This is Esme on the beach. 2/26
Month: February 2006
The Biggest Skiff Race Ever – July 30
The Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club is the oldest junior yacht club in the United States. Formed in 1906, it’s bylaws restrict voting membership to unmarried young people under the age of 21. It is also the heart and soul of summer life in the village of Cotuit and played a very important role in my life through the years.
2006 is the centennial of the CMYC’s formation and to mark the occasion an all-hands effort is being waged to get as many of the club’s fleet on the water for a massive race on July 30.
The invitation came in the mail last week and was not addressed to me, but to my boat, the Chugworm, number 19, built in the late 1940s by my grandfather, Henry Chatfield Churbuck.
I have a page about the Cotuit Skiff — or “Mosquito” — as the design was once called, elsewhere on Churbuck.com. It is allegedly one of the oldest one-design racing boats continiuously raced in America. A strange hybrid that has the rig of a Cape Cod catboat — mast stepped in the prow, gaff-rigged sail, no jib — but the flat-bottomed hull of a classic clamming skiff.
They are terrifying boats to sail in a breeze, but beautiful to behold when a fleet of them comes running down the Narrows on a Sunday afternoon in August.
The fleet has undergone a wonderful renaissance in the past twenty years, reborn thanks to modern materials and the love of their classic lines by owners devoted, at any expense, to saving their boats from the indignities of the barn to sail again. My famly has two, both built by my grandfather in the boat shop attached to my house here in Cotuit, so there is no question we will be out there sailing next summer.
I’m sure there will be photos and I will be sure to blog about it.
There is nothing in the world like a Fresh Thinkpad
I took advantage of the fantastic employee purchase program and ordered two Thinkpads for the Churbuck students — both are getting Z60Ms. The boxes arrived today and are being installed in between conference calls and work stuff.
Nice machine — widescreens.
I don’t get Frappr
When people get going on the word “mash-up” they generally point at the things being done to Google Maps by services that use the Google APIs to map everything from crime statistics to apartment classifieds.
I’ve used some great, and useful Google mash-ups. My favorite is the GMap Pedometer which I use to build bicycle route maps for sharing with other riders.
But along comes Frappr — basically an attempt to build some community around the maps, adding physical presence to the notion of social networking. Roadbikereview — a vBulletin based forum favored by cyclists — has a Frappr group. I put myself on there a couple months ago and have never been back.
Yesterday, Rage Boy, aka Chris Locke, sent a Frappr initiated invitation, finding my Roadbikereview handle — Cape Cod Dave — and asking me to join his network. I did, I now see Chris and his buddies, but in the end I’ve gotta ask the question:
Why do I care about where, on a map, other people are?Â
There’s no payday. Sure, we can babble about Web 3.0 and the airy-fairy notion of presence-enabled web, but I don’t want to have a GPS implanted in my head so people can see “where’s Waldo” as I move around the globe.
I think physical presence information is highly overrated. If I’m in Taiwan I’ll let you know so you can schedule the conference call. Or I’ll share my calendar — if the world ever gets calendar sharing fixed — but will I ever use Frappr to confirm that you are in Timbuktu?
I dunno.
WSJ merges print and online in reorg
Very interesting memo at Poynter from Gordon Crovitz explaining the reorganization of print and online under one roof. The WSJ was one of, if not, the first news operation to co-locate print and online, so this seems to be more managerial and sales side than any big revelation.
The headline should be that online is delivering a $30 million profit.
I was at Forbes.com’s new offices yesterday — my first return since departing in the summer of 2000. Harley in the hallway, TV studios — an amazing departure from the days of running the joint out of a second floor dump where laptops disappeared, toilets overflowed, and the staff held mouse trapping contests.
Online is now king and the publications who are sprinting are the ones that let their online groups fly under seperate management and P&Ls. Forbes appears very happy with their position in the universe now — free, open, and with massively large numbers, far more than their print competitors at BusinessWeek and Fortune.
Wireless WAN – should I buy this?
I need always-on WAN connectivity and Sprint is giving away the cards if I take the plan.
I dunno – Verizon or Sprint?
Time to get smarter about “Laszlo”
IBM Leads “Open AJAX” Coalition of Web 2.0 Vendors @ SYS-CON AUSTRALIA
Spent the day with some smart developers today and got piqued by their discussion of Laszlo. What it is, how it does it …. I need to do some homework.
Judah, in the comments, points out an excellent FAQ written by CIO’s Chris Lindquist.
Guy Kawasaki: How to Suck Up to a Blogger
Let the Good Times Roll–by Guy Kawasaki: How to Suck Up to a Blogger
Guy’s ten-lists are a hit. This one is pretty funny but very instructive to any would-be “community” marketing effort.
TechCrunch » Foldera: Never organize your inbox again
TechCrunch » Foldera: Never organize your inbox again
TechCrunch picks up on Foldera. Comments are skeptical — it’s a try it and see it type of product, still waiting on my beta account to come through though.