Month: June 2006

Hank’s Big Bass

It’s high season for the striped bass (I like how the old timers pronounce it “stripe-ed”) on Cape Cod, so at a Friday night family cookout the cellphone call came from a buddy fishing at a UDL (undisclosed location) with the news that he had just landed a large fish and there were more where that one came from. After making social with the wives and kids, the men-folk went into stealth preparation mode, everyone running to garages to dust off fishing rods and dig out rusty lures.

My brother Henry, besieged father of a 10-month old who has the bewildered look of a man who wonders if diaper pails last forever, wanted to go, but needed to check for permission first. I swung into big brother duty and asked for him, secured the yard pass, and off we went, bouncing down a dirt road in a truck loaded with rods, beer and eels.

Henry was under-equipped, had ancient line on his reel, but made his way out into the darkness and out onto the end a stone jetty. The rest of us hung back at the truck, drinking beer and rigging up, telling fish stories and admiring our buddy’s first fish, the one which drew us there in the first place. It was a perfect night, lights winking on the horizon of Nantucket Sound, just enough wind to keep the no-see’ums away.

“Yee-haw!”

We stopped talking and looked out towards Henry. Another “yee-haw”. Then another.

I walked down to the waterside with my youngest son.

“Look at the size of this fish. I think it’s the biggest I’ve ever caught.”

Henry was bent over the fish on the beach beside the jetty. He had indeed caught himself a nice bass.

There was much posing for the camera and fish for the family dinner.

Proactive tech support – further thinking …

Technical support has always been an oxymoron for most owners and users of anything electronic. The dreaded process of dialing an 800 number, navigating the voice prompts, and then being told there is a 45 minute wait before a person can help you has made tech support a universally deplored experience. The oxymoron part is the doomed belief that there will be no support at the end of the whole tedious affair. As someone who has been tangentially involved with the tech industries since 1984, and who has spent his fair share of time on hold, I can empathize with anyone who rants off on a blog about how vendor X’s products suck.

When my microwave died last month, there was no inclination on my part or my wife’s to dredge out the documentation and call Sharp’s 800-number. There was no way the machine was going to get fixed through the kitchen version of CTRL-ALT-DEL, one is not encouraged to pop the screws and start messing with jumpers, and the price point is low enough that in our minds, after a few years of hard use, its failure was marked down to old age and the cost of living.

But when a notebook or desktop computer dies, the stakes are incalculable for the profound reason that these things are our lives. Deadlines live in these things, works of immeasurable creative genius, MP3 collections stolen over years of Napster downloading; it all lives in these things. If the machine dies, that stuff dies with it, and I don’t care how obsessive you are, no one backs their stuff up enough. Continue reading “Proactive tech support – further thinking …”

Rat update …

The Weekend of the Rat Continues … Day Two update
First, I am not a gun owner in the firearm sense of the word, but I do have a brother who is a former Green Beret who is an avid gun owner and was more than well equipped to help me with the rat in the rose bushes. While a .50 caliber Barrett Sniper rifle is uncalled for, this Walther Nighthawk, gas powered pellet pistol with “red-dot” scope is proving to be quite the anti-rat weapon of destruction.

I was at the window overlooking the rodent hang-out this morning, doing some email and drinking coffee when the brown monster emerged from its den and went for a piece of sweaty provolone. I slowly picked up the Walther, thumbed off the safety, turned on the scope, got the red on Willard’s back, and BANG, hit it, made it squeal most rat-like, and then it fled through the flower beds, me trying to smack it with a second shop. So, there is now a wounded rat somewhere on the premises. Given its morning activity levels, I am going for it in a big way tomorrow.

My wife has moved into a deranged Annie Oakley mode where she’s talking in a West Virginian accent (she lived there for two years when she was a toddler) and plinking tin cans in the garden with my vast arsenal of pellet guns.

Day One …

Rat reappeared during morning coffee. I went into sniper mode but had to drive junior to work, leaving my wife to play Annie Oakley. I come home. She’s “hit it” but it ran away. Now we’re at DEFCON 1 and waiting …. I need to take the morning off to get a “bone scan” — radioactive dye, etc. to see where the fractures are in my neck. Then to the bike shop to get an accounting of the cash I’ve squandered on my cycling habit so I can get a new set of wheels. So endeth the Cotuit-phase with a return to RTP next week. Rat must be exterminated before then.

On BillG’s “retirement …”

I’ve had the pleasure to interviw Bill Gates a few times, usually under very controlled circumstances, under the watchful eye of a Waggener-Edstrom flak, interviewing him for PC Week a lot in the mid-80s, and then a few times, under much more controlled circumstances, when I was Forbes.

We aren’t buddies, I used to have his phone number, I never called it. I haven’t sat down and had the pleasure of a talk with him since an PC Forum in the early 90s in Palm Springs or something, when the PC business was boring as can be and there wasn’t much to talk about except “client server” and CD-ROM publishing.

When I was at Forbes, there was different interest in Gates than there was at PC Week, where we obsessed about NETBEUI and SNA and kernel architectures. Forbes is the magazine of wealth — Malcolm Forbes staked out that turf with the Forbes Rich List — the annual ranking of the 400 richest Americans that has sprawled over the years to include everything including the richest Chinese. There was never a big Gates obsession at Forbes. It was somewhat predictable that the top slots on the list would be owned and retained forever by him, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer, with Sam Walton and Warren Buffett moving up and down a few notches every year. But Gates was so far in front that there wasn’t anything new to say year to year. He wasn’t an aggregator of assets — you couldn’t watch with fascination his machinations like a Buffet or say Marvin Davis — people who kicked tires and did deals. Nope, Bill was sort of boring with his wealth. He made an immense stack of dough by winning big once, consolidated it, didn’t blow it early, and most importantly — and this is where I’m burying the lead of this post — he stayed engaged.

Think about it. I used to be on the general assignment desk at a little city newspaper and whenever someone one the lottery I’d get sent out to interview them, take their picture, and ask them: “What are you going to do with the money?”

No one, to my dismay, said anything remotely along the lines of: “I’m going to Vegas, gonna hire three showgirls, hunker down with a case of Johnny Walker Red, a bag of scag, and a Tibetan masseuse …” Nope. Each and everyone said they were going to buy a Winnebago, a home for their mom, and a new microwave.

And keep working.

There, that’s it. No one wants to stop working. You can be Scrooge McDuck/Bill Gates loaded, and still you’re going to want to work. Why? Isn’t the fantasy to do the hammock thing on Tahiti? Hit the snooze button forever and call it quits?
Bill Ziff once gave me a great quote in a story I wrote about his retirement: “Business saved me from a life of abstraction.”

So Gates decides to stop the day to day, focus on the foundation, and do what he pretty much is best at: which is put a face on Microsoft. For the past twenty years I’ve been pissed off at the demonizing of the man — he’s a decent person, smartest guy in the room, fierce competitor — but the Idi Amin treatment he got from the Slashdot ilk and his competitors was always way, way off-base. Windows may suck, Microsoft may have stepped over the boundaries, but Gates as a man, well, let’s just say he doesn’t have horns growing out of the top of his head.
Look at the accomplishments: he provided a de facto standard to an industry marked by incompatibility. That standard drove prices down to the point where PCs are truly accessible by nearly any one who wants one. He then took a ton of the profits and focused it on distributing medication through Africa. Not a bad life.

The Rat in the Rose Bushes

Ah, the joys of working from home. One gets to hear one’s wife announce: “There is a rat in the rose garden.”

Yep. Big one too. Strolling around without a care in the world. So it is time to dust off the old pellet gun or encourage the two terriers to earn their keep. I don’t want to trap, because we’ve got a thriving population of chipmunks, and they don’t elicit the same reactions of disgust that Mister Rat does.

I’d pay good money to watch a Skye Terrier’s base instincts kick in, but alas, I’m afraid mine is solidly a couch potato. These things were bred to hunt down Scottish varmints along the rocky shores of the Isle of Skye. Basically big, hairy torpedoes that are dachsunds covered with hair.

The other terrier? It wears clothing for crying out loud. This is not the face of a rat killer.

I love this caption, found elsewhere, of a picture of a Yorkshire Terrier staring at a cute little hamster: “Zoe the terrier’s unforeseen ratting instincts resulted in the loss of Rocky the Siberian Hamster. A year later, and after much careful introduction, Zoe is friends with Couscous and several other hedgehogs.”
I need something that does this — the whole Dickensian – Hogarth, back-alleys of Olde London act.

Which leaves it up to me. John Wayne Churbuck and his trusty pellet gun.

Video blogging — on its way

I’ve been a DV geek for a year and want to mess around with some embedded video on Churbuck.com to trial here some efforts for Lenovo. The question is which WordPress plug-in to enable to make this happen, and whether or not to use Google Video or YouTube as the host — the way I use Flickr for image hosting — so I don’t utterly hose my ISP bills moving video torrents through Churbuck.com.

I need to do more research, but any quick and dirty display options would be appreciated. I have the camera, I know how to firewire the capture into Adobe Premiere, now I want to figure out how to rapidly post it.

Foldera to take the wraps off the beta next week

Collaborative Technologies Conference to Showcase Collaborative Technology Industry’s Latest Product and News Announcements

“Foldera will release the beta of its long-anticipated work organization and collaboration service for individuals, teams and businesses, which automatically organizes work in the context of key activities, and enables collaboration with others.”

Next week, at a CMP Collaboration Conference, Foldera opens the beta of its online collab tool. I am looking forward to the launch and think people are going to be pretty impressed. When CEO Richard Lusk walked me through an Alpha-demo in early April, I was stunned.

[ Full disclosure: I am on Foldera’s advisory board and hold shares and options in the company]

The Erg is here

So the ultimate exercise tool arrived yesterday, was assembled in five minutes, and immediately I could tell the Dreissegacker Brothers have made some major innovations in their rowing machines. Not only is it quieter, but the performance monitor is a big, big improvement, including a USB cable and a CD so I can drive a laptop with it, and in theory, via my Lenovo X60s WAN antenna, race virtually against other indoor rowers.

It comes with a smart card so I can save workout records, displays a force curve, and does all sorts of geeky things that only a sweaty geek can appreciate. I did a mere 15 minutes this morning, low and slow, and will work up over time to my usual 60 minute slug-fest while listening to thrash music.

How to broaden one’s blog spam

Just post some Chinese characters from a China blog in a quoted post, and bang, up fills the spam queue with more Chinese character spam. There are interesting waves to blog spam. Last week it was mobile phone offers (if someone decides to kill of affiliate web marketing programs, then blog spammers lose all economic incentive to get click throughs. If someone captured one of these fine spammer and slowly sliced them from the soles of their feet upwards with a deli meatslicer set on the thinnest setting, one slice per night, on national television …. I’d watch.