Year: 2009

Unhappy Cotuit residents mull break with Barnstable

via CapeCodTimes.com – Unhappy Cotuit residents mull break with Barnstable.

Nothing like talk of secession to get the blood flowing in February on Cape Cod.  Cotuit seceding from the Town of Barnstable won’t happen, too many reactionary conservatives will fret about services and infrastructure. So the idea fades again into a quiet death, but it’s been tried before and is always good for some heated discussions about tar-and-feathering the scoundrels in Hyannis.

This article in the Cape Cod Times cracks me up. I know where it emanated and it astonishes me that it made it to the paper. Then again, my case of salmonella last summer made the front page of the CCT, so nothing is beneath its notice.

Would you buy a device between a laptop and smartphone? « GartenBlog

Would you buy a device between a laptop and smartphone? « GartenBlog.

Michael Gartenberg’s column caught my eye through one of his Tweet’s –   he casts a skeptical eye on the “tweener” space between the smartphone and the laptop (aka The One Pound Wasteland).

I like to demonstrate this tweener concept by taking an ultraportable laptop — say a ThinkPad X200 with a 12″ screen and setting it on the table next to an iPhone or a BlackBerry.  Then in the middle I drop one of two objects — either an 8″ by 5″ Moleskine paper notebook or an airplane ticket — and say: “What could you do with that?”

Devices in the tweener category are too big to hold up to your ear, and too small to do any serious keyboard work. They won’t fit in a pocket and one looks dorkish holding one like a lady purse at the opera. Yet from the UMPC to the Kindle, the form factor lures us in — designers and consumers alike. And never has there been a success until the use-optimized Kindle.

Gartenberg posits that consumers will carry three electronic devices — let’s say a digital camera, cell phone and laptop (I throw in a FlipCam and Kindle) and that trying to breakt triad …. well, let’s go to his bottom line:

“Mobile devices are following two contradictory trajectories. One class is fragmenting in terms of core functions, creating new markets for stand-alone devices such as dedicated cameras and media players. The other, which includes such devices as smartphones and mobile Internet devices, is taking on new features and functions, rivaling stand-alone devices in terms of functionality through convergence. Neither approach is universally correct, and vendors more than ever need to understand the contextual factors that influence consumer device usage. They have to focus on providing the sorts of core features that will lead users to include these devices among the three that they’re willing to carry. Devices that can’t displace one of those three will simply not be purchased.”

I agree with his premise — this is a dismal space where few have succeeded. And the industry is in an interesting state driven by advances in smartphone/handset functionality on the iPhone side, and decreases in laptop pricing from the netbook end.  I think Gartenberg is making the case that netbooks are tweeners. I don’t agree. I think they are Wintel machines that don’t cost much money. A tweener is a netbook like Sony’s $899 P device. The form factor is airplane ticket like, the keyboard is pretty cramped, but the screen height is very crowded in terms of scroll space. Netbooks have been a hot category — driven by a few factors: consumer attitudes towards commoditization, disposability, and their own economic comfort. If I can get a Windows experience on a sub-$400 device that hits the web when I connect to the home WiFi, then game over for many users. Keyboards aren’t super duper. Screens are ultraportable 10″ and under. But netbooks get the job done for a big segment of new laptop owners and the questions I have are this:

Can we go smaller or should we go smaller? Are tweeners just too big for pockets but too small for hands and therefore doomed? Or is the industry thinking about things entirely wrong? Where does pervasive connectivity come in? Where does simply working trump speeds-and-feeds? I never have patched, scanned, or otherwised babied my BlackBerry. So why am I patching, scanning, and babying a netbook running Windows XP?

Gartenberg is right. Either do something really well like a camera or an iPod, or do it all like a notebook. But trying to be all things to all people … no one has nailed it yet.

Old-School Keyboard Makes Comeback Of Sorts : NPR

Driving home and listening to NPR I heard about this company that continues to make IBM’s classic Model M keyboard. The clickity ones that would break your foot if you dropped one.

I think I want this baby — it has a Trackpoint built in. Only short coming — no split key set.

The name of the company is Unicomp. The name of the keyboard is the Endurapro. Dan Lyons at Newsweek was asking me for an external keyboard as good as the one on his ThinkPad. That would be our UltraNav series which has an embedded trackpoint as well. I am on track to go through one new Microsoft Natural Ergonomic per year, but I may suck it up and splurge $100 for the Unicomp.

Winter Beach Walks

Winter is the time of year when my wife and I take back Cape Cod, the only time of year when we can visit the corners of the peninsula that are over-run in the summer months. Traffic is sparse, parking is abundant, and the parking lots at the various town beaches aren’t closed to all but the town’s residents. Spring and fall may find me on the ocean beaches surfcasting for striped bass, but that takes place in the dark, on beaches deserted by everyone but the skunks and foxes rooting in the spindrift for dead fish, and the occasional fellow surf fishermen standing stolidly in the wash, waiting for a tug on the other end of their line. Winter is for beach walking.

The beneficial effects of a stroll on the ocean beach are well known, and have been described as far back as the 1850s by Cape Cod’s first literary tourist, Henry David Thoreau, who wrote in Cape Cod:

“The white breakers were rushing to the shore; the foam ran up the sand, and then ran back as far as we could see (and we imagined how much farther along the Atlantic coast, before and behind us), as regularly, to compare great things with small, as the master of a choir beats time with his white wand; and ever and anon a higher wave caused us hastily to deviate from our path, and we looked back on our tracks filled with water and foam. The breakers looked like droves of a thousand wild horses of Neptune,
rushing to the shore, with their white manes streaming far behind; and when, at length, the sun shone for a moment, their manes were rainbow-tinted. Also, the long kelp-weed was tossed up from time to time, like the tails of sea-cows
sporting in the brine. ”

Thoreau’s beach is just as he left it, but at the same time it is completely changed. The dynamics of littoral drift, storm driven waves, erosion, and the absence of any man-made impediments like groins, jetties or seawalls means the outer Cape is a single uninterrupted strand from the southern tip of Monomoy Island (Malabar, to the first explorers) to Race Point, 40 miles north, in Provincetown. Thanks to the protection of the Cape’s forearm by the massive eminent domain creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore during the Kennedy administration, the outer Cape is essentially frozen in terms of development, with no foolish condos or towers daring the Atlantic to wash them away. This is a place of great endings and beginnings. This is the first place in America to see the new day, but also the end of the road. It’s a wild shore, unfriendly and treacherous, and it has its moods – from clement coconut oil scented afternoons in July to terrifying nighttime fogs filled with apparitions, imagined monsters, and auditory hallucinations than can send a spooked surfcaster like me running for his car.

Beach walking exemplifies the verb “to trudge” and the art is finding that exact latitude of berm where the going is firm and movement isn’t wasted sinking into soft sand. The footing of a winter beach walking, especially on bitterly cold days, can be relieved by a band of frozen sand, but for the most part the firm going can be found either at the edge of the wash (where wet footware is always a risk) to the driest reaches above the high tide line near the base of the bluffs and dunes. The beach is not a place for speed walking, a Harry Trumanish pace of 120 paces per minute. It can aggravate and build some sour psychic resentment as the walker bogs down and mires, perpetually slanted by the angle of the sand and shingle and that makes one wish for a shorter leg on the “up-beach” side, or a longer limb towards the sea. Walking backwards from time to time will even out the discrepancy.

Beachcombing is part of the art of the beachwalk, and provides some diversion from the monotony of the trudging. With the wind in one’s face, stolid trudging follows, a head down posture that makes one feel a little abject and pentinent. Walk on the right strip of sand and keep an eye open for nests of monofilament, and sometimes a fishing lure can be unearthed. I see old men with treasure finders sweeping the sand for change or lost jewelry, but they never seem to shout “Eureka!” For me, filling an empty garbage bag is reward in itself, and I can annoy my wife to no end as I roam in the beachgrass looking for plastic water bottles, Mylar birthday balloons, and shreds of commercial fishing flotsam. Grim must have been the findings in the days when shipwrecks cast unidentifiable bodies onto the sand. The graveyards of the Outer Cape bear anonymous testimony on headstones for “Infant – Girl” and “Sailor – Unknown.” Legend has it that body parts washed ashore during the torpedoing of World War II; femurs and such poked up out of the dunes.

A shipwreck will occasionally surface from the sands, lazarus-like, and draw a crowd as one did last winter at Cahoon’s Hollow in Wellfleet. I tried to visit the ribs, but so did about 400 other rubbernecking victims of winter cabin fever. The British revolutionary warship, the Somerset, has been known to emerge from the sands of Race Point, and the wreck count, on the Peaked Hill Bars is huge – this beach being the place where the Lifesaving Service was formed in the 19th century which lead to the formation of the modern US Coast Guard. Those early surfmen – with last names like Snow, Cahoon, and Mayo – were the consummate beach walkers – patrolling the sands every night with an eye to the outer bars for a ship unlucky enough to ground on the lee shore. Thoreau writes of meeting “wreckers,” the legendary mooncussers who salvaged wrecks for their cargoes and timbers, eking out a marginal life on the margins of the country in the 1850s, the days before the railroad joined the remotest ends of the Cape with the rest of the state.

While I am not a birdwatcher, but the winter duck population is amazing and I understand, from my reading, that the Outer Cape is one of the best places in the world to observe warblers, sea birds, and the occasional “erratic” blown off course from Europe and the Arctic. Winter walks are also good for dogs – as there aren’t any nesting birds in the grass who would be badly disturbed – as long as I remember to bring some plastic bags so I can get really up close and personal with their contributions to the shifting sands and leave nothing behind but footprints (dog poo contributes to nitrogen loading in estuaries and is a bad thing aside from being unneighborly).

Here’s a reading list for the inveterate Cape Cod beach walker. Suggestions, as always, are welcome.

  • The House on Nauset Marsh, I discovered this collection of essays written in the 40s and 50s by Harvard Medical School professor Wyman Richardson and ordered a used copy. The essays were originally published in the Atlantic Monthly and are a great series of glimpses into life in Eastham during the 1930s through the 50s in an old farm house near the present day site of the Nzational Seashore headquarters. Richardson was a duck hunter, bass fisherman, crabber and clammer. So his point of view is a lot like my hunter-gatherer ethos. He also knows his birds, weather, and natural hstory. Reprinted in the 90s by one of my favorite publishers, Countryman in Woodstock, VT.
  • The Outermost House, Harvard graduate Henry Beston, wrote a beloved account of a year living in a dune shack on Coast Guard Beach, the north spit that protects Nauset Marsh. That shack and his account of life on the booming shore is a beloved Cape Cod classic but the shack washed away in the Blizzard of ’78
  • Cape Cod, Henry David Thoreau. The great Transcendalist wrote the classic work of Cape walks, and while not as spiritual as Walden, it is widely regarded as one of his best works. I need to re-read it soon.
  • A Guide to the Common Birds of Cape Cod¸by Peter Trull, is a nice slim volume with good sketches of the birds one is likely to spy on a winter beach walk. I can’t tell a sand piper from a piping plover, a grebe from a loon, but I could if I spent more time with Trull.
  • In His Garden, this is a super creepy true story of a Outer Cape serial killer,  Tony Costa, who killed and buried four women in the dunes of Provincetown, Truro and Wellfleet in the late 1960s. Read this and those woods walks start to take on some very bad vibes.
  • Mourt’s Relation: this is a first-hand account of the Pilgrims’ experiences on the outer Cape in December 1620 when they first made landfall on the backside beach and pulled into Provincetown Harbor. After marching up and down the forearm for a week, stealing the Nauset tribe’s cache of winter corn and robbing the graves, the Pilgrims under military leader Miles Standish fired on the Nauset’s at Eastham’s First Encounter Beach.

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.