Month: February 2009

Esteban Panzeri – Ten Ways to Be a Titan

There’s an award inside of Lenovo known as the Prometheus Award which is bestowed by the global marketing teams on one of their own — any one from headquarters, geographies or countries — who goes above and beyond, exemplifies the personality of the Lenovo brand, and in general achieves super-hero status as a global colleague and marketer. This isn’t an award made from the top down — but a true recognition by one’s peers. I had nothing to do with this, but I was delighted to be asked this morning  to present the award (I made no remarks about Prometheus’ ultimate fate, which involved the daily removal of his liver by an eagle in retribution by the Gods for giving fire to man) to Esteban Agustin Panzeri via teleconference in an all-hands meeting. I figured I’d publicly call him out because he’s a retiring sort of person and needs to blush more:

  1. Esteban is a blogger. And a good one at that. http://blog.estebanglas.com.ar/
  2. He built and administers Lenovo’s corporate blogging platform http://www.lenovoblogs.com
  3. He built our Olympic athlete blogging program: http://summergames.lenovo.com
  4. He was our primary person working with Google to build our Olympic sponsorship portal on top of iGoogle
  5. He knows web metrics like few others
  6. He runs our main Twitter account — @lenovosocial
  7. He is our primary Web 2.0/Cloud strategist
  8. He is recognized as a major authority on social media marketing and cloud strategy in South America
  9. He cares about his work and get things done like few other people I have met in my career. Not since John Moschetto at Forbes.com in 1995, or Mark Cahill at Reel-Time have I met a geek with such a profound, innate sense of what the right thing is in the digital world.
  10. He tells me when I am full of $hit. Which is frequently.

So, ordinarily I don’t like to get all Lenovo in this blog, but this is one time I needed to acknowledge a colleague and friend who has taught me a ton, driven some huge changes, and, well, is just a great guy to be around.


WP Auto update failure

I went to accept the auto-update on WordPress to 2.7.1 and got this ”
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class pclzip in /home/churbuck/public_html/wordpress/wp-admin/includes/class-pclzip.php on line 171″ — wondering if it’s me or if it’s the distro …

update: I turned off the auto-update plug in and the patch was accepted.

Ankle-biters in the air

Nothing makes me sadder and feel older than the sight of a young couple at the airport at 5 am with an infant, about to torture themselves with a six hour sojourn to Grandmother’s house laden down with the amazing baggage of baby strollers, baby seats, diaper bags, toys, noisemakers, pablum, formula, pumps, paregoric ….

The DiaperDecks in the men’s rooms of America’s airports are in full swing this week, and I detected a whiff of something accidental pass me by on the leg from Seattle to Atlanta this morning, rushing to the amidships head on the Boeing 767. I just pulled into my North Carolina office after a day of full-on infant screaming, and realize I need about an hour on the erg to get the nervous enervation and cringe out of my shoulders, neck, and face. I don’t mean to be W.C. Field and pull an misanthropic rant on the young of the year, but am I alone in the ranks of America’s airborne Willy Loman’s in dreading the spring when the planes get packed with the wailing of those too young to perform the sinus clearing Valsalva maneuver on themselves?

Believe me I empathize. There was the early morning return to Boston from San Francisco in 1988 after I pulled an all-nighter at the Grateful Dead’s New Year’s Eve show at the Oakland Coliseum. Not a lot of sleep and two toddlers made that a very special flight.

Amazon unveils thinner, lighter Kindle 2

I checked out the details on the new Kindle 2 from Amazon. Right off, the pictures indicate better ergonomics and button placement — someone must have climbed in bed and tried to use it this time — and I understand from ComputerWorld the revolution may come from WhisperSynch — giving users the ability to read cross platform on G1s or iPhones perhaps.

I won’t upgrade. The news seems to be in the cross-platform reader and opening of the format to alternative devices.

Lotus Notes + AT&T WWAN = LaBrea Tarpits of Mobility

Take one overbloated “productivity” app, combine with an anemic WWAN connection, throw in a VPN and try to replicate. Fail. Repeat. Grit teeth. Write blog post and beef about it. Realize no one cares.

Ice Drinking

So a horde of ATV driving, fruit brandy chugging ice fishermen mess up and find themselves winning a Darwin Award on a drifting ice floe in one of the Great Lakes. Good times. Taxpayers and authorities breaking out the torches and pitchforks to lynch the hard-water anglers. Me, I totally empathize with the fishermen, these are desperate times for the outdoorsmen of America, cabin bound and ready to commit mayhem in this dead month when there’s no sports on the tube, nothing to hope for but sitting around in plywood shacks in dirty long underwater, staring at holes in the ice while doing their utmost best to damage their livers.

Me, I started the weekend with great hopes and a 2009 Massachusetts Fishing License, but alas, I didn’t stir my bones and drag the ice drill and gas grill out to my own private ice floe. Instead I got all serious about flying to Seattle today.

Pimp my pad

Junior’s three-year old ThinkPad Z60M bought the farm yesterday, the hard drive is toast and it is flashing a BSOD with statements of pain like “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME”

The drive was pretty cramped to begin with, so I figure it is time to rebuild the machine from scratch — it has a big screen, good speakers, an optical, and in these days of economizing, I am not in the mood to buy anything new. It has two gigs of RAM (I added a SIMM), the processor is a little wimpy, so it will need to remain an XP box for now.

Original description: Celeron M 360(1.4GHz), 256MB RAM, 40GB 5400rpm HD, 15.4in 1280×800 LCD, Intel 900, CDRW/DVD, Intel 802.11abg wireless, Modem, 1Gb Ethernet, UltraNav, Secure chip, IEEE 1394, 6c Li-Ion batt, WinXP Home

Having taken the RAM way up to 2 gigs, now the pimping needs to focus on the drive. I’m thinking a 7200 rpm SATA – but am worried about compatibility issues and overcoming the Celeron with too much RAM or drive. It’s all about weakest link.

Memo to Lenovo support — bundle all drivers for a specific ThinkPad into one mongo archive .rar file and be done with it. The onesie-twosie-download thing is horrific.

New Kindles on the way?

Some speculation emerging on what Amazon will announce this week (I hope to get some disclosure in Seattle on Monday) around a new Kindle and perhaps the opening of the platform to permit Amazon e-books to be read on cell/smart phones — eg the iPhone perhaps.

An interesting piece in Computerworld by Mike Elgan speculates the new device will be cheaper and more featured that 1.o — which is to be expected — but Elgan touches on an interesting possiblility by speculating authors will soon be able to self-publish e-books and bypass the medieval functionality of the publishing industry. So, will Amazon open the Kindle SDK to writers? That would be very interesting and be the right move in my opinion.

Whereabouts week of 2.8.09

Little weekend here in Cotuit then fly on …
Sunday 2.7 to Seattle
Monday 2.8 Seattle
Tuesday 2.9 – Seattle to RTP
Wed. 2.10-Friday 2.11 RTP
Friday nite Cotuit (spending following week in home office most likely)