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Today’s WOD (Workout of the Day) for Crossfit is my new favorite thing to do — essentially picking up heavy stuff.  Crossfit, for the unitiated, is a fitness program developed by a guy named Greg Glassman which combined elements of gymnastics, Olympic weight lifting, and “functional movements” to build a definition of fitness which is pretty primal and controversial. CrossFit is used by the military, police departments, fire fighters, to build “elite” fitness (whatever that means). Me, I am trying to prep myself for old age and retain what dwindling muscle I have left before I enter that danger zone of elderly falls, broken hips, and nursing homes.

I started doing it in April at the suggestion of my rowing coach, Tom Bohrer, who occasionally contributes to the CrossFit Journal on rowing (CrossFit favors the Concept2 ergometer for building anaerobic fitness). Since then I’ve lost twenty pounds and developed some some serious upper body strength thanks to the first big weight workouts since I was on the heavyweight crew in college. It has taken a lot of time and ugly effort, but in a weird way it appeals to the sense of rower’s masochism which generally has propelled me.

My favorite exercise is the ominous sounding “deadlift.” As Coach Glassman says in his inimitable way: “this movement is baked into our DNA.” I guess cavemen practiced it by picking up big rocks.

You bend over a bar, you grab it, one hand gripping in, one gripping out, you curve your lower lumbar, and then you stand up. That’s it. Grab weight. Stand up. Put it down.

Having had my share of back problems in the past, I approach the lifting of anything with great care and trepidation. I was once bedridden for two weeks after lifting a television set. One bad move and twang, I’m down for the count. Years of rowing — a decidely back unfriendly sport — have set me up for issues, so when CrossFit put me back behind a weight lifting bar, I was terrified of the consequences.

Fortunately CrossFit’s site is loaded with good demonstration videos and coaching advice. The inhouse lifting coach — Mark Rippetoe — has a great book called Starting Strength which focuses on the technique used in Olympic lifting. I bought a copy, watched the videos, and set myself up in the garage gym.

The result? Well, let’s say I am not going to lift 1,000 pounds ever in my lifetime, but I am happy to say I can now pick up, and set back down, without injuring myself, over 300 pounds (I think I can do more, but I ran out of weight and need to buy more) And I don’t feel like one of those body builder meatheads with a big leather belt around my waist when I do it.

As my old cycling buddy Marta puts it — “Strength is about three things. Pick heavy stuff up. Pick heavy stuff up and push it over your head. Pick heavy stuff up and carry it around.”

The net result of three months of hard work with the CrossFit program is a total vanishing of my lower back pain. The return to very elemental movements — true situps, pushups, pullups — and the emphasis on back-to-basics exercise based on lifting one’s own body weight has been a revelation. There’s no membership, no gym, no machine. No fad. Just stuff our grandparents did  like the Walter Camp Daily Dozen — only more evil because a lot of CrossFit is done against the clock to make it interesting.

This is all inspired by today’s NYT article on the great benchmark of fitness — the simple pushup. I’d include in the mix the humiliating pull-up, and now my new fave, the dead lift.

I’ve been a massive fan of the software that drives this blog — WordPress — since first installing it in the fall of 2004 at the recommendation of Om Malik. As I’ve blogged in the past, this open source tool has the potential to disrupt the content management system market, as I believe it is now capable for most any content publisher to use and adapt WordPress to provide CMS services at a level that would have easily cost $100,000 in site licenses a year ago.

Full disclosure, I am a major Interwoven Teamsite fan as well. I’ve advocated Teamsite into two big implementations and believe it, and other enterprise strength CMSs will always have a role in the large global enterprise. Put simply, the probability of a site as complex and critical as Lenovo.com converting to WordPress or Drupal is nil at this point in time.

But WordPress — the list of sites that have adopted the software as their primary CMS backs up my contention that the power of the “blog movement” is not the trackback/RSS/notification environment, nor the citizen journalist side, but that it opens the realm of dynamic and frictionless content management to the masses. Indeed, not only the countless numbers blogging for free on hosted servives like WordPress.com and Blogger, but serious sites such as AllThingsD (Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at the WSJ), and CNN’s main politics blog (which doesn’t feel so much a blog as a really crisp site.)

Anyway, Mark Cahill upgraded me this morning to the latest and greatest version –2.6– and as he notes, the power of this version is not only it’s CMS capabilities (he formally annoints the version as a CMS and he should know coming out of Atex), but it’s auto-update capabilities for self-hosted morons like myself.

The single biggest feature though, is one that will come in handy for the lone gunman blogger: they will now be able to do an automatic (single click) update for WordPress when a new version comes out. That’s a huge feature, and will help the less technical stay up to date and secure

Jim Forbes blogs about how the wireless capabilities of the Intel Centrino 2 chipset should be marketed.

“If I were working in PR today for Intel or one of its portable computer marketing partners, I would have set up tables with new notebooks that incorporate the new technology in a parking lot or field. Each of the tables would also have an older notebook with legacy wireless networking chipsets. And each of the tables would set in front of as range marker listing the distance between it and the WiFi router.

The very visible point of the demonstration is that the new chipsets free notebook users from being close to a WiFi access point.

Now let’s think a minute about Intel’s WiMax WAN technology. Want a fun way to demonstrate it? Set up a test network along Amtrak’s Oakland, CA to Sacramento right of way. Now load up 15 reporters, editors or industry luminaries in several of the cars on a train’s consist ( the term used to describe an engine and cars expressed as a single unit). Let them experience true persistent mobile connectivity, sit back and wait an hour or so for the rave reviews to appear.

Mobile persistent connectivity is a transformational experience for most users.”

Jim and I worked together at PC Week in the mid-80s. He has seen it all when it comes to PC marketing and I think he’s right. Users need to see this stuff in the field to grasp the impact of what we marketers try to embody in the speeds and feeds that characterize “spec pod” marketing.

I ordinarily don’t rant about Lenovo products on this blog. Old journalistic allergies to conflicts of interest, subjectivity and public relations sort of chills any professional promotional instincts. But I’m making an exception here because new technology has come into my life and, well, of the dozens of PCs that I’ve used (beginning, technically, with a Wang dedicated word processor in the spring of 1980), this one, by far is the most impressive and “personal” in the sense of strong ergonomics and usability.

I’ll get the punchline of this post over early: the X200 is the best ultraportable notebook computer I’ve ever owned. I’ve gone super ultraportable for the most part in my PC choices — avoiding anything above a 12″ screen and using external monitors and keyboards for extended desk use.  Weight is important, but having gone too small, I’ve come to realize that in order to function happily, I need a serious keyboard and a crisp screen. This is my first widescreen PC, and the increased screen turf is appreciated. It isn’t the lightest ultraportable, but I don’t quibble about a half a pound difference at this point in life. I want something that is sturdy, and the X200′s magnesium frame makes this feel more hefty than my old X60s and X61. The screen is far crisper than my old X61 tablet, and the Intel Core Duo P8600 2.4 GHz processor is the fastest by far. As Computer Reseller News notes in its review, this sucker isn’t quiet, it’s silent.

Thin? Very, not as skinny as our former flagship, the X300, but definitely a sleek notebook and not a brick. I think for hardcore ThinkPad users, the machine will be appealing because a) it is Trackpoint only with no touchpad to mess with your head and b) since optical is (in my opinion) going the way of the floppy, you need the UltraBase dock to get a DVD rolling. I take both omissions from the system — touchpad and optical — to be a big plus. But, it does have three USBs, a SD slot, and the usual port stuff happening.

I’ve put about four hours into it, and the port layout, the keyboard, the wireless, everything is working like a charm on this Centrino 2 machine, our first. I need to dig, but not sure if this has a WAN card. I know it has the new  N standard 802.11 wireless and potentially Wimax, but I need to dig into the system config to see what’s inside.

Oh, and it is the first time I’ve used Vista.

Can you believe that? I work for a PC company and have never used Vista? Weird. Anyway, that will be short lived as I need to send this back to IT to get the Lenovo VPN and usual Lenovo specific apps installed and will most likely get re-imaged with XP (I can connect to the VPN, I just can’t download the apps from the LANdesk service until IT gets their hands on it.)

The X200 is out next month, until then we need to do something about pre-orders because I get the feeling that while this may not make the cover of Businessweek like the X300 did, it definitely is going to be a very high demand laptop.

Here’s PC Mag’s take. “The ThinkPad X200 soars to the top of the performance charts, while delivering battery life well into the 6-hour range. It maintains many of the classic ThinkPad qualities, like the industry-leading keyboard and a wide range of wireless connectivity options.”

And here’s CRN’s. “In fact, the X200 is now giving the X300 a run for its money for the title of year’s best notebook.”

Notebookreview

Trust me, best PC I’ve ever used.

If these people can try, I should too ….

This ought to be more fun than owning a police scanner — guess which neighbor is battering the spouse, where’s the peeping tom, and watch as the world gets closer and closer to invading my backyard.

Barnstable gets crime maps.

This would have been porn for my grandmother.

Summer reading and then some. Thank heavens I speed read. I blew through two expensive airport procured hardcovers (a bad habit I need to break) to and from Japan:

• Mark Kurlansky’s latest  — The Last Fish Tale — (see my review of his Oyster tome here) about the fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts. An okay read, not as cool as his cod or oyster books, but okay if a little ADHD. This is the home port of the Perfect Storm crew, one of the last (along with New Bedford and a little bit of Chatham) of the working fishing ports in Massachusetts. I’ve visited the place a few times, it’s gritty, it’s North Shore. The book … skip it. He seems to have phoned it in and tap dances between a history of the artist colonies of Cape Ann to fishing regulatory policies amongst the Basque.
• David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Hated it. Sorry, this is Forrest Gump humor. No intelligence whatsoever. Okay, he’s gay, he grew up in North Carolina and has a place in Paris, Tokyo, New York. I get it.  Finds funny things in the mundane. Quits smoking. Describes food as tasting “slightly like penis” — yuck yuck.  I will not read him again.

Still in progress, The Wind-up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami. After just being in Japan, this book is really captivating me. I would say it is one of the better foreign author works I’ve read in some time (the last being the wonderful Blindness by Jose Saramago. Murakami does a wonderful job with the mundane, describing ennui better than anybody since Saul Bellow in Dangling Man, but mixes it up with one of the most gruesome war scenes since Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

The Cotuit Library’s annual summer book sale went down Saturday morning. Eliot my eldest and I took advantage of abuttor’s first rights and hit the tables before the vacationing vultures could crowd in. Came away with about twenty titles ranging from a Cruising Guide to the New England Coast (you never know) to some Cervantes. The wife is getting allergic to books due to constrained shelf space.

And, I just committed Sunday book lust and ordered Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World and  The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa.

Let’s see, other random titles. A re-read of Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain because a) I like to eat at Les Halles (best charcroute garni in America) and b) have taken to his TV show, No Reservations thanks to the miracle known as DVR. And … that’s about it. Some stuff on SEO and landing page optimization for the usual professional reasons.

Hazen-san posts this incriminating evidence that I ate horse in Japan.

Alas, poor Trigger, I knew him well

Cotuit this weekend

Monday through Wednesday — Raleigh.

Thursday through whenever — Cotuit. One more NC trip on the 24th, then maybe some vacation before August 5 flight to Beijing for the Games. Getting excited.

I love random-list posts. They are the lazy blogger’s key to productivity – lots of loosely linked stuff in one fast post.

1. In a few hours I depart Tokyo to return to Cape Cod. I leave at 4:40 pm on Friday and I arrive at 7:30 pm on … Friday. I should hit Cotuit by nine pm in a complete state of dysfunction.

2. Very productive round of meetings here. The Lenovo interactive team accompanied me.

Jim Hazen, Nicole Estebanelle, David Barbara

3. I ate well. Very well. The Japan team took us out to dinner last night and I ate some interesting dishes. Let’s say the highlight was the fat from the back of a horse’s neck.

4. No time for sightseeing. A quick stroll around the hotel gardens and that was that. I want to write a book on how to be a power-tourist for business travellers. If you have three hours to spare in Tokyo, here’s the deal. I am serious. I am the master of milking the most out of a city in the shortest amount of time. First rule — you ain’t going to see anything in your hotel room. Get out and walk.

5. Very interested in the role of newspaper in Japanese marketing. That, in a nutshell, is the challenge that brought me here.

6. Jumping rope is the best form of travelling exercise I have ever discovered. I’m using a “hyperperformance” speed rope from Buddy Lee.

7. Dress code. Pretty funny. The Japanese dress well in the office.

That’s all for now. Big post to write on the flight about our Olympic blogging program which is on fire and taking off better than expected. So — next week Raleigh for some meetings, then back to the Cape for a little breather before  Beijing.

Dell blogs that the company has opened up social nets to its employees.

Um. You mean they couldn’t before? Sorry, but we’ve been YouTubing and Flickring from the get-go at Lenovo and haven’t felt compelled to honk our horn about it. The Lenovo segment on Facebook is huge.  Welcome to the social ……

Dell Opens Up Social Media Sites to All Employees

Thu. Jul. 10, 2008

Several weeks back, Dell as a company made a decision to give our employees access to social media sites. Todd Dwyer blogged about Facebook being open to Dell employees, …..

Pretty sure they are talking about me — except they got my age wrong  by a year.  Slow news day on Cape Cod when the lead item is about my anonymous butt.

“Officials at the state and county level declined to comment on the Cape town that has reported a salmonella case, or the individual who was affected, citing privacy laws. The only detail provided was that the sickened individual is a 49-year-old man from Barnstable County”

I want a set of the dead bug ear rings.

Lenovo makes the Fortune 500 — at 499 — for the first time.

That makes it official — I now work for a big company.

In Tokyo and I started to mess with Google’ s virtual world: Lively.

First impressions — not bad. At least the client is a browser. I’ll play some more and opine later. It seems to be organized around a “chatroom” model, the nav is pretty basic. And somehow I ended up on a couch in the sky.

{insert usual travel rant here]

Made it to Tokyo. Lots of street security (G8 meeting is happening to the north). Hotel gym is demented. Has one of those butt-shaker strap machines like the Jetson’s used. No weights. No erg.  Brought my jump rope. Just punished myself for 14 hours of limbo and feel good about it.

Two, not one, but two crying babies adjacent to me. So no sleep, or what sleep occurred was nightmarish.

Other than that — this time yesterday I was sitting in my mom’s backyard eating ribs, now I am in Japan thinking noodles.

Cellphone does not work. So this will be a Skypish trip when I can get connected.

I am in a semi-state of packedness — the killer these days is shoes. Now that I am the workout monster I feel compelled to fly with my trail running/gym shoes and have to ram a pair of loafers into my duffel bag (I never check a bag, I refuse to use a wheeled sarcophagus). And I am old and wise enough to anticipate forgetting something.

The big thing is the laptop sleeve and insuring it’s four little pouches contain:

• Laptop
• iPod and headphones
• sleeping pills
• ear plugs
• contact lens case and wetting solution

That’s all I need for inflight amenities. The other big need is books. Inflight reading this time will be Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash (a good book and relatively up to date) and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Mirakami (at the suggestion of my son Eliot, and a book underway long before Tokyo came into focus).

I downloaded a Maria Callas rendition of Tosca from the early 50s, I think it is a very classic performance from Rome on BMI. Anyway, waiting for iTunes to download it, then will synch it onto the iPod.

My drill is to settle in, shoes off, noise-cancelling headphones plugged into the music, read and eat for a couple hours, then get up, stretch, perform my ablutions, pop out the contact, stick in the earplugs (with the headphones over it, unplugged but on and cancelling the engine noise), take the pill, blanket, pillow, seatbelt loose as possible around the outside of the blanket ….

Then 12 hours of restless limbo — never sleeping because I am exactly two inches longer than the allotted space, but not motivated enough to clear out my inbox and arrange my desktop icons into some clever shape ….

I’m taking the little point-and-shoot Canon, so no big honking Nikon shots, I just can’t abide hauling that such a long distance only to spend most of the time in my backpack in a conference room. So, some blogging from Tokyo, hopefully more fruitful than my last expedition there in September 2006.

Mark Cahill, my web buddy since the days when giants roamed the earth, posted on Allthingscahill a few weeks ago that WordPress blogs needed to be kept up to date with the latest patches or risk the threat of being hacked. Having been hacked before through the XML-RPC door, I half-in-jest commented on Mark’s post that I’d be honored if he’d update Churbuck.com

Which he did. Today. Most nicely. Whenever I fire up the old FTP client and start mucking with the public_html directories I generally shoot myself in the face. While abdicating the sysadmin role to Mark sort of defeats the purpose of being a self-hosted WordPress dude, I am most grateful that he did the deed for me.

The theme is called Paalam. It is two columns. It is white (I cannot abide dark web pages) and it appears to be plug-in compliant and happy.

So — Mark. Thanks man. I owe you.

2008 07 04_0955.JPG

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck

This is the biggest fluke (summer flounder) I have ever caught. I landed it off of Succonnesset Shoal on the Fourth near the tail end of the ebb tide.

It fed four of us. It had big teeth.
The sucker was so big it hung over the edges of the cutting board.

Monday – 7.7 Boston to Tokyo via Dulles

Tuesday-Thursday 7.8-7.10: Tokyo

Friday  7.11: Tokyo to Boston

7.12-13 Cape

7.14-16 RTP, NC

I head of Beijing on August 5 and will be there through the 26th.

2008 07 04_0949.JPG

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck

I was walking back from the town dock last night after some late afternoon fluke fishing and saw this gorgeous 14′ (or-so) lapstrake pulling boat sitting on a trailer down by the village center. I popped home for the camera and checked it out.

The oars were still wet, so someone and their friend were obviously enjoying a cold beverage at the KettleHo after a nice late afternoon row around the bay. The boat was immaculate — it looked to be only a few years old, and was put together as delicately as a jewel box. I’m not sure what the naval architects would call it. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a Whitehall because of the double-ended canoe hull. Peapod might apply, but again, not sure.

This pretty much embodies everything I’d like in a traditional boat. I’m not a fixed seat rower, but this one would fit the bill if I were one. Oh, and the leather collars on the oars were stitched on with a perfect herringbone pattern that put my efforts to shame.

 

Clinker built hulls — where the planks overlap each other — are beautiful things. This boat is riveted together with bronze rods peened over washers.