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Some serious pre-China anxiety setting in. I am — despite my aura of world-seasoned, globetrotting, time-zone scoffing meanderings — a hater of change and a serious agoraphobic who needs a Rainman-like routine to survive. Here is my home from August 5 through the 26th. The Beijing Grand Empark.

This place looks like the dollhouse for Hello Kitty and the rest of the Sanrio menagerie. With nighttime lighting like this they should play steam calliope music through tin bullhorns at all hours. The number one amenity of the Empark is this mysterious feature, the “Underground Non-Night City:”

“The underground non-night city features various shops, gourmet street, super market, indoor swimming pool, recreational centre, beauty salon, KTV, sauna, night club, DISCO, etc.”

Along with “KTV” I need to figure out this mystery activity as soon as I arrive:

“Tennis Court / Pool Tables / Physical jerks / Badminton”

The Empark is way on the western side of the city (if the Forbidden City and Tienanmen Square are the center of Beijing, then the Empark is out at 9′o’clock), south of the Summer Palace in Shijingshan. I used Lenovo’s Olympic venue mashup of Google Maps to locate the place and orient myself in relation to the rest of the action. It’s not in Outer Mongolia, but the Empark doesn’t look like its in the heart of the action, which I predict will be more to the east around Chaoyang and the embassies. On the plus side, the hotel is near the baseball park, so if I can score some ballgame tickets, I’ll be close.

Travel around the city is not an easy thing when the Olympics aren’t in town, and even with even/odd driving restrictions in place, this is not a great city for a non-Chinese speaker to simply leap into a cab and issue directions. Indeed, I usually get a card with the hotel address in the appropriate characters and laminate the sucker to show to cab drivers when I get lost. Beijing is not a walker’s city — not in the Manhattan sense of the work — although one can definitely get some good strolls in around around the Forbidden City, a cross-town expedition is not recommended due to the sheer vastness of the megapolis.

My big concerns, as always pre-trip, are the adequacy of the gym, the conduciveness of the neighborhood to walking (I am an incessant walker when stressed out), and food. To give you a sense of how weird I am, I have eaten, with very few exceptions, the same breakfast for the last four months — steelcut oatmeal with apple sauce and almonds, two slices of Canadian bacon, a teaspoon of codliver oil, and two cup of Peet’s French Roast cofee, black. That’s it.  No eggs. No pancakes.  Beijing is the land of congee for breakfast — a favorite of mine — and the weirdest bacon (very tasty) I’ve seen outside of the US. As for the gym, I’ll bring my jump rope, new ultra-ugly Nike IDs, and the Crossfit list of hotel-room routines to try to stay on the fitness bandwagon.

I will say I’m psyched not to be at the usual Lenovo hotel — the Loong Palace (aka “The Lonely Palace”) which is way north of the city near the company’s offices in Haidan — a perfectly fine place to sleep, but per the nickname, pretty much in the middle of nowhere out on the Baidaling Expressway which leads to the Great Wall.

I need to get my affairs in order on this cloudy Cape Cod day and start packing for 21 days out of my normal routine. I don’t think the TSA is going to be cool with me packing a pint of Norweigan cod liver oil ….. Imagine how freaked out an athlete must get when traveling to a foreign venue? US athletes brought their own food to Rome in 1960 and half of the squad got dysentery from eating unwashed fruit. I can only imagine how freaked out some over-trained specimen must feel about getting settled into a new timezone, bed, diet, and air quality before trying to perform in the most important competition of their lives. I guess the lucky ones are those athletes who perform in what Uncle Fester calls the “Smoking Sports” — sports where one could,  if dumb enough, smoke a butt while participating. Sailing comes right to mind (what I would pay for a picture of some Olympic sailors on the downwind leg cracking open Budweisers and lighting Camels in the wind like Cotuit Skiff sailors in the Sunday afternoon Informal series) along with shooting (Billy Bob with a shotgun taking aim at clay pigeons with a Merit menthol hanging from his lip) and maybe bowling (except bowling isn’t an Olympic sport). The athletes with the freakish metabolisms and the V02 max ratings up in Lance Armstrong territory – they must have a hellish time dealing with travel and staying competitive. I get stressed thinking about it.

Okay, back to my second-to-last day off, some paperwork and bills, tomorrow I’ll start packing and worrying about my own details.

Nice thing about vacation is I can take a couple hours in the morning and get a serious row in before the day gets rolling. Today’s Crossfit workout of the day was to run 15 kilometers — and given my running technique has been compared to a pumpkin with serious issues — I said to hell with that, spare the knees, and decided to row 15K — which amounted to two circumnavigations of Oyster Harbors, aka Grand Island, aka Cotacheset ancestral home of the Wampanoags.

The first circuit was brisk and focused on technique, the second rotation was spent obsessing about the various blisters and chafings developing where skin met skin or wet spandex. My hands look gnawed. I literally have a blister forming inside of a blister on my palm.

Ah, but work is not far away. Morning war room call at 7, weekly Lenovo Marketing Board, assorted email spurts. As I pack for another day at the beach the first thing in the waterproof  bag is the blackberry, followed by the zinc oxide, iPod, etc. etc. etc.

I need to find a Beijing rowing club. there is a nice looking river near my hotel, it seems to run out of the lake where the Summer Palace is. I’ve seen crews rowing in Beijing in the past so I need to find out where their boathouse is. I doubt I’m going to get any time in on the Olympic course at Shunyi. (end sarcasm).

It’s vacation week (sort of) and that means time to dust of the books that deserve some concentration and not a quick skimming. After having my curiosity piqued by the Sunday NYT travel section a few weekends ago, I ordered a copy of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) from Amazon and waited for it to come off of back order. I have not seen the 1968 Visconti movie starring Burt Lancaster, but will save that for after Beijing.

I spent this afternoon on Dead Neck covered in 30 spf and zinc oxide, listening to an iPod filled with Dylan, drinking diet Moxies and really getting into The Leopard. I give it a strongest recommendation if you’re in the mood for some great historical fiction about an interesting transition in Italian/Sicilian history (the Risorgimento — the rise of Garibaldi and the decline of the House of Bourbon). Lampedusa wrote this in his late 50s and died before it was published. It is definitely a masterpiece and a case of a literary talent realized too late, but gratefully at all.

I need to start thinking about Beijing reading — two massive flights generally eat books — and I guess I blew it by not saving David Maraniss’ fine Rome: 1960 for the flight. Anyway, it was good and it gave me some interesting perspective on the history of Olympic media.

New search engine

Blam

Update:

Cuil was working this morning. Very interesting approach to search. The initial screen is googly in the sense that the search box is the main attraction and nothing else. Big design difference is a black page versus the Google expanse of stark white. The biggest differentiator is the results (or SERP) page.

Couple very interesting things. One — multicolumn and more thumbnail graphic exposure. Second, a tab implementation, and third a  box of related sub-searches.  That’s where Cuil is going to have an impact … the SERP.

For the first time since preparing for the Olympics took over my life in the spring of 2007, I spent some idle moments actually browsing the upcoming Beijing Games as a fan, and not a marketing geek. My sport of choice is rowing (of course) so I started poking around my favorite rowing site – Row2k.com where I was delighted to see Elle Logan featured on the homepage as one of the youngest members of the U.S. Olympic women’s rowing team, representing the US in the pair. I got to know Elle when she rowed at my prep school alma mater, Brooks, with my daughter. Their four won the New Englands and the nationals, an experience which was pretty intense for me as an overly concerned paternal spectator.

I head to Beijing in a week, arriving on the fifth, then settle in for three weeks of helping our China team manage our sponsorship, make friends of our 100 athlete bloggers, and do some intensive blogging myself. I am assigned to our command center, have been asked for my “uniform size” (I forsee a baby blue jumpsuit and a visor in my future), and will be staying at the Empark Grand Hotel out by the Summer Palace. Other than that, I have no solid agenda other than to get to meet as many of the 100 bloggers as possible, see Elle row (I also have no tickets to any events, but will deal with that when I get there), and try to stay on track for own athletic endeavors and the fall rowing season.

I’m kind of excited. Make that very excited. I’ve been a total Olympics sucker since I watched the 1968 Games and first heard that hokey Olympic fanfare and the voice of Jim McKay. I was outraged at the tragedy of Munich, envious I was so close yet so far from Montreal, and for a brief spell in the late 1970s wondered if I had what it took to make the 1980 team (as it turned out, definitely not and thankfully so given President Carter’s decision to boycott Moscow over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). I have a very close friend who is a medalist and look up to him as someone who has truly distinguished himself through the kind of preparation and dedication clichés can only begin to describe. So, this is my first Olympics, and if I have my way, not my last.

Cruising through our aggregation of the athletes’ blogs, it is pretty cool to see their first posts from the Olympic Village.

Rajyavardhan Rathore
our Indian target shooter writes:

“Hi Guys, reached the village yesterday night, late night. The first thing that we did here? Walk into the dinning hall ( i guess the size of 3 football fields put together), mind you we had been at the security check area of the village for 6 hours (unusually long) waiting for India’s Delegation Registration Meeting with the organisers of Beijing Olympic Games to be finallised so that we could get into the village as residents.
“Morning was at 7.30 am and we headed off to the shooting range. I had an italian shooter, Daneillo Francesco to give me company and we did a bit of training.
The targets seem fine, not so hard as last time that we were at Beijing for the test event. They were flying pretty smooth. The humidity is really something here, you are dripping of sweat in a few minutes, got to watch for our hydration. I guess i should not be complaining at all about humidity, being from Delhi, India. Cool, no probs, we’ll handle all this… and more. Adios Amigos”

Brady Ellison, the American archer, was also impressed by the size of the dining hall:

“well i arrived at the village yesterday and its absolutely amazing here. we got off the plane and got on a bus that took us to the village were the Chinese are more that helpful got us right through with no problems. The village is huge. Im at a loss of words of how cool it is here, the people are very friendly the food is great. The dinning hall is huge, 200 yards long and thats pushing the small side of it.

I shot today, for the first day off the plane I am very happy the way i shot. there is really no wind so far. they have made some changes since the test event they had last year. new shade canopies and that sort of thing.

I cant really think of anything else if anyone has a question or want to talk about something let me know and ill do my best. Im just so excited to be here we are about to go and shoot again for the afternoon then dinner. ”

This is getting me psyched to get on a plane and get over to Beijing ASAP. Well, a few more days of preparation and pre-blogging, and off I go.

Looks like a serious thunderstorm is sweeping up Long Island on its way to Cape Cod this Sunday afternoon. So, rather than risk life and limb in a sailboat, I’ve hunkered down with the laptop and am watching the radar show a big mass of red moving up the coast.

Run for your lives ....

I use the National Weather Service. In days gone by I used to actually pay Accuweather for “premium” weather until I figured out they get most of their data from the NWS. I need to get a book as I have no idea what “base reflectivity” means, nor the weird quadrangles that get arbitrarily placed on the storm track. Figuring out amateur metereology has long been one of those wish lists along with figuring the names of the constellations.

Looks like I have another hour to go before I need to make sure the car windows are rolled up and the porch windows are closed.

Vacation week — going nowhere other than Cotuit. This is a 95% vacation, meaning an eye will be kept on some stuff at work, but not entire disengaged and disconnected.

August 4 — fly to Beijing for the duration of the Olympics.

Took the clan to the Barnstable County Fair, an experience akin to paying ten dollars each to go to the worst restaurant on the planet, which then induces you to vomit on spinning rides, fill up again, then finish the meal with a stroll through fetid animal pens in 90 degree heat.

I have never gotten out of there for under $100.

It all begins with the fried food. Wife goes for a ginormous fried onion with horseradish infused mayonnaise and a tub of Del’s lemonade (allegedly considered a delicacy in Rhode Island). Eldest son and I go for the foot long hot Italian sub with greasy fried onions and peppers, and a large $7 order of “curly” fries soaked in vinegar. Youngest son always gets something strange involving mystery meat on sticks. Daughter goes dessert right from the beginning, generally fried and covered in powered confectioner’s sugar. We rendezvous in the glen behind the fried food stands and go communal, all while reassuring ourselves “It only happens once a year.”

Then to the rides. I like looking at the carnies. Belt buckles the size of garbage can lids, weird leather cowboy hats … one actually said, “Get ‘er done” after loading a passel of screaming tie-dyed campers onto the Regurgitron. I don’t go on the rides. I have a notoriously wimpy stomach, horror of heights, and would flunk out of the astronaut try-outs of the first round. So I make the boys do it and then take great glee in watching them get sick.

We play games. Generally involving guns.

And then my favorite part. Animals.

Courtesy of Uncle Fester who found this CRN report:

“A report from a Chinese government agency said there are now 253 million Web users in China, up 56 percent from a year ago and surpassing the number of users in the U.S, according to reports.

“While the numbers are impressive, there is still much room for growth. The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) found that the figures represent only 19% of the Chinese public using the Internet, according to the Wall Street Journal.

China’s 253 Million Internet Users Surpasses U.S. – The Channel Wire – IT Channel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness.

Ben at Walking the Berkshires and the Cape Cod Times (and its excreble daily video show CapeCast) are sounding the tocsin over that-which-should-not-be-eaten, Tomalley, or the vile green goo found inside the bodies of lobsters.

Apparently lobsters, who personify the term, “bottom feeder”  are utter scavengers who dine on whatever lands on the bottom, store a lot of toxic crud in their tomalley, which is essentially a two-organs-in-one deal for the lobster, playing the role of both liver and pancreas.

Lobsters lying in state

Sorry, but I don’t know about you, but I tend to use my liver to deal with stuff like toxins. Indeed, back in my glory years when tequila shots were my bane, anyone who ate my liver, Prometheus style, would have been struck dead faster than a spy biting on the cyanide molar implanted in their jaw.

My mother, a native of the New Hampshire sea coast, gets more mileage out of a lobster than a parasite. We’re talking Outer Limits/Twilight Zone sort of behavior — with much meticulous sucking and picking away until there is nothing but a red husk on the plate. She is one of those whack jobs that declare “tomalley” and its nasty red twin, “coral”or the roe, to be a delicacy. Ben’s mom apparently is the same way. Me, I believe tomalley is a soft, meconium sort of substance that one usually finds on a dock after a flock of sea gulls meets the fleet on a hot day.

So when the State of Maine health department and then the Massachusetts BOH declare tomalley to be bad for you, I’ve got to ask: “Who in their right mind ate it anyway?”

Check out the photo on this Cape Cod Times story. Hungry? And my respects to anybody who would brush their teeth with tomalley, you are my hero.

… to mess with Cisco VPN clients throwing of IP forwarding table errors.  VPN’s are the evil afterbirth of Lotus Notes — I swear the two go hand-in-hand down the toilet together.

I leave for a Beijing a week from Monday. I have my credentials – a big plastic placard that will hang around my neck; a new PC, pretty much configured, debugged, and ready to go; a high end digital camera; a FlipCam, a QIK phone (on its way), and hopes that all of my online life – from this blog to Flickr, YouTube to FriendFeed, are all accessible from my hotel, our command center, and the Olympic venues.

I’ll figure out WAN access when I get there. Right now this X200 is without an integrated WAN card, which is just as well. I figure I’ll buy a PC Card for my domestic Verizon EVDO, and do the same in China for a GRPS provider. I’m tempted to go buy an AT&T card but I worry about China’s mobile standards and figure it best to work that out in China in ten days.

I’m heading over to Beijing on August 4 for the duration of the Olympics, supporting our Olympic sponsorship team, helping out wherever I can, but focusing my attention on our Olympic athlete blogging program, the culmination of more than 18 months of intense planning and execution in what has been one of the more exciting but complex launches I’ve been involved with. I expect whatever challenges I face in blogging from the scene will also be faced by the athletes, who, for the first time, are permitted to blog during the Games by the International Olympic Committee. I have not had any direct interactions with the IOC or the Beijing Olympic Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG), but I have tormented our liason to those committee – Yan An – by pushing the IOC and BOCOG’s limits on what is in and out of bounds for our sponsorship. Blogging is a touchy topic for the IOC, but credit goes to them for relaxing the strictures that silenced the athletes in Torino.

These are (to my slight buzzword discomfort) the first Web 2.0 Olympics. If Atlantahens in 1996 was the first Web 1.0 Games – thanks to IBM’s launch of the first Olympic website – then Beijing is going to mark another significant technical milestone thanks to blogging athletes, broadcasters grappling with control over video, DVR/Tivo timeshifting across a significant time zone gap between the venue and the audience in the West, and fans and athletes doing what they will with what they see. Putting this in perspective has been David Maraniss’s Rome:1960, a good account of the first televised Olympiad, one where an antiquated IOC under the draconian leadership of Avery Brundage made its last stand for an Olympic movement that transcended nationalism, forbade any hint of professionalism, and was beginning to grapple with issues such as doping and sponsorship.

Less than 50 years later and the Games are a massive media circus. Rome had no cute mascot or jaunty logo. The entertainment wasn’t choreographed by Steven Spielberg or Andrew Lloyd Weber but was a four-hour performance of Aida and a blessing from the Pope. Sponsorship was minimal and instead of marketers like me crawling over the athletes, Rome was the scene of frantic Cold War posturing and maneuvering between America and the Soviet Union.

So here we are in 2008 and I want to take some credit for pushing the limits on Olympic media, starting with the notion of who owns the content. In the Olympic media model beginning in 1960, the IOC sold the broadcast rights to a select number of well-heeled broadcasters. NBC paid under $500,000 for Rome. Wordlwide rights went for a reported $1.7 billion, more than $800 million for the US alone! NBC is taking some minor heat for its online video strategy – withholding the hot primetime sports from online until they have been broadcast. NBC is also partnering with Microsoft to make that video only available through Microsoft’s SilverLight player – the new high-def standard for online video. The question for the broadcasters and the IOC is how long can they hold onto the exclusive rights to the images coming from the events. The athletes are prohibited from filming or blogging about their performances, their competitors, or inside of the venues.

Lenovo has equipped 100 athletes with laptops and video cameras. About half are using our new consumer PC, the IdeaPad Y510, the others are using an assortment of ThinkPads. All of them have been given Lenovo-logoed FlipCams from PureDigital. We’re building audience for the athletes by aggregating their feeds and buying lots of ad impressions. We’ve asked, but not required, the addition of a Lenovo Olympic Blogger badge on their blogs. We’re not running ads on their blogs, we are not hosting or administering their blogs, we don’t approve what they write, we don’t manage their comments. The only rules governing the athletes are Rule 41 of the IOC.

Some big questions are going to develop over the next few weeks.

1. Web access. Will the leading social media tools and platforms be accessible?
2. Will the athletes push the limits of Rule 41? How hard a line is the IOC going to take against athletes who capture and share an actual event?
3. Will the broadcasters have to police instances of pirated video showing up on the video sites?
4. How will the Chinese public follow the Games online? Will any Chinese athletes blog? (We’re sponsoring one Chinese Olympic blogger, Yang Yang, a veteran speedskating medalist but not a competitor in these Games)

I think I am very fortunate to have a front row seat to these sorts of issues. This goes beyond Social Media 101 and is the ultimate “how I spent my summer” story, my first Olympics, and doubtlessly a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I intend to make the most of it.

Back to the blogging program. First off, I am eating my hat on the efficacy of Federated Media and Facebook. I acerbically squinted at Federated’s FaceBook plays for Dell, and blogged a “we’ll see” note after listening to Federated’s founder, John Battelle, espouse the wonders of his ad network at an Ogilvy conference. Well, we’re just a month into the program and I can attest that it is working as planned. Big credit due to our partners at Intel – Megan McDonagh and David Meffe really pushed the program and helped us figure out how to design and pay for it. Intel CMO (and fellow sculler) Sean Maloney’s drive to transform PC marketing through innovative digital tactics is transforming PC marketing and the promotional plan for the Lenovo Olympic Blogger program has benefited from Intel’s insights. I won’t divulge numbers, but we’re more than 50% of the way to our target and the Games haven’t even started yet. The surprise? Iceland, the second highest country in terms of fans on the Facebook app developed for us by Citizen Sports.

Second: metrics of success. These sorts of programs in social media marketing desperately need to earn their stripes if they’re going to fulfill the promise that has the analysts and pundits, pardon the pun, all-a-Twitter. I told AdWeek in a piece that ran this week that I wasn’t going to use the Olympics as a billboard for gross impressions of Lenovo. Our TV buy, heck, our double-decker buses, will take care of that. I am looking for a couple things out of this program.

1. I want some manifestation of interest and commitment from the audience to the athletes. Do they click through to the athlete’s blog? Leave a comment? Subscribe to a feed? Send a cheer on Facebook?
2. I want some PR recognition for Lenovo. We’re the technology sponsor. I want us to be acknowledged for our technical expertise and innovation. Running an online sweepstakes to win an all expense paid trip for two to the Games is decidedly uninnovative.
3. I want to raise the bar on interactive Olympic sponsorships. I will not slag any other sponsors on their efforts, but let’s keep in mind from 1996 to the present no sponsor has exactly done anything memorable online. There have been beautiful websites produced and launched. Programs initiated which met their goals. But who can remember a cool sponsor web experience from Salt Lake City?

Third: post-Games. We need to figure out how to continue to support and activate the audience we’re spending so much time and money to develop. Three weeks is a blip on our marketing calendar. How do I take this audience and sustain it after the Games? That’s the next big question and I have no easy answers right now.

So, tell me what you think. The feedback we’ve received – from the SEO community on how to improve the ranking of the main blog page, from fans who want things we hadn’t considered, from our partners at Ogilvy PR’s 360 Digital Influence Project (who have done an outstanding job helping us recruit and manage our 100 athletes in 29 out of the 32 Olympic sports from 25 countries) – has shaped this project into directions we hadn’t considered when we started planning the play a year ago.

Acknowledgments are in order.

From Lenovo, Alan White is the project manager who has made this all happen on time, under budget, and at a degree of quality above my high standards. Our technical talent, Esteban Agustin Panzeri, has sacrificed his health and personal life to design, code, and launch this. Tim Supples, who manages Lenovoblogs.com, has chased athletes from Italy to the Philippines trying to get hardware into their hands. In China, Sheji Ho and Yan An have been explaining this program to the officials and getting us permission to do what we need to do with total tenacity. On the agency side, Rohit Bhargava and John Bell’s team pulled off a complete miracle in identifying and recruiting 100 athletes in 90 days. Kaitlyn Wilkins and Megan Padilla have been magnificent. Intel is an awesome partner when it comes to doing cool stuff online. Megan and David are really into this stuff and it’s nice to work with someone who gets it as opposed to someone who goes skeptical on every new idea. Neo@Ogilvy has managed the Federated/Facebook program with great precision, and at Federated, James Gross and Peter Spande have made believers out of me.

Finally, Deepak Advani, Lenovo’s CMO, really had my back on this one. He has been unflagging in his support for this play, in taking the chance that it would collapse and turn into a ghost town. When others disparaged it, when the crabs in the bucket tried to drag it back down, Deepak stood tall and made it happen.

Ben Worthen at the WSJ blogs on a Deloitte study about how businesses overinvest in tech when building communities.

1. Going out with the claim that 60% of businesses invest over $1 million in online communities thanks to a Deloitte typo that should have stated 6% is not a great way to get off on the right credibility foot. Worthen does the correction, but …

2. The comments on the post are cluttered with community vendors, imagine that.

3. “Community” as a term, is tired and over-fraught with implications of good will, social good, and cooperation among customers and companies.

4. This is bad research on a tired topic.

“One of the hot investments for businesses these days is online communities that help customers feel connected to a brand. But most of these efforts produce fancy Web sites that few people ever visit. The problem: Businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.”

Business Technology : Why Most Online Communities Fail.

Dan Lyons ends a couple weeks of silence after pulling down the shutters on the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, quitting Forbes, and joining Newsweek as their new Steve-Levy-Tech-Eminence.

The new blog is The Real Dan

“So I wanted to get out and stay out. I really did. I wanted at least to have the summer off. But stuff keeps happening and I can’t resist. Jerry Yang and Carl Icahn and Steve Ballmer continue doing their frigtarded three-way monkey dance. It’s getting to be like one of those Ricky Gervais bits in the original Office (the funny one) where he lets the scene go on too long and it goes from being funny to being painful … and he still won’t stop. He makes you watch. It’s terrible but you can’t look away. And, if you’re me, you can’t help rushing to the computer to make fun of it. So thanks a lot, Ballmer-Icahn-Yang, for not letting me getting any rest. Just when I thought I was out, you pull me back in. Bastards!

Plus look at the ridiculous shit happening in the rest of the Valley.”

Good to have him back, I was missing my daily dose.

Hope springs eternal and so I filed my application to scull in this fall’s Head of the Charles Regatta. Having turned 50 in May, this would be my first year in the elder statesman category of Grand Master, but first i need to have my application accepted as it is a tough ticket to get into the Head unless one competes and finishes within 5% of the winning sculler’s time. My last time racing the HOCR was in 2003 — my first time as a sculler — and I performed horribly, coming in third from last with a terrible time and twenty seconds in penalties. The low light of that October morning was hitting the Weeks Footbridge in front of the Harvard Business School and being urged to capsize by drunken frat boys there for the WASP equivalent of NASCAR crashes.

That's the bridge I am about to hit in the background ...

Whatever, I rowed my first Head of the Charles in the early 70s when I was rowing in prep school, kept doing it through college, and a couple of other times in my college alumni boat. I’ve done the Head when no one but a couple hundred rowers were participating, and I’ve done it as a parent watching my daughter row it for my alma mater.

But, application acceptance or not, I did file my forms for the Green Mountain Head, which according to my good friend Charlie Clapp (silver medal, US Men’s 8, 1984), is the best of the fall regattas because it is so darn pretty, has no spectators, and the prizes are a bag of apples, a block of Vermont cheddar, or a jug of maple syrup. I’ve rowed only one GMH and thought it a most wonderful experience.

So — all this time in the garage gym working off the excess poundage now has an immediate goal. Don’t hit the Week’s Footbridge and try to do better than 2003.

Yeah, so I got scoped today — but not through the netherlands — but an endoscopy to check out my upper G/I tract. Nice doctor put me to sleep, waving a menacing hose with decimeter marks on it before I nodded off, I woke up an hour later feeling most soporific. I went in with symptoms of GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) , came out diagnosed with NERD. (something like Non-Erosive reflux disorder) When I got home I fell asleep for five hours.

The big ugly is this fall for those of you faithful who have inquired.

Major admission made by me last week — that while I work for a frigging PC company I had yet to experience (for any extended period of time) Microsoft Vista. Having spent the early part of my geek career as a reporter covering Microsoft, I used to get semi-aroused by new operating systems, and indeed still own a copy of the first version of Windows as well as IBM’s failed bid for GUI dominance, TopView. However, given my decline into the ranks of management in the mid-90s, the last significant OS I cared about was Windows 95 (Rolling Stones, Start Me Up).

Vista just never made it on the radar. I never felt compelled to upgrade the home machines with it, and the company hasn’t made the switch. So I did. Last week, when I took delivery of this new X200, it configured with Vista Business. “I’m screwed,” I thought. “Must send this back to IT and get downgraded to XP.”

Ah, but what a shame to take the best piece of hardware I have used and stick ancient software on it. So I resolved to figure out how to get the three essentials of life at Lenovo installed and running — SameTime — our Lotus/IBM instant message client, the Cisco Web VPN for getting into the internal systems securely, and Lotus Notes, the productivity equivalent of the heartbreak of seborrhea and psorasis.

Well, one week later and Notes stirred itself, found its server, and replicated, making me and my X200 members of the corporate network via Vista.

Yes, imagine that. Instead of being a bad man and hacking Ubuntu or OS/X onto the hardware and then onto the network, I took our default OS that we ship to customers and got it to work ….. (end of irony).

First impressions of Vista:

1. It is paranoid. Anytime I do anything it wants permission. Not once. Not twice. But three times.

2. It is pretty. Aero is good eye candy. I like the animated windows, the transparency of the menu bars, the bling bling is good.

3. It is pretty stable. Not a lot of lockups to report.

4. It is incremental to XP — sure the kernel may be all new, who cares?, magic smoke as far as I am concerned — but the U/I is an improvement. (The window switcher-thingy is most cool). Vista may not tie my shoes and walk the dog, but I like it and I am not going back.

The trees look skanky around here. Now I know why. The cicadas. They are gone, not to return for 17 years, but they left their mark.

The cicadas have come and gone, but not without leaving their mark on Cape Cod. The insects have caused more damage to area trees than anyone expected, marring thousands of oak trees from parts of Centerville to Mashpee.

The trees in Cotuit, Sandwich, Bourne and East Falmouth look like they are diseased and dying.

Cicada Problem on Cape Cod Sure to Have Lasting Effects | ABC 6 | South Eastern Massachusetts.

Monday – Cotuit

Tuesday – Personal Medical Day (getting the scope you-know-where)

Wednesday – Cotuit

Thursday – Morrisville to present the Olympic Blogger Program

Friday – Cotuit, start of 10 day vacation prior to Beijing

The kids have been bitching the boat is running weird when they drag each other around on a tube (we used water skiis) and claimed engine trouble. I knew what the problem was — barnacles on the bottom because I had been too impetuous in launching in March without repainting with antifouling paint.

Cotuit Skiffs on the run before the wind

The barnacles cause a lot of friction, are disgusting to look at, are a hazard if you try to climb aboard from the water, and make the propellor cavitate — or lose its bite in the water — because they disrupt the flow into the prop. So, out of the water came the boat, into the backyard, out came the pressure washer, and for an hour I whittled away at a pervasive mass of univalve parasites.

“Did you know barnacles have the longest penis of any organism on earth, relative to their size?” Asked number one son. (That makes two references to the male organ in one week on this blog, damning it to some netnanny filter for eternity).

Did he ask to help? Did he get down and dirty with the scraper? Did he smell like barnacle guts as the sun set in the west and my favorite question: “What’s for dinner?” was asked by number two son.

This morning I woke early, dragged the de-barnacled hull over the grass, and started looking for a can of green bottom paint. I really don’t want to drive to Hyannis this time of year — bad things happen there involving drivers from Quebec and lefthand turns. I found a can of green Woolsey copper paint — a relic from the 1950s that would definitely get the EPA and people in hazmat suits here if they knew I owned it. This was the real deal — stuff from my grandfather’s era, when smoking was good for you and exercise was bad because it enlarged your heart.

On it went, a gorgeous hue of green and then I discovered the keelson under the bow was severely worn down from too many groundings on the beach, so back into the shop I went to mix up a pot of WEST System epoxy. That went on, was smoothed down with wax paper and tacked into place while I finished the paint job by moving onto the boottop (see earlier post on waterlines and boot tops).

By this point its 90 degrees out, I am covered in green and red paint, have it in my hair, am sweating into my eyes which makes them ren, and up drives my step-sister with some Chinese VIPs.  After a hearty round of introductions and vague promises to go on a boat ride, I went back to Project Nautical, finished up, and by noon was ready for my workout. I sponged myself off with a rag soaked in paint thinner and set out in my garage gym/boat shop to row 10,000 meters on the erg. Wrong. The man/air moisture transfer equilibrium was waaaay out of whack and I easily dropped a gallon of sweat in the first 2,500 meters, and being sicked by the fumes and the smell of the bottom paint, I bagged it, came in side, showered and discovered one can actually continue to perspire in the shower.

Boat was launched, brief ride, but I was too fried to go to the beach, so I went to the grocery store with the other senior citizens and walked around in the air conditioning for an hour.

So ends a summer Saturday.