Day: January 14, 2006

Winter Bike Rides

Took a nice hour-long, 18 mile spin with the good Dr. Dan yesterday afternoon, overdressing as it turned out for the 55-degree spring temps. The man is on fire after losing 15 pounds over the fall, so it was a hammer-fest the entire ride.

Riding in January is a bit insane — the drivers aren’t used to seeing cyclists on the road so one has to be extra, extra careful not to be taken out by a roaring pickup truck driven by a hungover nailbanger pissed off that someone has the time and wherewithal to get on a $4,000 bike wearing day-glo spandex. But, as the Scandavians say, "There is no bad weather, just bad clothing.’ Dress right, put up with the snot production that comes with rolling along at 20 mph in the winter air, and as they say, the "Tour de France is won in January."

More in later post on the cycling goals of 2006. 

Cape Cod Blogs

Walter Brooks, a Cape Cod publisher, evidently technorati’d my "Dangling Man post" and sent this email:

"I ran into you (I hope it was thee) today reading

 
…all ending with a sad and final thud as I drove out of Manhattan to Cape Cod with a car filled with mementos and my Herman Miller Aeron chair, a totem of the dot.bomb if there ever was one.
 
at http://www.churbuck.com/wordpress/. Do you have a Cape Connection? Am I addressing the correct writer? What is the real meaning of existence… forget the last.
 
If you do ever have thought about our sand spit held together by package stores" please past them along and I’ll feature that post on http://CapeCodTODAY.com.
 
All the best….
 
Walter Brooks, Editor & Publisher, 
900 Rt 134, South Dennis, MA 02660  ( 

Network; http://BestReadGuide.com"

Funny – I hadn’t seen any local blog of blogs before. The concept of regional blogging seems strongest with Jonathan Weber’s community publishing experiment in the west. Good concept whereever it lands.

Pack it up, pack it in, let me begin …

Getting one’s act together for a big move is an utter drag. Long lists of stuff to get done before flying to Raleigh and all of it tedious. Ranging from a screw to replace the paper clip holding my reading glasses together, to taking my bike to the shop to get it broken down and boxed for a UPS ride to North Carolina (I care more about the bike than anything else, truth be told, and don’t want to buy a new "unobtanium" down there, having just dropped big coin to build up the Viktor Rapinski LeMond).

Total sadness on leaving family. Daphne and Fisher are off to China at the end of the month to celebrate Chinese New Year and Fisher’s birthday with Aunt Dede. Me, I’ll stay in Raleigh and poke around for an apartment and some semblance of a lifestyle outside of the office.

Using rent.com to find an apartment is hopeless. I’ll just drive around the region and see what looks good and then go from there. In the interim, I’ll be living in some sucky extended-stay suite deal in Cary and driving a micro rental car. Feel sorry for me. I feel sorry for myself. 

The Reading List – 1.14.06

Search Engine Marketing Inc. Bill Hunt & Mike Moran, IBM Press.

Recommended by Mark Cordover at IT.com. Hunt is the man in SEM/SEO. Working my way through it like homework, so it isn’t a fun read, but it delivers the goods.

Autumn of the Moguls, Michael Wolff

This falls into the category of "why do I bother?" Total gossip, snark, and mastubatory inside-baseball about the media morons of the late 90s. Reading Wolff’s description of glomming onto uber-flak Pam Alexander at a TED conference to try to suck up to Rupert Murdoch made me wince, and then wince some more. If anything, this piece of drivel makes me happy, once again, to be off the media bus.

 

Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang, Jon Holliday

So far (I’m 200 pages into this opus), the authors’ seem to be grinding an axe that is hard to dodge. I like my history served straight up, and this one has an agenda. I’d recommend a pass, but will probably forge onto the end.

 

 

Blue Ocean Strategy: W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne

Deepak Advani, CMO of Lenovo and my new boss, recommended this. Good book — comes down to how to open new markets rather than engage in a caged death match with the competition in a fight for the bottom. Best analogy is how Cirque d’Soleil beat the stuffing out of Barnum & Bailey in the Circus market by doing away with three rings, animal acts, and introducing some plot lines into the traditional circus chaos. News note is that Barnum recently reacted and did away with the three-ring format, recognizing that people didn’t want sensory overload in their entertainment.


 

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