallows’ piece in the Atlantic Monthly remains the best FAQ on the situation.

So our CEO is on CNBC last night, talking about the super skinny X300, and he lets it be known that it is spill resistant. There is actually a drain built into the machine to funnel liquids out of the machine and away from the electronics. I have never had occasion to find out if it works.
The co-anchor says, “I’ve got a bottle of water right here …”

Our CEO — a former college wrestler (Lehigh) not known for backing away from a challenge — picks up the machine and says, “Try it.”

The TV guy starts pouring away, CEO yanks the machine back, saying in effect, “I didn’t say give it a bath!” The machine is soaked. Not just the keyboard, but the entire bottom half of the machine.
Discussion goes on, then they decide to push the power button and see what happens. Drumroll please. The machine lights up. All is beautiful, high fives all around.

Here’s the video.

Henry Blodget, Redeemed?

Here! Here! I must chime in with my respects to Blodget for his redemption. When he first popped back onto the scene a few years ago like a bad echo from bad days I was predisposed to sneer and say, nah, he’s painted with the Big Stink. No more. Silicon Alley Insider is a serious piece of work that is high in my reader. Roben Farzad writes on Businessweek.com:

“So I must tell you, I now admire Henry Blodget—for his audacious reincarnation as a tech and media blogger and author. I find his work indispensably frank, stuff you see all too rarely from an ex-insider.”

Thanks to Tim Dalosio (Red Sox blogger first, CNET dude second) for getting this prime piece of video up and embeddable on YouTube: