The Man in the Rockefeller Suit | vanityfair.com.
Last weekend, in Seattle, the topic turned to McKinsey and did I know the story of Clark Rockefeller and his wife, a McKinsey partner and Seattle native ….
I had lunch with Clark Rockefeller in the fall of 2000 in a little outdoor cafe on Park Avenue. We talked about the perils of raccoons nesting in fireplaces.
Now he is in jail.
“While the alleged kidnapper’s prints were being analyzed, the bureau, in hopes that someone might recognize him, released pictures to the media, and soon a lifetime of carefully constructed identities began emerging. Some people knew him as Chris Gerhart, a University of Wisconsin film student. Others said he was Christopher Chichester, a descendant of British royalty, who had charmed the residents of a wealthy Los Angeles suburb in the 1980s, only to vanish after being sought for questioning in the disappearance of a California couple and their possible murder. Still others remembered him as Christopher C. Crowe, a TV producer, who had worked for at least three Wall Street investment firms in the late 1980s before suddenly vanishing. Scores of people knew him as Clark Rockefeller, a Boston Brahmin and scion of industry whose friends included important artists, writers, producers, physicians, financiers, and members of prestigious private clubs.”
Freaky. There’s talk of him being tried in a court on Cape Cod.
Having rebuilt two machines this weekend and not having the restore CDs that shipped with the boxes, I have dropped $300 getting certified versions of XP installed via the Net and Microsoft’s Genuine Authentication thingy.
$150 for a XP license after I’ve paid for it in the past — but was too stupid to create recovery discs — is a) a lesson to myself and b) a warning to Microsoft that free beats the pants off of paid any day and that in this day and age, with Ubuntu getting better with every rev, the Giant of Redmond might want to go sit on the mountain and think real hard about a Windows 7 model that includes a free-kernel. The Win7 beta is free — and early adopters are reporting positive things. But come September, when it ships. The free ride ends.
Most vendors, like Lenovo, no longer ship physical XP discs with their systems, but instead ask their customers to create their own backup CDs during the system set up. I, of course, do not create these damn discs, and like most other aggrieved users, only rue that day when the hard drive fails (as all hard drives inevitably fail).
Combine a few things and Microsoft is in a perfect storm. 1. It’s the Economy Stupid: No one wants to pay for anything if there is a free alternative. 2. Track record. Vista is being written off. All eyes are on Win 7. Consumers are  looking at OS alternatives and coming to the conclusion that an operating system should be as irrelevant to them on a PC as it is on a phone. E.G. — give me a device that doesn’t need to boot, have patches, get viruses, or otherwise require a full time nerd to babysit.
Consumer Linux is becoming more and more attractive. If Linux can get some solid driver support rolling for consumers’ peripherals, hide the heck out of the kernel (a consumer user should never be aware of stuff like GRUB and Wine) with a friendly GUI skin …. I could have rebuilt both of these two ThinkPads with Ubuntu but didn’t, and paid $150 per machine to build them back up on XP for one simple reason:Â the people who will be using these machine expect to see XP on them. Me? I’m more than happy to mess with Ubuntu. My wife is not.
Microsoft can buy a lot of time and hearts and mind with one simple solution — go free at one level and make it up in volume on upselling. Seriously. Whack a consumer for a credit card in this market and free starts to rule. Give me a free OS to enable a device, and when I decide I want some added benefit … then hit me with the credit card. If Microsoft can get on the free-bandwagon and get free into the corporate mindset, they buy another decade of success without any problem.
Monday-Tuesday- Feb 16/17: Cotuit
Wednesday-Thursday – Feb 18/19: California
Friday-Sunday – Feb 20/22: Cotuit
Advice for Those New to New Media – Specialize | All Things Cahill.
Good post by Cahill on the need to specialize in social media, indeed all things.
It’s not good enough anymore to be a “new media specialist”, or even a “web video specialist.”  It’s heading to the direction where each of the general video tasks will become their own separate areas of specialization.  Such as editing, or compression, etc.
So now would be the time, especially if you are looking to retrain, or are already working in new media, to think about becoming more specialized.  In the long term I believe you’ll see more job opportunity, and better job security.  You’ll still compete in the general market, and you’ll have that one area of expertise where you’ll be the superstar.
Now is the winter of charceuterie and this weekend’s project was sausage, about twenty feet of forcemeat I mixed up and extruded into pig casings. No photos or video. Way too digusting. I trashed the kitchen and smeared emulsified raw pork and chicken over every available surface, including a Tivo remote, phone, all knives, bowls, the KitchenAid, the grinder, the extrusion tubes ….
I bought the casing in Osterville and made the forcemeat from a pork shoulder. That was diced and then mixed into two recipes – one for a sage/ginger/garlic sausage, the other for hot Italian (which I over salted). I made a third sausage out from three pounds of boneless chicken thighs, fresh and sundried tomatoes, and basil. The chopping, spicing, and grinding were fun, basically Play-Doh Fun Factory with dead pig. The filling of the casings … that was as primal as it gets in the Churbuck kitchen. I’ll spare you the details, but I found myself a little less than hungry when I cooked up a few for dinner, doubtlessly because I had just spent a couple hours a bit too intimate with my food.
The payoff for this winter dry run is going to come in May during the bluefish run. My intent is to get good at a smoked bluefish sausage only because I have always wondered if it actually might be any good.
Next – rillettes and confit.
via CapeCodToday Blog Chowder.
“In the nightmare, the waiter puts a plate of steaming blue mussels on the table. But when his customer digs in, she recoils in disgust. Then she raises her fork and glares: On it is a tiny, dead crab.
Shellfish farmer and dealer Bill Silkes is haunted by scenes like this, both real and imagined. For far too long, his nemesis has been a parasitic crustacean – so puny it’s nicknamed the pea crab – that stands in the way of a thriving mussel aquaculture industry in local waters.”
In my alimentary experience, mussels are the riskiest clam for food poisoning and a sure bet for a long night on the bathroom rug. I haven’t knowingly had a mussel since 1983 at the Union Oyster House in Boston.
So, the parasite thing doesn’t weird me out. I’ve eaten fiddler crabs in Tokyo — shells and all — and a pea crab sounds like a fishy baby aspirin. But a bowl of gaping, labiate orange and black mussels steamed open in a bath of bad chablis and shallots?
Being driven home from the airport and blogging in the backseat on my ThinkPad with the 3G cranking away. I am easily amused. Now if I could only learn how to read and write in a moving car and not feel like I was going to blow lunch at any second. AT&T WAN is worth every penny.
Two colleagues, one current, the other former in an article about the new interactive model of advertising on the old medium of television. Former PC Week, McKinsey and CMO Magazine colleague Rob O’Regan writes the February cover story for The Advertiser. Nut graph:
After years of fits and starts trying to turn the concept of interactive TV into a broadly based reality, a collection of service providers, technology companies, agencies, and marketers finally seems to be making some legitimate headway in transforming TV into a more addressable, more targetable, and more measurable advertising medium.
Sure, we’ve seen this dance before. For years, we’ve been hearing promises of two-way engagement, better buying and measurement systems, and addressable ads for TV viewers. But real milestones have been elusive in an industry known more for inertia than innovation.
Something feels different now, however.
Rob quotes Gary Milner from Lenovo who ran our trial on GoogleTV last year with great success. Gary, as noted earlier, is blogging at The Digital Difference.