Churbuck.com

via Spielberg Hooks Rights to Derby Book – 3/13/09 – Vineyard Gazette Online.

This ought to be good. A book about the Martha’s  Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby — my annual excuse to take vacation on the island and chase fish. The late Robert Post’s Reading the Water is one of my favorite volumes in the fishing section of my bookshelf, this promises good things as well. It gets released in early April. Dreamworks thought highly enough to buy the option.

“The Vineyard may yet be the scene of another big fish film under the eye of Steven Spielberg: the Jaws director’s studio, DreamWorks, has just bought the film rights for a soon to be released book about the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby.

The book, The Big One: An Island, an Obsession and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish, by David Kinney, published by Atlantic Monthly, will be released on April 8.”

I just launched the motorboat while wearing a set of patched and re-repaired neoprene waders some field mice made house in. In the left boot. Which made me smell like rodent urine from the boat ramp all the way around Grand Island at full throttle during the shakedown cruise. Now I need to figure out some vinegar soak solution to get the pee stink out of the waders.

The boat started on the second try (Honda four-strokes rule, mine is now on year eight) and runs smooth as can be. The boat is sitting on its mooring, first boat in the cove thanks to John Peck who recommissioned the pennant and put away the winter stick for me this past week.

Tomorrow is clamming time on the morning low tide. I’ll get my limit and start stacking up clams against the summer rush for chowder, stuffed hawgs, and other bivalve goodness. In the afternoon I’ll ferry the wife and dogs to Dead Neck for a trash pickup (lost lure discovery mission). Boat in water = happiness and end of winter couch potato.

via R.I.P. White Rooster.

On the topic of noble but dead birds ….l. some great Cape Cod writing by Bethany Gibbons on Cape Cod Today.

“  Skunk? Big red Jimmy got nailed by an owl. Maybe he was out too early that snowy morning. Whitey Bulger flew the coop and went on the lamb. My daughter insists he may be still hiding out in the swamp somewhere, living the wild and free life. I doubt it. The evil Spanish Black Minorca lost his head to a stump and some Lebanese friends. I couldn’t do, but after living through civil war and that cheese (arish?) they leave out in the sun for weeks on a rooftop, they had no problem doing the dirty work. I just couldn’t have a 5-year-old lose and eye to a wicked bad rooster.”

I’m so impressed that her rooster will live on in many a saltwater fly pattern.

I have a big bird feeding station set up under the grape arbor in the alcove on the southside of my house. I feed pretty much year round and as a result have a massive population of birds that visit throughout the seasons.

This morning I heard a boom,  followed immediately by my wife yelling for me to come look.

On the deck was this sad sight:

Now it sits in the brush pile, awaiting a critter to take it away, or this weekend’s annual burn pile cremation. I think I need to put up warning stickers in the windows. This hawk has been taking out robins in the alcove, but this morning it missed and it missed big. A shame, for it really is a magnificent bird and was very amazing to hold, still warm and pre-rigor mortis.

I’m pretty sure it is a sharp-shinned hawk.

CapeCodTimes.com – Cape Cod Potato Chips founder had ‘no regrets’.

Steve Bernard, who founded Cape Cod Potato Chips in 1980 passed away last Saturday at 61. One of my first assignments as an intern reporter at the Cape Cod Times was a story on his first humble efforts.

He sold the company to Anheuser Busch in 1985, bought it back, and sold it again. He did the same with his Chatham Village line of croutons.

It always makes me a little homesick to step into a convenience store in North Carolina and see the lighthouse logo of Cape Cod Potato Chips.

The Dow is up 300 for reasons unknown.
My garlic bed is showing green above the dirt. Daffodils and tulips doing the same. Snowdrops showing on the neighbor’s lawn.

My mooring goes in this week and the boat will follow this weekend.

My nose is healing despite my headcold.

Cousin Pete’s X61 Tablet — a nice ThinkPad he bought off my employee purchase plan discount a year ago — is acting wicked weird. I have an internet connection: verified with Ping. iTunes can browse the iTunes store. Outlook can send and receive mail. But neither FireFox nor Internet Explorer can open a website.

Maddening. I suspect either a recent Microsoft system update or Norton Antivirus is behind the glitch. Trying to deduce the issue — e.g. not performing an amputation when a band-aid is all that is needed — while trying to have a semblance of a Sunday afternoon. Pete brought over some ribs from his smoker, so that buys some time.

Update: It was Norton. So uninstalled that, swapped in free AVG. All is well.

Since it felt like spring today I actually started messing around with the boats, getting ready to launch the motorboat for some spring clamming and not looking forward to launching and rigging the new boat (more on that later). Boat work means dragging out the tools, so out came the ditty bag. I don’t know the etymology of the word “ditty” – but there is a good treatise on the subject by Louis Bartos, an Alaskan sailmarker. Clifford Ashley wrote about them, and gives instructions on how to make one. Some of the eyelet work and draw-string/ handle/lanyard knots cited by Ashley are very creative works of art.

As a kid learning sailing I was impressed when the sailing instructors and grown-ups came down to the beach with their ditty bags – canvas totes filled with tools for working on the rigging of boats. Bob Boden, John Peck, and some of the saltier people in the village had very well stocked ditty bags. At a minimum, a good rigger’s kit consists of:

• A block of beeswax for waxing linen thread used in whipping, or finishing lines (aka ropes)
• A fid, or marlinespike, for forcing open the strands of a line when splicing
• A rigging knife – generally a blunt tipped, fairly stout blade, often with a marlinespike included
• A sailor’s palm: a leather strap with a thumb hole and a metal base, think of a industrial thimble for pushing needles
• Sailmaker needles: very big, sometimes three-sided, kept in a old tobacco tin with a cotton ball soaked in 3-in-1 oil to keep them from rusting
• Marline – tarred twine that smells like nothing else in the world. Marline is the most salty, nautical smell I can think of. Lapsang Souchong tea tastes like marline smells.

I load my ditty bag up with some additional tools, including a special fid for splicing braided lines, an awl, a swaging tool for compressing wire cable sleeves, rubber mallet, and a small compartmentalized box filled with cotter pins, washers, and assorted stainless steel and silicon bronze hardware for random boat repairs. I use a canvas bag I bought from my local sailmaker, Squeateague Sailmakers in Cataumet near Buzzard’s Bay. It was made in India for Green Mountain Products, and is basically a white, mildewed rectangular tote with leather sewn around the handles and a ton of outside sleeves and pockets for easy access to tools and stuff. I use it a few times a year, when I need to splice lines, rig boats, or feel salty.

Last winter, at a local boat builders’ boatshow in Hyannis, I couldn’t resist picking up a new bag, one of the more clever conveyances I’ve ever seen. This is a Nantucket “Diddy Bagg“, The owner of the company was pretty enthusiastic and did a great demonstration of how the bag could be converted into nearly a dozen different configurations. I bought one on the spot, but have yet to do anything with it. It reminds me of that children’s book when the kangaroo needed more pockets and the man made her an apron with tons of little places to tuck stuff away. As they old timers said, “A place for everything and everything in its place.”

If I were really over the top and made a living as a rigger, my bag would have some esoteric tools like a seam rubber for creasing canvas, a wooden mallet and a caulking iron for laying oakum into seams, and a worm-and-parcel rig for covering manila hemp lines. There aren’t many riggers left who can do those old skills, but there is a small community of knot and marlinespike seamanship geeks online who share some interesting work and techniques. In a future post I’ll post a list of rigging suppliers, knot workers, and other marlinespike seamanship links that I’ve been stowing in my del.icio.us account. I’ve also started a new folder in my Google Reader of nautical blogs. More on that later too.

I just finished “The Unfinished“, D.T. Max’s piece in the Arts and Letters section of the March 9 New Yorker on the career and suicide of David Foster Wallace.

This is a great piece of writing about writing; a frightening, sad look at the loneliness of a sick genius left to his own thoughts and insecurities and the terror of a blank page. “Feeding my wastebasket,” Wallace wrote to his friends. Sitting in an airconditioned garage in Claremont, California with a 250,000 word manuscript of a novel, The Pale King, about the Internal Revenue Service, an exploration into the topic of boredom by a writer so brilliant that his style demanded a digressive pile of footnotes and endnotes to sustain the intellectual horsepower raging inside of him. Anyone who thinks the life of a writer is glamorous needs to read this tale of mental illness, brilliance, and heavy, grueling, lonely hard labor.

Wallace is significant in American writing in that he helped end the dry spell of spare realism inflicted on American literature in the late 1970s by editors such as Gordon Lish and writers such as Raymond Carver. Heavily influenced by Thomas Pynchon, Wallace took the post-modern reveries of Gravity’s Rainbow, John Barth, John Hawkes and Donald Barthleme and made literature emotional again, instilling in his great wordplay a philosophical intelligence (he wrote a book on infinity) picked up from another of his favorite influences, Don DeLillo. Wallace summed up the role of fiction is to show the world what is was to “be a fucking human being.”

Unfortunately, dead at age 46, he leaves the instruction manual unfinished.

Cotuit for the duration, still recovering from schnoz surgery (doing great, still look raccoonish). Need to deal with mooring permits, recommissioning motorboat (may start that this weekend), 2009 taxes, and tons of work projects. Full-on March mud season now – snow giving way to mud, daffodils and tulips showing some activity, weeping willows starting to color in. Clocks change tonight.

My Garbage brain needs to unload some stuff too brief for posts, too long for tweets.

• Google Finance is the best example of data design I have seen. Remember Edward Tufte? The charting function – I strongly recommend you visit the Dow Jones Industrial Average and drag the time-slider back to 1970 – and its integration with news headlines, makes Google Finance my favorite financial tool on the web.
• Sponsored applications. This morning’s New York Times has a short profile of Spiceworks – a web service for IT managers to track their tech assets. It’s also a community and advertising opportunity – free to the users, but supported by sponsorships by the same companies who’s products are being used and tracked by the Spiceworks users. That, and the news earlier this week that there would be an advertising supported version of Office coming is proof to me that we could be moving to a new ad model in 2010 that sees adjacent/relevance targeting shift from media to services and functions. Anyone know of any other sponsored applications?
• Omniture does Twitter. Coming out of the Omniture Summit was the news that one can use Omniture’s SAINT API to track Twitter. Adam Greco blogs the details: ““SiteCatalyst has a Data Insertion API that is used to inject non-website data into SiteCatalyst and Twitter has an API associated with itssearch.twitter.com website, so if you put the two together, why couldn’t you pass Twitter information into SiteCatalyst?”
• Networked Insights: I met CEO Dan Neeley at CES, introduced by Pooj Preena, head of biz dev at DropBox. Networked Insights is an interesting twist on the social media/online reputation monitoring space – differentiated from Visible Technologies, Radian6, and the other detect & monitor applications in that their tool, SocialSense, is more of a “what-if” analyzer, segmenting detected conversations and expressions of brand engagements against different demographics, competitive sets. I took a WebEx demo last night. Neeley is smart and SocialSense is actually one of the first track and monitor systems I’ve seen that has shown some promise above our homegrown Google Reader solution inside of Lenovo.
• Next-Gen Wireless Broadband: I’m looking hard at LTE – “Long Term Evolution” or 4G wireless. I have two years on WWAN 3G, having tried Verizon’s EVDO and now AT&T’s HSDPA GSM solution, integrated into my ThinkPad X200, and while both were great for dodging paid 802.11 paid WiFi charges in airports and coffee shops, neither is slick enough to make ugliness like Lotus Notes and a VPN, or streaming video truly workable. I sense we’re still in early generations of wireless data (and keep in mind I have a certificate on my wall from some early wireless association for filing the first story wirelessly using a thing called a Mobidem from a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute research vessel in the early 1990s) and thinks like the Kindle’s Whispernet are harbingers of “invisible” solutions that will make devices just unconsciously connected. Think about Wifi in its earlier iterations. Used to be a total pain in the ass to configure. Now WiFi is pretty much unconscious (at least with the ThinkPad’s Access Connections properly configured). I had a long discussion the other day with my buddies at Intel about WiMAX and am very interested in finding someone in Portland who would be willing to blog about their WiMax experiences on a properly configured ThinkPad. Any guinea pigs? Please ping me.
• Hard drive dock: At Uncle Fester’s recommendation I bought a cheap external hard drive dock. Basically a plastic box with a power supply and a USB connection that you can plug an internal hard drive into. As I scavenge old notebooks and desktops I want to first comb through their drives for photos, personal files, etc.. I bought a NexStar dock from Vantec. Here’s a review from Virtual Hideout. I need to get the whole ghost thing down and find a good file replicator management system. I did buy a utility called FileScavenger to help recover files from a corrupted 200 gig 7200 Barracuda that I had in an old HP tower. I got a couple years worth of family photos and low bit Napster MP3s as a result.

New Bedford is an alien city a mere thirty-miles from where I sit, a place I really don’t know that well, a messy collection of triple-deckers, stone churches, abandoned textile mills and infinite sadness. New Bedford is sad because of its past greatness – it was arguably one of the wealthiest cities in the world in the middle of the 19^th century. I expect most people think of New Bedford through Ishmael’s eyes; Jack Tar rolling down cobble-stoned streets past the Seaman’s Bethel to the Spouter Inn. Few see it as the drug-ridden, tired mess of a fishing port it is today, cut off from the sea by a ugly rampart of stone built to protect what’s left from another hurricane like the ones in 1938 and 1954 that nearly wiped the place off the map forever, ruined by Route 18, an ugly slash of highway some dumb politician pushed through to tie the docks to the interstate. Yes, there’s the Whaling Museum – it’s cute and kind of sad as it tries to revise the bloody history of what the city did to the world’s whale population — and there are parts of the town that ache with memories of past glories, when New Bedford men roamed the globe and fortunes were made on everything from oil to golf balls, rope to coke.

Rory Nugent wrote Down at the Docks
following nearly two decades living in New “Bej” It’s about eight chapters long, each a profile of a different character, all related to the waterfront in one way or another. From the Portuguese-American, former Miss Massachusetts (third runner-up) tending the dockside diner coffee pot, to the unluckiest fisherman, or Jonah, on the docks, the book is about the people – captains and crew, mobsters and fixers, bluebloods and dope addicts. This is not a book about commercial fishing, watch Most Dangerous Catch if you want to get off on guys killing themselves in orange Grundens. This is about fishermen trying to sink old boats for the insurance money, about captains pissed off at the scientists, madmen who snort coke and meth to stay awake during killer blizzards, not because they want to have a party.

This isn’t about my world or my people. I can point at a whaling captain ancestor, but in no way can I claim the kind of bond to New Bedford that Nugent describes in the gallery of washed-up, screwed over miscreants that inhabit Down at the Docks. This is a weird subculture that Kurlansky comes close to describing in his recent tome about Gloucester, The Last Fish Tale, but doesn’t because Nugent just flat out takes a novelist’s liberty and invents his characters into something more real than any diligent reporter could objectively describe. I’m sure he’ll take some heat for fictionalizing, but it doesn’t matter. The details are real. The speech patterns are dead on. This is southeastern Massachusetts long after the circus left town, a broken down, depressed, grey and brown place that got the stuffing kicked out of it by the Great Depression, roused itself for a little while in the 60s, and is now floating face down.

My only bone to pick with the book is one of the last chapters, about the Petticoat Society, where Nugent tries to tell the history of the Quaker whalers through the eyes of a society of women who hold the true power while their men are away at sea. The scrimshaw phallus story is heh-heh, humorous, and not the first time I’ve heard it told (the first being in Forbes FYI in the 90s).

How good of a writer? I’ll buy Nugent’s other stuff. This one was great. Problem with the damn Kindle version is I can’t walk it across the street and make my Cousin Peter, a true student of New Bedford, read it.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in the WSJ on not divorcing Yahoo’s search and display assets in any discussions with MSFT:

“Yahoo’s search and display businesses are greater than the sum of their parts, she said. The two businesses are “linked in the minds of the top 200 advertisers,” she says, noting that Yahoo’s salesforce can sell more advertising because they sell the combined concept. She also said that any deal between the two parties would have to give Yahoo access to the raw search data to enable it to optimize all its other ad offerings. “We would never debone the company,” she said.”

This is reaffirming the obvious — that search and display advertising are inseparable and enhance each other’s yields. Looked upon at large, Yahoo’s value pitch is around the targeted of its tier one display inventory — the Yahoo sales team spins a compelling vision of targeting and detection of consumer intentions much better than their counterparts at MSN or Google.  But … (big but), Yahoo search is not regarded as the defacto standard to the extent Google is (though it certainly beats Microsof’t's efforts like a drum).

To revive Yahoo search I think the company needs to make an overt engineering committment to improving the quality of its SERP (search engine result pages) and make a convincing argument that its “black box” has attributes that distinguish it from Google. Until Yahoo can turn itself into a verb, it will hobble along, strong in a weak medium — banner ads, but weak in a strong medium, paid search.

The best asset they have going for them: reach. We did a big push through Yahoo during the last week of the Olympics and the results were impressive and the buy, for all its global complexity, amazingly efficient (thanks to Neo@Ogilvy and their fast moves to nail down availabile inventory).

via Bartz Takes the Hot Seat – Digits – WSJ.com.

Chambers, the CEO of Cisco opines on GigaOM about the necessity of provisioning true broadband as part of the Obama economic stimulus package. Just as I am in favor of a big investment in high speed rail, I am definitely in favor of a high speed data highway for the country.

Chambers writes:

“If 100 Mbps at home seems ambitious, consider this: Japan and South Korea are already reaching that level. According to a forthcoming research paper by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, South Korea — a country with 1/6th the population of the United States — has almost as much Internet traffic. That’s because they’re already operating at average speeds of 49 Mbps.

In the U.S., ITIF projects that high-speed connections to the home would increase the number of telecommuters to 19 million by 2012. That would save 1.5 billion hours of commute time — and reduce gasoline consumption by 5 percent. It is a green technology, one that can help us kick our oil habit.”

I have telecommuted since 1988 when I started the New England bureau of a national magazine in my Boston bedroom. From 9600 bps Hayes Compatibility to my present DSL connection courtesy of Verizon (and as the first residential ISDN account on Cape Cod way back in the early early 90s), I would dearly love a surfeit of bits flowing my way. Would faster connections mean an economic boon for an economically challenged hinterland like Cape Cod? To some extent — and it certainly would change the nature of the upper Cape from arduous commuter bedroom community to a more normal residential cast with white collar types working from home for Fidelity rather than clogging Route 3 with their Camry’s.

Chambers doesn’t cite the set-aside in the stimulus plan for broadband. I need to go dig that out.

via John Chambers: Broadband Speeds Our Economy.

I just deleted my Yammer account. Utterly useless service. Now to think of some other candidates for de-listing. Plaxo might be next.

… even if the august analysts at Forrester have convinced themselves that as long as the bloggers disclose the payment and are permitted to say whatever they feel, that pay-per-post sounds better redubbed as a “sponsored conversation.”

I still think it is one of the dumber marketing manuevers in the social marketing bag of tricks.

Call me a purist but I like my critics to be objective and my reviewers to be uncomped. Product changes hands to be reviewed, not as gifts. Cash is spent on advertising, not on payola.

“As long as bloggers don’t hide who’s paying them and have the freedom to write whatever they want, we think sponsored conversation will fit in well with the other forms of marketing through blogs,” writes Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran. The report – written in conjunction with Forrester analysts Jeremiah Owyang and Josh Bernoff – also includes advice for interactive marketers considering using sponsored conversations in their marketing arsenal, much of it centered on the critical issues of authenticity and transparency.

Whether you agree with Forrester or not, we’d love to have you (and your readers) engage in this dialogue with us. Please let me know if you would like a copy of the new Forrester report, “Add Sponsored Conversations To Your Toolbox.”

There are so many more intelligent ways to get a blogger or group of bloggers to talk about your brand without resorting to cash payments. And I don’t buy this re-tweet/give away for charity dodge either.

I will continue to unsub from “posties” and have long given up following analysts and experts who condone these tactics. The world is slipping into the Idiocracy quickly enough without the “experts” undoing all semblance of objectivity and honesty in the higest potential communications channel ever invented.

Links withheld in protest.

update: Owyang is determined to bait me into a pissing match on this one, now by citing Lenovo’s Voice of the Olympic Games program as an example of a “sponsored conversation.”  I am not going to get semantic with him on “sponsored” and “conversation” definitions. Lenovo did not pay any athlete to blog nor once suggested, demanded, hinted or discussed that the athlete mention the word Lenovo. We gave them free laptops and FlipCams with no strings attached. The point that just won’t sink in with him — no matter who huffs and puffs, is payola is wrong, cash-for-blogging sucks, and Forrester is on the wrong side of the whole pay-per-post debate. I revert to Mark Cahill’s pointer to the concept of journalistic ethics. I suggest every blogger with a shred of dignity read it. And yeah, yeah, I know. Bloggers aren’t journalists. I’m suggesting they may want to avail themselves of some journalistic best practices and take the high road. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_ethics

It’s a sure sign how desperate the social marketing world is for a new case study when a maker of sugar balls replaces its corporate web site with its Twitter account, launches a Facebook page, and posts some pictures on Flickr.

I can see the cool ad agency checking off every one of the requisite social media laundry list boxes and patting themselves on the back for being authentic when people like me tweet that their sugar pellets taste like shit.

I refuse to acknowledge this junk anymore. It’s not creative, it’s not anything more than a two-headed carnival act cooked up for the PR. The fact someone got paid to do this is further proof that we have nothing to worry about as the Ukraine melts down and the world looks forward to a summer of civil unrest.

Dour indeed. Ride the Naked Groundswell!

I just sent and read my first “private” documents on my Kindle — a bit of a breakthrough as I wondered if I could ever take my “to read” folder off of my desktop and transfer it to my Kindle. Turns out it’s simple.

Every Kindle has its own email address. Send a mail to that address from an approved sender and the attachment will be delivered wirelessly.  Most formats are supported, with PDF in experimental beta. I moved a Jeremiah Owyang’s white paper out of Forrester on social platforms, and aside from some formatting gremlins, it’s quite a convenient way to get reading off of the laptop and onto something better suited.

I’m not ready to go full New York Times or Wall Street Journal on it, but I have started the New Yorker and am quite pleased.

Now if there were a way to make a right-click function that sent docs right to the Kindle address the way I can right click and image and send it right into Flickr via the desktop uploader.

Condemned to Cotuit for the next two weeks because of nose surgery, perhaps three weeks with an attempt to get down to NYC by train at some point. Beijing coming together now for the end of the month.

My latest idea of heaven has to be a snowy Sunday in March with a Red Sox game on NESN and laptop at hand to geek out on baseball stats. With some 30 days until opening day, I went cruising on redsox.com for some April seats but alas, the frigging ticket system is a total boner and not coughing up any pairs, only singles. So, off I go to one of the ticket brokers to get gouged hard for a pair for my son and me.

Soon will come the question of which Sox t-shirt to invest in this year. Last year was Dice-K Matsusaka – a smart choice as it turns out when I walked out of the stands at Wukesong Park in Beijing following the US-Japan bronze medal game in last summer’s Olympics. The Japanese fans were very effusive and back slappy and all thumbs up. This year … I dunno. I’m thinking Ortiz as something tells me this is the Big Papi’s big season – the crescendo after his extra-terrestrial performance in 2004. Shirt selection is everything. I’m talking the official red t-shirt model, the one with the name of one’s favorite player printed on the back. A fan must wear it to the game, and one’s choice is, by extension, a proxy for one’s entire karma and psychological proclivities. Last June, when I took the kids to the bleachers to see the Orioles get thrashed by the Sox, the dominant shirt was Ramirez – a situation that certainly shifted after Manny’s mid-summer meltdown and trade to the Dodgers. A lot of Ortiz and Papelbons, but me, being mister eccentric, had to go with the Japanese ace last summer.

The pride of the closet is the Lowell 2007 World Series away jersey. The real deal with buttons, etc.. After all “Scenic” Lowell was the World Series MVP that year, and is the Churbuck-family God of Doubles according to my son Eliot – for whom the shirt was bestowed as an Xmas present as part of his misalignment in Manhattan as a student at NYU and occasional infiltrator of the Toilet, aka Yankee Stadium. I wore the Lowell shirt last October to the Sox-Rays playoff series (thank you kind people at CNET) but we lost in a nasty game that was over before I even got of the first inning beer line.

Colleague Steve S. – a fellow Masshole transplanted to RTP – and I are discussing wallpapering the wall between our offices with a 8′x12′ poster of the Green Monster

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