Posting a link to this is probably one. 50 signs you’re a blogaholic.

Last week I attended a Checkpoint Firewall class (hence the silence here) and really enjoyed it. Being from a smaller company means I get to wear many hats sometimes, and now I’m also a backup firewall administrator. Firewalls and Security are fascinating to me, so it’s a nice skill to pick up.

The funny thing was, in the Checkpoint training materials, the hacker was always shown as the goateed guy with the baseball cap. I guess that’s what they look like. Apparently I’m a hacker.

🙂

Just wanted to let you know that next week’s Collaboration University keynote address by Mike Rhodin will be available LIVE. And live as in video streaming live! Next Monday, at 8:30 AM Central Time, they will be broadcasting the keynote live at:

Okay last week, when Quickr hit, I was thrilled. I wanted to get it up and running as soon as humanly possible. You see, the company I work for is in dire need of teamrooms/document management type software. And we’re really close to just saying screw it and going with Sharepoint.

Yes, you read that right.

You see, Lotus had the promise of nice teamrooms/document management with Workplace Services Express. We all know how well THAT went. Anyway, a year later, and our company is tired of waiting. “Hold on for Quickr” I say, “Let’s give it a chance before we chuck money at Microsoft.” So I’ve been given my chance. Time to install Quickr and dazzle and impress the natives with its brilliance.

So I do the following:

• On a clean machine, install Domino
• Config Domino to our company standards
• Install Quickr (sure installs easy)
• Scratch head

This was due to the fact that the info center about Quickr currently sucks. Bad. I’m brand new to this software, and the docs REALLY don’t help. Doesn’t even tell me if you can use website docs (you can’t) or what the default URL is (/LotusQuickr). I finally figure out the default URL and get to the homepage and try to login. When I do, I get an error. It won’t let me in. I also try to login with the admin username/password that I set up during the install. Also a no-go.

After asking for some help on the forums, I also hit up admin-extraordinaire Chris Miller. Chris helped out a TON, he helped me get my standard settings squared away. And lo-and-behold, he came up with some of the same issues on a default install. So between us we figure out that the admin user has two OU’s in the ACL’s of the databases, but only shows up with ONE OU in the notes.ini. We also find the ACL’s have a super user group created, but that group doesn’t exist in the Domino Directory. So we add that as well. After changing both of those things, both my and Mr. Miller’s Quickr installs start working.

About frickin’ time.

So many thanks to Chris for all his help, and make sure to catch him at Collaboration University next week. It WILL be worth your time! To Lotus, please get some better documentation and fix these bugs pronto!

I was driving down the street the other day when I passed an old closed down indy music store. It was a place I used to LOVE going to. It was packed with CD’s, had really obscure stuff, sold new vinyl releases, the whole shot.

I could literally go into the store and spend hours browsing. I spent a lot of money (and time) there over the years and a realize how much I miss it.

Most of these indy stores have all gone out of business. Even many of the bigger mall music store chains have gone out of business. About the only place you can buy physical music now are the big box retailers. Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart etc. And they only tend to stock the really the popular stuff. Nothing obscure, no back catalog, no deep genre stock, nothing real shocking. So now where the hell am I supposed to go to get excited about buying music?

I know that you are saying the online stores like iTunes and Yahoo Music, and yes, I do like purchasing online, but it’s just not the same. Thumbing through CD’s at your local store just cannot be replicated at the computer. Spending a couple hours searching through racks of music used to be a fun pastime. Grab some CD’s, open one up and listen to it on the car ride home. That got me excited about music, and it was another leisure activity. Now that I don’t have that option, I spend far less money on music. I use a subscription service ( Yahoo Music Unlimited ) and it works well, but the industry is only getting my $16 a month or so. Compare that to the $100 a month they used to get.

I can’t imagine that I’m the only one who feels this way, or the only one whose purchasing habits have changed so dramatically. It’s just a shame to me that there’s not a similar experience that the younger generation could have. Who knows, maybe someday music stores will sprout up again with interactive searching kiosks, listening stations, and the ability to buy the digital tracks you want delivered right there on the spot to a burned DVD or something. It could happen, but I’m not holding my breath.

Now I just shake my head whenever the music industry claims that the entire downturn is due to piracy. There are a lot of reasons. The death of the indy music store is one of them.

I’m happy that Quickr is being released, but could IBM have picked a worse day to do so? Seems to me that there’s something else launching on June 29th. I’m just not sure what it is… hmmmm…

🙂

After living exclusively in the Notes 8 Beta for the last couple of months I wrote about the new client in my latest story for Intranet Journal, “My Life with the Dolled Up Lotus Notes 8 Beta.”

Notes used to be your smart, albeit ugly, date. Microsoft Outlook always looked better on your arm while hitting the club, and while Outlook was pretty, she wasn’t relatively deep (not to mention her penchant for viruses.) On the other hand, Notes was the smart, reliable girl you could marry, but were embarrassed to tell your friends about.

Enjoy!

Okay, I LOVED the series ending of the Sopranos. Ending that way was brilliant in my opinion. Initially I figured that Tony’s life just went on, but after this analysis I’m convinced that Tony got whacked. Read it and see if you’re convinced.

Well, after a month with my MacBook Pro, I have to say that I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Windows full time. I’ve become part of the cult, the chosen, the blessed. That doesn’t mean I’m completely abandoning Windows, it just means that Windows may only live on servers and virtual machines for me from now on.

I had been wanting to make the leap for awhile, and now that I have, I find that there’s really nothing on Windows that I can’t live without. There are two pieces of software that I don’t have any immediate alternative for. Domino Designer and Yahoo Music Unlimited. Obviously, DomDesigner is coming along on Eclipse, which means that eventually I might actually see it native on the Mac too. Yahoo Music Engine (with it’s protected subscription-based music server) will never go Mac, and for some reason I don’t see Mr. Jobs doing subscription music in iTunes. ‘Tis okay, I’ll always be running a Domino server on my network on Windows, so I can run the music software there.

Right now I do have Parallels up all the time, simply because I’ve been using the Notes 8 Beta exclusively for the past couple months, and as we all know, the Mac versions of Notes stuff lag behind by about six months or so. But, if I wanted to use 7.0.2 of Notes, I could pretty much stay all Mac, all the time.

Macs aren’t perfect, I do get the rainbow beachball of death unexpectedly at times, but compared to Windows this this is pretty crash free.

My mother-in-law has Vista on a pretty beefy laptop and it has way more problems than I’ve encountered here. And other than the pretty graphics, I don’t know what benefit you really get with Vista. At least until DirectX 10 games are out in full force. But, I’ve been doing more of my gaming on the XBox 360 lately anyway, so it’s a not a huge deal. Even if it was, there’s always Boot Camp.

I’ll probably go into more detail in future posts, but for now, just know that I “switched” from Windows to Mac, didn’t miss a beat, and never looked back. I imagine that if you read this blog, you could have very similar results.