Allegedly used by Air Force — pilots are supposed to be able to handle it for two minutes. My best is 12 seconds.
thanks to June for advising me the old link was broken and thoughtfully providing me with one that works – 22.03.25
Month: March 2006
And yet more Captain Chatfield
In this episode, things really get going, in a Moby Dick kind of way, and the Captain gets stove in by a whale. Arr matey. And goes home to win his first command at the age of 25. Sheesh, at 25 I was covering car wrecks at a daily newspaper and making $113 a week, not trying to outswim angry whales.
Conference Season and Incest
Tis conference season — PC Forum, eTech, Demo, etc. etc. — the sort of thing I was forced to attend when I was a tech reporter in the early 90s, now a dim memory of getting harangued by flacks, begging for interviews with the high and mighty, and suffering through interminable presentations. Now I avoid these affairs but wonder, after reading vicariously on the blogs, what it would be like to be a professional tech conference attendee? To do nothing but fly around and hang out in warm places (inside of course), listening to the brilliant prognosticate while chattering away on the IRC backchannel with the rest of the snarky people. Does anything actually get accomplished at these $4000 a head affairs other than business card exchange?
It seems like a closed loop — the way it was in the 80s when PC conferences were actually cool. Now it is Web 2.0 conferences where those hoping to get run over by the Google/Yahoo/Fox/etc. money truck make their debut with some ajaxy social networking thingy that no one will ever use, where the A-list (the modern Digerati) all blog and crosslink, and then pick fights with each other afterwards.
I think I will stick to clamming strategy and my own circle of friends. I rather read Jim Forbes bitch about hailstorms in his garden than some unnamed pedantic blogger moan about how Dave Winer is threatening to stop blogging, or how Ben Metcalfe got b$%^-slapped by Mena Trott, etc. etc. etc.
There’s more to life than bloglines, technorati, and wordpress.
Lunch
Coprolite is the word that comes to mind.
Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?
A colleague loaned me his autographed edition of Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.’s Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance, and in the course of a five-hour flight from Raleigh to Cinncinati to Providence, I plowed through it, testament perhaps to my speed reading prowess or perhaps to the less-filling-tastes-great density of the story of IBM’s dramatic turnaround under Gerstner from 1993 to 2002.
- IBM lost $8.1 billion the year Gerstner took over the helm from John Akers. It made a profit of $8.1 billion in 2000.
- The stock price was $12.72 on 3/31/93. It was $120.76 when Gerstner retired.
Any questions? Good. First, let me first praise Gerstner for writing the book himself. No ghost in the wings and the writing is actually precent decent. Sure, there’s an element of messiah-walking-on-water, but give the man his due; a non-technologist walking into an epic mess, he did one thing and he did it well: he executed a plan, using Chrysler’s ex-CFO Jerome York to attack the expense-side of the business while he developed the transition out of hardware and software into services. His management incentive plan gave the executive team some skin the game — and while Gerstner doubtlessly and deservedly enriched himself in the process — the turnaround reads like a page from the McKinsey playbook, where Gerstner was the hot star in the 60s and 70s, making partner at one of the youngest ages in the firm’s history.
I would recommend Douglas Garr’s IBM Redux for a better, more objective account of the turnaround, and for some better and nastier anecdotes about the dysfunction that was in place when Gerstner arrived. Who Says Elephant’s Can’t Dance is actually pretty good with the leadership econiums:
“Passion. As a student going through Harvard Business School, I would never have guessed that passion would be the single most important element of personal leadership. I don’t recall the word ever being spoken during my classroom time at Harvard.”
While you could print that on a poster with a picture of a high jumper, the reality is that in technology especially, it’s the passionate leaders that lead the dynamic companies. Ballmer, Jobs, Ellison, McNealy — these aren’t dry corporate-speak drones, and Gerstner points out, with some awe, the degree to which the technology business is insanely cut-throat in its ad hominen attacks, religious wars over formats and standards, and chaotic in its pace of innovation and decline. That he was able to walk into an organization beset with acronyms and legacy systems, investing billions in things like SNA and OS/2, and turn it around is, in the end, the most amazing turnaround story ever told.
Stalking the wily clam
Days don’t get any better than yesterday. Spring came in on a southwesterly breeze, so I opened the morning with a beach walk with Daphne and the dogs, followed it with a fast 90-minute bike ride to Sandy Neck, then started the ritual of re-commissioning the Tashmoo for another season of clamming, fishing, and expeditions to Dead Neck.
The battery was dead, victim of a defective bilge pump, and the tool “borrowers” had made off with the trickle charger, so off to the hardware store for a new charger, which, upon return, was too smart for its own good and would not permit its “microprocessor logic!” to bring the battery back to life. I took Fisher to his last YMCA basketball game, calling the mechanically inclined Cousin Pete on his cell phone to see if he could sort out the charger while I was rooting in the stands.
Returning 90 minutes later, Pete had sorted out the charger and there were electrical signs of life, enough so that we pulled oun our waders, collected the clam rakes, licenses, baskets and buckets, and made ready to launch and be off to the clam flats.
Once in the water, we dropped the engine, gave it a crank and … nothing. There wasn’t nearly enough charge to get the engine alive after three cold months of inactivity. Pete took the car to the house, grabbed some jumper cables, and in a move out of the handbook of stupid things not to do in saltwater, we got the nose of the car close enough to the boat battery to get the jumper cables on and crank the Honda four-stroke back to life.
That was a very good sign and optimism filled the hearts of the clamming crew. Pete reparked the car, my son Eliot climbed aboard — yelling at us because he insisted of listening to iPod for the rest of the afternoon and instantly turned into our version of Forrest Gump, unresponsive to all questions, louder than a deaf codger for anything he cared to share — and we pushed off from the beach with an oar, lowering the idling engine until we were ready to click into gear and head out to the head of the harbor.
Bad move. The boat always stalls out the first time it goes into gear, and this time it stalled again. Now we were fifty feet away from the beach and the engine hadn’t been running enough to get another crank’s worth of charge into the battery. I tried, we crossed our fingers, but alas, the boat needed to be paddled back to the boat ramp, the car un-parked and brought back down the water’s edge, and again we jump started. This time waiting ten minutes before getting back into gear.
This time it worked and we winged across the Bay at full throttled to the cove where the clams were. I ran us aground in the shallows and nearly lost the engine — an unacceptable outcome given there was not another start in the battery yet — but recovered nicely in time to jump aboard in my waders and push us back into the channel.
We unloaded and left the engine running at an idle, something I don’t like to do as idling outboards get overheated and foul the plugs, but the clams were calling and the day was waning into the late afternoon. Pete took his new Ribb jerk rake — a mini two-handle bullrake — and I dropped to my knees and started pawing through the cold mud for steamers while he worked the inlet for cherrystones and Eliot walked in circles, iPod distracted and ignoring my waves to come over and work the productive section of flat I had found.
I waded into the cove and raked some quahogs for stuffed quahogs and Clams Casino — doing pretty well but paying for the effort this morning with pulled muscles in my shoulders and back — while Eliot and Pete continued to fill the steamer bucket. Lost in the reveries of basking in the sun and the smell of the clam mud, watching a beautifully restored biplane fly low over us and waggle its wings when I saluted it with my rake, I remembered with a jolt that the outboard had been idling for an hour with no attention.
I returned to the flats, took a turn on the Jerk Rake (I didn’t like it so much, and prefer my basket-rake) and started packing up our gear for the return to the mooring and a post-clam beer.
When I waded out to the boat I didn’t hear anything — a normal enough condition given the silence of the Honda, but, to our horror, the engine was off, the ignition switch was on, and we got one crank, a quick start, then deadness.
We were hosed. There was no walking home for help. Only a long, long paddle back to the mainland in the approaching darkness.
Pete opened his cellphone and called his foreman, Greg, who had been out on the water earlier that afternoon. We were in luck, he was at his mooring only a half-mile away. Fortunately we had the jumper cables, so when Greg arrived we were able to give it a start. The engine wasn’t happy though. The gas left in the tank was a bit messy — water, over-winter varnish — and it wouldn’t come up to speed. So we rigged a bridle, transferred Pete and Eliot to Greg’s boat, and towed me ashore, the more ignomious of outcomes.
Oh well. Pete and I knew what would happen when we left the hard with a weak battery, but it was too good a day not to clam. As we drank the post-clam beer and watched the sun set pink behind the library, we had a good laugh at our knuckle-headedness, and agreed, had Greg not been afloat to come save us, it would have had a much worst outcome than it did.
Today the battery should have a full night’s worth of charging in it, I will buy new gas, and we’ll make a return to top off the clam baskets and get some more steamers for tonight’s clam fest of fried clams, Clams Casino, and Ultimate Stuffies. It’s another great spring day here in Cotuit, no thoughts of returning to Raleigh for the week are permitted to cloud my mood, all children are upstairs in the beds, and all, given a working boat, should be right with the world.
Hatred of Roller Luggage
Real men carry their own bags and the total takeover of AirWorld by dweebs towing their luggage behind them is now officially out of control. Overhead bins have been lost to them, every retard who steps out of the plane and into the jetway is begging for a solid kick when they stop, lean back, retract the spiffy telescoping handle, and roll on their way while I am hard charging to make my connection right on their heels.
Then it’s squeaky-squeaky-squeaky down the industrial carpeted concourse, briefcase and waterbottle laced through the retractable handle, falling off half the time, once again causing a pause to recover and begging for another boot of the old Bally in the butt. Again, real men use their hands, shoulders and backs; burn some calories, or pack their baggage like a Sherpa.
Then there are the Bluetoothed Borgs — sorry, unless you are driving in a state that forbids the use of a cell phone in a car, headsets do not make you look cool — people talking on headsets in public look like a maniac on the median of Park Avenue preaching at the big shiny skyscraper — talking to themselves about uncovered electric outlets and behaving like full-on candidates for an aluminum foil turban. Borgs and Wheelie People are usually one and the same.
Young Blogger
Noted author Jeffrey S. Young, author of iCon — the recent Jobs biography that resulted in all of publisher Wiley’s titles getting banned from the shelves in Apple’s stores — is blogging for ZD Net, a good thing because Young’s been a blogger for years but hasn’t known it. Dan Farber will find himself with a handful in Young — who I edited in the first days of Forbes.com — but if initial posts are any indication, Young will distinguish himself.
Formerly colleagues at PC Week — where his scoop on Job’s first Next machine (ask Jimmy Guterman about that escapade, traveling to England to find the black box clad in a down-vest to cover it from inquiring eyes) shook things up, and then at Forbes, where we collaborated on what should have been a cover story on the impact of broadband on rural backwaters inspired by the late Walter Wriston, and where he went on to write a compendium of the greatest technology stories for Forbes and Wiley under the Forbes “Great Stories of Business” imprint, Young has been a part of my professional life since the mid-80s.
He is also the screenwriter behind Flesh Gordon, an utterly bizarre soft-core porno he penned while at the UCLA film school.
Today he is encamped in Rescue, California, somewhere in Gold Country above Sacramento, setting his fields on fire and tending his vineyards with fellow PC Week alum, Jim Forbes, who need desperately to come up with a better title for his excellent blog than the generic “My Blog.”
Young’s current take on Cisco’s China play is pretty savage and to the point. While some may take exception to Young’s assertion, especially John Chambers, that Cisco is helping China build a Big Brother society through the deployment of IP-enabled security cameras just in time for the ’08 Beijing Summer Olympics, he displays some good reporting and blogger-esque editorializing. Into my Bloglines he goes.
Reuters’ Glocer- Old media must embrace the amateur
FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment – Old media must embrace the amateur
Tom Glocer op eds in the FT about the role of MSM in a citizen journalism world. Good points, now let’s see Reuters put it into action. Sample suggestions I would make are:
1. Make all content bloggable — no cost walls, no reg walls
2. Make photographs, charts, maps, and other graphics bloggable under fair use. No server side blocks.
3. Initiate del.icio.us tagging on all Reuter’s stories
4. Open a contribute function to permit citizen journalists to upload their contributions adjacent to the “professional content”