And in the mean time, WordPress reminds me that I’ve been away from my own blog too long.  Long enough to have forgotten how to use it.

So here’s to two immediate goals for this year: read more and blog again.

Happy New Year, everyone!!!

If I were to write a product review of Lion, as a user, I would give it a thumbs-down. It feels like a very raw attempt at bridging the gap between the mobile and the desktop computing paradigms. Apple promised to bring all the best of iOS to my laptop and it didn’t work. I don’t have an iPad or an iPhone so I’m not used to some of its concepts. And when translated to my MBP, they just don’t feel natural. The full screen experience of Mail, the Mission Control, the “natural” scrolling and the multitude of new gestures just don’t translate well to the desktop world. I’m slowly getting used to some of these things, but the reason behind them still escapes me. The concept of the Launchpad sounded nice in Apple’s marketing, but is pretty useless in real life. I launch my apps from the Spotlight search, not from a desktop icon.

Overall, while touted as a major release of the OS, Lion feels like nothing more than a point release with a bunch of UI “enhancements” that I could do without. It reminds one of Windows Vista. To paraphrase one MS fanboy’s statement about Vista, Lion is not bad enough not to upgrade. Unfortunately, it is also not good enough to upgrade. If going back to Snow Leopard did not involve reformatting your drive, I would do it.

Overall, the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2011 includes over 35 sessions and workshops covering topics including application development, system administration, best practices, and social business.

Benefits of MWLUG 2011

MWLUG 2011 provides you as an IBM Lotus professional many benefits including:

• Over 35 sessions and workshops
• Breakfast and lunch for two days
• 50% off one IBM Certification Test
• Networking with other Midwest IBM Professionals
• Wednesday evening reception
• Thursday networking and fun event
• Access to experts of IBM solutions
• Free XPages workshop

MWLUG 2011 Registration

Registration for MWLUG 2011 is now open. Registration is $35 that will be donated to your favorite Lotus user group.

To register go to: http://www.mwlug.com/mwlug/mwlug2011.nsf/uxpages/conference.uxp?openDocument&tab=tab1

About MWLUG 2011

To learn more about MWLUG 2011 go to: http://www.mwlug.com

Saturday night, he, I and one other neighbor sat outside into the wee hours hearing him tell the story of what went down on that flight.  It was a pretty disconcerting story.  I can’t even begin to imagine what the passengers on that flight went through, the thoughts and feelings that went through their minds.

I obviously don’t know the reasons behind the unruly behavior of this young man, what made him act the way he did, what made him decide to get physical with a flight attendant.  There are plenty of rumors flying around the web.  I just know that I’m very impressed with the way my friend managed the situation. Proud to know him.

Well, let me rephrase that.  If you’re a Kindle user like me and only ever get books that are available on Amazon, you probably don’t have much for Calibre.  Same goes for the dedicated Nook users.

But if you get your books from a variety of sources, then Calibre is an awesome piece of software.

First of all, it gives you a nice visual tool to manage all of your e-books: the ones saved on your computer and the ones already on your reader device.

Secondly, and most importantly, it can convert e-books from any format to any format.  When you install Calibre, it asks you to specify which device you have.  If you said ‘Kindle, then if your local library has e-books available for download but they all are in EPUB format, which your Kindle doesn’t read, then Calibre will effortlessly convert them to the Kindle’s mobi format, including all of the features you’ve learned to love on Kindle.  If you download books from a variety of sites, even, God forbid, some Russian and Ukranian sites, which will go unmentioned, Calibre will just as effortlessly convert them from the FB2 format to mobi.

Lastly, it has a nice book search feature.  Calibre will search a variety of popular e-book sites to find a book of your choice.  If, for example, B&N has a book cheaper than Amazon, I can now buy it in the Nook format and convert to Kindle.  I just wish I could edit the list of sites it uses.  Project Gutenberg, for one, is not included.

I can’t believe that it took me this long to discover this great program.  I am now reading some Russian books that I’ve wanted to read for quite some time, but never got around to acquiring them.

Happy readings.

Do it in 33 minutes and 33 seconds.  You can focus on 1 thing for 33 minutes and 33 seconds, right?  It is hard to believe but even I can.

Get yourself a timer or a stopwatch.  Any old timer will do.  I use Aptimac Timer on my Mac.

Set your butt in a chair.  Open Word, Keynote or whatever program you will use to write whatever it is you have to write.  If you’re a coffee or tea drinker, get a mug of your favorite hot beverage.

Set the timer to 33 minutes and 33 seconds.  Hit the start button.

For the next 33 minutes and 33 seconds you can do one of the following things:

1. Drink your beverage
2. Stare into space (wall, window, blank sheet in MS Word)
3. Do absolutely nothing
4. Or…  you could actually write.

For those 33 minutes you can’t leave, you can’t check email or do anything else other than the 4 things above.  Doing nothing and staring into space eventually gets awfully boring and, slowly at first, then with more gusto as ideas take shape, you start to write — to do the actual task you set off to do.

When the 33.33 minutes are up, stop.  Stop in the middle of a sentence, if it happens.  Give yourself a break of 10 minutes, during which you can do anything else, even tweet.

When the 10 minutes are up, it is back to the 33.33 routine.

It works.  That’s how I got myself to write this very post.  (Hey, what can I say?  I’m a slow writer.)

And, of course, like most of my productivity tips, the idea is not mine.  The credit for the system goes to the legendary copywriter Eugene Schwartz.

Earlier this year, when Mozy decided to raise its prices, I switched to Safecopy backup.  In addition to lower price, Safecopy runs much better on my laptop not draining the battery with constant excessive CPU usage; and it backs up networked drives, too.

After few months of using Safecopy, I suddenly went over the 200GB space allocation.  I accidentally included some extra folders from my networked drive, which took me over the limit.  Unfortunately, Safecopy has a problem when deleting backed up files from networked folders: they simply don’t delete.  I worked with a support engineer, Kevin Woods, who readily admitted that this is a problem that they are working on.

So to help me out, Safecopy increased my space allocation to 300 GB.  For free!

Thank you, Safecopy, for not telling me to delete extra files one-by-one or to pay for the extra storage.

You have a very happy customer.

I came home on Wednesday to find a trail of liquid leading down the street and into my driveway, culminating in a big puddle of pink, Pepto-Bismolish looking liquid under the truck.  The coolant reservoir was completely empty, the radiator was full and the transmission dip stick was covered in the same pink substance.  I had the truck towed to the local Toyota dealer and sat with my fingers crossed, praying for its safe return.  Alas, it was not to be.

Turns out that Toyota trucks equipped with a towing package have 2 radiators: one for the engine and one, at the bottom of the engine compartment, for the transmission.  Well, something or other rusted away down there.  The radiator leaked coolant into the transmission, mixing coolant and transmission fluids, creating the said pink substance and, eventually, spilling it all out onto my garage floor.

$3K in repairs for a new transmission, new radiator and everything else that’s involved in installing and connecting them was just too much to spend on an 11-year-old truck.  So I had little choice but to leave my baby in the dealer’s parking lot and apply the trade-in amount towards a new Toyota Highlander.

This 4Runner was the vehicle I’ve always wanted.  It was a truck I loved driving even after 11 years.  I bought it when I probably couldn’t truly afford it but never regretted it.  And after all these years I don’t even have a picture of it to remember it by.

Rest in peace, my baby.  You were a great truck and a friend.

Before I tell you how absolutely awesome this book is, I have to get something off my chest.  The word “Classic” in the title is the absolute key word here.  Mr. Ellis starts off the book by saying that everything here was written for and tested with Domino Designer 8.0.  Upon reading that sentence I just had to go back to the very first page to check the publication date: someone is playing a trick on me.  Alas, no tricks.  The book was indeed published in March of 2011.

The book also stays away, far away, from anything related to XPages and says so right off bat.  But it is about classic development after all.

Once you get over those two facts, the book is actually very good.

I was afraid that it would stick to the trivial topics of web enabling Domino applications and using framesets and tables to layout an application.   Of course, you can’t talk about web development without explaining the basics of including HTML in a Notes form.   And the book certainly does mention framesets and tables.  However, it quickly moves to more advanced techniques of using DIV tags and CSS to effectively build a modern-looking web application.  And for Notes developers who are not faint of heart, there are even sections devoted to advanced JavaScript and AJAX calls to boost performance.

If you are an advanced Domino developer building web applications every day, this book may not be for you.  But if you are a Notes developer who is making a transition to the web and want to know how to web enable your awesome Notes apps without looking like they were built by 5th-grader in 1999, get a copy of the book.  You’ll be hard pressed to find a better single source collection of Domino web development tricks.