Monday – Cotuit
Tuesday – Personal Medical Day (getting the scope you-know-where)
Wednesday – Cotuit
Thursday – Morrisville to present the Olympic Blogger Program
Friday – Cotuit, start of 10 day vacation prior to Beijing
Month: July 2008
Foul bottom
The kids have been bitching the boat is running weird when they drag each other around on a tube (we used water skiis) and claimed engine trouble. I knew what the problem was — barnacles on the bottom because I had been too impetuous in launching in March without repainting with antifouling paint.
The barnacles cause a lot of friction, are disgusting to look at, are a hazard if you try to climb aboard from the water, and make the propellor cavitate — or lose its bite in the water — because they disrupt the flow into the prop. So, out of the water came the boat, into the backyard, out came the pressure washer, and for an hour I whittled away at a pervasive mass of univalve parasites.
“Did you know barnacles have the longest penis of any organism on earth, relative to their size?” Asked number one son. (That makes two references to the male organ in one week on this blog, damning it to some netnanny filter for eternity).
Did he ask to help? Did he get down and dirty with the scraper? Did he smell like barnacle guts as the sun set in the west and my favorite question: “What’s for dinner?” was asked by number two son.
This morning I woke early, dragged the de-barnacled hull over the grass, and started looking for a can of green bottom paint. I really don’t want to drive to Hyannis this time of year — bad things happen there involving drivers from Quebec and lefthand turns. I found a can of green Woolsey copper paint — a relic from the 1950s that would definitely get the EPA and people in hazmat suits here if they knew I owned it. This was the real deal — stuff from my grandfather’s era, when smoking was good for you and exercise was bad because it enlarged your heart.
On it went, a gorgeous hue of green and then I discovered the keelson under the bow was severely worn down from too many groundings on the beach, so back into the shop I went to mix up a pot of WEST System epoxy. That went on, was smoothed down with wax paper and tacked into place while I finished the paint job by moving onto the boottop (see earlier post on waterlines and boot tops).
By this point its 90 degrees out, I am covered in green and red paint, have it in my hair, am sweating into my eyes which makes them ren, and up drives my step-sister with some Chinese VIPs. After a hearty round of introductions and vague promises to go on a boat ride, I went back to Project Nautical, finished up, and by noon was ready for my workout. I sponged myself off with a rag soaked in paint thinner and set out in my garage gym/boat shop to row 10,000 meters on the erg. Wrong. The man/air moisture transfer equilibrium was waaaay out of whack and I easily dropped a gallon of sweat in the first 2,500 meters, and being sicked by the fumes and the smell of the bottom paint, I bagged it, came in side, showered and discovered one can actually continue to perspire in the shower.
Boat was launched, brief ride, but I was too fried to go to the beach, so I went to the grocery store with the other senior citizens and walked around in the air conditioning for an hour.
So ends a summer Saturday.
Favorite things — lifting heavy stuff
Today’s WOD (Workout of the Day) for Crossfit is my new favorite thing to do — essentially picking up heavy stuff. Crossfit, for the unitiated, is a fitness program developed by a guy named Greg Glassman which combined elements of gymnastics, Olympic weight lifting, and “functional movements” to build a definition of fitness which is pretty primal and controversial. CrossFit is used by the military, police departments, fire fighters, to build “elite” fitness (whatever that means). Me, I am trying to prep myself for old age and retain what dwindling muscle I have left before I enter that danger zone of elderly falls, broken hips, and nursing homes.
I started doing it in April at the suggestion of my rowing coach, Tom Bohrer, who occasionally contributes to the CrossFit Journal on rowing (CrossFit favors the Concept2 ergometer for building anaerobic fitness). Since then I’ve lost twenty pounds and developed some some serious upper body strength thanks to the first big weight workouts since I was on the heavyweight crew in college. It has taken a lot of time and ugly effort, but in a weird way it appeals to the sense of rower’s masochism which generally has propelled me.
My favorite exercise is the ominous sounding “deadlift.” As Coach Glassman says in his inimitable way: “this movement is baked into our DNA.” I guess cavemen practiced it by picking up big rocks.
You bend over a bar, you grab it, one hand gripping in, one gripping out, you curve your lower lumbar, and then you stand up. That’s it. Grab weight. Stand up. Put it down.
Having had my share of back problems in the past, I approach the lifting of anything with great care and trepidation. I was once bedridden for two weeks after lifting a television set. One bad move and twang, I’m down for the count. Years of rowing — a decidely back unfriendly sport — have set me up for issues, so when CrossFit put me back behind a weight lifting bar, I was terrified of the consequences.
Fortunately CrossFit’s site is loaded with good demonstration videos and coaching advice. The inhouse lifting coach — Mark Rippetoe — has a great book called Starting Strength which focuses on the technique used in Olympic lifting. I bought a copy, watched the videos, and set myself up in the garage gym.
The result? Well, let’s say I am not going to lift 1,000 pounds ever in my lifetime, but I am happy to say I can now pick up, and set back down, without injuring myself, over 300 pounds (I think I can do more, but I ran out of weight and need to buy more) And I don’t feel like one of those body builder meatheads with a big leather belt around my waist when I do it.
As my old cycling buddy Marta puts it — “Strength is about three things. Pick heavy stuff up. Pick heavy stuff up and push it over your head. Pick heavy stuff up and carry it around.”
The net result of three months of hard work with the CrossFit program is a total vanishing of my lower back pain. The return to very elemental movements — true situps, pushups, pullups — and the emphasis on back-to-basics exercise based on lifting one’s own body weight has been a revelation. There’s no membership, no gym, no machine. No fad. Just stuff our grandparents did like the Walter Camp Daily Dozen — only more evil because a lot of CrossFit is done against the clock to make it interesting.
This is all inspired by today’s NYT article on the great benchmark of fitness — the simple pushup. I’d include in the mix the humiliating pull-up, and now my new fave, the dead lift.
Churbuck.com
Since Churbuck.com points to this old post and not a home page, I wanted to set a pointer to the main page of this blog – churbuck.com
I’ve been a massive fan of the software that drives this blog — WordPress — since first installing it in the fall of 2004 at the recommendation of Om Malik. As I’ve blogged in the past, this open source tool has the potential to disrupt the content management system market, as I believe it is now capable for most any content publisher to use and adapt WordPress to provide CMS services at a level that would have easily cost $100,000 in site licenses a year ago.
Full disclosure, I am a major Interwoven Teamsite fan as well. I’ve advocated Teamsite into two big implementations and believe it, and other enterprise strength CMSs will always have a role in the large global enterprise. Put simply, the probability of a site as complex and critical as Lenovo.com converting to WordPress or Drupal is nil at this point in time.
But WordPress — the list of sites that have adopted the software as their primary CMS backs up my contention that the power of the “blog movement” is not the trackback/RSS/notification environment, nor the citizen journalist side, but that it opens the realm of dynamic and frictionless content management to the masses. Indeed, not only the countless numbers blogging for free on hosted servives like WordPress.com and Blogger, but serious sites such as AllThingsD (Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at the WSJ), and CNN’s main politics blog (which doesn’t feel so much a blog as a really crisp site.)
Anyway, Mark Cahill upgraded me this morning to the latest and greatest version –2.6– and as he notes, the power of this version is not only it’s CMS capabilities (he formally annoints the version as a CMS and he should know coming out of Atex), but it’s auto-update capabilities for self-hosted morons like myself.
The single biggest feature though, is one that will come in handy for the lone gunman blogger: they will now be able to do an automatic (single click) update for WordPress when a new version comes out. That’s a huge feature, and will help the less technical stay up to date and secure
How to market Centrino 2
Jim Forbes blogs about how the wireless capabilities of the Intel Centrino 2 chipset should be marketed.
“If I were working in PR today for Intel or one of its portable computer marketing partners, I would have set up tables with new notebooks that incorporate the new technology in a parking lot or field. Each of the tables would also have an older notebook with legacy wireless networking chipsets. And each of the tables would set in front of as range marker listing the distance between it and the WiFi router.
The very visible point of the demonstration is that the new chipsets free notebook users from being close to a WiFi access point.
Now let’s think a minute about Intel’s WiMax WAN technology. Want a fun way to demonstrate it? Set up a test network along Amtrak’s Oakland, CA to Sacramento right of way. Now load up 15 reporters, editors or industry luminaries in several of the cars on a train’s consist ( the term used to describe an engine and cars expressed as a single unit). Let them experience true persistent mobile connectivity, sit back and wait an hour or so for the rave reviews to appear.
Mobile persistent connectivity is a transformational experience for most users.”
Jim and I worked together at PC Week in the mid-80s. He has seen it all when it comes to PC marketing and I think he’s right. Users need to see this stuff in the field to grasp the impact of what we marketers try to embody in the speeds and feeds that characterize “spec pod” marketing.
New laptop – X200 for Beijing trip
I ordinarily don’t rant about Lenovo products on this blog. Old journalistic allergies to conflicts of interest, subjectivity and public relations sort of chills any professional promotional instincts. But I’m making an exception here because new technology has come into my life and, well, of the dozens of PCs that I’ve used (beginning, technically, with a Wang dedicated word processor in the spring of 1980), this one, by far is the most impressive and “personal” in the sense of strong ergonomics and usability.
I’ll get the punchline of this post over early: the X200 is the best ultraportable notebook computer I’ve ever owned. I’ve gone super ultraportable for the most part in my PC choices — avoiding anything above a 12″ screen and using external monitors and keyboards for extended desk use. Weight is important, but having gone too small, I’ve come to realize that in order to function happily, I need a serious keyboard and a crisp screen. This is my first widescreen PC, and the increased screen turf is appreciated. It isn’t the lightest ultraportable, but I don’t quibble about a half a pound difference at this point in life. I want something that is sturdy, and the X200’s magnesium frame makes this feel more hefty than my old X60s and X61. The screen is far crisper than my old X61 tablet, and the Intel Core Duo P8600 2.4 GHz processor is the fastest by far. As Computer Reseller News notes in its review, this sucker isn’t quiet, it’s silent.
Thin? Very, not as skinny as our former flagship, the X300, but definitely a sleek notebook and not a brick. I think for hardcore ThinkPad users, the machine will be appealing because a) it is Trackpoint only with no touchpad to mess with your head and b) since optical is (in my opinion) going the way of the floppy, you need the UltraBase dock to get a DVD rolling. I take both omissions from the system — touchpad and optical — to be a big plus. But, it does have three USBs, a SD slot, and the usual port stuff happening.
I’ve put about four hours into it, and the port layout, the keyboard, the wireless, everything is working like a charm on this Centrino 2 machine, our first. I need to dig, but not sure if this has a WAN card. I know it has the new N standard 802.11 wireless and potentially Wimax, but I need to dig into the system config to see what’s inside.
Oh, and it is the first time I’ve used Vista.
Can you believe that? I work for a PC company and have never used Vista? Weird. Anyway, that will be short lived as I need to send this back to IT to get the Lenovo VPN and usual Lenovo specific apps installed and will most likely get re-imaged with XP (I can connect to the VPN, I just can’t download the apps from the LANdesk service until IT gets their hands on it.)
The X200 is out next month, until then we need to do something about pre-orders because I get the feeling that while this may not make the cover of Businessweek like the X300 did, it definitely is going to be a very high demand laptop.
Trust me, best PC I’ve ever used.
I gotta learn some Chinese and fast
If these people can try, I should too ….
Online crime maps
This ought to be more fun than owning a police scanner — guess which neighbor is battering the spouse, where’s the peeping tom, and watch as the world gets closer and closer to invading my backyard.
Barnstable gets crime maps.
This would have been porn for my grandmother.
What I’m reading …
Summer reading and then some. Thank heavens I speed read. I blew through two expensive airport procured hardcovers (a bad habit I need to break) to and from Japan:
- Mark Kurlansky’s latest — The Last Fish Tale — (see my review of his Oyster tome here) about the fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts. An okay read, not as cool as his cod or oyster books, but okay if a little ADHD. This is the home port of the Perfect Storm crew, one of the last (along with New Bedford and a little bit of Chatham) of the working fishing ports in Massachusetts. I’ve visited the place a few times, it’s gritty, it’s North Shore. The book … skip it. He seems to have phoned it in and tap dances between a history of the artist colonies of Cape Ann to fishing regulatory policies amongst the Basque.
- David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Hated it. Sorry, this is Forrest Gump humor. No intelligence whatsoever. Okay, he’s gay, he grew up in North Carolina and has a place in Paris, Tokyo, New York. I get it. Finds funny things in the mundane. Quits smoking. Describes food as tasting “slightly like penis” — yuck yuck. I will not read him again.
Still in progress, The Wind-up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami. After just being in Japan, this book is really captivating me. I would say it is one of the better foreign author works I’ve read in some time (the last being the wonderful Blindness by Jose Saramago. Murakami does a wonderful job with the mundane, describing ennui better than anybody since Saul Bellow in Dangling Man, but mixes it up with one of the most gruesome war scenes since Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
The Cotuit Library’s annual summer book sale went down Saturday morning. Eliot my eldest and I took advantage of abuttor’s first rights and hit the tables before the vacationing vultures could crowd in. Came away with about twenty titles ranging from a Cruising Guide to the New England Coast (you never know) to some Cervantes. The wife is getting allergic to books due to constrained shelf space.
And, I just committed Sunday book lust and ordered Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World and The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa.
Let’s see, other random titles. A re-read of Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain because a) I like to eat at Les Halles (best charcroute garni in America) and b) have taken to his TV show, No Reservations thanks to the miracle known as DVR. And … that’s about it. Some stuff on SEO and landing page optimization for the usual professional reasons.