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The integration of telephony into Google Gmail this week is realization of a long standing desire on my part to be able to easily initiate a phone call from my contact list. For phone intensive users, like reporters, the ability to search for a contact, hit a call button, and be connected in seconds can’t be underestimated.

While Google’s move was judged a Skype-killer by some, the war is not on who’s platform initiates the call, but what contact list dominates the user’s attention.  Contact management is a massive pain in the ass — the history of Personal Information Management starting with flat file databases like AskSam in the 1980s, up through Lotus Organizer, ACT! then Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes — all seemed to divide a user’s world between the enterprise directory and their own personal method of organizing friends, phone numbers, email address, birthdays, etc.. Migrating a contact list from one system to another was an evil process of CSV export files and the usual comma-delimited b.s. designed to lock one’s world into a single system. Throw a cell phone into the mix, and things became uglier and uglier to sync.

Skype’s contact management is meager — essentially no more than a list of names on a par with any standard IM client. It doesn’t integrate with one’s other lists and stands alone, as a window within a window, with few hooks out to other contact management services.

Google has underplayed its contact management capabilities in Gmail, but it is obvious that of its suite of applications, Gmail is become the keystone and as such, some overdue attention is being paid to contact management. Adding the capability to call from that list is a wonderful feature, and Skype and others need to quickly build hooks into those lists and make it possible to extend their client or risk being stranded on their own desert island.

Memoirs are generally untrustworthy affairs, especially when penned or ghost-penned by retired politicians or athletes seeking to cash in on their glories with a fat advance and a chance to put onto the record their version of the past with no arguments or contradictions. But rare is the memoir of a man of letters, a literary autobiography as it were. Some writers, like Steven King, have written strong reflections on the craft of the writer, weaving in their own life’s plot as a framework, but for the most, the autobiography is at best an opportunity for we readers to be taken into the conspiratorial confidences of the tale-teller and given a version of events that at best is written with the same verbal grace as their non-Onastic work, and at worse whitewashes controversy and settles past feuds with the awesome singularity of the printed page.

Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Melville, Hemingway … few literary lions have written about themselves, indeed some like Pynchon are impressive in keeping their biographies off of the page, and limited to but a few cryptic paragraphs on the edge of the dust-jacket and end papers.  Literature resists critical psychoanalysis and the text is supposed to speak for itself, but yet the reader wants more insights into the dark influences behind the fiction: hence the cottage industry a few years back into tell-all biographies of John Cheever, the tortured alcoholic chronicler of Mad Men-era suburban New York and Westchester. The result was a bit embarrassing in the end.

I have not been a close fan of the political journalist Christopher Hitchens over the years. His work in Vanity Fair has occasionally come into view, but I haven’t been a fan in the sense of buying his books and seeking out his work in the Nation and television talking head-fests. For some reason I bought his memoir Hitch-22 and have been picking away at it this summer, slowly immersing myself into the life of what could be one of the last true British men-of-letters. That he has esophageal cancer didn’t come to my attention until I was half-way through the book, a relief as I am glad I didn’t come to the book with some morbid rubber-necking as a motivation. I had first become aware of him when he assailed my former employer, The Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, and my late colleague, Susie Forrest, for their first Pulitzer Prize for reporting the Willie Horton scandal during Michael Dukakis’ failed run for the presidency in 1988.   Then came this astonishing video of Hitchens undergoing waterboarding so he could report on the experience first hand.

The book is remarkable and opens with the type of astonishing development that any novelist would crave. Hitchen’s mother, a relentlessly self-improving English woman hiding her Jewish roots from the strictures of post-WW II English society, abandons her career naval officer husband and ends her life in a lonely Athens hotel room with her new lover. The effect, the development puts into place a foundation for the rest of the tale that never relents.

Hitchens intelligence and ambitions are unwavering. His mind is obviously astonishing. But it is is dogged refusal to back down from a life-long hatred of totalitarianism, to proudly wear the jingoistic labels of “Trotskyist,” to reject religion and faith and willingly face his attackers that makes this work a true profile in courage. His early calls for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, his proud embrace of American citizenship despite an upbringing as the consummate Englishman, his love of the language and the fun of word play …. in the end it combines into what I have to declare is my favorite literary autobiography ever.

Today I’m leaving Lenovo after four and half years as the vice-president of  global digital marketing. I had set myself a two-year timer for the job when I joined in January of 2006, planning on moving on to the next big thing following the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. But the Great Recession intervened in the fall of 2008 and for six months I had a very enjoyable career shift into the development of a fascinating cloud PC called the Skylight.

After the CMO — Deepak Advani — who hired me departed in the winter of 2009 and the company restructured itself to weather the recession by focusing on its China base and emerging markets, I found myself  in a marketing organization scaling back from the halycon days leading up to the Olympics. My focus on social media shifted to the formation of a digital marketing organization focused on delivering sales, and for the last six months I’ve been pushing string inside of the organization to re-focus Lenovo.com and deliver some value to a company in the midst of a profound transition to a new world of handheld mobile internet devices, slates, phones, etc..  This past spring a new CMO was brought in from HP to rebuild the brand.

All combined to make it the right time to move on.

What’s next? The cliche that I have irons in the fire is an understatement and I have a book or two I should be writing, I’m looking at cloud services, software and Web 2.0. I miss media, fraught with change as it is, but I won’t be rushing back into the hardscrabble margins of the PC hardware business.

Thanks go out to:

• Deepak Advani, the Chief Marketing Officer who hired me in the fall of 2005  and gave me a huge amount of freedom to launch Lenovo’s corporate blogging program, transform web marketing, and in general be as creative as possible.
• Bill Amelio, Lenovo’s former CEO, for emphasizing the new world order of conversational marketing, and seeing the value of a brand that listens and responds to its customers.
• Glen Gilbert, Craig Merrigan, David Hill for their amazing creativity and willingness to take risks.
• Gary Milner for being one of the smartest digital marketers I have ever had the pleasure of working with.
• Ajit Sivadasan for being a partner in web marketing and an amazing force of nature unto himself.
• Mark Hopkins, Nano Serwich, Matt Kohut for having a passion for blogging, social media and doing the right thing for the customer and the company.
• Peter Hortensius, Fran O’Sullivan, Peter Gaucher, and Ninis Samuel for giving me the chance to watch a fascinating hardware development project up close.
• Lenovo’s China team. Alice Li, Leon Xie, Elijah Degan, Cissy Yang and countless others for permitting me a glimpse into the most dynamic market in the history of the world.
• Andrew Flanagan, Mark McNeilly, Jeff Shafer, Ray Gorman, Lisa Sonntag, Kevin Beck and all the great people in Lenovo marketing.
• Steve Starkey — for a shared love of the Red Sox and for his friendship, advice, and counsel.
• And my team: Vivian Young, Maureen Ahmad, Regina Leonard, Nano, Gavin — Esteban Panzeri (who left in February). We did some great things together.

Thanks to all for the well wishes.

Okay, so the Fourth of July water fight was getting a little out of hand but the baseball team started it, or actually the EPAC Grotto’s peeing clam float started it, but that’s my theory. The local landscape company towed a trailer the size of a tennis court behind a big dump truck and loaded it with the best college baseball teams in the country. Young men at the peak of their capabilities, armed with SuperSoakers the size of Iwo Jima flamethrowers and an endless supply of softball-sized water balloons, wreaking havoc down Main Street from the Kettle-Ho to the elementary school.

Someone was sure to get hurt. Some toddler diving for a piece of penny candy was going to get crushed beneath the trailer wheels like a fanatic hurling himself under the wheels of the legendary Juggernaut. Old ladies in lawn chairs were being rudely entered into a bad wet t-shirt contest that no one wanted to judge. We had to defend ourselves, and over the years the sidewalks were lined with garden hoses, pressure washers, water cannons and the war was on, escalating to the point that finally reason had to step in and say enough.

The Cotuit Kettleers sat out the 2010 Cotuit Fourth of July parade and the village was upset.

Would we take out our aggressions on the Mason’s Mariner Lodge, and do away with a dozen old men wearing white shirts and natty little aprons? Would the librarians get it next? What could be done? The omission of the boys of summer was the talk of the counter at the post office. We were mad. A ritual had been taken away from us.

The season had already opened in early June, when snowflakes still could be imagined in the rickety wooden bleachers in the shade along the third base line at Elizabeth Lowell Memorial Park, the gem of all the Cape Cod Baseball League’s ballparks, an oasis carved out of the pines and oaks a few hundred yards away from Cotuit Bay. Was this our year? Had coach Mike Roberts (UNC Chapel Hill’s coach from 1976 to 1998 and father of Oriole second baseman Brian Roberts) recruited a dugout full of superstars? It was impossible to tell. June was a difficult month, of rosters churned by the College World Series, the Super Regionals, Team USA try outs, and even the Major League scouts knew not to come with their radar guns as the college freshmen and sophomores made the wrenching transition from metal to wooden bats. The scouts would come, trying to answer the question we all asked:

Who would be the next major league superstars? They were out there, on the dusty basepaths and achingly green outfield. We knew they were out there, every summer revealed them to us. Chase Utley. Ron Darling. Mo Vaughn. Jason Varitek. Kevin Youkilis. Nomar Garciaparra. All had once stepped up to the plate, dove for liners, fumbled and stumbled for our ticket-free enjoyment on the hallowed grounds of Lowell Park. But who were they? We wouldn’t know for a few years, not realizing that the tanned pitcher who sold us our 50-50 raffle tickets in the stands would soon be standing on the mound at Wrigley or Petco or Fenway heaving heat on national television. What was clear was how blessed we were to be living in the town with the team that had won the most championships in the country’s most prestigious amateur baseball league, the league where the best of the best came to learn how to swing wood and get noticed by the scouts.

As the season progressed one learned to pick one’s place in the bleachers very carefully, to arrive precisely 45 minutes early while the basepaths were being hosed down and the coaches spraypainted new baselines. The musical cliches of the game blared through the PA – a weird playlist of country music, jump-around fist-pumping hip hop, and hair band anthems that we wished would just stop — and we all snickered at the interns behind the microphone who mispronounced “Cotuit” and referred to Cape Cod as “The” Cape Cod. Top row, back corner, brown paper sack of popcorn from the Kettleer’s Kitchen and a bottle of Poland Springs. Layout the scorecard, fill in the teams, the date, the names of the umps, the start time, and wait for the announcer to list the lineups. A few rows down, the founder of the dynasty, Arnold Mycock, for whom the Cape Cod Baseball League championship trophy is named, dean of the scorers, always presented early with the coaches’ lineups by an intern sent from the press box. Avoid sitting near the bozos — cell phone man who loudly calls his friends and always repeats the same silly cliches “…it’s the best wooden bat league in the country …,” anyone with kids under the age of ten, the Fountain of Misinformation who plaintively repeats over and over the obvious plea to the pitcher to “Throw Strikes.”

Rise for the National Anthem, cap over heart, as Nicky Chevalier takes the microphone out to home plate and we all look out to centerfield, the maroon (or is it Cranberry) uniformed Kettleers standing in a long line in front of their dugout, everyone’s eyes on the flag waving flaccid in the summer southwesterly breeze.

Play ball.

The pitcher superstitiously skips over the third baseline on his way to the mound. The umps and coaches swap line ups at home plate. The announcer reads the same script he’ll read at every game. The first pitch it thrown out by some account manager from Wells Fargo Private Wealth Advisors LLC. Their picture is taken with the catcher, they are handed the ball as a souvenir, the only one that will be given out as balls are too precious to give away blithely like they are in the majors. Shag a foul ball and return it to the red tent for a coupon to the Kettleer’s Kitchen.

And so it goes for 22 home games. The same routine, the same script, the same vista, the same rules, the same nine innings. But the players are all new. Few ever return for a second season. Yet instantly they become Our Team, their names gradually memorized through rote and repetition until they are as familiar as nephews at a family reunion.

Would this be the year? Cotuit hadn’t won the champs since 1999 and Coach Roberts didn’t have a title on his mantle yet. Bandy legged from years of hitting of swinging a fungo bat during batting practice, he gamely rises from the dugout and takes his place before us in the third base coach’s box, semaphoring hand signals and truly coaching his new charges in the art of Roberts Small Ball, a game of bunts and steals, and devious tricks like the mythical Hidden Ball Trick. His temper is wonderful to behold, a mixture of ferocious indignation and bewilderment over the genetic stupidity of umpires and the appalling rudeness of the visiting team’s fans, all philistines who should know when to sit down and shut up in the presence of his righteousness.

My scorebook gradually fills with the record of games won and lost. Exclamation points cryptically marking moments of greatness, moments uncaptured on film, lost in a park with no replay, no statisticians, no grotesque mascot dressed like a kettle. Sweat stains mark the heat waves. Mustard the hot dogs. Every page has a dogeared greasiness from the popcorn butter.

The girls in their summer clothes parade back and forth behind the dugout trying to catch a ballplayer’s eye. Vacationing bozos in Yankee caps self-consciously preen. Every foul ball into the parking lot where only a fool would park is greeted with a warning of “Heads Up!” and cheers as yet another windshield gets smashed with a spidery thunk and the line at the snack bar cowers and holds their hands over their heads.

The sailors from the yacht club arrive in the fourth inning, salt stained, barefoot and sunburned. “What’d I miss?” they ask. And I dutifully read back the highlights from the scorecard. “Bushyhead lined to third into a double play. Coach intimidated the visiting Meat into a balk. Yaz hit a dinger to center. And there’s a yellow jacket nest behind the the bathrooms that just attacked a herd of anklebiters and made them cry.”

The lack of a parade concerned us. Would it cast a dark cloud of bad luck on the home team?  Cotuit baseball fans fight all change. “The day they install lights is the day I stop coming.” But no parade? It was wrong. Something would happen and it wouldn’t be good.

It did happen. And it was good. Yesterday the Kettleers won the championship in a beautiful post-season run that saw them sweep their way into the finals against the Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox. I missed it, obligated to attend a meeting, but the game played on my phone, a little window of video that suddenly saw a flood of cranberry colored uniforms rush the mound, silent with the audio muted, a clutch of bouncing hopping happy young men surrounding a weathered coach with tears in his eyes.

There won’t be any parade this year. In the 70s, when the Kettleers won a consecutive string of championships, the fans would drive up and down Main Street for an hour blaring their car horns. But last night the village was quiet, chilled with a harbinger of the fall to come, silent except for the emerging crickets.

There won’t be any parade this year. The players have scattered back home or back to college. Soon the Volvos and Range Rovers will file out of town, pink children’s bikes on their racks, back to what seems to be an earlier and earlier start of school every year. The skiffs will be hauled. The yacht club dock dismantled and stacked in the bushes. And the town will go quiet for nine months, waiting for them to return.

I’ve quoted it before, but I must quote it again, Bartlett Giamatti, late President of Yale, former commissioner of baseball, quoted in this summer’s baseball sermon by my friend (who also has sadly moved away) the Reverend Jeremy Nickel, quite possibly the saddest obituary of summer and baseball that I know:

“ [Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

A nice hiatus in Cotuit comes to an end (just in time to miss the Cape Cod Baseball League finals ….) — so off to Chicago on Wednesday, Raleigh through Friday morning, then off to Martha’s Vineyard on the Yacht Saturday morning

8/9-10: Cotuit
8/11: Chicago and RTP
8/12: RTP
8/13: RTP to Cotuit

Upstairs, disconnected for years, is an old Western Electric wall phone. Dark green, the kind with a bell that woke that dead. Rotary dial. Stick a finger in a number, crank it over to the metal stop, and wait for it to return before doing it again with a different hole. In the center of the dial is the number – the same number this house has had since it first received phone service lord knows when. GA8-6948 a throwback to an era when numbers had names to denote the exchange. Our was “Garden Eight”

As a kid I recall two things about the phone. First was the inviolate rule of the party line. We shared the line with three other houses and our ring was one short and two long. I was banned from ever answering until an adult confirmed the ring was ours. Of course that didn’t stop my brother and me from listening in to George and Millie or Fred and Betty or the nice old lady next door.

The number was simple. Massachusetts had a single area code — 617 — and all we needed to dial were five numbers. 8-6948. The boat yard in Osterville, Crosby’s, was 8-6958, so we got a lot of misdials looking for one of the Crosby uncles.

Five digits went away in the 70s as the switches were upgraded and the population grew. We had to dial all seven digits: 428-6948. Then the 617 area code that covered the state was overloaded and in came the hated 508 area code. And before long we were a touchtone house.

But the old phone still sits upstairs, screwed into the wall above the laundry folding table.

I tend to be a sucker for completing surveys from brands I love and the New York Times is one of them. This morning I invested 15 minutes in a lengthy survey on my willingness to pay for a variety of schemes to deliver NYT content to me via print and online. As a staunch hater of pay-walls, yet an inveterate paid subscriber of the Wall Street Journal Online (as well as a paid subscriber to the print editions of everything from Woodenboat to Baseball America, the Times and the Atlantic Monthly) I contradict myself when I say on the one hand that information should be free versus my practice of paying for stuff that I really want and prize.

The Times is obviously going to a paid model. But here’s my proposal to them. Segment your circulation in a pyramid model. At the top are print subscribers who cough up the big bucks to have a wad of paper dropped at the end of the driveway every morning. Those subscribers get carte blanche access to everything. iPad apps, smartphone apps, NYT.com. No questions, no up-charges, no nickle and diming. The rest? Well, tier it from a monthly model but don’t nag the user to death with micropayments and day passes.  I would rather be hit once and hit hard than suffer the death of a thousand cuts.

Gauging from the dozen or so pricing schemes offered up during the interminable survey, the beancounters at the Times are crunching through a lot of models, models driven by the panoply of platforms they have to deliver to: paper, PC browser, iPad, Smartphone, e-book readers. But what came through for me, as I tried to pick the best pricing scheme like a new set of eyeglasses at the optometrist – “Better this way? Or this way?” — is how much the Times is important to me and would rank, along with a handful of sources, as the only publication Iwould cough up $50 a month or more to read on whatever device I decide to read it on.

While I wish there was an advertising model robust enough to subsidize publishing and keep the paywalls down, the truth is the old display model of CPMs does not work, sponsorships are barely hanging on, and marketers will carry their ad dollars to volume ad networks and paid search for the foreseeable future. So, if keeping the reporters and editors of the Times employed means paying for digital access, then so be it. I will pay.

The one thing I may not pay for much longer is the print edition. Much as I love it, I seem to be the only one in the household who does. So … iPad get ready, you may be the preferred platform for the foreseeable future.

Hanging out with family on the shores of Tomales Bay near Marshall, California on 800 acres of West Marin perfection. Some meetings in San Francisco then home to the Cape on Friday night. Photos to follow. I think this is my first San Franciscan summer visit since 1982 and all cliches about it being cold and foggy certainly do apply.

Internet is a function of a Hughes satellite dish, so connectivity is here, but cell coverage is not.

In the 1990s (when exactly I cannot say because the their archive has no search function) Suck.com declared that the American cure for depression was the consumption of consumer electronics. Feel blue? Buy a Palm Pilot. Feeling stupid? Buy the folding external keyboard and the wireless data modem for that Palm Pilot. 3D televisions, gaming consoles, the latest Call of Duty, handheld weather stations, binnacle mounted GPS-Nav Chart Plotters with integrated radar and XM Satellite radio …. Then there is the whole Apple addiction, with something from Cupertino to pine for at least every six months. Add in all those iTunes downloads, Kindle books, Netflix, paid apps, online subscriptions to get through costwalls: I need to do a digital audit of my finances. Off the top of my head — from DSL to DirectTV to cell phone subscriptions, the big ticket recurring items, I’m spending $500 a month on digital services and easily $1000 a year family wide on new devices. I guess all those days picking through Garry Ray’s discards in the PC Week lab infected me with the need to try new stuff.

When will it end? I joke that in my retirement there will be no PCs. But what about cell phones? When my eyesight really goes and I start reading large-font books (thank god for the Kindle’s font sizer), will I own a large font cell phone like a Jitterbug? (note to self, burgeoning market in elderly CE devices).

It didn’t end today. I killed the Blackberry after four years of Lotus Notes/RIM BES mediocrity and embraced my inner Google ecosystem and bought my first real App phone, an HTC Evo running on Sprint’s 4G network. Why no iPhone? I get the iPhone experience and know full well the Apple ecosystem of iTunes, AppleTV, iPods, and now my iPad. Great experience, wonderful design …. but:

• Android is going to pull away in terms of share very quickly.
• I am a Google person: Chrome is my browser. Gmail is how I read my churbuck.com email. I use Gmail’s contact manager. I use Google calendar.  Google Docs. Google News ….pretty much everything except Google Talk and Google Voice. Android loves Google and Google loves Andy Ruben. It all works together, and had I lived on a Mac I’d probably a MobileMe person, or whatever it that Apple calls its cloud suite.
• The iPhone 4 is on AT&T and I want to get off AT&T. AT&T’s Android offerings are weak compared to Verizon (Droid X) and Sprint (EVO)
• Sprint’s 4G sounds cool but it will come to Cape Cod after I adopt a unicorn and teach it to fart glitter. For now, it’s an urban phenomenon.
• Kindle for Android
• No Skype. No ooVo. Guess I’ll wait for Adobe’s new “facetime” video call app.

So, to Best Buy for the EVO. I asked the clerk about the memory, and she said 32 GB. Wrong, it has eight. The porting of my number off of AT&T and onto Sprint was the usual Kafka Samsa Cockroach dive into “wait while I transfer you to technical support” but eventually I was out the door and on my way. The phone is nice, more a handheld mobile internet device than a phone really. Portable Wifi (I am retiring my Verizon MiFi) hot spot so I can tether my ThinkPad and iPad off it; decent camera, and a hardware build about what you would expect. Not Apple level, but not too bad either. If one handset maker would try to hit Apple in the build-quality space they could carve a good segment out of the Android market. HTC is no Apple, but they are going great guns after famously being Google’s hardware partner for the first Android phone, the G1 and then the recently discontinued Nexus One. The Taiwanese company’s rise to the forefront (it helps to be a Tour de France fan as HTC is cosponsoring a pro bike team this summer) in handsets is pretty remarkable and due in large part to their position as Google’s favored nation for building reference platforms.

I configured the following apps on the Evo

• Dropbox because Dropbox is still far and away the best “hard drive in the sky” that there is. I save ALL my files to my Dropbox folder and can get them from the iPad, the EVO, and via any browser on any device.
• Doubletwist for music management. First to free my music from the tyranny of iTunes, second because it has the same slick synch integration that iTunes does, but with any device.
• Evernote for being a packrat and saving notes, voice memos, snapshots, and URLs
• Pandora internet radio because everyone raves about it and I didn’t have it on my Blackberry
• MLB.com “At Bat,” now the third time I have paid the only major league sport that  truly understands digital apps another stack for cash  get scores, watch highlights, and read stats
• And several utilities, widgets, etc.

What else to say? In the end, it just something to deliver a little more noise and as the Fake Steve Jobs would say, a “little more shittiness” in our lives. But what am I complaining about? I dig little computers.

So with all of six hours on Android, let me make the comparisons to Apple  – at least the iPad experience which is needless to say a stupid basis to talk a slate form factor versus an app phone. But nevertheless — there is a lot of similarities and differences that have me persuaded that people will focus their online lives on three devices:  app phone, pad, and clamshell notebook/netbook. The three macro use-cases are obvious. Smartphone for rapid response communications and idle-moment-diversions; pad for consumption of film, book, newspaper, blog, and games; clamshell-keyboard notebook for writing long-winded blog posts and the Powerpoint Forced March. Right now Apple has the wide lead on seamlessly integrating all three. Heck, the non-Apple pad market is totally nascent and no Wintel hardware company has brought a successful tablet/pad to market. Yet. There will be a flood of Android tablets leading up to CES, some total clones of the iPad, others laden with proprietary skins and some with a nod to the commercial/enterprise market. The Linux variants and sideplayers like JoliCloud will fall to wayside as Android integration proceed across increasingly bigger screens, culminating with Chrome OS on netbooks.  If Google can control a seamless experience even with the code projects in the open domain, then every hardware manufacturer can dive in and do the “brown bananas” game of competing on price and driving average margins down to a brutal 1%.

Apple has a beautiful interface with rabid attention to detail that Android lacks. There’s something spare and elegant in Apple’s user interface. Android’s is … not as clean. Clean, and the usual gestures of swipe and pinch work well … but still.

Android is very Volkswagen to Apple’s BMW.

So, enough devices, my depression is lifted, my phone number is the same and … farewell Blackberry and onwards into standing astride the dominant mobile internet architectures, slightly schizo but always enlightened.

Yes, it has been a while since this church project has shown any progress. Trust me, there are two posts in the draft queue awaiting publication, but today I had to mark a significant event: the second annual baseball sermon at my village church here in Cotuit.

The Reverend Jeremy Nickel, my neighbor and friend and baseball buddy, pitched a gem of a sermon last summer at the Federated Church, preaching (to my ears at least) that Dave Roberts, the Red Sox pinch runner who sparked the greatest comeback in sporting history with his steal of second base against the evil Yankees in 2004, opening the door for the Red Sox’s first World Series championship in modern memory, should be canonized and given sainthood for his courage to step off of the bag and fly like the wind into the unknown and future greatness.

This morning Jeremy pitched his final baseball sermon, sadly on his way to California and a lucky congregation in the San Francisco Bay Area. The topic was, “The Imperfect Game”, and with artful elegance and insight the Reverend Nickel recounted the tale of Detroit Tiger pitcher Armando Galaragga’s tragic reminder that there is no perfection in the human pursuit, only the Daedalusian drive to try, always strive, to find perfection only to see it lost, robbed, by human fallability and fate.

Baseball is indeed a sport of awesome precision and regularity, yet also a pastime rife with errors and the capricious wiles of bad luck, misfortune, and emotion. The distance between the bases, the beautiful geometry of the lines, the time it takes for a catcher to throw a ball to second to try to catch a runner stealing the base …. it all fit beautifully, played out over a numeric routine of innings, outs, strikes, and plays that while tightly prescribed and timeless, is ultimately chaotic and as subject to entropy as anything can be.

The Church:

This is where Churbucks are married, where they are buried. I was married here. I have stood on the altar stairs twice — once as a sweating groom, then before that at my father’s funeral, stammering to choke back tears as I read these lines from Melville in memory of his imperfect but brief  larger-than-life life, and his unrealized dream of sailing around the world:

“”Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.

“Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.”

Those were sad words to say, words I always think of when I see the little shingle chapel in my comings and goings from the post office. I am not a parishioner of the church, but it remains my church, and while I planned on saving it as the last and final church in my rounds of 52, it had to happen today, out of respect to Jeremy and his wife Nicole, who are leaving later this summer for their new parishes in California.

The Service:

Fortunately I checked the church website for the time of the service, having mistakenly assumed a 10 am service when in fact summer hours called for a 9 am start. I popped upstairs, put on my 2007 Mike Lowell Red Sox jersey (he was the World Series MVP that year and is to my mind the ultimate Red Sox for his abilities, his good humor in the face of injury, and his solid performance in the clutch), and my battered and sweat stained Red Sox cap.  The walk across the park takes all but three minutes, past the library and down the shady bower of Norwegian Maples where the hippies congregated in a noisy tribal mob during the late 1960s. Up the little hill and into the chapel, steamy in the July heat.

I took the back pew, in the corner under an open window and started to sweat. In the pew before me sat Cotuit Kettleers Michael Faulkner, the fantastic centerfielder from Arkansas State and his teammate Chad Wright who also stands in the outfield and is also batting over .300 so far this season. To my right, politely standing so the women and children filling the church could have a seat, was the Kettleer’s coach, Mike Roberts, father of Baltimore Oriole Brian Roberts. It felt good to be surrounded by talent.

The pastor, Nicole LaMarche, opened the service with announcements, a bell-choir rang the introit, and Reverend Jeremy (@PeaceNick) was given a Barnstable Bat and an old framed map of the village from the grateful congregation.

He began the call to worship with these words:

“To worship is to stand in awe under the hot sun in Fenway, to smell the fresh cut grass, the peanuts being freed from their shell …”

Then he and his wife read, one after the other, some poignant quotes about the religion of the game. Including my favorite from A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of Yale during my days in New Haven, and perhaps the best commissioner of Major League Baseball of all time:

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

The sermon was the best retelling of the Galaragga incident I have heard.

Then we rose as one and sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Random Thoughts:

• We’re going to miss Jeremy and Nicole
• Baseball is one of the last great things in the world, a  place where children can stand on the field with their heroes, where youth displays excellence, where men like me can exult in the timelessness of the form.

The design of a global organization would appear to be a dreary exercise in org charts and bureaucracy. The rise of the multi-national conglomerate in the 1970s in a pre-fax era, made decentralization a necessity. But does decentralization lead to chaos, redundancy, and loss of control?  Bear with me, as I believe it does for the simple reason that the very nature of digital marketing is its capability to be managed, executed, measured and optimized from a single point, a function that revels in the fact that technology destroys distance and time zones. What remains is localization and translation and little else.

• Singing from the same page: Lou Gerstner, the former chairman of IBM, tells the story in Elephants can Dance about bringing in Chief Marketing Officer Abby Kohnstamm. She gathered the giant’s marketing executives in Armonk in a conference room ringed with examples of the chaos the company was inflicting on the world with out of sync advertising campaigns. She knocked heads together, revoked the right for anyone with a bright or “better idea” to execute it, and got the company singing on the same page with Ogilvy & Mather’s brilliant eBusiness campaign.
• Where is it written?: Marketers may have certain “unalienable” rights, but as one very smart marketer at Coca-Cola told me at a Google Marketing Advisory board meeting, where in hell is it written that a country manager in Uzbekistan has the right to her own 30 second spot? Consistency is everything, this is not to say that localization is needed and warranted, but permitting the edges of a brand to dictate what their web presence looks like on any given day, other than to reflect some sensitivity to local culture and mores is insane in my mind.
• Web: to quote Tolkien: “ One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” That ring, being of course, the most Precious of all brand assets, the corporate web site. Here is where the brand begins and launches the customer — existing or prospective — into the brand experience. Operating a global brand web infrastructure makes centralization mandatory. From content management to translation and verification, the notion that a brand would not present the same digital face globally is insane, yet …. I think (fodder for another post) that large corporate brand sites are hopelessly screwed for the most part. Done in by internal politics until they are link fests satisfying internal owners, but doing little in terms of supporting a unified customer experience.
• Microsites: where brands go to die. This is the classic manifestation of marketing going off the rails and into the weeds of inconsistency. First off,the behavior to acknowledge is every one is a web designer and everyone is a creative director. Everyone wants to take lunch with the rep from Google and feel part of the cool-kid club. The local agency proposes a “Twist” on the new campaign and next thing you know you’re sending traffic to a microsite with no tagging, no metrics, nothing but the latest Flash bling and a check mark in the campaign cookbook. Sure, it’s a bitch to get the temple priests running the corporate Web Vatican to build custom pages. Templates and corporate style guides are the anti-Viagra of innovation, but do you really want to find out that the brand is being lit up on some disconnected set of pages dictated by the aesthetics of a junior marketing manager in Moscow.
• Outposts: Facebook to Twitter, Orkut to Flickr — brands are falling over themselves to establish a presence on the highest populated social networks and sharing services. First: you can’t be everywhere, second, this is where the real chaos is occurring. Some bright young marketing professional in a far flung country is just dying to practice his social networking chops, so up goes a Facebook fan page, a country Twitter account — and the brand has yet another outpost to manage and keep consistent with the messaging emanating from headquarters.

That last point, the chaos caused by third-party services and over-eager local teams is where brands are feuding internally. Unless there are consequences and an iron-fisted CMO like IBM’s Kohnstamm, global brands will continue to kill themselves from within trying to defer to the edges in the belief that there is where the creativity lies. Sorry, in digital your brand crosses country sites. That killer product you only sell through one channel? Well good luck concealing it from a Chinese consumer who wants to know why they can’t get it at their local dealer. The very fact that everything is a click away from everything else makes the artificial silos and pigeon holes of marketing management an utter and complete fiction.

I traveled to Newport, RI yesterday to the International Tennis Hall of Fame to watch a match between the Frenchman, Nicholas Mahut and Alejandro Falla. Mahut made history at Wimbledon this year with his 11 hour, five minute match — the longest in history. He beat Falla in a speedy hour and half yesterday in a staggering heat wave. The Hall of Fame is a gorgeous place to watch a match. The shingle-style facility, the fin de siecle grandstand, the slight ocean breeze blowing in from Block Island Sound. I couldn’t escape fast enough.

The car thermometer says it all. I suspect it was exaggerating just to impress on me how hard it was working.

Cotuit, Cotuit, Cotuit

Raleigh Monday through Wednesday for a trip to the sweat lodge and then back to Cotuit for the fourth of July. Will try to hit a Bulls game on Tuesday night.

This past weekend, while on Martha’s Vineyard, I caught a few strong whiffs of skunk on the road from Vineyard Haven to Chilmak. I had forgotten how strong a sentimental reaction that smell evokes in me and realized its been a few years since I’ve smelled skunk in Cotuit. Skunk, old garbage in the heat, and urine-like smell of privet hedges are the key smells of summer in Cotuit for me.

My theory is the coyotes have thinned down the skunk population to next to nothing; sparing me the annual washing-of-the-dogs-with-tomato-juice. Still, it was a surprise to smell the fulgent aroma on the Vineyard (where there may be no coyote population yet), and recall the story about how they were introduced by Craig Kingsbury (the person Steven Spielberg emulated with Quint in Jaws, and who’s head — Ben Gardner’s head — popped out of the sunken boat) out of spite against his neighbors.

Monday-Friday: Cotuit and calling into whatever needs calling into. Was considering a quick return to North Carolina but have decided to hang back on the Cape.

Venice May 26 068

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck

I was walking along the waterfront in Venice and came upon this guy on an ancient Concept 2 model A ergometer, cranking away in the May sunshine as the world went by in front of him. He was rowing outside of a Venetian rowing club — a big cavernous boathouse filled with rough water wherries and quads. Not racing stuff, but boats for a few people to have some fun pulling down the Grand Canal. I watched as a quad tried to make a go of it during the Venetian equivalent of rush hour — vaporettos, water ambulances, water taxies, freight lighters and garbage barges all chaotically skittering from bank to bank — but they weren’t getting much run out of the shell and seemed to be perpetually backing it down to avoid lunching their bow on something bigger.

“When Jobs ran into error messages and slow-loading pages from his demo phone, he called out “Scott,” to Scott Forstall, the company’s senior VP of iOS Software, “you got any suggestions?” Multiple audience members shouted back in response “Verizon!” — referring to the network that often has more reliable coverage, especially here in San Francisco.”

Tip of the hat to Om.

via Steve Jobs Survives Gizmodo, But Not MiFi.

Dawn patrol to Raleigh on Monday morning — in North Carolina through Thursday night.
Cotuit 6.11-6.13
Week after: RTP again

I am back from first real vacation in a long time (“real” means two consecutive weeks, use of passport, exposure to new places) and spending this week at home to catch up on projects (email was managed under cafe tables on blackberry when wife was not watching) and get ready for a very busy summer working on Lenovo.com. Raleigh next week on the 7th through the 10th.

6.1-6.7: Cotuit