Churbuck.com

Monday 3.15: Cotuit
Tuesday-Thursday 3.16-18: North Carolina
Friday-Sunday 3.19-21: Cotuit

offsite in Raleigh on Tuesday, team outing Wednesday night, home again Thursday night.

The Wreck of the Thermopolyae

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck

A mighty wind blew last night through Cotuit — my anemometer is fried so I have no idea what the peak gusts were, but i’d estimate well over 50 mph. Lots of tree damage as I drove to church this morning, the sign at the strip mall is toppled. And sadly, my friend’s clam barge took a beating and foundered at its mooring.

Paul Carr at Techcrunch nails it: why I will never go to Austin in March and pity the fools who do. Brace yourselves for a tidal wave of NMDB tweets. Read this, stay home, and thank your lucky stars.

“Tip One: Don’t go to South by Southwest Interactive.

“I’m serious. It sucked last year, and it’s going to suck again this year. You’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise. The idea that SXSWi is a conference – or even a festival – for people doing interesting and useful things in technology is a fallacy. In reality, it’s just a non-stop orgy of bullshit fanboyism – a chance for people with stickers on their laptops to go and add more stickers to their laptops; an opportunity for sweaty dorks in Diggnation t-shirts to line up for two hours in the hope of getting Alex Albrecht to – I dunno – sign their laptop, I suppose, or maybe give them another freaking sticker…

via SXSW Interactive: Because hell doesn’t have enough promotional stickers.

New dock – Cotuit

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck

I saw the marine construction crew out on Saturday putting a new deck on the old town dock. This ought to spare a lot of bare feet from some splinters. The entrance is cordoned off and blocked with a skiff to keep someone from trying to drive out to their doom.

Monday – Raleigh day trip on 3.8
Cotuit balance of the week
Back to Raleigh the following week

Monday 3.1 – Cotuit to Raleigh
Tuesday 3.2-Thursday 3.4 – Raleigh
Friday 3.5- Sunday 3.7 – Cotuit

Back to Raleigh to present budgets and proposals, back to Cotuit where spring is arriving and boat work beckons. A return to Raleigh the following week — very quick flipturn visit — then the balance in Cotuit.

No international stuff looming. Passport is getting a Brazilian visa, but nothing is on the books. I’ve confirmed vacation for the last two weeks of May to fetch daughter from her term in Italy.

Pretty pissed at Flickr (for a WHOLE lot of reasons I will not go into here) and their HP-enabled photo printing service Snapfish.

I ordered a poster-sized print of Paul Rifkin’s aerial shot of Cotuit Bay and the Kettleers playing at Lowell Park and got back a crap piece of work — colors off register (looked like it was whipped off on a crap ink jet printer) and most woefully, cropped with an axe losing the most interesting elements of the photo — the island at the top of the scene.

An utter waste of money. Serves me right for being lazy and not walking a local photoshop and getting it done right the first time. Avoid Snapfish.

update: Snapfish refunded me my cash via PayPal with no phone call required. Bravo to them for that.

Another Cotuit-based week, the second in a row. Still heads down on budget and strategy for the fiscal year starting April 1, and preparing for another round of presentation next week in Raleigh.

Boston Tuesday night for a dinner with Digg
Wednesday – dinner in Rhode Island with a customer
Rest of the week focused on powerpoint — then down to Raleigh the following week to guest lecture at UNC’s Keenan-Flagler business school, executive presentations, etc.

Hey, American Airlines just made me Platinum, so now I have that going for me. …..

I walked most of the eastern shoreline of Cotuit yesterday, breaking the hike into three sections. One at 7 am. One at lunch, and the last in the late afternoon around sunset. All told I covered six and half miles of mostly sand, with some Main Street pavement mixed in. The dogs accompanied me for half of the distance, their favorite thing in the world is a beach walk. Indeed, all I have to say to them is “Do you want to …..?” and they start bouncing off the furniture and assault each other in anticipation.

The new camera is a nice thing to bring along, especially its high definition video capabilities. I find myself very fond these days of Flickr’s video hosting for two reasons: the Flickr uploader application bundles the videos on the camera up with the still pictures so I don’t need to upload stills to one place and videos to YouTube; and second, Flickr is not normally blocked in China or Turkey — two places where YouTube is dead.

First, a video of some Canada Geese exploding off of the marsh when I surprised them at Handy’s Point. Good thing Captain Sullenberger was not on the ascent in the neighborhood.

I started at the town dock right at sunset — which at the start of this week at this latitude is 5:15 pm. By Sunday it will be 5:31 — so we’re gaining two minutes of daylight every day now. There’s still ice in the harbor — it comes and goes depending on the wind and temperature. This sheet stuck against the town dock makes an interesting ringing sound as the waves wrinkle underneath it.

Then along the beach to Lowell’s Point. Above is the abandoned home of the former president of Harvard, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, also known as the arbitrator in the Sacco-Vanzetti case early in the last century.  The cement sea wall and old wooden groins are disintegrating.

Then along the shore to the boat ramp at the foot of Old Shore Road, where this old sign warns people not to anchor on the submarine cable that runs across the bottom of the bay to Grand Island.

My father always advised setting the mooring of the family boats to the south of the cable, in the belief that in a blow they would drag through the black mud and fetch up and hook onto the cable. So much for warning signs. I think the old man was right though. Stay to the south of the cable.

Then around the fresh water springs at Hooper’s Landing where Conrad Geyser proves the best use for an O’Day Daysailor is to be reborn as a clamming catamaran named the Thermoplayae.

The rest of the walk is smooth sailing down the broad sands of the yacht club beach to Handy’s Point. Ducks cruise along, the winter sticks on the moorings look like crosses in a military cemetery, and critters rustle in the underbrush under the bluff. The dogs get freaked out by something at the same place along the beach. I think a coyote must have killed something there  because they sniff at the spot and then cling to me like something bad is going to happen.

Handy’s Point is where my great-great-grandmother used to live, before she sold the place to be closer to the village in the winter. Can’t blame her, husband at sea, infants, big drafty house on the beach. Her descendants may wish for the view, but the salty old timers wanted nothing to do with the beach. That’s where bad things happened during storms and where the lower class clammers and watermen made their livings.

I find myself needing beach time more this time of year than the middle of summer. It’s just me and the dogs and no pissed off waterfront property owners, few ticks, and a vacant harbor to gaze out on.

Home is the sailor home from the sea as the hunter is home from the hill ….

No travel this week. Full work from home coinciding with Junior’s February vacation but alas, I am not taking any time off but need to sit still in one place and focus on some big strategy stuff for the upcoming fiscal year (which commences 4/1). Will be good to be home and not on the road for the first time in three weeks. Next trip is back to North Carolina the first week of March to guest lecture at UNC Keenan-Flagler business school, push on my Digital Marketing agenda, and push onwards with the big project du jour.

NYC perhaps the week after that.

Farch: the mythical month invented by Tony Perkins long ago when Red Herring missed a month and he decided to combine February and March — which in New England is the nadir, the pits, the lowest point of the annual cycle when the blizzards roll through, then the  winds follow, the landscape turns grey, and slowly, as St. Pat’s draws nearer, the dog shit starts to surface through the grey snow  banks.

• Red Sox Equipment truck left for Fort Myers — this is good. There are two halves to the year: the baseball half and the non-baseball half.  Truck Day is my personal Groundhog Day and now, with some luck, I’ll be blogging about the blooming of the crocuses, the planting of the sugar peas, and even — dare I tempt the gods — the launching of the boat for some clamming.
• Reading. I’ve been busy on the Kindle and in print.
  • The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain: worth a read, definitely worth a read. How these escaped me is a mystery, but it takes a strong sense of humor to make a reader laugh out loud more than 100 years later.  I’m reading the Modern Library edition edited by Lawrence Berkove.
  • Istanbul: Memories of a City, Orhan Pamuk won Turkey’s only Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.  This memoir of growing up in Istanbul introduced me to him. I will definitely visit his novels next. It has been the perfect coda to the recent Turkey expedition.
  • Europe Central, William Vollman. Lyrical history of the Eastern Front in WW II as seen through the eyes of various luminaries from the artist Kathe Kollwitz,  the composer Dmitri Shostakovich to the Wehrmacht General Freidrich Paulus.
  • The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons. I couldn’t finish it, but the beginning is great as he relives the glory dynasties of the Boston Celtics as only a true Masshole of my generation could. The rest of it — especially his “what-if” scenarios are confusing and indulgent.
  • Baseball America: monthly rag out of Durham, NC devoted to inside-baseball and minor league prospects. Feeding the inner baseball geek.
• Watching. Lots of art film. In the past couple weeks ….

• Tropical Malady: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, aka “Joe.”  Beautiful, strange, mystical Thai film.
• Pickpocket: Jia Zhang-Ke. mid-90s film about a doomed pickpocket. Amazing flick. Sino-philes need to see this.
• Crimson Gold, Jafar Panahi. Iranian flick, written by the Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami.

That’s it. Lots of things happening at work, still engaged with the church thing, thinking about social devices, emerging market internet usage behavior, censorship issues in Iran and China …. the usual and not enough time to blog about it all cogently.

Cotuit – Feb. 6-9
Raleigh, NC – Feb. 10-12
Cotuit thereafter

More time on the road next week. Then I hope to decompress in Cotuit for a week or so. Passing on Brazil due to visa issuance problems.

Prior to the trip a good friend forwarded an article from the New York Times about a stellar breakfast restaurant in Cihangir, a neighborhood on the Beylogu side of Istanbul near Taksim, the “Times Square” of the city. I tried to hit the place during the week, but it was closed, done in by the snow or perhaps only open on weekends. I woke up this (Sunday) morning with no real agenda (other than to get a mosque under my belt) and started off by walking through the Besiktas Market (site of the fish vendors) via a little park that reminded me of Gramercy Park only grungier and surrounded by less posh apartments.

I saw this demented sculpture garden – quite possibly the weirdest thing seen this trip – and continued downhill past the by-now-common site of a gazillion mangy cats and pre-distemper dogs that infest the vacant lots and narrow hillside streets of the city. Some of the dogs have some sort of identification thing stapled through their ear – like cattle – and the cats are everywhere, perched on air-conditioner units, dashing into kebab shops, and languishing under parked cars with their tails ticking away. I imagine they must have to round them up and neuter the poor things every so often. Or, what I saw was a product of not rounding them up and neutering them. Some of the dogs are just nasty. They come wandering down a sidewalk and the first thing that comes to mind is “Oh shit. It’s Cujo.” You avoid eye contact –  be the dog whisperer – and stay out of snapping range. One bite and it’s fourteen injections through the belly button. I passed one cur that morning by the steps up to the German Embassy by the Karbatas soccer stadium that smelled like halitosis on four paws. It had this moussed electrified perm in its fur and smelled as if it had spent the night snacking in a dumpster. Two similes are not enough for this dog.

I wandered up to Taksim – a serious trudge up a big hill which instantly rendered my morning shower a memory and turned me into AquaMan – he who sweats buckets in January. No huffing or puffing. My cardio is okay. I just have very efficient liquid transfer capabilities. So off came the Filson logging coat and up I marched in shirtsleeves to the wonder of some French tourists bundled up for Ice Station Turkey. Taksim was quiet but I saw a big Orthodox church I spied from the morning I ate a “wet burger”, so I ducked in and took in another service to keep up the march moving towards 52 holy places in 12 months [I'll post on that later, I am highly burned out on churches right now.]

After the service at the Greek church I remembered the New York Times reviewed restaurant, Van Kahvalti Evi, was on a street that fed into Taksim Square. I Five minutes later was wedged into a seat next to a table full of loud Americans ordering a traditional Turkish breakfast from Van, the city in the easternmost regions of Anatolia, the Asian mainland of Turkey.

Tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, a little pot of peanut butter, another of butter, a basket of breads, a bowl of yogurt and dill and cukes, a saucer of wild unfiltered honey and sweet clotted cream, and five kinds of cheese: Armenian string cheese, a very hard and coming close-to-smegma clump of some cheese with herbs, a bland cheddarish cheese, the ubiquitous triangle of very salty feta, and a wet cube of something made from sheep’s milk. To add insult to injury and to keep up my reputation as a trencherman and gourmand, I tossed on a order of flatbread grilled with meat and cheese – think a pastrami quesadilla and you aren’t far off except the tortilla was more like filo than masa flour.

I dug in. This was a project that took some planning and strategizing and when I eat alone I tend to become self-conscious and understand why my two terriers, when given a bone, immediately head for the underside of a table or staircase to eat it alone in their lairs. I took notes about the church service in my notebook, Tweeted, checked out my city map, and did my best impersonation of a guy eating in prison – shovel quickly, don’t make eye contact, and guard the plate with both forearms. The breakfast was very different, very good, and not your usual IHOP clown-face pancakes with the bacon eyebrows.

I left a better man for it, and walked back up past the church (which had two Cujos in a muddy side yard jointly gnawing on what looked like a diaper) to a serious main drag – a pedestrian Broadway with a cute little tram clanking up and down it. It was open and booming on this grey, drizzly Sunday morning, so I took it all in, snapping pictures and taking little tram videolets until I stumbled into the Greek Embassy and an exhibition on the Greek churches in the city. More churches. Just what I needed. But it felt obligatory and I had to feed my head after doing so much damage to my stomach at the Van. In I went, picking up a program, and for a half hour I circled two rooms reading big placards about the sad little churches left behind when the Byzantine Empire tanked.

Back into the fresh air. I walked down the hill past the Galata Tower and headed into the Golden Horn for my Excellent Mosque Adventure. See below.

On the return back to the hotel I had to do some souvenir hunting back in the Besiktas bazaar. Sons get Turkish soccer scarves, daughter gets a collection of pins, wife gets the Sultan’s Dagger (the one with the emeralds on the hilt) and a box of Turkish Delight (assorted Fruit flavors). While there I decided to eat the Turkish Last Supper and go as low rent as possible for a full grey-meat-on-a-stick experience. What follows is mayhem. Pray for me on the ride to Beijing.

Right off – worst meal of the trip. Worst meal of the month. The waiter – who is Rudy Giuliani’s doppelganger – was as good in English as I am in Turkish – and the menu didn’t have any pictures. A good rule of life is “Do not order anything called a: Sausage Special” and don’t order something that on second check of the menu is described as “boiled leaves of dough with cheese and/or meats.”

Boiled leaves of dough was amazing in its nastiness. It was like eating with a finger down your throat. Gelatinous. Wet with hot water. Sort of floating in the hot water. Cheese was chunks of hard feta. Some pale green parsley was hanging around in there too. Someone had rolled up a handful of cheese and a bunch of parsley in six sheets of filo and tossed it into the dirty hot dog water. Then assaulted it with a scimitar.

So now I have that going for me. I couldn’t wait for the Sausage Surprise. I saw the cook messing around with a red squirt bottle and a white squirt bottle, the International Greasy Spoon symbols for ketchup and mayonnaise. Waiter brings same plate to me. What occurred was a bed of greenish French fries bedecked with two hot dogs – pure Oscar Meyer – and two discs of what looked like anemic hamburger patties but were definitely not cow, I am assuming weren’t pork, and most likely were lamb or goat or both. On one side was a pickle stuck in a wad of tartar sauce, on the other was two squirts of ketchup and mayo.

Surprise indeed. I picked at a couple fries. Abandoned the dogs after one bite, and finally just gave up. Rudy Giuliani was sad about that. But I tipped him anyway as I didn’t want to carry any Turkish lira out of the country and besides, it wasn’t his fault. He shook my hand and touched his heart in gesture of “hail fellow, well met.”

I lurched out into the rain, missed squashing a cat, and sent it flying into the restaurant in fear. Perhaps it will join the Surprise.

A sad note. As I walked back to my hotel I passed a bookstore and in the window, big as can be, is a picture of my hero, the late David Foster Wallace. I became very blue, and stood still for a second, tired from running around, tired from to-do lists, tired from the fever pace of this emerging market, and looked up across the square where the ferries from Asia dock and saw in big lit up red letters the word “Final.”

Thanks Turkey, that was awesome.

It rained today and I had calls sprinkled through the afternoon, keeping me hotel bound except for a dash across Barbaros for a couple beef kebab rollup things called durum and a spicy cold meat thing called kofte. The weather was just sucky and I had no remorse about missing a day out on the streets and in the bazaars.

Finally, around 5 pm, as it was getting dark, the thought of room service  again was too depressing so I bundled up and walked down to the port of Besiktas, a very busy, vibrant intersection where the ferries dock and a big monument to Ataturk stands in a plaza surrounded by smoking buses and a perpetual queue of yellow taksis. After five days poking around the city, I realize my hotel is beautifully situated between some great neighborhoods, the Golden Horn, and the modern era of digital agencies and the like to the north.

I’d noticed a  busy little alley down at the bottom of the hill the other day, so I headed there and turned in with the crowd of commuters heading out to pick something up for their dinners. The lines at the ATMs were ten people deep. The rain was at a mist stage so my glasses were dazzled with the lights.

The fish market had more species on display than anything I’ve seen outside of Tokyo. I recognized a few things — especially the ubiquitous brawling bluefish — but there were some little fish in abundance that were staggering to behold and smell. There were some super weird fish.

The square with the fish stalls was ringed with fish restaurants of course, so I had to enter one to see what the fuss was about. Indeed, the fish was ordered, the order was taken outside, the fish was filleted on the spot, and brought into the kitchen to be cooked. I consider that fresh fish.

Now the restaurant was very nice, the Ahtapot Restaurant to be precise, and the proprietor overloaded me with mezze and salad and cheese. When we got to the discussion of the main course I was trying to convey that I wanted his freshest fish — whatever was in season — but NOT bluefish as I had eaten that a few nights before in Ortakoy. He put his finger on the bluefish entry. I shook my head. He nodded his head. I shook my head. I pointed at bonito. He shook his head. I shook my head. I asked: “What’s fresh.” He pointed at the bluefish. I pointed out the window at the market. He smiled. I gave up. “Get me whatever you think.”

I ate bluefish.

No complaints. I had to walk that monster off, so I toured the bazaar for an hour, snapping pictures of nut stores and pastry shops and white box PC sellers. I  passed a shop that sold water pipes, or nargile, or hookahs.

The bazaar felt like a real neighborhood. There were no tourists. Just locals getting bread and stuff for their dinners. It was very interesting in its own non way: a functional souk that the neighborhood depended on for life’s essentials. Each alley had a theme. There was washing machine alley and bedding alley, there was pharmacies and spice shops. The fast food — the doner spots — were bewildering in their numbers and variety. Guess who added insult to injury and threw a doner kebab on top of his fish dinner?

I walked up the hill past a monster traffic jam where the cars were spinning their wheels on the wet cobblestones and the air was filled with the stink of burning clutch. I descended along a little urban park, made my way back to the Conrad, and now must do some research on the Eastern Orthodox church as I am attending a service in the morning at St. George’s, the Rum Patrikhanesi, conducted by the current Patriarch, or supreme leader of the Orthodox Church, the religion of the Byzantines and Constantinople.

Apologies — car video sucks. But still …I drove from Europe to Asia in 90 seconds.

Photos to follow, but I ate a “wet burger” for my breakfast in Taksim Square — standing in the shadow of Anthony Bourdain in his recent No Reservations episode set in Istanbul. It was good, not gotta-have-another-great, but okay. To be precise it was a Kizilkayalar burger.

I was in Cihangir looking for a breakfast spot profiled in the New York Times, but alas, it was closed. and I made do with a glass of tea and a couple pastries called Pogaca, followed by the aforementioned wet burger.

Food pictures are so attractive.

Quoting from the hamburger’s website:

“After a few years, doner becames a sector and Kizilkayalar becames the founder and the leader of this sector.
The name of the doner was heared in all Istanbul and people knew that they can eat doner in Taksim whenever they want. Anymore, doner became important fast food of Istanbul. Doner was the innovation from the Kizilkayalar to Istanbul. The important reason of the fame of Kizilkayalar Hamburger is being the first presenter of doner.”

More meetings today and tomorrow, then some time for sightseeing towards the end of the week. Snowfall was kind of interesting yesterday — glad I brought along my waxed Filson coat with the zip-in wool vest and my Merrill snow clogs. This is full on winter and more snow than I’ve seen yet this year on Cape Cod.

Gorgeous blue skies today.

Liquid Crack

1.23 Saturday – Cotuit to Istanbul
1.24 Sunday – arrive Istanbul, Hotel Conrad
1.25-1.31 Monday – Sunday: Istanbul
2.1 – arrive Beijing, Intercontinental (Olympic Plaza)
2.2 – 2.4 Beijing
2.5 Beijing to Cotuit

Monday – Cotuit, winter plan budget work
Tuesday – Boston, eye checkup with surgeon
Wednesday – Cotuit
Thursday – Bryant College, Smithfield, Rhode Island
Friday – Cotuit
Saturday – Cotuit to Istanbul
Sunday – Istanbul

This one from my daughter who is spending her Junior-year spring term in Florence.  I have to say a Wordpress.com blog, a Flickr account, a digital camera, and a Lenovo S10 netbook are a great way to keep the grandparents and friends informed.

http://bchurbuck.wordpress.com

Virus, Spyware & Malware Protection | Microsoft Security Essentials.

Am I imagining things or did Microsoft effectively kill Symantec and McAfee and every other anti-virus vendor with this free release of the Security Essentials?

I am on a new Win 7 platform, the 30 day trials all expired, and I was a bout to pull out the credit card when a colleague sent me a link to the Microsoft Security Essentials. After years of prowling through download.com looking for free virus scanners like AVG, I am a happy man. I wonder why Microsoft didn’t do this sooner.