Just a brief addendum to my thoughts on Lotusphere 2010...

Last year I estimated that if I leave out the pure travel days but do count any of the Saturdays before or Fridays after Lotusphere on which I had actually scheduled pre/post conference business events, then the OGS of Lotusphere 2009 was the 95th day that I had spent "at Lotusphere". That's probably plus-or-minus one, and the actual conference-attending days are only about 85, but I am very confident that this year I crossed the 100 days mark for total time spent in Orlando specifically for Lotusphere. My best estimate is that by Thursday of Lotusphere 2010 the tally was up to 104 days. Many other Lotusphere veterans are probably close to the same mark, and some who travel much longer distances to get to Orlando than I do could probably add their travel days to the total and get closer to 120 days of their lives that have been devoted to Lotusphere. It's not that I think that this is impressive in any real way to other people, but I do find it pretty amazing just for myself. If I add in some Lotus and Advisor DevCons, some of The View's Admin conferences, one user group meeting and several Penumbra Group meetings, it's clearly somewhere between 3 and 4 months of my life that have been spent at Lotus-oriented professional gatherings.

I can't think of anything other than family, school, and my various jobs during the course of my career, that has taken up a bigger chunk of my life. I can only think of one thing that I've done in my life that has been this consistent for more years, year after year, doing the same thing at (roughly) the same time of year, never missing the occasion... and that would be my family's annual visit to Cape Cod on Mother's Day weekend, which we started two years before the first Lotusphere so this will be our 20th coming up this May.

And to think, it all started with a bit of serendipity in an interview for a short-term VB contract

Smooth sailing, and full speed ahead.

I really can't summarize the mood of Lotusphere 2010 and my attitude toward Project Vulcan any better than that.

I'll try to explain, but first a digression: I want to say how fitting a nautical metaphor seems to me in this case.

You see, near the climax of one of my favorite sessions of Lotusphere 2010, Ed Brill put up a slide highlighting a truly dedicated Navy man who is also a true-believer Yellow-Bleeding Lotus man. He is an aviator, not a sailor, but he's Navy through-and-through, and he's my former CEO and a friend. I recommended that Ed contact Mike Griffes because he's a great example of a someone who keeps coming back to Lotus technology to solve difficult information sharing and management problems in different arenas, and I thought stories like his would be a great way to add a personal touch to Ed's oral history presentation.

Meet the old blog, same as the new blog. But cleaner in look, and hopefully with more regular posting.

After a long period of blog neglect, I'm going to try to re-energize myself and start blogging regularly again. To help kick things off, I decided to do my first major reviison to the look of my blog in years. I decided to stick with the old blogsphere template (really old!), and just strip out almost all of the distraction. I may decide to upgrade or switch templates eventually, but for now this is the path of least resistance.

If there's anyone still subscribing, I guess I'll find out soon enough. Look for a couple of post-Lotusphere thoughts soon, and even some technical articles. Yes, I can still do them occasionally. I'm sure I can. I just have to do it.

The occasional bit of humor, or commentary on things of interest to me in the world around us, will also occasionally appear.

Wow. Hard to believe it's been two three and a half months since my last post. I've set up a posterous site, which I hope to use for the occasional quickie post. And as I'm doing in this case, I may sometimes expand on the quicke posts with a full-blown blog entry.

With all the ridiculousness that certain   people   conservative commentatators and politicians   pathological Obama-hating paranoid idiots   dangerous, opportunistic media-whores and the people who lose whatever facility they have for rational thought after listening to them   people   are raising about President Obama's upcoming speech to schoolchildren, in spite of the fact that President Reagan and President George H. W. Bush also gave speeches to schoolchildren and the nation somehow survived, I thought I'd ask "The Google" about President George W. Bush's visits to schools. Here's what I came up with:

Bush Visits Md. School to Promote Education Agenda Source: Fox!! Yet somehow in their fair-and-balanced coverage, they didn't include any coverage of the all the warnings from patriotic Americans about the danger of President Bush's diabolical plan to create a private army of students and take over the country! I better hope Bush's brownshirts don't read this post. They'll be after me for sure. Oh, wait... That didn't happen.

Bush Visits High School In Missouri Source: UPI. This was a campaign event! At a High School! Can you believe the brazenness of it? It was a blatantly partisan event, promoting the Cult of Bush, yet somehow nobody thought it at all unusual. No wonder he won re-election in 2004. He brainwashed all the children! OK... He did win, but there's no actual proof that the brainwashed High School vote was the deciding factor.

Kids Meet President (Pres Bush visits Tennessee school) Source: Weekly Reader. I have fond memories of Weekly Reader from when I was young. Look how it has been subvertied! President Bush made a publication that is read by millions of school children into a tool of his evil, anti-American, anti-Freedom agenda. That's why the Constitution was changed and he's still President today! Oh wait.. That didn't happen.

President and Mrs. Bush Visit New Orleans High School, Discuss Gulf Coast Recovery  Source: the White House web site. He undoubtedly discussed all those socialist aid programs for Katrina victims. Oh, Horrors!!! All those government programs that help undeserving people, rob us of our freedom and laid the groundwork for President Bush to subvert democracy and name himself President-for-Life. Oh, wait... That didn't happen.

Bush visits Greensburg, Kan., a town torn and then reborn after 2007 tornado Source: LA Times. The visit included speaking at High School graduation, no doubt to promote yet again his socialist disaster relief programs, which were part of his master plan to steal our freedom. Oh, wait. He kind of did steal our freedom -- mostly with the consent of Congress -- but the CIA, NSA, and Justice Department were his tools for that, not schoolchildren.

Bush Visits Alabama High School Hit By Tornado. Source: Fox. Here, yet again, he was no doubt indoctrinating students about those socialist relief program. It's amazing how nobody noticed the consistency of his pattern until after Bush declared the Democratic Partty a terrorist organization and canceled the 2008 election. Oh, wait. That didn't happen.

President Bush and Laura Bush Visit Ohio Elementary School Source: CNN. Look how early it all started!! He was in schools a month after he took office! By the time 2008 rolled around, the oldest kids in that school were voters! No wonder the Republicans won in a landslide! Oh, wait. They lost. Badly.

Bush Visits N.Y.C. School Source: Education Week. Look how young the kids were when Bush started his indoctrination program! First graders! We're doomed! Doomed, I tell you!

Bush Brings Smiles to Children During Philly School Visit Source: NBC Philadelphia. Look at this! He didn't stop, even after he lost the election! He was still visitng schools in January of 2009!. That was just befrore he declared martial law and canceled Obama's inauguration. Oh, wait... That didn't happen.

President Bush Visit to Bay St. Louis MS Schools. Source: Smugmug. This one is really, really diabolical! The first sentence of the report indicates that the venue is St. Stanislaus College, yet further down it reveals that it is really a High School! This is clear proof of a conspiracy to cover up Bush's nefarious activities long enough for him to finish his brain-washing campaign, dissolve Congress and the Supreme Court, and declare himself Dictator. Oh, wait... That didn't happen.

And last, but not least...The Drama In Sarasota Source: St. Petersburg Times. On the very morning of 9/11/2001, President Bush was pursuing his plan to build his private army of schoolchildren, He was visiting the Emma E. Booker Elementary School on that morning. Does anyone else see the obvious implications? 9-11 was part of Bush's plot to deflect attention from his plan to... Oh, wait... None of it happened. We don't need insane conspiracy theories to explain the fact that Bush was a terrible President who put his administration above the law and eroded the basis of our freedoms in the name of protecting them. And who, by the way, destroyed our economy and substituted partisanship for leadership at every turn, leaving a legacy to President Obama of a broke country fighting two foreign wars, and fighting an ideological war on the home front.

But on second thought, maybe there is a danger. How long has it been since Reagan gave his speech? And how old was Glenn Beck then?

A Little Quiz: Is this code safe?

sub Initialize

  dim s as new NotesSession
  dim db as NotesDatabase
  dim c as NotesDocumentCollection
  dim doc as NotesDocument
  dim item as NotesItem

  set db = s.CurrentDatabase
  set c = db.UnprocessedDocuments
  set doc = c.getFirstDocument

  if doc.HasItem("Body") then
    set item = doc.GetFirstItem("Body")
    if item.Type = HTML then
      Call doc.PutInFolder("HTML Body Messages",true)
    end if
  end if

end Sub

This LotusScript was converted to HTML using the ls2html routine,
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.

You've probably guessed that I wouldn't be asking if this code was safe if the answer was 'Yes', so can you see why the answer is really 'No'?

Almost two months since I've posted anything here. Wow. Longest drought ever, I think.

Today's news about Oracle buying Sun is certainly enough to wake me up. It's a bigger shake-up by far than it would have been if IBM had done it. This will re-shape business relationships throughout the IT industry. Judith Hurwitz has some interesting thoughts/speculations here.

Will Oracle make a move toward the consumer space? Perhaps with an acquisition in mobile technology? Palm?

What will happen to the recent Database Machine hardware alliance with HP? No idea..

Most important to the Lotus community, of course, is that Oracle will own Java. What will they do with it? How will this impact IBM's long-standing committment/devotion to Java? There are certainly other languages out there gaining in popularity on the web, but nothing near as ubiquitous in the industry as Java. With Oracle now in the hardware business for real, and possibly poised to go after a major acquisition in the services space, will IBM draw itself closer to Microsoft?

The next few years will be very, very interesting.

Via Kevin Schofield: a well-written review of salient economic facts from recent US history

No sessions for me today, except the OGS. I spent the rest of the morning and afternoon at the HP booth. I had hoped to get to one session, but because the OGS ran long I couldn't get the things I needed done at the booth soon enough to get away for that time slot. I do hope to get to several sessions on Tuesday. Our engineering team is meeting at 7 AM to finalize our coverage schedule for the day, and hopefully we'll be able to stick to it.

It's really hard for me to judge our booth traffic this year versus last. We had a great turnout last year, but we had a bigger booth, bigger staff, and eye candy with a great big rack. Ummm... wait a minute. Let me rephrase that. Not with a great big rack. The eye candy was a great big rack... of servers! Eye candy for geeks. This year we're right next to Binary Tree. They've got the more traditional type of eye candy, and they just might be diverting a bit of traffic from us. We do have a great give-away this year, though: an HP touch-screen PC is the grand prize that we'll have a drawing for on Wednesday, and we're giving out lots of yellow USB mice, too.