Month: July 2007

Heaven is a dish of warm nuts …

….or so proclaims my sagacious colleague, Glen somewhere over Mumbai, who is sitting next to me in Lufthansa Business Class from Frankfurt to Bangalore, and who has amended the statement to include a full Ipod, and the latest book by David McCullogh.

The entire business class thing is very embryonic. I’m sitting in some strange teutonic carbon-fiber pod designed by Recaro, the Italian bucket seat designer, long given up on the 30-page operators manual for a seat which delivers a non-sensual massage, can play first run movies (I watched Zodiac, the latest David Fincher, and found it awesome save for the 7-point text at the end which tied up all the loose ends and was completely illegible on the seatback LCDs) and contort itself into every attitude except prone. I avoided the temazepam for the JFK to Frankfurt leg, instead doing my usual contortion act in a seat which is, without fail, always one inch too short for a truly stretched out nap. I went into twilight zone mode, woke up feeling like my sinuses had been raped, with my one monocular contact lense warped and dried like a scab on my poor right eye.

Quick German frushtuch (there are umlauts in there somewhere) of dense rye bread, cervelat and cheese, a couple drops of rewetting solution in my eye, and I was ready for leg number two to Bangalore. Frankfurt was Frankfurt — under-airconditioned so I  developed a thin sheen of airport terminal sweat which was improved by four coffees and anxiety over the contents of my Blackberry. I even got to tick off the ladies at the coffee bar with my atrocious self-taught Schweitzerdeutsch (“Gruzi! Ich mochte ein bier bitte!). Germans do not tolerate beginners in their language. They let you get all wound up and then correct the phelgm-hocking sound you’re supposed to make when uttering the word “mich” before they launch themselves into flawless condescending English. The German language is best explained by Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad, but I explain it by pointing to Yoda’s sentence syntax.

Since I am arriving in India around 11 pm, I decided not to sleep on this long leg but to work and save the big sleeping pill for some point after midnight, when I am down prone on a hotel bed and assured of six hours of uninterrupted shut-eye. I worked the entire flight thanks to in-seat A/C power, whittling away at an inbox with 1200 stale emails in it. There is nothing like replying to a three-week old email to prove email bankruptcy, and when I get to the hotel and replicate my Notes account, about 75 emails are going to go spamming out of this laptop to bewilder people from our CEO to the summer interns.  I was able to get the total message count down to 755, which is an improvement but not a victory.

My Ipod died in Cotuit — probably the victim of too many recharges and Apple’s enlightened embedded battery program. So I have had to make due with a quite excellent collection of Grateful Dead soundboards I had forgotten on my hard drive given to me by Jim Louderback, the EIC of PC Magazine a year ago in Augusta. I’m particularly glad to discover the 6.15.76 Beacon Theater show as that was the year when I went on “tour” for the first time and had the sublime experience of seeing six New England Dead shows in the magical month of May (I saw my first show in August of 1976 at Hartford’s Colt Park). So, a new Ipod is needed. I live on the thing when I use the erg and fly. The noise cancelling headphones have been a godsend in shutting out my seatmate in row 14, the Italian IT consultant who has his SecureID random-number-generating fob on a bracelet and who fell asleep when the plane was taxiing in Frankfurt and has been making cartoon snoring sounds like Curley in the Three Stooges ever since. The man is doing that “snark-phwee-phwee-phwee” noise with flapping lips and everything. The stewards are impressed and roll their eyes at me whenever they walk past trying to get me drunk on good wine which I decline in favor of wasser mit gaz.

As far as books go: I read Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” in three hours. A waste of a perfectly wonderful book (soon to be a movie by the Coen Brothers) that deserved to be enjoyed. McCarthy, I have concluded, is the master of conclusions.

Camera is charged, bandwidth rocks in Bangalore, so I’ll try to post through the week with photos of Bangalore, the Lenovo offices, and whatever food gets put in front of me. I am heartened to read that Bangalore’s cuisine is essentially my favorite (and hardest to find in the US), vegetarian with an emphasis on dosas and thalis.

Three working days here — topic is agency relationships, production, and our new marketing hub — then back to the US on a 1:50 am flight on Friday. That is sure to be special, especially since I am consigned to coach for the Bangalore to Frankfurt leg. So, I shall enjoy business class while it lasts, which is about one hour.

Words to kick off a trip to India

From Moby Dick:

“Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.

“Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.”

Barren mazes indeed. Think about the dread in a person’s heart in 1840 when slipping lines in Nantucket for a six-month sail to the Antipodes, versus a middle-aged guy sitting in an airport in Providence, about to embark on something which would have seemed as fantastic  to Ishmael and Captain Ahab as a Star Trek teleporter would to me.

Bangalore week

The car picks me up at noon, kicking off six days of long travel from Cotuit to Bangalore and back again on Friday. I haven’t thought about packing yet, but intend to get by with a single duffel bag and a backpack jammed full of ThinkPad, headphones, iPod (into Stoner Metal this month, so lots of Fu Manchu and Queens of the Stone Age) books (No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy and maybe the new Pynchon), passport, sleeping pills, etc. etc. etc.

Cell phone will work, but please do the math before dialing. I get whaled on at 3 am in Beijing by well-meaning people who think it is 3 pm. And yes, I leave the phone on.

I’m planning on Raleigh the week after this.

Marlinespike Seamanship

Sailing this afternoon in a fluky (erratic) breeze with my son, I realized it isn’t the sailing that appeals to me, but the boats. I’ve always wanted to build a boat — a small rowing skiff or a kayak perhaps — but haven’t had the time. So I make myself content with the annual painting thing, some boat “dentristry” and best of all, the ongoing art of keeping a boat sailing known as marlinespike (or marlinspike) seamanship.

This is a world of sennets and turk’s heads, grommets and whip finish (with and without a needle), eye splices, back splices, long splices and end splices. Of bowlines, clove hitches, half hitches and sheepshanks. The art of making baggywrinkle, of finishing off a crown knot, of weaving a bell rope.

I keep my tools in my “ditty bag” a canvas bag with rope handles (if I was truly gifted I would have sewn it myself with a sailor’s palm, seam rubber, a piece of beeswax and a spool of sail thread). They consist of a rigging knife with a fid (a pointed implement for breaking open the strands of rope for splicing), heavy, big-eyed triangular sail needles, a ball of Italian marlin that smells the way the sea should smell, smoky and mysterious, tape, cords, light line, manila, bell cord, and pliers.

I am, by no means, even a novice, but I am one of the few people I know who can knock out a new anchor or mooring pennant in ten minutes, complete with galvanized eyes and shackles properly locked down with bronze wire.

When I was ten I went skiing in the Berkshires at my cousin’s place in Adams, near Williamstown in the extreme northwestern corner of the state at the base of the state’s highest mountain, Mount Greylock. There was a small ski hill with a rope tow — a big 1000 foot loop of heavy hawser that ran up the hill and around an old car wheel before going back down to a tractor engine modified to drive a big spool. The rope tow was pretty old, and didn’t get used very often, and within ten minutes of starting the rope snapped.

I was disappointed as were about 100 other people. The man who owned the hill apologized and offered to pay back everyone’s dollar.

“Why would you do that? We want to ski,” my father lived to embarrass me. The ski hill owner said there was nothing he could do, the rope had parted and he couldn’t tie the ends together with a knot, the rope was too thick and the knot wouldn’t pass through the pulleys at the top and bottom of the hill.

“You don’t need a knot. You need a Long Splice. Let me show you.”

My father took off his coat, lay it on the snow and placed the two snapped ends of rope on it. He borrowed a knife and cut the line back a foot on each piece and then unraveled about 15 turns worth of the strands. He “married” the two lines and began to re-lay the strands into the opposing line, making a seamless connection that was no thicker than the original line. He shaved down the strands as he went, and in about 30 minutes, stood up, asked for a hammer, and pounded the line smooth.

Then he asked my uncle to find the splice. He couldn’t, or pretended he couldn’t.

“Where in hell did you learn to do that? The Boy Scouts?” asked one of the other fathers.

“Junior Seamanship test at the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club,” said my father. And we were back skiing.

That spring I asked him to show me the …. ahem, ropes. He obliged, getting an old manila (hemp) halyard and cutting it up into small lengths for me to practice knots on. He drilled me through about a dozen standard sailing knots, then moved me onto whip finishes — the use of a waxed piece of string/thread to “finish” or bind the end of a cut rope so it won’t unravel. By the end of the summer I could do every splice except the long splice, the one that saved the ski hill (and I still can’t do it, as it is very challenging).

Over the years I learned how to do decorative work such as turk’s heads and sennets from Dr. Robert Oldale, the preeminent geologist at the United State Geological Survey in Woods Hole. He is a very salty man, and showed me some very good tricks for making stuff like this:

Tim Whitten, Marlinespike.com


The best rope worker-rigger I know is Jeff Higgins here in Cotuit. He can do industrial level rigging, including splicing steel cable and rigging sophisticated towing set ups on commercial tugs. He can go aloft in a bosun’s chair and do mast-top repairs, and in general knows more about marlinespike seamanship that anyone in my generation.

There are two definitive works when it comes to knotwork. One is Clifford Ashley’s Ashley’s Book of Knots. Ashley, a native of New Bedford, the saltiest city in the United States, was a marine artist/illustrator who shipped out on one of the last commercial whaling ships to sail out of New Bedford. Ashley studied with Howard Pyle in Wilmington, Delaware, as part of the famous Brandywine School of illustration.

The other classic text is the Bluejacket’s Manual, the handbook of the U.S. Navy. I actually memorized it as a kid, having found an old copy from World War II in one of the upstairs bookcases. That’s the book to read if you want to learn how to splice wire.

How to get with the Web 2.0 program …

How to get all Web 2.0-ified and stuff like that:
1. Personal Blog: go to wordpress.com and open one. Name it something you can live with for a few years. Do not use Blogger. Do not use TypePad. Use WordPress. Write down the password. Take some time in the control panel and learn how to write a post. Bug me later to explain the ecosystem of trackbacks and comments, read any of a million posts elsewhere about how to blog. Free.
2. Blog Reader: like Mr. Wolf in Pulp Fiction asked, are you an Oak or a Pine person? For me it comes down to: are you a Google or Yahoo person? Do you have a gmail or a yahoo email account? A Google portal page or a MyYahoo page? Doesn’t matter. You need a blog reader to hold and read subscriptions to other blogs. The reason blogs rock is you don’t have to visit them to read them. They come to you. In your blog reader. All are free. Three choices in my mind.

  1. Bloglines — good web based service. I used for a couple years. Now I use
  2. Google Reader — buried in the Google Lab
  3. MyYahoo — those who know about these things say Yahoo is actually the best at social media stuff thanks to their acquisition of …

3. Flickr: blogs need pictures, pictures needed a home, pictures need to be shared. Get a decent digital camera, sign up for a Flickr account, download the Flickr photo uploading widget, and figure it out. No Smugmug. No Shutterfly, no whatever. Flickr. Any questions? Free unless you do a lot of pictures, then you need to go Pro.
4. Del.icio.us : think of it as bookmarks that you can share and which are hosted elsewhere, not on your PC. Also, this is the cool way to share web pages with other cool people. You can share pages with me by tagging them “for:dchurbuck”. Free.
5. Feedburner: good way to get statistics about your “feed” the thing people subscribe to so they can read your blog in their blog reader.

6. Google analytics: because you have to measure it if you want to manage it.
7. MyBlogLog: good way to see who is looking at your blog, and let them know you are looking at theirs.

8. LinkedIn/Facebook: these are good networking places. LinkedIn is more of a headhunter sort of thing. Facebook a little more social. Your teenagers will deem you a geek if you get a Facebook page, but hey, the mission of being a parent is to horrify and embarrass one’s children at every opportunity.

9. Technorati: the best of the blog search engines, but Google Blog Search is coming on strong. Get an account, register your blog, and Technorati will help track who is linking to it and where it ranks.
10. Things to avoid: Twitter, Plazes, most sidebar widgets. Adsense, affiliates (you will NOT make money as a personal blogger), and any plug in that ruins the look of your blog.

So, take an afternoon, sign up for all this stuff, use the same log in and password, and for heavens sake, use FireFox to get it done. What did I leave out?

Passage to India

Any readers want to get together in Bangalore next week? Give me a ping!

Hah. I’m booking the travel today. Need to make sure the Ambien prescription is filled, the noise-canceling head-phones are packed, and my shots are up to date …. shots? What shots? (I took the full India shot-list from the Tropical Medicine department of Mass General in 1991, never again, they gave me the Plague every week for a month).

I’ve never been to Bangalore, but I have been to India. In 1991, after racking up a massive number of Pan Am miles on the Pan Am shuttle between Boston and LaGuardia, I was sitting in a story meeting at Forbes when the aviation editor, Howard Banks, said he was working on a piece about Pan Am’s impending bankruptcy. Alarmed, I phoned my wife and said we needed to take a trip that would use up as many of those miles as possible — the choices came down to round trip first class tickets to either Nairobi or New Delhi.

We picked New Delhi, and with the help of some Indian colleagues and India experts — Jim Michaels, Ignatius Chithelen — made arrangements to tour the country from Delhi to Jaipur to Madras and back. We made the trip with  backpacks, no reservations, and had some amazing adventures, especially in the south in Tamil Nadu.
It was an amazing, life-changing trip, the beginning of a 15-year love affair with all things India.

So off I go again, this time to the epicenter of Friedman’s Flat World, where an abundance of bandwidth and Y2K bug remediation has turned into one of the planet’s most extensive IT and customer service hubs.

SEX SIG — who’d have thought?

Sex & Games

“The Sex SIG of the International Game Developers Association welcomes everyone interested in the topic of sexual content in video games, particularly developers active or interested in adult content development.”The adult content development community grows every year. It needs a place where it can discuss the unique issues, challenges and possibilities it faces while sharing information with others hoping to enter the field.”

Video game sex? Where?

Water Sports — Ambushes and Capsizes

The Cotuit Civic Association Newsletter is one of my favorite junk mail periodicals, coming monthly on a single sheet with some news about goings-on in the village, garden club meetings, fire district elections, that sort of thing. The last issue asked people not to engage the Cotuit Kettleers in a water fight during the Fourth of July Parade because things apparently got out of control last year. Put a team’s worth of the nation’s best college baseball players on a big flatbed truck, arm them with big SuperSoakers and an endless supply of baseball-sized waterballoons, and drive them slowly down Main Street, and someone is sure to get an H20 fastball in the face.
As a spectator, there isn’t much one can do except take the splashing, smile, and protect the cameras. Nothing until last year, when one group decided to fight back and donned wet suits and Deadliest Catch Foul Weather gear and lined up on both sides of the street armed with multiple garden hoses. The truck driver had been bribed to stop in the middle of the gauntlet, and you can see the incident here, one of the few things that YouTube returns on a Cotuit keyword search.

This year the assault on the Kettleers commenced in front of my house, when my best friend — the dauntless Doctor Dan — and sailing buddy Don loaded up two industrial water guns and pulled a set of my daughter’s pantyhose over their heads. There was a pitched battle which lasted a minute of so, and culminated with the overturning of buckets of water on the physician’s and shortstop’s heads.


That was cute and the parade continued on, the giant Squirting Clam, the Aleppo Shriners on their little scooters, the tumbling gymnasts, the actors in the Cotuit Art Association’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream … and Milo the drummer in the back of a pickup truck. When the fire trucks roll by the fat lady has sung, and by 11:30 the streets were back to normal.

Today, Independence of the Nation aside, is the day of the first race of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club. My youngest and I decided to race (I press-ganged him into compliance) on what turned out to be very windy conditions which necessitated a reef — a shortening of sail using reef points and line to reduce its area by about 20 percent. We rigged up, set out for the starting line, and did the usual pre-race drill of checking out the angle of the line to see which end was favored, and seeing how close to the wind the boat was going to point with the reef in. All was well, my son was grumpy to be out there under steel-grey skies with a 20 knot breeze, but I was full of false cheer and trash talk about how this was going to be our race, etc.
During the first gybe of the day, the tiller got stuck inside of the baggy cuffs of my shorts, causing me to muff the maneuver, nearly neuter myself, but cause the boat to capsize in slo-mo before the five minute warning horn could sound. Skiffs are nasty ugly boats when they tip over. They tip over like slow motion cows. They cannot be emptied unless they are on the beach and the second you turn over everything expensive starts to float away: rudder, tiller, boom crutch, bailer, sponges …… Fisher and I managed to corral the floating gear and I had to give the finger to one solicitous sailor who insincerely asked several times if we were “okay”. I took the line from the crash boat for the tow-of-shame into the beach.

Ten minutes later we were back in the race, but behind by a “horizon” so we bagged all pretense of competition, came back to the mooring, and as we lifted the float from the water the line parted, snapped, sinking to the bottom and leaving us with no alternative but to go ashore and anchor until tomorrow’s low tide when I will go out and find the chain with my toes.

Ugh.

I tip over about once a season, so here is to hoping that this was the first and last of the 2007 racing calendar.

Getting back to work tomorrow will not be easy. Mid-week holidays are strange and the Fourth of July is that one holiday they can’t conveniently reschedule to another date falling on a Monday the way it is done with Labor Day and Memorial Day. All hell is breaking out at work, so it’s time to get heads down and deal with the possibility of a trip to Bangalore on Sunday.

Yawn: Alinghi secure America’s Cup win

BBC SPORT | Other Sport… | Sailing | Alinghi secure America’s Cup win

First off, there isn’t anything American about the America’s Cup. Second: the event has sucked ever since it left Newport, RI and the stewardship of the New York Yacht Club. Three:  the boats suck. Bring back 12-meters. The Cup became a joke the year Dennis Connor decided to defend it in a catamaran. If you want to watch exciting sailing, check this out:

“Alinghi won the America’s Cup to become the first European team to defend sailing’s most prestigious prize.”The Swiss syndicate beat Team New Zealand in a nail-biting seventh race to seal the best-of-nine series 5-2.

“Alinghi finished two seconds ahead of the Kiwis after SUI 100’s sail fell off and left them at a standstill.”