Flight Log: Abbreviated Breakfast Flight

The wife, kids, and myself set out to fly to Janesville, Wisconsin for breakfast this morning. Then we were going to fly to Lake in the Hills to drop the kids with my sister then fly back to LL10 in Naperville. I knew the winds were going to be gusty out of the WNW but all the airports had runways mostly into the wind. I was looking forward to some crosswind practice. A last minute call to flight services revealed an AIRMET for moderate turbulence. I don’t mind the bumps but my wife does.

I decided to go up and head toward Morris airport just to see how it was. It was bumpy with some mild dips down low. It smoothed out around 3000’ MSL. It was still a little much for my wife so we decided to just have breakfast at Morris. It’s about a 10 minute flight from Naperville. The wind was out of 320 at 12 with no gusts reported yet. Morris has a 360 runway so I did a nice slip landing. There were some minor gusts coming in. I taxied up to the restaurant and there were no cars out front. Not good. The restaurant at Morris is closed again. By now the family is starving.

We thought about going to Clow airport since they have a restaurant as well but I didn’t want to try landing on their 50’ wide runway in these winds. I decided to go back to LL10 in Naperville and we would drive to the local IHOP. Back at LL10 I used their 270 grass airstrip. Their is a nature preserve on final with walking paths. I love coming in over people out for a stroll. Landing in the grass was uneventful. I didn’t need that much correction angle.

We stuffed ourselves at IHOP and now my wife is driving the kids to meet my sister. The toughest thing about flying isn’t learning how to fly the airplane, its predicting the weather and making the correct go / no-go decision.

Road to Domino 8.0.1

We started our walk to Domino 8.0.1 last week by upgrading the production Domino directory to the 8.0.1 design. I pushed the new design Thursday evening and after a week not a peep from anyone. Just the way I like it and is generally the norm with a directory update.

You need to be aware of the fix for the Domino 8.0/8.0.1 directory which Andy referred to in his blog. It can be found here. I manually updated the scripts from the technote since I had already built the 8.0.1 template with our minor customizations.

Next up is the Admin server in a couple weeks.

Notice this post says Road to Domino 8.0.1 and not Notes/Domino 8.0.1. Our organization is going down the road of evaluating their e-mail platform. More on that later but we are at least moving ahead with some back-end pieces to be ready for Notes 8 if wiser minds prevail.

ADMIN2008 Recap

I’m a little behind in posting this but here is my recap of the ADMIN2008 conference in Boston. As in past years it was packed with technical information from those that live and breath Notes, Domino, and Sametime. I have never made it to Lotusphere so I can’t compare it to that event. I noticed that Andy Donaldson compared them both and calls ADMIN more of a training event than a conference. I agree with that.

Most of the sessions I attended were with the dynamic trio of Chris, Andy, and Rob (where is Rob’s blog?) doing the ND8 Upgrade sessions. I also attended some Sametime sessions since we are in the pilot phase of rolling out 8.0.x. All these sessions were excellent and loaded with real world information. The presenters are always available (for a short time) after the sessions and in the Ask The Experts time in the evening. They are also open to responding to questions via e-mail after the event which amazes me. I guess the Notes/Domino community is a nice group of people that don’t abuse this generosity.

I also attended Ed Brill’s Birds of a Feather talk on Sending a Message to Management: How to keep Lotus Notes and Domino in your Company. He took some heat from people that are fighting the ‘Let’s move to Outlook for absolutely no business reason’ in their organization. I am in the same situation in our organization and all I can say is promoting Notes 8 from within has probably been the best approach so far. Ed handled the questions as best he could and as he said there is no silver bullet. If business decision makers take a thorough technical look at both platforms the smartest choice is obvious. I have worked with both platforms so I know the capabilities of both. Domino is the only viable platform for any company over 100 employees that deems e-mail as mission critical.

The last session I attended was Jess Stratton’s on Giving Your Users the Complete Notes 8 Upgrade Experience. This was essentially a look at how to promote the upgrade to Notes 8 to end-users. She showed how to communicate the new client to users and get them excited about it. She also included words that should and shouldn’t be used in communication to end-users. It was a good chance to look at the upgrade from a non-technical point of view and put ourselves in the end-users shoes. After all, if the end-users aren’t happy then the Outlook banner starts waving.

I attended this year with 2 other co-workers; another admin and a developer. We arrived on Tuesday and had the day to bum around Boston. It was raining so we didn’t do much walking around. We toured some of the old Boston buildings including the Boston Public Library. We ended the day at a sports bar where they put the Cubs game on for us. Wednesday evening we saw the Red Sox play the Blue Jays and Fenway Park. This was a first for all of us. I’m not a huge baseball fan but I enjoy going to games. The Red Sox won by a run in the bottom of the ninth. Then Thursday evening we hit the local Legal Seafood which has become an annual thing. Maybe we will find a different seafood place next year. We flew back late Friday afternoon and missed most of the earlier flight delays the affected flights to the midwest.

It was another week of getting excited about all the things Notes and Domino has to offer. Now lets upgrade the servers!!!!

PS. I’m trying out MacJournal for this posting so hopefully it posts clean. More on that later.

First PPG flight of 2008

I had my first PPG flight of the season tonight at one of our local fields. It was a short flight but worth it. The winds gave me some trouble and I ended up with a sore back but nothing broken. I'm ready for another season of flying, fly-ins and camaraderie.

If you want to read all the gory details you can here at our local PPG group list. Please ignore all the bickering that has been going on in the other posts on that list. We have some strong willed pilots.

If you are wondering what the heck PPG is then you kind find out here.

Twitter Two Dollar House Challenge

Evan Courtney is someone I have been following on Twitter. He and his wife are in the process of making an offer on a new house and only $5,000 separates them from their first home. He decided put a call out to all his Twitter followers for a $2 donation. I thought this was a creative way to reach a large audience (I think he has something like 2500 followers) and it's a relatively small donation for each individual. So, if you would like to help a couple get into their first home out of the kindness of your heart you can do so by clicking the image. You can check out his blog here.

Where did the OK button go?

I continued the progression into Apple land. First came the 2nd gen iPod Nano for my wife, then the 3rd gen iPod Nano for me, then the Apple TV, and now this past week, a MacBook Pro. This is a life long Windows users first impressions of using a Mac.

I can sum it up in three words; easy, pretty, and just works (ok, four words). I have been bombarded by coworkers who use Macs for some time so when I decided it was time for a new laptop I was ready to try it. Our current laptop is a Compaq 15.4" that weighs 8 lbs and was never meant to be a 'portable' computer. Just one to use around the house. I wanted one that was more portable and the Macs fit that bill.

It isn't that a Mac can do anything more than a PC can but it does everything better and more eloquently. Apple has thought of the little things from the magnetic power connecter, illuminated keyboard (on the pro), built in camera that works out of the box, and simple clean design. PC makers try to tack on more features to their laptops often making them confusing. Apple adds more features without losing the simplicity. They actually put thought into the design.

Operating within the OS does take some change of mindset from the Windows world. Like the concept of installing apps is in most cases as easy as dragging an icon to the applications folder. Clicking on the X doesn't necessarily close an application so you get familiar with the Apple - Q key combo to close an app. Although leaving an app running in the background isn't necessarily a bad thing in OS X. The preference dialogs don't have OK, Cancel, or Apply buttons. You just set and forget. This is all part of the simple elegant design.

It still has it's faults like everything else. I installed a 3rd party desktop widget which caused some slow return from sleep issues. I have the issue where a noise is emitted through the audio out port when the laptop is connected to the power supply and no audio is playing. I believe this is due to some power saving feature where the line amp is turned off and lets some noise in from the power supply. Once you play audio the noise goes away. Not a big deal but I have started using the MacBook to play pre-service music at church through the sound board. I just have to remember to mute the channel when I'm not playing anything.

There is no right mouse button on the laptop but I got used to putting 2 fingers on the trackpad and clicking the button to bring up right-click menus. There is no separate Backspace and Delete key. There is one Delete key which actually functions as a backspace key. Not a big deal for me but I know there are people that hate it. There is no Insert key which I have found distracting. I use Lotus Notes and the Insert key toggles the message read and unread indicator. I use this quite a bit. There is probably some other key combo to emulate this. 

I'm avoiding installing XP in a partition because I want to maximize OS X. I can run most programs I use on OS X including Lotus Notes and if I need a Windows OS I have RDC installed so I can just remote to another machine. I'm not planning on transitioning my photo and video editing to the MacBook. I use Adobe products which run on OS X but I would rather wait for an iMac to do that stuff rather than do it on a laptop. I will take the MacBook on vacations though as a temporary computing platform for photos and video. Flickr also has an uploader app for OS X.

Anyway, these are my initial impressions. I can seen Macs taking over our house in the not so distant future. I just have to convince my wife now. That shouldn't be too hard if I can stop using it long enough for her to try it. :)

How I got started with Lotus Notes

Here is the story of a man named Kevin and his journey down the IT road which led to Lotus Notes. I started work with a small technology company created by a couple of ex-IBMers while I was in college. They specialized in providing services for IBM's Advanced Function Printing products as well as some Sun Solaris services. I started out turning paper forms into electronic forms to be used with AFP and IBM high speed laser printers. I then became a system integrator for the IBM PSF2 product running on OS/2. This product tied the PC printing world with the Mainframe and AS/400 printing world so I was exposed to many different systems. Then I became the in-house system administrator managing all the IT resources; servers, network, workstations, and printers. This included getting to learn the following OS's; OS/2, Windows, OS/400, VM, AIX, and Solaris.

One day a manager handed me a yellow box that said Lotus Notes Release 3. He asked me to get it installed and see if we can use it. Just as Ed mentioned I too struggled with getting my head wrapped around Notes PKI. I installed it on an OS/2 server and then gave everyone the Notes client. It was an instant hit. I then setup our RS6000 system to be an SMTP gateway for Internet mail. Then we opened another office in Florida so a Notes server was setup there with modem replication to the first Notes server.

I left that company in 1997 and went to work for a consulting company. My first assignment was with a global company running Notes on a large scale. I went from a company using 2 Notes servers to a company using 50+ Notes servers. This is where I really learned the power of Notes and how to configure it properly. I also received my first Notes certification on Release 4 while I was at this client and have maintained it with each release since. I spent time with other clients during my 7 years at this consulting firm mainly doing audits and fill in system admin duties. Then the consulting firm turned more and more Microsoft centric and the Notes/Domino assignments started to dwindle. I became certified in Exchange but couldn't understand why any organization that deemed e-mail as mission critical could use this product. Not after knowing the scalability and redundancy available with Notes and Domino. I decided to find another job where I could work full time with Domino and didn't require the travel that the consultant roles were.

That leads me to my current position with a global law firm using Notes and Domino as it's mission critical e-mail platform. It still has the variety that I liked with consulting but with a steady location. We run Domino on Windows, i5/OS (oops, now it's just i), and SuSE Linux. We have server clusters across separate physical sites which gives us excellent uptime and I believe a competitive advantage.

So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. As long as I'm in the IT field I believe I will be working with Notes and Domino. As everyone should know by now it isn't going away.