Author: David Churbuck

Cape Codder with an itch to write

Why blog on a train?

Because with WAN EVDO you can.

I was just spared having to present a weekly review via cellphone and thus turn myself into the person everyone hates on the train — self-important/cellphone man — lord knows there is enough of them in the car with me right now. What no one understands when they are babbling in public is, of course, that the other side of the conversation is opaque to the overhearers. I once took the train from Zurich to Geneva and listened to a guy say “D’accord. D’accord.” (french for OK) about a bazillion times.

So much for using travel time to clean out inboxes or read novels. With wireless it just keeps filling up.

The Idiocracy is upon us

Last month I watched Mike Judge’s hysterical view of the future, Idiocracy, which predicts a future where stupidity rises to the top in the evolutionary process as smart people are more selective with their birth rates than stupid ones. Luke Wilson — who improbably is frozen into hibernation, only to thaw out in a garbage avalanche — is the smartest man in the world.

Which isn’t saying much.

Anyway, Luke has to save the world from starvation as the idiots have decided that water is for toilets only and that all crops should be watered with Brawndo, a sports energy drink that flows out of even the water fountains.

Today’s front page of the New York Times gives us the great news from the soda companies that they will introduce “new carbonated drinks that are fortified with vitamins and minerals.”

One exec argued at an industry conference, that “his diet products should be included in the health and wellness category because, with few or no calories, they are a logical answer to expanding waistlines.”

Buzz About Wireless – Sprint launches customer forums

Buzz About Wireless – Welcome

Former colleague points out that Sprint has launched a user community to fight the perception the company doesn’t listen. Interesting format — semi-blog, semi-forum, definite community. Cingular has had a more traditional threaded forum for some time, using users to help users and promoting the more prolific and helpful to the status of “cell tower.”

Interesting developments — part of a trifecta as Mark Hopkins in our proactive support team would put it.

  • Monitoring — the listening post that seeks cries for help and aggravation.
  • Forums — a company hosted facility for users to help themselves and seek guidance from other users … as well as company expertise.
  • Blogs — the company’s communication channel for presenting its story, but also permitting customers to freely comment.

Tristan at Sprint writes in the welcome post at Buzz About Wireless:

“I have been with Sprint Nextel for almost three years. In that time I have learned a lot, both directly and anecdotally, about what our customers think of us via other boards, in our retail stores, reading emails, the list is pretty long…not all the stories are good.

Here are some of the weaknesses I have heard from you:

• We don’t listen.
• We have lost the human side.
• We haven’t really helped you.

To prove we are listening we have taken on launching this community to open an honest dialogue about wireless technology and service. I believe, along with many other folks here at Sprint, this community will be an excellent place to start having conversations that are meaningful to you and us.”

Ed Foster’s Gripelog || Lenovo, CDW Get Kudos From Readers

Ed Foster’s Gripelog || Lenovo, CDW Get Kudos From Readers

“What surprised me most about Lenovo was the suggestion by many that things have actually gotten better since the China-based company took over IBM’s PC business. “I have never seen a company stand by its warranties as well as Lenovo,” wrote one reader.”

When you’re on the front lines and hanging out in the open with your cell phone number and personal email available for unhappy customers to call — and they do call — it’s easy to lose sight of the good side of caring about customer service and product quality. Every now and then something great gets said, and that makes it all worth while.

DST? WTF? Change your fricking clock

I am amazed at the mounting hysteria among IT people about the upcoming clock change on March 11. Thanks to a congressional act, we’re getting rid of daylight savings time three weeks early this year, and I for one, am glad for it.

But … you’d think Y2K was coming back to haunt us for all the noise being expended talking about it. So Windows 2000 users won’t get an automatic update … um, probably Microsoft Me and Bob users won’t either. Will planes crash, power plants go dark, and cats start dating dogs? Yeah. Just like they did in 2000, when everyone toasted the New Year expecting looting to break out by dawn.
Here’s one example from ZDNET:

“Some say those companies that don’t pay full attention to the issue are in for a rude awakening.

“We’ve been aware of the DST changes since late last year. But the tools and patches keep changing, or weren’t available, which made it difficult to create a solid plan,” said Warren Byle, a systems engineer at an insurance company. “This change might go smoothly for those who are prepared, but I think it will be the ‘Y2K that wasn’t’ for the rest.”

The move could impact time-sensitive applications other than calendaring, such as those that process sales orders or keep track of time cards. Gartner, for example, says the bug could lead to incorrect arrival and departure times in the travel industry and result in errors in bank transactions, causing late payments. In addition, trading applications might execute purchases and sales at the wrong time, and cell phone-billing software could charge peak rates at off-peak hours.”

I have a solution. It’s called changing the clock. You know the drill. Go to the clock and spin the hands forward an hour? Do the digital equivalent on your desktop and be done with it. And sure, any IT person who doesn’t reset the server clock should get spanked.

A rift in West Bay – Oyster Bags

A rift in West Bay (March 5, 2007)

“Strung out across the water at high tide was a half-acre of what looked like thousands of black floating purses, each almost 4 feet long. Filled with oysters, the bags were laid out in a grid held together with 5,000 feet of plastic line and 400 feet of chain. The bags were tethered to the ocean floor by eight anchors.”

Cape Cod Times today has a story about angry waterfront property owners in Osterville looking to ban floating bags in West Bay put there by a local aquaculturist. The guy who put the bags out claims they have been used for a “forty years” in the Three Bays area, but I’ve never seen them. The Cotuit Oyster Company has grants in Cotuit Bay, and in the area known as the Narrows, but I’ve never seen them use the bags in the past. Time was the only evidence there was an oyster bed was a black and white stick in the water, and years ago, a tree branch stuck in the mud.

Aquaculture is a growing business on the Cape. A buddy has a quahog grant outside of the harbor on the SW side of Dead Neck, but oysters do better inside where the salinity is lower due to the fresh water springs and rivers running into the bay system.

Here is the Three Bays Preservation report, or rather point of view to the town opposing the bags.

update: a reader sent a link to the Friends of West Bay’s website. It has an amazing photo, scraped here.

Farch reconsidered

Another sunny Sunday and taxes can wait another weekend, so Daphne and I climbed into the car, plugged in the GPS, and headed to Moby Dick country — the South Coast from Rhode Island to Cape Cod. This was a backyard adventure, the kind I have been meaning to do for … oh … 48 years, and having done it wondered why I haven’t done it sooner. One answer is the GPS. (thank you Uncle Fester!) It would have been nearly impossible to poke around the shore without it.We drove down 195 past the exits with names of town we had never visited, at least not in any sort of detail, and made our start in Rhode Island at Little Compton, a seaside village on Sakonnet Point that is full of saltwater farms with expansive views down open fields lined with miles of stone walls over saltmarshes to Block Island Sound.

We poked around, then drove back east through villages like Adamsville and Westport, past Horseneck Beach and eventually into Padanarum for an awesome lunch of fish and chips and chowder at the Black Bass Grill. Onwards into New Bedford, walled off from its waterfront by a gigantic levee of orange stone, a hurricane barrier built after the storms of the 30’s and 50s trashed the home port of the Pequod. New Bedford is a sad place, a tattered town, but hope springs eternal and I said to Daphne if I were to ever start an interactive marketing company I’d take a mill with a great water view near the whaling museum and set up shop.

Then across the bridge to the more genteel Fairhaven, homeport of Captain Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail alone around the world. We poked coastward to West Island, driving over causeways dividing Buzzards Bay from the inshore marshes, snapping pictures as the skies cleared and flooded the Farch skies with a tease of spring. (One more week to daylight standard time!)

Through Mattapoissett, the port where my great-great grandfather’s whaling ship, the Massachusetts was built, making a note to return to pick the brains of the historical society in the center of the village. And after lingering for the sunset over Mattapoissett harbor, returned to Cotuit for dinner and the end of the weekend. A very cool day, enabled by a GPS, no agenda, and a lot of lazy curiosity.

Chief Digital Officer

David Berney at Avenue A/Razorfish came up with that title yesterday. I think I like it. Not sure what it means, but it makes sense that most e-commerce or media companies need it.

NBC Universal and MTV both have execs holding that title.

Farch

Tony Perkins at the Red Herring Magazine first came up with the merger of February and March in the late 90s when the magazine slipped on shipment and had to combine two months into one. So he took two crummy months and turned them into one uber crummy month: Farch.

While some may look at this portmanteau word as a mere combination of February and March, I prefer to refer to it etymologically as “F%^&*#g March” — the longest month of the year and the worst stretch in the calendar, the low point of New England. Looking out a window on a rainy day on Cape Cod in Farch is like looking out at a black and white movie, shot in Scandinavia by a manic-depressive director considering suicide. There’s no snow to make it a fluffy Currier & Ives landscape, just dead grass and piles of dog excrement moldering in the drizzle. There is no color at all. Nothing. Utterly monochromatic. Grim old people trudge the sidewalks. The sky looks like a bruised sweatshirt.
John Malone — the man of the cable industry, dealmaker extraordinaire, and one of my heroes — once said of the corporate scandals of 2000-2002 that financial malfeasance was like dog shit in the back yard. It’s always there under the snow, but come March it starts to surface.

But I digress. If you consider the nadir of Farch, when one’s notion of a good weekend is tax prep, then it’s easy to understand why New England is experiencing a negative trend in population and why places like Fall River and Fitchburg look like sets from Dawn of the Dead. That said, the sun is shining today, taxes can wait, and I intend to get on the ergometer, row a few thousand meters, take the dogs for a beach walk, and prepare myself for a month of solid travel capped with an April trip to Beijing, my second China trip in a year. That is something to look forward to.