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Happy Festivus people. Imagine if some crazed Griswold on the cul de sac in your gated community one-upped the  Christmas lighting arms race with this?

(tip of the hat to my daughter)

This is for Marta, who I imagine is skiing across all the late fall bald spots somewhere in Jackson, New Hampshire.

Tip of the hat to Peter Kafka @pkafka:

I generally avoid editorializing about business. Too many years writing “objectively” about the technology industries has me gun shy about taking an un-reported stand. But since I covered Hewlett Packard closely when I was a tech reporter in the 80s and the company was nearing the pinnacle of its reputation as one of the keystone companies in technology, the news this morning that its board didn’t have the gumption to even interview its latest, and apparently lameduck CEO, Leo Apotheker, feels like the last straw in a decline of Sheenesque proportions and I have to say something.

HP’s former dominance in printers, PCs, workstations, minicomputers, medical diagnostics, even financial calculators was the culmination of a noble heritage that literally started in a modest residential garage when the founders hand built an oscilloscope they sold to Disney for post-production sound work on Snow White. HP was never the hippest company — it wasn’t a place I associate with the bearded sandal wearing characters that made Sun and Silicon Graphics and Apple and Next so colorful — but it was the most solid and mythic, a place that capitalized on smarts and research and innovation and was able, against the laws of Silicon Valley physics, to maintain its edge even as it absorbed companies like Compaq and DEC. While I believe “corporate culture” is an oxymoronic construct, “The HP Way” seems to indeed have been a good thing, one that held the massive organization together for a remarkable record of growth and innovation over five decades.

As the founders retired and faded into the philanthropic background, things became unhinged.  Lew Platt missed the Internet. Carly Fiorina over-acquired. Wire-tapping reporters and board members seemed, at the time, like an aberration (now it doesn’t). Hurd couldn’t keep it in his pants and mortgaged the company’s future by slashing R&D … and now after one remarkably weird year characterized by throwing in the towel over and over, Leo Apotheker — the CEO no one had ever heard of before — is the next to walk the plank.  The question is why was he ever even on the boat? I didn’t even know how to properly pronounce his name until yesterday at lunch when my partner corrected me and put an emphasis on the “e” with an accent (It’s “Lay-O” not “Lee-O”).

So what went well in the last year? Not much. The Palm acquisition yielded an operating system that was a lame darkhorse out of the gate. The company had a great success in tablets — once it discontinued them and slashed the price and alienated the first customers silly enough to pay full price when it launched. And the greatest bumble of all — telling the world that it is considering getting out of the vicious PC business before it had a buyer for that business —  effectively killing, in a single utterance, all corporate/enterprise demand for fleets of its PCs and future demand by whatever greater fool buys the business off of them.

The headhunters and the board that was too divisive and busy to interview its last round of CEO candidates is drawing up yet another short list of possible leaders. Whoever gets tapped, they have a major mess to muck out. The situation as I see it without looking at the balance sheet:

1. The PC is dead. It has another decade in the corporate world, but game over in PCs. Apple won and tablets are the new form factor. HP made its bid and failed there.
2. The Wintel standard is irrelevant. Microsoft and Intel no longer call the tune. Operating systems are irrelevant in the cloud. WebOS was nice looking, but too late in the Apple, Android, Windows race.
3. HP dictates few standards, has no APIs, has no developer community.
4. Printers. Printers are the last mechanical appendage. Think about it. Once hard disks stopped spinning and went solid state, the last thing with a motor is the printer.  Printers are a means to an end, not a future.
5. Crisis communications. Beginning with the CNET wiretapping, the Hurd scandal and this summer’s string of can’t-shoot-straight missteps, the once golden credibility of the company is very tarnished and tattered.
6. Marketing. Once Lenovo snagged David Roman — the marketing rock star that gave HP its awesome “The PC is Personal Again” campaign — the air went out of HP’s creative consumer balloon.
7. China and emerging markets: no where near as nimble or familiar as Lenovo and Acer.

A buddy at a cocktail party told me he wanted to buy an “International Moth” but thought he wasn’t up to the physical challenge. “What’s a Moth?” asked I? I fired up the smartphone and searched this out on YouTube. Now I want one.

We got on the subject of weird hydrofoils because another friend raffled off a ride on his Rave Windrider. This I need to try.

Leave it to the French to build the fastest sailboat in the world, the Hydroptere

The single nicest thing about moving on from Lenovo is a life free from Powerpoint.  The company, like most modern organizations, ran on Powerpoint. The CEO even had a style guide that limited presentations presented to him to 15 pages with no line breaks. As a writer I like my words in sentences, not bullets. I like to look the audience in the eye and tell them a story, not read them … bullets. Powerpoint simply sucks.

Esteban Panzeri alerts me to the existence of a political party in Switzerland dedicated to banning the evil presentation software that is destroying humanity’s ability to string together words in a coherent string, with a beginning, middle and end. Sign me up.

Here is my current favorite presentation:

Son spent his April school break with his grandparents in San Francisco. A trip to Chinatown and a hit on his savings account yielded a five-foot genuine Chinese stainless steel replica of Aragon’s sword, Anduril. Lord of the Rings geeks will know that Anduril came about when “…Elven-smiths reforged the shards of Narsil into a sword, setting into the design of the blade seven stars (for Elendil) and a crescent moon (for Isildur), as well as many runes. This sword Aragorn took up and renamed Andúril (meaning “flame of the west” in the Sindarin language), and it was said to have shone with the light of the Sun and the Moon.”

Junior decided his new instrument of mayhem needed an edge to repel pain-killer addicted home invaders. So out came the electric KitchenAid knife sharpener and the result was a sound to curdle your fillings.

Found on the Beastieboys.com this morning. I recommend viewing this full-screen, sitting up close. Look for the dog.

Sorry, but $6 Billion for a service that sends a daily email containing a coupon to a local restaurant or nail salon?  Has Google lost its mind? Is its $33 billion in cash burning that big a stupid-hole in its pockets that it feels compelled to pull the 2010 equivalent of Time Warner  buying AOL? This may be the deal that signifies the shark jumping of the social networking craze. Especially given that Groupon shows absolutely no social tendencies that I can determine other than a call to action to share the spam with a friend.

I signed up for Groupon — the Chicago local online social coupon whatever service — last month, and every morning get an utterly useless email containing a spammy offer to get a plate of cheap BBQ or a pedicure for half-off the list price somewhere in Greater Boston. Sorry, call me dense, but I just don’t get the secret sauce that makes this deal worth $6 billion.

In other words: Sign up to receive a daily deal. Receive the deal. Maybe share the deal. Then redeem the deal.  What am I missing here? The NYT goes for the jugular when it questions the payoff for the merchants.

“Not all small businesses are sold on the golden promise of Groupon. Ina Pinkney, the chef and owner of a cafe called Ina’s, in Chicago, said she was curious about Groupon when she first heard about it a couple of years ago. She ultimately decided against using it.

“We did the math up front when they first started coming around to us and I said, ‘No, it really doesn’t make much sense,’ ” she said. “If we were to offer a $25 coupon for $50 worth of food, it doesn’t work.”

Groupon’s cut is half the dollar amount of the coupon, so the average amount of money Ina’s would collect for each Groupon customer was around $12.50, she said.

“I would never produce that much food for such a small amount,” she said.”

As this deal is questioned by analysts and investors, the most plausible explanation appears to be the most insane: Google bought Groupon to keep Facebook from buying it.

This could go down as one of the dumbest deals since Yahoo paid a billion for Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com.

The sinking boat that isn’t sinking. From Gizmodo.

Leroy Stick – the man behind @BPGlobalPR.

I love this line, an indictment of PR consultants and social media gurus who “know” how to handle the mob.

“I’ve read a bunch of articles and blogs about this whole situation by publicists and marketing folk wondering what BP should do to save their brand from @BPGlobalPR.  First of all, who cares?  Second of all, what kind of business are you in?  I’m trashing a company that is literally trashing the ocean, and these idiots are trying to figure out how to protect that company?  One pickledick actually suggested that BP approach me and try to incorporate me into their actual PR outreach.  That has got to be the dumbest, most head-up-the-ass solution anyone could possibly offer”

The mime was working the crowd next to the loggia and the entrance to the Uffizi Gallery. White-faced and in an orange jumpsuit with the helpful word “Jailbird” stenciled on the back. He wore a single green glove – a sanitation worker down on his luck – furtively  hamming around behind the backs of unsuspecting tourist girls, whose hand he would grab and as they turned to see who hadaccosted them he would shout, “HA!” and give them a terrible fright.

“Stay away from him, he’s a f#$%^r,” said my daughter, wise to the ways of the Florentine alleys after a term across the Arno. I was tired – having just surmounted the 450 plus steps (and my severe acrophobia) to climb to the top of Bruneschelli’s dome of the Duomo – and I was in no mood for any mime bullshit. Too late. Five people between me and the crazed white faced garbage man and he locks eyes on me – as Quint said in Jaws, he had a doll’s eyes, dilated crazed Siberian husky eyes. There was nothing I could do but shrug and endure.

First we embraced like long lost brothers and I understood what did me in – I was wearing an ancient orange Orvis polo shirt which made me look like a large tangerine. He in his orange jumpsuit … it all made sense but then it made no sense. Lesson learned, wear orange at one’s own peril.

Then we danced a little and the mob of people sitting on the stairs along the loggia started to laugh. The laughter was like mime fuel. He smelled poorly.

We stopped. He dropped to one knee and put his ear to my stomach. He held up one finger to the crowd. They laughed. He held up two fingers to the crowd. Twins. They laughed louder. I thought of Alec Baldwin playing Junior in Miami Blues and how he casually snapped and broke the finger of a Hari Krishna in an orange robe who had bothered him at the airport, the surprise causing the Krishna to die of a heart attack on the spot. There were too many witnesses for me to maim the mime, so I continued to smile while inwardly counting down the moments until the mime assault would end.

Finished with establishing that my paunch meant that I was pregnant – go ahead, laugh at the fat man – the final indignity involved lifting my shirt, baring said paunch to the mob (and the astonished, apoleptic, laughter-oxygen-deprived faces of my wife and daughter) and then planting his face on my abdomen and doing the mime equivalent of the 14^th century letterpress – aka The Motorboat – leaving behind a bas relief of his white makeup with two eyeholes, my navel as a nose and below, two horizontal black lines from his lipstick.

The crowd went insane. Truly insane. I turned, showed them the greasepaint on my chiseled six-pack, saluted and walked on. A beaten man.

Thx to Mark Hopkins for the post title.

DecoDen is currently a popular trend amongst young Japanese women. They enjoy decorating their phones lavishly with bright objects like beads, and enjoy having a truly one-of-a-kind portable phone. Deco comes from the word “Decorative” and Den is an abbreviation of “Keitai Denwa” which means portable phone in Japanese.Here is where a PC like the IdeaPad S10-2 comes in. Check out what happened when we told our decorator “you can do whatever you like.” It’s a sight to behold.

via Yamato Thinking » Blog Archive » Ultra DecoPad.

Found on Popular Science, a nice moaning robot mouth.

Fred in the comments of yesterday’s post noted that his wife foraged 24 of these suckers during her perambulations of Cotuit. Today, expecting a minor haul of litter, I set out down the same walk as yesterday and found 47 of the little bottles of fun, most strewn in a single spot near Loop Beach, others scattered randomly around Main Street and Oceanview.

Here’s the scenario behind the evidence in my Sherlock Holmesian mind:

• The perp is an alcoholic.  (Durrr. No way!) As a former bartender I know serious vodka drinkers are the real deal.
• It’s two people. Maybe three, but most of these belong to the vodka man
• The vodka man likes flavored vodka. Primarily cranberry and orange flavors
• The cranberry preference points to a local who wants to be a localvore and drink the native fruit
• The second perp likes Jim Beam
• The third is an occasional schnapps drinker, though I suspect Schnapps Man and Vodka Man are the same
• The perp drinks these at Loop Beach while parked and looking out at Nantucket Sound
• He is a he
• He has a drunk driving arrest on his record which is why he tosses the empties as he drives away, as he doesn’t want to be nailed under the open container law
• He may do this during the day, preferring to drink the more economical version from a bottle at home.
• It wouldn’t make sense for him to do this in the evening, unless he is concealing his drinking from his wife or girlfriend.
• He does not live in Cotuit.
• I bet he buys these at the Coop.
• I bet he drinks two, maybe four at a time.

Via Clay Shirky – YouTube claims that Viacom was uploading its content to the video hosting service via several “marketing agencies” while beefing in public that its rights were being violated.  If true, then Sumner Redstone and friends are jerks of the first degree, giving further proof of the mainstream media’s guaranteed penchant for doing the wrong thing digitally whenever given the opportunity.
From the YouTube blog:

“For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.”

via YouTube Blog: Broadcast Yourself.

You know the theory that if you are in a plunging elevator you should jump into the air at the last moment before impact? First of all — take a physics class. Second of all, don’t try it in a Turkish elevator because it doesn’t work in one of those either.

Here’s the setup. Turkish elevators are pretty small by American standards. Four people are cozy. Six intimate. Four of us climbed into one on the Asian side for an appointment on the sixth floor with an agency. It was the style with the door that swings — not slides — open. We climbed aboard, I made my obligatory “little Turkish elevator”  remark and pressed “6″.

We go up three floors, watching them roll by the doorway which I am standing against. Then we stop. We are not there yet. Have I pressed the wrong button?

We start to descend. More like: we start to slip. Then the lights go out.

Then we plunge.

[insert whistling sound here]

We hit. Major bang. I keep my feet but that sucked and we land three feet under the first floor. Pitch black darkness.

I declare: “I have a flashlight” and I unzip my most awesome Patagonia bag and pull out the Qualcomm combo-laser pointer LED flashlight.

My colleagues are very upset. Thank heavens no one broke wind or worse. I turn on the laser dot and that gets a laugh. then the light. Light is good. Then I find the alarm button and I push it a couple times.

I hear muffled Turkish sounds like “copchik?” I don’t even try to reply. I hit the alarm again for good measure.

And then the claustrophobia strikes. Will we be there for 30 seconds? 30 minutes? 30 hours?  A couple minutes go by, we make little jokes but none of us are excited. Then the door opens and up we climb to fresh air and I immediately think about those poor souls stuck under collapsed buildings in Haiti.

I guess the guy on the roof with the crank was tired. If we were in North Carolina Cherie Berry, the lady who’s face is on the elevator inspection certificate would have saved us. There’s even a song about her.

Thanks to CNET and Technically Incorrect. Just too much weirdness to do anything but admire.

Thanks to Nano