Month: July 2007

Captain Leonard Peck

Leonard Peck slipped the hawser Saturday morning, passing about the time the tide turned and began to ebb.

By coincidence I was at his shop buying some wire for a new gaff bridle from his son John, paying his granddaughters who were working the same register I worked in the 1970s when I was the clerk with Leonard’s other son Geoffrey, and I asked John how the Cap was faring, but the news was sad, and the prospects of a visit weren’t good. Today I learned he passed.

The Francis Minot
I will remember Leonard Peck as a literary man (a Harvard English major), with a Lincolnesque white beard, and a laconic way of speaking that belied a love for telling a good yarn. He was one of the last of a generation of Cotusions (his son John’s coinage) that made their living on and around the water, running Peck’s Boats forever, building Cotuit Skiffs, and his incongruous tugboat, the Francis Minot.

The Peck’s and Churbuck’s were close families. My grandfather gave Leonard his frame for building skiffs, the Peck’s rented this house one winter in the late 40s or early 50s when my grandparents moved off Cape. I sailed with his sons, Geoff and John, but only knew his eldest, the late Bill Peck, from afar. All three were named after Leonard’s favorite authors, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, and William Shakespeare.

Leonard took the Francis Minot on an epic voyage down the Mississippi and back up the east coast. He wrote a memoir about his life in Cotuit, For Golden Friends I Had, and last year, at the dinner commemorating the 100th annivesary of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club, delivered a masterful speech about the yacht club, and the fleet he helped build.

My condolences to his wife Betty, his sons, John and Geoff, and his grandchildren. This is Cotuit’s loss.

A new pair of oars

History – Shaw & Tenney – Orono, Maine

The five-foot basswood crap oars I’ve been nursing for five years are about three strokes from giving up the ghost and having invested several coats of Epiphanes varnish, Churbuck Yellow  on the blades, and tacked on leathers and buttons, I’ve decided enough is enough, no more lipstick on the pig, and for once it is time to get some real oars.

I looked at a pair at an antique shop on Martha’s Vineyard over the weekend, the lady quoted $125 for a so-so pair of six-footers, maybe 50 years old. I was tempted, but I was basically paying New York prices for something some hedge fund manager was going to turn into a piece of wall art. It was time to call Shaw & Tenney, makers of the best oars on the planet, and the third oldest marine manufacturer in the country.

I dropped $180 for a pair of six-foot spruce oars with a leathers/button kit I’ll sew on myself. These should, knock on wood, wind up in the hands of my grandchildren. I was tempted to get ash — the “ash” breeze is the old nickname for rowing — but ash is heavy and overkill for a set of dinghy oars.

This fall I think I’ll clamp a sculling notch on the transom of the dinghy and learn how to propel myself with one oar. Interestingly, Shaw & Tenney charges more money for a single sculling oar than they do for a pair of conventional ones.

Quint’s Boat

I went to Menemsha today for some excellent fried clams at  The Bite — and five pounds of harpooned swordfish from Larsen’s. On the Lobsterville beach inside the jetties was this huik, the wreck, allegedly, of the Orca, Quint’s boat in Jaws.

Kaushik’s book is out

Avinash Kaushilk, something of a hero to web analytics people, writing incisive stuff at Occam’s Razor has published Web Analytics: An Hour a Day and I returned home to find the package from Amazon, having pre-ordered it about six months ago.

Now to read it. Knowing Avinash, and appreciating the expertise he’s been sharing at his blog, it is sure to become a bible for the art.

Discovering their bodies …. this is personal

A 25-hour plane ride and 10.5 hour jet lag makes me goofy. Tonight, over a restorative burger and beer on the back deck, a friend said “… it’s summer. Their friends are all here. They’re discovering their bodies …”

In disbelief of the inane Marin County New-Age Psychobabble of that comment, and delirious with the lag de’avion, I blew a mouthful of burger onto the picnic table, and said “Discovering what?”
My cousin across the table jammed his hand down the front of his shorts and said, “Whoa. Look what I found.”

This went on for five minutes until I laughed so hard I think I tore an intercostal muscle between my ribs. But I digress.
Peter Kim at Forrester has named this one of the top client-side marketing blogs. Max Kalehoff notes the prevalence of personal in a list of professionals:

“Examining Pete’s initial list, I think it is important to note that many also are largely personal and passionate endeavors, as evidenced by the quasi-independent relation to their employers. In other words, these are not “official” company-sanctioned blogs; they live on completely different hosts and domains. Most are personal blogs and digital profiles likely to travel with these individuals regardless of their future relationship with their employer. This is a new phenomenon in business, where niche yet potent and personal brands are playing a bigger role in marketing. They’re benefiting the companies while changing the dynamics of employee-business relationships.”

It’s not that I wouldn’t have an official blog, but shit, could I say “shit” if I did? Or post a picture of my dog with a shaved ass? Or make fun of people who marvel that teenagers are discovering their bodies?
Or talk about clams? Blogging is fun for me, not blogging about marketing. This scratches the ol’ cacoethes scribendi and keeps the pencil sharp.

Here’s the list. Peter has good taste.

  1. Flooring The Consumer :: Technorati authority = 504. Authored by CB Whittemore, Director of In-Store Innovation, Wear-Dated Carpet Fiber.
  2. Marketing Nirvana :: 424. Mario Sundar, Community Evangelist, LinkedIn.
  3. ExperienceCurve :: 332. Karl Long, Web/Social Media Integration Manager, Nokia.
  4. The Marketing Excellence Blog :: 254. Eric Kintz, VP Marketing, Digital Photography & Entertainment, Hewlett-Packard.
  5. cgm :: 191. Pete Blackshaw, CMO, Nielsen Buzzmetrics.
  6. Decker Marketing :: 167. Sam Decker, VP Marketing, Bazaarvoice.
  7. Masiguy :: 162. Tim Jackson, Brand Manager, Masi Bicycles.
  8. AttentionMax :: 153. Max Kalehoff, VP Marketing, Nielsen Buzzmetrics.
  9. Churbuck.com :: 148. David Churbuck, VP Global Web Marketing, Lenovo.
  10. Emerson Process Experts :: 130. Jim Cahill, Marketing Communications Manager, Emerson Process Management.
  11. Bernaisesource :: 99. Dan Greenfield, VP Corporate Communications, Earthlink.
  12. John Dragoon’s Blog :: 29. John Dragoon, CMO, Novell.
  13. Randy’s Journal :: n/a. Randy Tinseth, VP Marketing, Boeing.

Today’s Interactive Darwin Award — When CEOs turn into Sock Puppets

Whole Foods Is Hot, Wild Oats a Dud — So Said ‘Rahodeb’ – WSJ.com

Need an explanation of the perils of “sockpuppets?” Read this page one in the WSJ. The CEO of Whole Foods (aka “Whole Paycheck”) logs onto the Yahoo finance forum for the Whole Foods stock and posts for years under a pseudonym, trashing the competition’s stock and praising his own haircut. WTF?

“In January 2005, someone using the name “Rahodeb” went online to a Yahoo stock-market forum and posted this opinion: No company would want to buy Wild Oats Markets Inc., a natural-foods grocer, at its price then of about $8 a share.”Would Whole Foods buy OATS?” Rahodeb asked, using Wild Oats’ stock symbol. “Almost surely not at current prices. What would they gain? OATS locations are too small.” Rahodeb speculated that Wild Oats eventually would be sold after sliding into bankruptcy or when its stock fell below $5. A month later, Rahodeb wrote that Wild Oats management “clearly doesn’t know what it is doing …. OATS has no value and no future.”

The comments were typical of banter on Internet message boards for stocks, but the writer’s identity was anything but. Rahodeb was an online pseudonym of John Mackey, co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. [emphasis mine, .ed] Earlier this year, his company agreed to buy Wild Oats for $565 million, or $18.50 a share.”

Dosas and Paan

Nothing beats a little bindle of paan in one’s cheek at the end of a big Indian meal other than the expression on the face of a bewildered colleague who stuck the silver triangle in his mouth and bit down on a melange of spices and betel nuts. He asked: “What does this remind me of?”

“Old Spice men’s deodorant? A urinal cake?” I replied. The art was not getting it in one’s mouth — the bravest man in the world was the first one to eat an oyster — (many people before me have grown addicted to paan, their teeth stained red from the betel, but few outside of India have tried it) the trick for me was trying to figure out what to do with it after ten minutes.A lot of exterior walls and sidewalks around paan stalls in northern India are stained red from paan expectorations, so I assume the proper thing to do is what any good ballplayer does with a cheekload of chaw, and that’s spit. Problem is what to do inside of a nice restaurant. With no spittoons in evidence, and my Indian hosts displaying no stuffed-cheekedness, I swallowed mine down.

There are things you swallow and things you don’t. I believe I was eating a fairly sissy version of paan known as meetha paan, or “sweet paan” which is not as hardcore as some of the tobacco and masala based ones the pros swear by. Anyway, here I sit, burping perfume.

Dosas, on the other hand, are good things, especially for breakfast with a bowl of sambar. I could live on dosas, and was very fond of them when I was working in New York, sometimes eating them twice a week at the Madras Mahal on Lexington Ave. with Om Malik. These are big lentil flour pancakes wrapped in a flamboyant crunchy tube around spicy mashed potatoes.

This one, from Flickr, by late_blOOmer, is just about right:

Remember, never eat anything bigger than your head, and don’t swallow the paan.

Ding dong, the page view is dead

Rob O’Regan at Magnosticism reports Nielsen’s decision to drop pageviews as the primary metric for site measurement. Good riddance say I.

Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.’s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranks first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo’s 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.

Google, meanwhile, drops to fifth in time spent, primarily because its search engine is focused on giving visitors quick answers and links for going elsewhere. By page views, Google ranks third.

I posted on this a while back, arguing that Ajax and other page-cache models were making the Web 1.0 model of page-by-page sessions irrelevant. Expect to see some sites rail against this decision, and don’t expect the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) to make a move anytime soon.  Here’s the pdf of the Nielsen-Netratings release.

Bangalore morning

The saturation of global brands in this office park in Bangalore is pretty impressive. I’m sitting in a perfectly modern office building near other perfectly modern buildings housing Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Target, Microsoft, Dell …. A golf course runs down the length of the development and a steady state of construction is an indication that more brands are coming.

Bangalore is the third largest city in the country, has a new airport under construction, and is quite pretty in a tropical way, with the same wonderful coal smoke smell I remember from 1991.

But, in truth, I am here to sit in conference rooms and talk to people. Here’s my view today.