Seth’s Blog: Flipping the Funnel–new ebook
This Godin e-book was quite useful to me this afternoon as I built a presentation on “community marketing.” I haven’t had time to view the Scoble video on the same topic — reversing the marketing “funnel” of awareness, consideration, comparison, and buying — into turning your customers into your megaphone.
I’m not down with the video thing. Webinars, etc. Too serial. I can read faster than I can watch.
This is prime clamming season. Water is cold and I can hit the spots that get closed by the Barnstable Department of Natural Resources on May 1 when the bird poop will make the clams a bit of an intestinal crap shoot. Call it the Townie’s Perogative, but he who gets on the water early, gets the clams. I try to pick the inshore flats clean before the tourists raze them in the warmer weather.
Last spring I took stock of my tired, rusty clamming equipment and decided to borrow my step-father’s stainless rake. What a revelation! Nice rake, cut through the mud nicely. So I went in search of a similar one, ran a Google search on Cape Cod Clam Rakes and found R.A. Ribb in Harwich. I called Ribb and they had an 11-tooth, stainless rec rake with a 6` ash handle. Off I went, down Route 6 to exit 11, banged a left and took the second right. At the end of the cul de sac was a quaint old Cape house with a weathered sign that read “Ribb.”
In the shed behind the house was a machine shop filled with huge metal working machinery. Inside the door was my rake. A quick credit card transaction for $87 later, and I was going home with a sweet implement of clam death.
This is a fine tool. I blast the tines with some WD-40 to keep them from rusting off. It made my old clam basket look positively ghetto, so off I went to Sandwich Ship Supply for a new one, a couple nice shucking knives and the annual copy of Eldridge’s Tide Tables.
Five more pages transcribed.
This popped up on my Treo last week while I was waiting for a plane and idling away the time with Google mobile.
““The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” –
— Hunter S. Thompson
I wish I could write a sentence like that.
“Children: You have asked me to jot down the principal incidents of my somewhat varied life, and something in the nature of a history of my ancestors. I am afraid it will be anything but satisfactory, either to you or myself. Most of it must be from memory – some, even, tradition – and with my limited school education, both spelling and grammatical construction faulty.”
To while away my idle evenings in Raleigh I’m going to tackle a project that has been nagging me for a few years and post it here on Churbuck.com in html, .doc, and pdf formats.
My great-great-grandfather, Thomas Chatfield, ran away from his Hudson Valley home in the 1830s to seek his fortunes on the seas. He became captain of the Nantucket whaler, Massachusetts at the age of 20, participated in the California Gold Rush, whaled in the Arctic, New Zealand, and Sea of Okhtosk, and was an officer in the Union Navy’s Gulf Squadron, maurading the Gulf coast of Florida from Key West to Tampa. He retired to Cotuit, captained a coastal schooner, operated a sail loft (now my bedroom closet), founded the Cotuit Masonic lodge (in my bedroom closet/sail loft), and was, by all accounts a decent and exemplary man.
A novel based loosely on his life, The Cut of Her Jib, was written by my distant relative Clara Nickerson Boden and published in 1954. A series of boy’s novels, The Skipper of the Cynthia B, were written by my distant relative Charles Pendexter Durrell and published in the 1920s. Again, the main character, Captain Seth Nickerson, was loosely based on Captain Chatfield. He had a big impact on all who knew him, and continues to cast a big shadow through the family tree on my cousins and myself. My home is essentially a museum of his life.
His friend, A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard, lived next door in Cotuit, and urged the captain to pen his reminiscences. The result was a 200 page typescript that has been handed around the Chatfield clan. My father had a dozen copies xeroxed and bound, but I think it’s time to get the manuscript into a digital format for easier sharing throughout the family. This was written for his four daughters, and thus not as salty as one would expect the true story would be. Another chronicle of his life are his letters to his wife, Susannah Nye, written during the Civil War and compiled by the Cotuit minister in the 1970s.
So, not wanting to slice up my one copy of the Reminiscences so I can run it through an OCR scanner, I thought I’d rekey it and post it here, seeking out supporting material such as navigational charts, illustrations, and his original ship’s logs which are now held by the Kendall Whaling Museum in Sharon, Massachusetts. I’ll post the first few pages now and keep updating as I go along. Comments are appreciated.
Eventually I may scan the pages so I can get an accurate picture of the manuscript which has some hand drawings of anchorages, battles, and other marginalia, but for now I’ll transcribe a few pages every night and post them in a sub-page here. I will try to scan some photos of the Captain and try to enrich the text. I am not going to clean up the manuscripts misspellings or punctuation errors, nor will I flag those with sics and footnotes.
Interestingly enough, these Reminscences have an ASIN number (B0008CRZNU) and the title is already listed at Amazon! Having never been published, I suppose the copy on the shelves of the Cotuit Library which has its catalogue on the Cape’s interlibrary load system led to its being catalogued. Anyway, Amazon lists it, but you can’t buy it.
Okay, okay, you know I hosed my blog on Sunday when I did the foolish and upgraded this thing from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0.1. The sites been down for three days and your emails have been telling me to pull the plug and move on.
Aha, an email to my friendly sysop and I am back. Back, I tell you.
I don’t know what he did, how he did it, or where he found the time to do it, but let me say most strongly, there is no ISP like Cape.com. I’ve been with these guys since the late 90s and their customer service and technical support are unparalleled. Had I been hosting elsewhere I think I would have given up long, long ago.
William and his partner at Cape.com, Vern Grabel, run an outstanding local ISP, one that powers a lot of Cape Cod businesses and organizations from the Cotuit Kettleers to the Barnstable Patriot. They are smart, know what they are doing, and in my case, saved me from myself in a very big way.
Thanks to Om Malik at gigaom.com and Chris Murray, CTO of CXO Inc.for keeping me from inflicting further injury on myself.
WordPress 2.0 upgrade has boned me.
Scary. I don’t have the stomach for upgrades, and after making the 2.0 upgrade I lost the blog for a while. Eventually getting into the admin console, but unable to view the site. Uh oh. Trying this post to see if that forces it back