Month: May 2006

Calling all Bluetooth geeks

I transferred my life onto a new Lenovo X60s — the ultraportable in the same form factor as my old X41 — but with dual core processors and better built in wireless. The thing is fast, as Hunter S. Thompson wrote about electric windows in the convertible he trashed in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the machine jumps like a frog in an electrified pond. We’re talking fast. Hyperspace fast. Stars getting blurry fast.
I’ll rant about system migration in another post. Forget about crossover cables, backups, etc.. So much customization is lost in a migration that I’ve come to dread the process and the weeks of noodling and fiddling that must ensue to relog into all my web services, download extensions, etc. etc. Now I’ve managed to get Verizon’s EVDO console to throw an error message every time I surf to a new web page…..

So, having contradicted myself in my earlier post this year about my hatred for luggage with wheels and losers who use wireless headsets and appear to be talking to themselves like the prescription to Clonapin ran out last week … I bought a wireless bluetooth headset made by Motorola after getting a citation at the toolbooths leading to Manhattan’s FDR drive for driving while talking on a cell phone.

It’s an okay headset. Volume is funky, buttons are too big for my sausage fingers, but here where the potential comes in — because the X60 has both Bluetooth and EVDO and Wi-Fi, I figured I download Skype and pair the headset to the X60. Smart right? Wrong. The laptop won’t discover the headset. Woe is me. I need to go hunt down the engineering guys, waste an hour googling “Pairing Motorola Bluetooth X560, and keep at it until the thing works. When it does, I will post the solution as I have buddies in the same boat. Pointers on how to solve the issue would be appreciated, but I will not go buy a Bluetooth dongle, but I will contemplate reinstalling the Bluetooth stack to one more friendly to my headset.

My intention is to fire all phone companies by September.

Second Life = Get-A-Life

I’m trying, really trying to buy into the whole Second Life phenom, but two visits and I won’t be going back. Aside from the lag factor — doubtlessly due to my PC and my internet connection — I don’t get a ton of enjoyment walking aimlessly around a Myst-like landscape, altering the length of my nose, building 3-d cones, and chatting via the keyboard with other inhabitants who seem to spend most of their time worrying about their appearance and IMing each other.

I’ll give it another try, but I like my community in words, not pictures. Clicking on the fine print and seeing that Linden Labs was serious about policing the use of illegal trademarks, and the ranks of politically correct recycling bins to throw away my trash made the whole experience feel like some weird Big Brother Space. Cyberspace is too clean. I want dysfunction. Dirt in the corners. Spiderwebs on the ceiling.

I am too old for this stuff and my time is too valuable to hang out in the metaverse building “prims” and figuring out how to make money and build my virtual pad. If sex was involved — and you know someone is going to build OrgyLand — then a business model will emerge.
Flying was kind of cool for a few seconds. Seeing other get-a-lifers cruising through the sky was very weird too. It all cries out for a BFG, rocket launcher, and Duke Nukem dialogue.

I had to erase my 12-year old son’s copy of World of Warcraft. Six months and the kid was getting haunted by the game, putting hours into it at a time. It’s sad to see someone get sucked into an online experience — it’s happened to me — and realize, as the man said, “If you plant ice, you’re gonna harvest wind.”

Lenovo x60s EVDO is awesome

Blogging on the taxiway at Philadelphia on my way to Raleigh this morning. Completely excellent experience not being dependent on the local wi-fi bandits for airport connectivity. Coverage is excellent — I picked up the EVDO signal in Cotuit this morning — and the price, if one takes the $70 per month flat fee all-you-can-eat plan, is easily amortized against airport wi-fi charges at $7 each. Hats off to Verizon for being so aggressive in EVDO. This is going to shake up T-Mobile’s wi-fi franchise.

Downside is battery life suffers. I need to upgrade to an eight-cell LI-ION to get more usage out of the system. Down to minutes now and watching the power meter like the gas gauge on a Hummer.

Digital Influence Mapping Project: Co-Creation & Customer Made

Digital Influence Mapping Project: Co-Creation & Customer Made

John Bell at Ogilvy PR on the concept of co-creation. Provocative concept.

Captain Thomas Chatfield


Captain Thomas Chatfield

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

At home in Cotuit, here is the man in all his glory. According to the handwritten note on the back of the picture, this was taken in 1910, twelve years before his death.

I’ve scanned and uploaded a good number of photos into my Flickr account. Now the project moves onto the second phase of correcting the scanned war letters. When that is done I will need to decide how to treat the letters vis a vis the Reminiscences and whether to annotate the narrative with the details found in the epistolary account, or keep them separate and standalone.

Then I’ll move everything to Blurb, mock up the book itself, import the high res scans and finish the facsimile portion of the project before moving onto the primary research with the ship’s logs to determine the path of his voyages. That research will lead me to a Google Map tour, more contextual research (I want to learn more about the Gold Rush and Civil War is particular, having studied the whale fishery extensively in college.)

Then, when all the contextual research is finished, time to think about the book and getting it published. This is a very rewarding project personally and the antidote to a career obsessed with internet marketing.

There is a “Chatfield” photo set on my Flickr account to be found here.

The War Letters of Captain Thomas Chatfield

I just scanned the letters by Captain Thomas Chatfield, written between 1863 and 1865 while he was stationed on the Gulf coast of Florida as an Acting Master in the U.S. Navy. Most of these letters were written to his wife, Florentine (Handy) and some to his daughter Mildred (Millie).

The PDF is 6 megabytes is size. And can be downloaded here. 

I need to clean up the RTF file and convert the file into live text. I take back what I said about the scanner earlier, I just saved myself three months of work!

Connecting the Dots: Web 2.0: Connecting people to dots

Connecting the Dots: Web 2.0: Connecting people to dots

I discovered Steve Borsch’s blog via Foldera’s news paper this morning. Seems smart and genuinely engaged with the online collaboration space. Into the blogroll he goes.

Thomas Chatfield – At the Start of the Civil War




Thomas Chatfield

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

This photo was probably shot in New York City or Brooklyn shortly before Chatfield was ordered to the USS Somerset as acting master.

He would have been 31 years-old at the time of this photo, recently returned from San Francisco and his first successful voyage as captain of the whaler “Massachusetts” his fourth Pacific whaling voyage in all aboard that ship.

OCR still sucks

I bought a Canon 8400F to scan some photos for the Chatfield project and to attempt to accelerate the transcription of his Civil War letters. The photos are fine. No big deal there. A scanner is a scanner and I use the “import” function through Photoshop to grab the pictures, crop, save as .psd and .jpg.

Getting the thing to recognize simple typescript is another matter altogether. While I think it is faster than a 100 wpm transcription exercise, the typescript is so messy due to strikeouts and the preservation of Chatfield’s bad spelling that I spend a good five or ten minutes per page cleaning things up in an interface that isn’t too intuitive to play with. I’m using Omnipage SE Ver. 2.