First off, I have to say THANKS! to Jess for letting me blog here for a while. I’ve decided to strike out on my own and see if anyone follows along. My new blog is at dmcnally.blogspot.com. I hope you’ll come and check it out - and leave me comments!
Spending so much time with computers, games, dogs, cars, and other non-frilly things leaves me with a girly side that’s nothing short of, well - inept at best.
A girlfriend of mine convinced me to get acrylic nails before Lotusphere, with the argument that they’d look great, and I’d feel great. She was right, of course, but boy did I realize I’m waaaay behind the times in terms of “fanshy girly technology”.
Wine lists I can handle. I can blindy stumble through a sushi menu, and stutter “hamachi, please.” I can even close my eyes and wildly point at the oil change list and still manage to come out OK.
I could have never made it through this list of nail options without my friend there at the time.
Gel, acrylic, tips, fills, french, pink and white, UV gel, polish changes, repairs, ahhh!
As it turns out, my friend told them I needed a “full set”. Which, by the way, was not even listed ON the menu. Apparently, most women just know these things.
Anyway, I entered the salon with cuticles the size of small pebbles, and walked out with no less than ten new little daggers on the ends of my fingers. They looked great. And I did feel great. But, not having to stare at my cuticles anymore left me all sorts of time to do some thinking. These things are weapons! Wolverine’s innards have nothing on these tips.
It baffles the mind. People aren’t allowed on planes with toothpicks, yet I was allowed on with my ten indestructible scythes of doom.
Here’s the real tricky part about these nails. Every two weeks or so, you have to go back to get them worked on. I called my friend back.
“What do I ask for when I go in? I can’t just call and say ‘hello, I’d like some routine maintenance done on my nails’…’can I have the 3,000 tap polish change?’”
When she finally stopped laughing at me, she informed me that I needed a ‘fill’.
As it turns out, I didn’t need to ask for anything. I went in, and showed them my hands. They knew what to do. And now I know for next time.
We all have to start learning somewhere, I suppose. Now, moving onto learning more about my car. If you asked me what a “limited slip differential” was before owning Eloise, I’d have said it was why they never have anything in my size in stock at Victoria’s Secret.
Don here once more. Change control in your application development has become increasingly important over the last couple of years. How good is your system for documenting changes? There are products out there to help manage the process and keep track of which design elements have changed but you can develop a basic system on your own.
In the Lotus Sandbox at developerWorks: Lotus (LDD/Notes.net) you can find the DatabaseDesign class. We used this class as the basis for developing code that compares design elements in two databases to identify differences. The databases can be two replicas of the same database (for example one local and one on the server) or two copies of a database (for example one development and one production). Within the same application, we also used the class to create lists of design items to populate drop down lists in a dialog box; that lets users create their own list of changed design items by choosing from lists.
Unfortunately, at this time I am not able to show you the code we developed, but I thought it was worthwhile to point out that the class is out there (thanks Damien Katz and Andre Guirard) and that it can be helpful in developing a change recording system. Contact me if you run into problems developing your change recorder.
Don here again. This is a story from a while ago but it seemed worthwhile to share as a success. About four years ago, we decided to evaluate Sametime in our environment. We installed the server and rolled out the Connect client to a few people. We also made the web conferencing components available to a larger group of people to test that feature.
When we did our post-trial analysis, we found that we had pretty much paid for the software during the trial. One group of people used it for an online meeting instead of paying for another vendor’s “rented” option. Our team used it to install a piece of software on 15 user machines, saving trips to desktops (including some in remote offices) or time on the phone walking people through the procedures. I know: who visits desktops to install software? But this was four years ago before automated software distribution was implemented in our environment.
To this day, it receives fairly heavy use for scheduled and instant meetings. My team uses it nearly every day to demo applications that are in development, to resolve problems on user machines or provide training at application rollout. We have also been slowly incorporating presence awareness into our applications.
The reach of the product is relatively small within our organization, but the investment continues to pay for itself.
The March issue of LotusUserGroup.org’s Developer Tips newsletter is out, and I am now the proud co-editor along with Tom Duff.
Tom and Libby had asked me about it during Lotusphere, and I am honored to join them.
If there are any developer topics you’d like to hear, please drop me a line.
There must be a lot of Princess Bride fans out there, which is *always* a good thing. I’ve gotten a few emails since it’s been out, and they’ve all said the same thing - “loved the PB quote!”
