Author: David Churbuck

Cape Codder with an itch to write

Clamming Strategies

Today was an extreme tide — a spring tide I believe — so there was but one thing to do and that was clam.

March clamming is clean clamming — the water is clear, the nitrogen levels are low, the danger from red tide, fecal coliform, hepatitis, vibro and any other alimentary tract threatening clam induced illness is next to nil. It is also open clamming, meaning the department of natural resources hasn’t closed the back waters yet and its open season until May 1 for those spots that are off limits in the summer.

The old saw about only eating clams in a month with an “R” in it, is pretty much a good rule of thumb. I’ll clam into June, but July and August, even September clams … I pass.

This isn’t because of any recent threat to the clams, or any degradation in water quality, it’s just warm water clams don’t seem to taste as well as the cold water kind.

With new clam licenses in hand, and my son Fisher in his first pair of waders, we launched the boat and put-putted across the harbor to the island where we saw a baby harbor seal sunning itself on the beach. Well meaning people sometimes call the dog catcher or the ASPCA to say such beached seals are in distress, but usually they are not, and are just a new thing for people to deal with since they had all but vanished from our beaches before the passage of the marine mammal protection act. Trying to “help” a beached baby seal is evidently a very dumb idea, as the suckers are complete ingrates and will try to take your fingers off.

We dug our limit in quahogs (pronounced “co-hawgs”) with rakes, then hand dug our limit in steamers (aka, “soft-shelled” clams). Fisher was good with the bull rake, and took a turn with my Ribb rake, the best clam rake on the planet. We focused on cherrystones and littlenecks (referring to the relative size of the quahogs) for eating raw on the half-shell and broiling into Clams Casino. If I had been in a chowder mood then we would have focused on … chowder clams — big quahogs that generally see their shells turned into ashtrays. Extra-large steamers are known as “chokers.”

We then went to the super-secret wild oyster spot. This is a very big deal as oysters are delicacies (Cotuit oysters are world renowned, and indeed, are considered the best there are by true gourmands) and wild oysters, as opposed to farmed ones, are very, very hard to find. But we found them. Lots of them. Getting to them was a challenge as the extra-low tide exposed the extra-treacherous mud. This is Fisher reenacting the quicksand scene from Wages of Fear.

As we left, I had to take a picture of my favorite piece of rich people insanity, the security camera disguised as a bird house..

So … Clams Casino, cherrystones, and oysters on the half-shell tonight. Fried clams tomorrow night after the steamers have had a night to “de-sand” themselves.

The kind of day it has been

5 pm and I notice that my shirt is not only inside out, but on backwards.

This is par for the course. When leaving my first job, I was given clothing as a going away present. I consider a Swingline Stapler to be a perfectly good tool for hemming pants and dealing with dangling blazer linings.

Over-engineered

Dan Goodman at Ogilvy — the interactive guru — made a statement today during a discussion about metrics and optimization that made me stop, think hard, and then ask him to back up.

“Don’t over-engineer things,” he said.

As the interactive marketing guy for the company that makes the best-engineered PCs, who is often the only non-engineer in most meetings; the guy who only passed algebra II because the teacher was his coach, who sat at a dinner last night in NYC and listened to the inimitable Uncle Fester from this blog’s comments tell my eldest son that his father “was a serious math retard …”

For me to hear an A-team interactive marketing guy tell me not to be over-weening in online advertising, behavioral targeting, multivariate testing, A|B analysis, demographic segmentation, continuous improvement`cycles, dashboards, NPV, E-to-R ….

Well, it made my day to hear someone throw a bucket of cold water and basically say, there’s so far you can take it.
The maddening thing about web marketing is it represents a collision of the logical precision of information technology with the creative chaos of media. Maddening because in theory one should be able to measure and improve with a high degree of precision. But in practice no one has enough, time, money or talent to get to the Valhalla vision that in theory, you know is possible.

As T.S. Eliot wrote in The Hollow Men:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

That’s what keeps me grinding away in the online medium — the idea, the promise, the illusion that if you do it all just right, it will all start to swing along on its own. Integrating metrics with a content management system and an ad server, building a neat little closed system that sort of self-optimizes …..

The reality is fouled up insertion orders, weird metric tagging, site errors, and that big unknown … user behavior. Yet, I suspect every online operator — from the service providers, the agencies, the publishers, the bloggers, the vloggers, the podcasters — will, if caught in the right optimistic mood, express an idealistic hope that online media is the most perfectable medium ever known.

Association backs floating bags for aquaculture – UPDATE OPINION – The Barnstable Patriot – Cape Cod & Islands

Guest Commentary: Association backs floating bags for aquaculture – UPDATE OPINION – The Barnstable Patriot – Cape Cod & Islands

In the clam department, The Barnstable Patriot has a rebuttal by the president of the Massachusetts Aquaculture Association, Scott Mullin, to Three Bays and the anti-oyster bag forces.

I am trending towards a pro-bag position based on nitrogen reduction. Oysters are excellent de-nitrifiers. I also respect the navigation risk — being an in-shore sculler I stand a higher risk of running into a field of bags than most — but being made aware that there were bag systems used in Cotuit last summer, and not remembering their location, I can’t say they were an issue for me directly. I don’t know. More thought and study required on my part.

“In addition, the nursery systems provide positive ecosystems services in the form of removing nitrogen from the overlying waters. The consumed nitrogen, in the form of phytoplankton, is either incorporated into oyster tissue and harvested or is transitioned to the benthos where it is converted to a form that is unavailable for biological activity, i.e. a non-eutrophic form. In many areas of the country, large public programs, e.g. in Chesapeake Bay, and more locally in Mashpee, are focused on expanding oyster populations to counter the eutrophic conditions resulting from nutrient run-off from land-based sources. In the Three Bays area, local shellfish farmers are taking care of this program for you, at no cost to the public.”

Lenovo goes to the races
http://youtube.com/v/kHrlbiwTVSg
In which the Williams-AT&T Formula One car is mounted by a Red Bull

Me ThinkPad, it’s Sick

Two lines, one red and one blue, run vertically down the middle of the screen. doubtlessly caused by some screen carelessness on my part while travelling.

Then, just now, the active protection sensor just reported a malfunction. I didn’t know how much psychological comfort I received from knowing that feature was protecting my drive until it told me it was not feeling well.

Oh well, off to the service team for a fix. Best notebook I have ever owned — this X60s

Online branding — possible or not?

I am coming to the conclusion that building a brand online — in any interactive medium — by buying awareness, is a fool’s errand. Sure, there are some online only campaigns that have established companies — Vonage is generally cited. The X10 Web Cam pop-under was inescapable … but I am eager to find a brand that primarily built online, or, at the very least, changed itself through an online brand campaign.

I think one can change demand through online buys, but brand is a function of:

  • Citizen marketing: users telling other users whether a product/company is worth doing business with.
  • Search: the game changed with Google when prospective customers can work the consideration process with total recall and accuracy
  • Buzz: whatever buzz is, it seems to be activated online via viral, YouTube is an enabler, but buzz seems to be ephemeral and something you find, not plan.

If I were to invest in brand building online I’d pour my money into the social media side, not impressions.

I like the Sony Noise Cancelling Ads

I think I like these ads (I’m seeing them in airports) because right now, on the train to NYC, Willy Loman is selling routers with “Gee-BIX” in a loud backslapping voice in the seat behind me.

Route 128 Ghosts

Driving around Boston this morning to escape the rush hour I passed the old headquarters for Wang, then the exit for DEC, then past where Data General used to be ….

And I wondered, what happened to the tech sector in Eastern Massachusetts? It’s gone. Poof. Sure, there are some pockets here and there, but the dot.com era seems to have passed the region by (CMGI and Lycos were hot in their day, but aren’t a shadow of their former selves), hardware is long gone, software sort of became irrelevant after IBM did its hostile takeover of Lotus.

Just weird to realize with the exception of EMC, there just isn’t a lot going on in what was one of the richest tech corridors in the country. Old news I know, but still, sort of an indication of why I fly to RTP these day and don’t drive to a marketing gig outside of Boston.