Churbuck.com

Nothing beats a bus when it comes to marketing. Hats off to Ogilvy Frankfurt for this great play:

Via Gawker

Indian Tomb

The cultural dissonance in this Fritz Lang epic is too weird to resist sharing. Indian pundits speaking German, a mechanical cobra, and a stripper.

Today – Monday 11.30: Rhode Island, customer visit
Tuesday – Wed. 12.1-2: Cotuit
Wed. night- Friday 12.2-12.4: RTP
Sat-Sun: 12.5-6: Cotuit

An advantage to the 52 Church project (more accurately the 52 Houses of Worship project) happening on Cape Cod is my proximity to relatively old churches and traditions. For example the oldest American synagogue is an hour away in Newport, Rhode Island; Plymouth is a mere 30 miles away, and the oldest Quaker meeting in the country is less than ten miles to the north in East Sandwich.

There are some significant churches on my mental list that I look forward to, either because of historical reasons or pure curiosity, and one of those is the Quaker meeting in Sandwich. This morning I went with great anticipation for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the historical importance of Quakerism to Cape Cod. I felt a bit guilty indulging in the Quaker meeting so soon in the project, but it was what I decided to do, so I did it.

“Quaker” is a perjorative term affixed to this particular practice of religious dissent and faith which began in 1650 in England when a judge dismissed the faithful as “quakers” because the power of their beliefs made them tremble before God. It arrived in Massachusetts shortly after the Mayflower, and its early adherents were severely punished, chastised, and even put to death for their beliefs, leading some to emigrate out of Plymouth to Sandwich, the oldest town on Cape Cod, where a meeting was founded in 1658. Other persecuted Quakers fled the North Shore of Massachusetts and founded the first white settlement on Nantucket. Over time many of the most prosperous whaling fortunes (Coffin, Howland, Folger) were Quaker fortunes. I strong recommend Peter Nichols “Final Voyage” and Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In the Heart of the Sea” for a clear look at Massachusetts Quakers and their relationship to the seacoast, industry, and the first American fortunes. My whaling captain ancestor, Thomas Chatfield, was not a Quaker.

But I digress. To the meetinghouse and its remarkable service.

The meetinghouse was built in 1810 in Kennebec, Maine, dismantled, barged down the coast, and reassembled by the numbers on its present location  north of the King’s Highway (Route 6A) in East Sandwich. It is on Quaker Meetinghouse Road and sits on a small hill in a wooded copse of locust and holly trees. The architecture is quite severe and ultra-New England, with weathered shingles and remarkably plain but beautiful detail work.

I arrived ten minutes early and entered the door as a woman stepped outside and declared “there’s a fire in the stove, make yourself at home.”

I stepped into the narthex/entryway, signed my name in the guest book, dropped some money into a box labelled the “building maintenance fund” and guessed at which closed door I should open. I stepped into a moderately sized room with rows of pews facing to the northwest and another set facing back towards the door. In the middle of the room was a woodstove and the chimney rose up to the ceiling and made a 90-degree turn to the chimney on the western wall. One woman sat in the pews. She did not turn when I entered. I found my place in the back row corner seat and made myself comfortable. It was so silent in the room that I didn’t dare snap a photo of the interior. This shot is from the Meeting’s website:

Not a word was said in the room for the next 70 minutes.

More people arrived and the only sounds in the room were the soft ticking of an old clock by the door, the rustling of one man’s synthetic jacket, an occasional airplane flying overhead unseen in the blue sky, the ticking of the woodstove as it slowly warmed up the chilly room, the shifting coals as the logs burned down, three sneezes that were unanswered with “gesundheits” or “god bless you’s,” the occasional rustling as someone shifted in their pew, the turning of a page as a man in the front pew read a Bible. This was not a place to have a cough, a rumbling stomach, or the hiccups.

No one preached. No hymns were sung. No prayers were said outloud.

I was attending an unprogrammed meeting. That means there was no minister or service, but instead a meeting of friends to contemplate God. I’ll quote from the Meeting pamphlet:

“We invite you to share the hospitality of our Meeting House and join in our unprogrammed Meeting. The Meeting asks that you listen attentively, both to the remarkable harmony of the silent waiting and to the minustry that may arise from the silence. We ask you to wait with patience and openness for an understanding of Friends Meeting.

Meeting really begins only when we are all joined in the silent waiting upon God that is known among Quakers as Centering Down.

Speaking, when there is any, arises from a deep religious experience and is preceded by the conviction that this experience must be shared. This is sometimes senses as an upwelling of the spirit, sometimes as an insight following study, meditation and prayer. It is always humble, always a result of the most earnest seeking. It is not casual or argumentative and seldom is humorous.”

The meeting ended around 11 am when the same woman who welcomed me stood up and shook hands with another person. I greeted the people around me, there were introductions by all, and some announcements of forthcoming meetings, food drives, and pot luck suppers.

Random observations:

• I was perhaps the youngest person there
• There were too few people to make any pithy sweeping demographic statement about the parking lot
• I want to return to this service more than any of the previous three experiences

What I thought about during the 70 minutes:

• Whaling and why Quakers dominated that industry (I have no idea).
• William Penn
• Quaker Oats
• Why such a silent, benign, pacifist gathering would be persecuted 350 years ago
• The branches of the bare locust tree through the antique glass windows and how that swirling effect is like my eyesight now
• How completely timeless the room was — nothing in it other than the clothing and eyeglasses we wore and the three electrical ceiling lights was from this century
• Richard M. Nixon (his mother was Quaker and his father converted)
• The overalls the bearded man who tended the woodstove wore
• Would someone speak?
• This was the quietest I have ever been for an extended period of time
• How much I enjoy this project

Here is the Wikipedia entry for the Religious Society of Friends. Next week, I may go Catholic.

Imaged Chromium onto a 4 gb USB key, set the boot order on a brand new Lenovo S10 to look for a USB FDD first, and voila — I am running Chromium (and blogging).

Now to try this USB trick on a certain smartbook … Video to follow later. Fairly easy process involving a .tar file, Bittorrent, an image writer and simple instructions.

Why? Why not. If the wireless drivers worked I’d consider running Chromium and Google apps forever on this PC.+

Update:

Instructions are on PC World

Follow @hexxeh on Twitter, he’s the rocket scientist who figured out how to build this native-boot image(versus virtual machine insubstantation)

The login and password are “facepunch”

“Beware of any enterprise requiring new clothing” Thoreau
“There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing” Anon.

I resumed my spiritual smorgasbord with a trip to Hyannis to attempt to attend services at the Brazilian Assembly of God church on Mary Dunn Road. I pulled into the parking lot at 9:45 – having had no luck in finding the service times as the church has no website – but things looked very sleepy, so with only a few minutes left on the clock until 10 am (which I assume is the default start time for many Sunday services) I fell back on Plan B and continued north to Route 6A, the Kings Highway, and turned into the Unitarian Church of Barnstable across the street from the Trayser Museum on Cobb’s Hill above the intersection of 6A and Captain Phinney’s Lane. This was not an entirely compulsive decision as I have admired the church for many years and wanted to have my first Unitarian experience somewhere in the course of my 52 visits.

The service didn’t begin until 10:30, so I drove down to Barnstable Harbor, parked the car, and listened to an excellent 1973 Boston Music Hall concert by the Grateful Dead that featured a flawless Here Comes Sunshine/Weather Report Suite from the Wake of the Flood album. That was an appropriate warm-up for my introduction to what may be one of the most liberal of the Christian denominations, if indeed “Christian” is even an appropriate label to fix to the “UU”. Unitarianism is very much a Boston tradition – the church has its headquarters on Beacon Hill and the church is identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former Unitarian minister and perhaps the foremost American philosopher of the mid-19^th century along with his peer, Henry David Thoreau. When I studied 19^th century American religious and intellectual history in college, the influence of the Transcendentalists on the Unitarian church made me make a mental note to check it out one day – a note that took 30 years to realize.

The Unitarian Universalist Church is a liberal religion – more a congregation of people bound spiritually than by religion – which has no overt Christian dogma or reliance on scripture. Wikipedia has a long definition, here’s an excerpt:

“Although Unitarian Universalist congregations and fellowships tend to retain some Christian traditions, such as Sunday worship with a sermon and the singing of hymns, they do not necessarily identify themselves as Christians, nor do they necessarily subscribe to Christian beliefs. The extent to which the elements of any particular faith tradition are incorporated into one’s personal spiritual practices is a matter of personal choice in keeping with Unitarian Universalism’s creedless, non-dogmatic approach to spirituality and faith development.”

None of this was known to me as I entered the church, so I entered with an open mind after wrestling with the front door for a few tugs until a nice woman (subsequently identified as the Reverend Dr. Kristen Harper) popped it open and bid me to enter. I took a back row corner seat in the straight backed pew, and pulled a guest card and history from the hymnal rack. The church was built in 1905, and was the eastern parish in the original Congregationalist parishes of Barnstable founded in 1646 (the western parish was the last church I visited, but that congregation is Congregationalist ((which is the antecedent for Unitarianism according to Wikipedia}). Reverend Harper, as luck would have it, posted some thoughts on how to define Unitarian Universalism on the church website last month. I suggest reading her reflection for a more personal attempt to define the “UU”.

The choir was rehearsing with great gusto as I filled out the guest card and blinked wetly with feeble eyes at the big room (note to self, need to read a basic guide to church architecture so I can show off with words like “narthex”). The podium, or altar, was simple, with a back wall displaying several bas relief carvings of a Star of David, Islamic Crescent and Star, Yin and Yang, Cross, and of course the Flaming Chalice symbol of Unitarian Universalism. No Jesus. No Virgin. No overt displays of any religion’s totems over another’s. The church was built in 1907 — replacing an earlier structure destroyed by fire in 1905 – and was designed by Guy Lowell, the architect of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

The pews filled up and folding chairs were brought in to accommodate the late arrivals. Reverend Harper rang a bell and the organ played a nice prelude of Thanksgiving hymns, including one I remember liking as a ten-year old, the classic Dutch hymn of Thanksgiving, “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing.” Reverend Harper made her introduction and welcome, noting that the congregation welcomed gay, lesbian and transgendered visitors. The chalice was lit, the congregation rose, and in unison made their affirmation. A hymn was sung, then a nice communal type of ritual was performed, with the congregation rising and walking up the center aisle to the altar where each picked a pebble from a bowl and dropped it into another while giving silent thanks. I was tempted to participate, but have decided not to engage in any rituals such as communion or other altar activities out of respect for the congregants and for fear of giving offense through lack of protocol.

At the back of the hymnal was a series of readings, or prayer-like statements, known as “responsive readings” written by many noted authors including Abraham Lincoln and Rabindrinath Tagore, the Indian Nobel Prize winner. We read “To Loose the Fetters of Injustice” (I forget who the author was).

The reading was “The Arc of the Universe” by Charlie Clements and the sermon was entitled “Guest at Your Table: Water Justice,” which fit neatly into my preconceptions that the UU would carry on the Transcendentalist koan of a “sermon in every stone.” Reverend Harper was a very eloquent and persuasive speaker and rooted her message that inequities in the distribution and availability of fresh water in the Third World and among the poor in local realities of drought and water use on Cape Cod. She kept me wide awake, the Churbuck test of any sermon.

Random observations:

• Christ was never mentioned, nor any Bible quoted
• The music and the setting were traditional. Juxtaposed with the absence of any overt Christian trappings, the music made this an unChurch-Church experience.
• Barack Obama and Martin Luther King were cited by Reverend Harper, who is of African-American descent and who did a wonderful job quoting Rev. King’s “If not now, when?” speech
• The average age of congregation tilted to 50
• There were two dozen children and teens present
• I didn’t see many twenty or thirty year olds
• The sexes were equally represented
• The parking lot had a high quotient of Mini Coopers and Subarus, this was not an SUV or BMW crowd

Next week — I have to catch up on a missed Sunday due to travel from San Francisco to Boston earlier in the month — so I may attempt a double-header this coming weekend with a synagogue visit on Saturday and a church on Sunday. Oh, and church recommendations are always appreciated. My neighbor, the Right Reverends Jeremy and Nicole are giving me some pointers in exchange for the loan of my clam rake. I will be in San Francisco over the Christmas holidays and thought I’d hit the Zen Center and perhaps Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, Glide Memorial on Van Ness or the North Beach church where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio tied the knot.

Vacation this week as I burn through unused vacation days before they expire at the end of the year. In Cotuit — clamming, blogging, fixing leaky roofs; puttering is the operative word of the week. All children return tonight, big family feed on Thursday.

Following week — RTP for annual industry analyst conference. RTP the following week for winter planning.

Monday – Nov. 16: Cotuit

Tuesday-Thursday: Nov. 17-19: Morrisville, North Carolina

Friday -Monday: Nov. 20-30: Cotuit, Thanksgiving vacation

Returning to the east from California today — intense day of phone stuff tomorrow, sttategy review with COO on Tuesday, digital marketing team stuff for the balance of the week, then home for the holidays. Thus ending a solid month of travel from RTP to Beijing to San Francisco to RTP. Next road trips — back to back weeks in RTP the first two weeks of December, then west back to San Francisco for XMas and eventually CES in Vegas the first working week of 2010.

Friday the 13th ……
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskaidekaphobia

Qualcomm Shows Lenovo Smartbook – PC World.

This was my “secret” project from December 2008 to September of this year when I moved off of the project to the Global Digital Marketing role. Previewed today by Qualcomm by their CEO Paul Jacobs. Stay tuned. This is a very interesting product. What is a “Smartbook?” — take a Netbook and connect it via 3G to the Internet and run it on a super long battery life  ARM processor with HD Flash video and optimize the whole thing for a cloud computing experience. The design on this baby is stunning (but I am biased).

Forbes.com has more details. I’ll tell the full insider story at CES in January.

Woke up at 4 am in California to take East Coast calls. Stumbling around pre-coffee in the dark in my mother-in-law’s Potrero Hill kitchen I grabbed a baguette and smeared some Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk cheese on it.

I needed a gas mask. This stuff is seriously toxic (but good). Reminds me of a French Epoisse,  the cheese that is reputedly banned from French public transportation. I am totally ruined for public consumption. Mere breath mints will not erase this issue. Now to figure out how to smuggle a few of these things back to Boston on Sunday without a) ruining my suitcase and its contents and b) setting off the nerve gas detectors at the security checkpoints.

Who says Google doesn’t market? Free WiFi for the holidays in select airports — this is a major relief from the $10 T-Mobile Logan wifi extortion. log in, get an offer to download Chrome. Brilliant. I  hate paying for wireless and this exposes Chrome to a ton of mobile customers.

A band I have been keeping my eyes on for a few weeks — Them Crooked Vultures — is a week away from releasing their debut album. It’s one of those celebrity rocker projects — John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin, Dave Grohl from Nirvana/Foo Fighters, and Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age/Kyuss. In keeping with the trend set by Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and others, the band has done an interesting job in building demand for the music through a web site, email newsletter, and the release of a sample song …. through YouTube.

This morning the band notified me via email that the entire album was on YouTube. The website is a great example of leveraging social sharing tools to spread the word — a real time Twitter feed — Facebook integration. So very smart interactive marketing happening behind the scenes.

So I went to YouTube — which is not surprising given that I heard the experts at YouTube/Google once confirm that the most viewed type of content on the service is …. music — and indeed, there were all 13 tracks from the furthcoming release.

Now it gets interesting. I’ve been playing with DoubleTwist all summer — a content “synchronizer/player” developed by DVD Jon. This is a very very very intriguing piece of software that has freed me from the locked tyranny of iTunes so I can manage my digital assets across multiple devices — in other words, I can put iTunes music on my BlackBerry Bold thanks to DoubleTwist. The program has a cool function that also allows one to paste in the url of a YouTube video and import into a local playlist.  Five minutes and I had the entire Them Crooked Vultures album on my iPod a week early (I will buy it, the quality of the MP3s is obviously low and sub-par).

So what? Well, the so-what is that the artists are sharing stuff for free on free platforms and I can collect and manage that free stuff using free tools. If I were a credit-card challenged 25-year old who was compelled to build a music library I think I would need look no further than YouTube and DoubleTwist. I look forward to the insights of noted Music Economist Uncle Fester on this “freemium” tactic.

I’m a food snob with the best of them — but I am not necessarily an organo-phobe who demands to know whether my steak died happy and fed on grass. I am also a customer of D’Artagnan, the specialty butcher supply house that can provide everything from armagnac duck sausage to wild boar. Being an occasional customer I receive their email offers.

I just had to ask, who would pay $178 for a turkey? I mean, turkey unto itself is not up there with Kobe beef and Bluefin tuna as one of life’s essential delicacies. What’an equivalent Butterball cost? $40?

I’d expect this thing to play the accordion and entertain me.

“Enjoy the natural goodness and delicious flavor of a traditional Heritage Turkey at your holiday meal.”

via Thanksgiving Turkeys, Buy Fresh and Natural Turkey for Thanksgiving Dinner Online.

david.churbuck@googlewave.com if you are running the beta and want to add me as a contact. I’ve played with it a little bit with Mitch Ratcliffe but the earth didn’t move beneath my feet. I need to invest more time and effort in the tool.

Also need to light up Google Voice — if I can find my invite ….

Monday – Tuesday 11.9-11.10:  Cotuit. Developing strategy for emerging market digital marketing following last week’s workshop in Beijing. Organizing new Global Digital Marketing team.

Wednesday-Friday 11.11-11.13: San Francisco, CMO Club, Thought Leadership Summit. Speaking Friday on “Leveraging High Technology to Redefine Marketing”

Saturday-Sunday 11.14-11.15: San Francisco personal time

following week: Raleigh, NC 11.17-11.119

feels good to be back on the road. Three months of being utterly housebound because of  l’affaire de retina simply sucked.

I am not a religious person, but this morning marked the second Sunday in a row that I’ve continued with a concept that I hadthought about for a number of years (but officially commenced last weekend); visit a different local church, temple, mosque, or coven every week for a year (within reason) and then blog about it.

Some background on my religious proclivities or lack of: I attended church as a child thanks to my mother, who was determined to see some spirituality instilled in me and my siblings, mostly Congregationalist churches in Georgetown and Andover, Massachusetts. My father was an atheist who claimed to be a “Home Baptist” and a parishioner in the “Church of Saint Mattress.” He did not attend my baptism at the age of 13, and indeed blamed the demise of a pet gerbil on that same event coming a day after I was officially inducted into some long-forgotten church in Andover. I attended an all-boys prep school in Massachusetts founded by an Episcopalian Bishop – Phillips Brooks – a famed orator, clergyman, and rector of the Trinity Church in Copley Place in Boston. Chapel was conducted several nights a week after dinner, was compulsory, and a few of the faculty were ordained ministers. I was baptized at Brooks in Lake Cochiewick a second time by the late Reverend George F. Vought (along with a Buddhist classmate from Thailand) and was eventually confirmed as a member of the Episcopalian church in the Brooks Chapel – probably my favorite religious memory to this day.

The Churbuckian religious status today:

• I don’t go to church and don’t consider myself religious
• I am a “registered” congregant of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Osterville, but again, do not attend services
• I was married in the Cotuit Federated Church by a visiting minister who once played on a famous UCLA national championship basketball team in the 1950s and was extremely tall
• The Cotuit church is the “Churbuck church” – we get married and buried there – but I have only attended services once to see my neighbor Reverend Jeremy do an awesome baseball-themed service last summer
• I am not a big Jesus guy and don’t go for the miracle stuff, but understand it is powerful stuff – and has dominated Western thought for the last 2009 years.
• I am monotheistic in the Einsteinian sense that I believe something ties stuff together.
• I do not take communion when I do attend services because I am agnostic
• I do not sing hymns because I am tone deaf and annoy people sitting around me who usually think I am mocking the music
• I subscribe to the foxhole theory of atheism. I prayed very earnestly for my life in 1981 while delivering a decrepit 60-foot ocean going catamaran to Florida in a November gale

So – with all of that said as a form of disclaimer and disclosure: why visit random houses of worship and then write about them? Good question. Let’s see:

• It is a nice way to spend a couple hours on a Sunday morning that would be otherwise spent doing email and reading the Sunday Times.
• The music can be quite good
• The architecture of some churches is impressive
• I live near some old churches with some significant colonial history behind them
• It seems like an interesting thing to do, especially religions I know nothing about like Greek Orthodox, Hinduism, Jehovah’s Witnesses …..
• It could be very enlightening
• I get to be pedantic and indulge my interest in 19^th century American intellectual and spiritual history
• It’s a good excuse to go to different places and find a nice lunch and a walk afterwards
• It beats blogging about interactive marketing

I intend to limit my range to Southeastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod and the Islands. My criteria? Try to visit as many diverse denominations and faiths as possible, seek interesting churches, and always attend with the utmost respect and humility. This is not a “critique” of churches or religions, nor will I award stars, rankings, or any judgments. So, let’s start off.

11.1.09: St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Falmouth, Massachusetts, on the village green.

At the invitation of my good friend Paul Noonan, I attended a very unique service in this wonderful stone church on Falmouth’s historic village green. Entitled Solemn Evensong for The Feast of All Saint’s Day, this was an afternoon service on the first early afternoon of the late fall – the day after Halloween and the first night of daylight savings time. I attended in bowtie and blazer and was greeted by Mr. Noonan for being overdressed. I reminded him that alumni of The Brooks School would no sooner appear in chapel without a coat and tie as they would go to the dining hall without pants.

The organ and choir were the main attraction of this musical service, which has its historical antecedents in vespers or evening prayers. There was no sermon nor standard religious drill, but instead most, if not all of the proceedings were sung by the choir.

The prelude was Johannes Brahms “O Welt, ich muss dich lassen” – or “O World, I Now Must Leave Thee” – in keeping with the avowed purpose of the All Saints service which was to remember the congregations’ deceased from the previous year.

I sat alone, near the back, and found the service amazingly relaxing and meditative, particular the Lessons, which were sung – The Magnificat and the Nunc dimittis. Coming from the WASP tradition, this is pretty much a familiar, “home-team” sort of church experience for me.

The program gave an excellent explanation of Evensong:

“Based on the services held daily in the medieval Church, Evensong, as arranged in the Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church, has been sung regularly in the Church since the sixteenth century, the Tudor Age (with only a few breaks during the Commonwealth in the Seventeenth Century. Here the music is sung by the Choir. ”

The church is quite intimate and cozy, with a very high cathedral ceiling, wonderful stained glass made in England, and dark woodwork. This is a very late 19^th century “English” church. Attendance was somewhat sparse – a shame given the quality of the wonderful choral music, and I believe I was the youngest person in the congregation (there were very young people signing in the choir). Mr. Noonan recommended I return for another musical service, the “Compline.” I will likely do so.

11.8.09 West Parish of Barnstable, West Barnstable, Route 149

For years I have admired this amazing white clapboard church off of Route 6 in West Barnstable. The architecture and the exposed bell in the belfry make this a jewel of Cape Cod’s ecclesiastical architecture.

I arrived a bit before the 10 am service and was warmly greeted, given a name tag, and shown a pew in the back of the meetinghouse. This church was built in 1717 and is the oldest Congregationalist church in the United States. A quick digression on Congregationalism or the United Church of Christ – this is the “ancient” denomination of New England, the direct descendant of the Pilgrim’s faith, and indeed the hymnal is the “Pilgrims’ Hymnal.” Based on what I read in Barbara Tuchman‘s Bible and Sword, the faith of the Pilgrims (not to be confused with the Puritans who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in Boston) was very Old Testament and almost Jewish in its close dogmatic affinity to Israel. While the Pilgrims fled England in the early 17^th century for Leyden, Holland and then Plymouth, the current tenor of Congregationalism is very community focused, social, and liberal in its approach.

I realized my plan of slipping unnoticed into random churches was both rude and unreasonable. When the Reverend Reed Baer asked if there were any visitors I stood and introduced myself by name and hometown. The layout of the church is very interesting – with the Parson ascending steep stairs to a pulpit high above the congregation who sit in “penned” pews with gate door and spindle railings. The layout is square – with the congregation sitting in a u-pattern in front of the pulpit. An upper balcony looked very inviting, and I spied a head or two sitting above me. There was organ music, but the choir sang with a pianist seated near them on the main floor of the church.

There was no stained glass, just nice 24-pane windows (and lots of them). The church was flooded with light on the sunny morning and the wood was all exposed and naturally finished with, heavy split beams supported by several slender columns.

The theme of the service was “healing.” The Parson, a former corporate attorney who was ordained later in his career, was very well spoken and friendly. The house was very nearly packed and had a very warm, community feel in the way the congregation said goodbye to some long-time parishioners who had sold their home to be near their children.

As I departed I met my old captain, David Ellis, from the M/V Point Gammon, the Hy-Line ferry to Nantucket that was my summer job during high school and college. We hadn’t seen each other for 30 years and had a good time reconnecting on the steps of the narthex (which is today’s word of the day).

While grabbing an hour of power and free bananas at the Red Carpet Room in San Francisco, some random observations:

The essay on Griefing by Julian Dibble, taken from Wired — “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual Work” is a very good read.

Andrew Sullivan’s contribution on blogging is incredibly good. So is David Talbot’s Technology Review piece on “How Obama Really Did It.”

danah boyd’s screed on the Myspace bullying case is not ….

The collection is skippable — too many “magazine” contributors — I would expect there to be more online only representation, but the majority of the contributions are culled from dying dead tree rags.

Final Voyage was just another whaling history. This time focused on the Arctic disaster of 1871 and the Howland fortune — the primary New Bedford Quaker whaling fortune. Okay, but not a high recommendation.

iPod — mostly late 80s Dead Shows, including a Nassau Coliseum, 5/6/81 Dick’s Pick. Actually a good Saint of Circumstance on there, and that is typically a big buzz killer.

Did zero work — now time to kick butt on the inbox from San Francisco to Cape Cod. I take tomorrow off – back at on Monday.

Basically 24 hours from the time I woke up on Cape Cod to the time I pulled into the Crowne Plaza Zhongguancun in Beijing.

Read all of Linda Greenlaw’s “All Fishermen are Liars”
Read most of Stephen Johnson’s “Best Technology Writing of 2008″
Watched part of Pixar’s “Big”
Started “Final Voyage” by Peter Nichols about the Arctic whaling fishery

Trudged through dozens of powerpoints.

Slept about an hour or two — hence now feel like the usual POS — but passed the heat sensor test on the way in and was not administered a thermometer like I was in August.