My latest article for Intranet Journal is hot of the presses. Configuring Multiple Websites on Lotus Domino is available now. It’s my attempt to help out the admin newbies out there who didn’t know how to do this. Enjoy!
Aye, it be Talk Like A Pirate Day, and what a day to welcome me matey and co-worker Mike McGarel to the blogosphere. So avast ye scaliwags, visit his blog, or ye will find yerself walkin’ the plank!
This last weekend was a wonderful one for two of my sets of friends. First, on Friday August 24th Zoë Kendall was born to Matt and Jess. Then on Saturday August 25th, Nora Joyce was born to Tim and Jen.
So two girls to two sets of great people in two days! How awesome is that? Trust me Matt and Tim, there is nothing like a Daddy’s Little Girl. Welcome to the club.
Congratulations to everyone, I’m so happy for all of you!
Okay, when this came through my RSS reader, I just had to chuckle. Lem Bingley of IT Week rants on his blog about a reason for hating Notes. That reason? Because the Sent view is called Sent. Yup, he is incensed that the Sent view is called Sent and he sometimes gets it confused with the Send button. He would prefer that it’s called Outbox. [sigh]
Nevermind that pretty much every single email client in existence calls it sent, and that an outbox is a temporary place for things to reside until they actually LEAVE.
He also rips on Notes for not going through Use Case analysis (citing Wikipedia) to see how users really use a product. So I rightfully pointed him to Mary Beth’s blog and suggested he move off of Notes 6.5 and to Notes 8.
🙂
My latest for Intranet Journal covers yesterday’s announcement of the Lotus and Novell collaboration on the Open Client. Even though we all know that Lotus has been good recently at supporting Linux, it’s nice to see them promote something jointly with Novell and make it a little easier to install. Check it out.
Okay, this does not bode well for the cigar industry. The words I don’t like are that this was passed with a “veto-proof margin.” The only hope now is when the Senate and House compromise between the two bills, that they take the less restrictive cigar taxes from the House version. If they don’t, a lot of people will be losing jobs, and some of us might be losing a hobby. Ack.
Yes, you read my headline correctly. The Senate currently has a bill up for debate that would raise money for children’s heathcare by increasing taxes on cigarettes and cigars. Cigars are the highest hit, going from a cap of 5 cents to a cap of 10 dollars. A large premium cigar could cost an additional $10 if this bill is passed. That would be a 20000 percent increase in federal tax on an individual cigar.
Here are some good reaction pieces:
The Cigar Tax: Up In Smoke
Businesses Fret over proposed cigar-tax hike
Cigar Tax: a job killer
The gist of things is that the bill will put cigar makers and cigar shops out of business if passed into law. I enjoy an occasional cigar, but if you tack on an extra $10, I really wouldn’t be able to afford to buy them any more. A friend of mine runs a cigar shop. That’s how he makes his living. The regulars (myself included) are not rich people. We will walk in once in awhile, sit down and enjoy a cigar or two. Once in awhile we might buy a box of 20 for a special occasion, but this tax would pretty much eliminate all of that. The law would also require my friend to pay back taxes on existing stock to ‘true up.’ The amount of money he would have to pay would put him out of business. That’s a husband and wife small business put out of work. Cigar smokers are not all rich people wearing top hats and driving expensive cars. We are regular folks that enjoy a fine smoke once in awhile.
We are already banned from smoking pretty much anywhere. I can basically have a cigar in my yard or at my cigar shop. That’s it. So allow me to do that in peace without EXORBITANT taxes. Now, I’m all for some tax. Feel free to tax me more than a nickel. I agree that cigars are a luxury and should be taxed a bit. But let’s not charge me up to $10 a cigar. There currently is a bill in the House that caps the tax at $1 and doesn’t make shops pay the back taxes. To me that’s fair. It’s going to cost me more, but not make it so I cannot continue my hobby.
Now, either way Bush has said that he will veto the $10 a cigar bill. I think that’s why so many Senators are showing support for the bill. They can claim to support the tax to help children, knowing full well that it won’t get passed into law. Looks good to the voters who aren’t cigar smokers. Never mind that if the bill passed, the cigar industry (in THIS country) would die off and they wouldn’t make any money for the children anyway.
Now I’m not against taxes in general. But I already pay on everything I make and everything I spend. To keep jacking up everything when I’m already taxed to death doesn’t sit well with me. And for those who think it’s a good idea, what happens when they come after your vice? Will you be as gung-ho then?
My guess is no.
Well, I’ve been looking at the recent trend of products such as Twitter and Jaiku and wondering if there is really a good reason to bother. Enter Pownce. Pownce is another one of these ‘what am I doing now’ apps, but I kind of like it so far.
First, you can use their website or a client built on Adobe AIR. Because of that, it’s cross-platform on Mac and Windows (Linux coming soon.) Secondly, it is created by a company that includes Kevin Rose. If you don’t know Kevin, he’s the main guy behind Digg, and was on TechTV and G4 for quite awhile. He’s generally pretty spot on on technology, so if he’s working on something, I take notice.
Now what Pownce does is it allows you to send messages, links, events and files to your friends. They can be private or public, and you can group your friends into different groups. So, I could have a Lotus User group, a Fantasy Football group and a Family group. I could then send messages, or links, or files to everyone in a particular group. Messages can be almost like a mini-blogging concept when a whole post is not needed. Or even a way to let people know where you are.
It’s an interesting concept, but you really need to get a base of the same friends all using it all the time to make it work I think. Right now Pownce is invite only, but I have five invites available. If you want one, leave me a comment with the email to send it to. We’ll see if this thing can really take off.
Well apparently Nathan thinks our songs were not obscure enough. 🙂
So, I started looking for really great opening tracks from artists you may not have heard of. I came up with so many, that I thought I would just list them out for you. I’m sure there are some on this list you know, but hopefully a lot you do not as well.
Punk
Metal
Alternative
Rock
Pop
As for Industrial, and Nathan’s comments about Skinny Puppy. I never really dug them, but if you wanna get into some obscure stuff, I could probably dedicate an entire post to just weird ass industrial
🙂
My latest for Intranet Journal is out now. “Quickr Way to Enhance Your Intranet” examines the features of the recently released Lotus Quickr. Yes I do have it running in my environment, and it does run really well. It’s just the getting it up and running in the first place that can be fun due to the lack of good installation instructions. Anyway, if you were wondering what Quickr was all about, check it out.
Quickr is the evolution of Lotus Quickplace. Quickplace has been around for more than eight years, and has always been a self-service team room and document management system. Quickr one-ups that formula by adding connectors and integration to a variety of software products, as well as adding a Web 2.0 makeover to the presentation. AJAX and brightly colored gradients are prevalent, but they really make this product seem like something fresh, and not a legacy product from 1999.
