sadness

My dog Woodstock is an impeccable judge of character. In our house, we refer to it as passing the Woodstock test.

Woodstock is a field spaniel, and like many in his breed, he is reserved. He's not nasty at all, but if he doesn't know you, he will generally keep his distance.

I brought Woody in to Iris when he was a puppy. It was an overwhelming experience for him. But one person passed the Woodstock test, Cynthia Ice. Cynthia had a soft heart underneath a very dry cynical wit. Woodstock saw straight to the heart, and made a fast friend. Cynthia saw past Woodstock's reserve to the sweet dog he is.

Cynthia died this week, and we will miss her very much. I keep remembering snippets... Her guide dog Cashmere would sometimes wander out of Cynthia's office when she was absorbed in her work, and Cashmere would head straight to my office. I'd spoil Cashmere for a bit, then bring her back to Cynthia quickly, as Cashmere and Cynthia were quite a team. Meeting Cashmere and Cynthia in the hall, rubbing Cashmere's tummy as Cynthia and I chatted. Cashmere died a year or two ago, and I know Cynthia's heart ached for her. She never replaced Cashmere, I think because there could be no replacement.

And there is no replacing Cynthia. She has left this world a better place - she fought for the rights of the visually impaired, and she gently taught all of us to make our software the best it could be. And she has also left this world a darker place for her light no longer being with us. Cynthia, it was an honor to know you, and heaven is a brighter place today.

bookmark migration

In my Lotusphere presentation, there was a slide that had the phrase "bye-bye bookmarks" on it. I meant that pretty literally and have not as yet scheduled anything into the plan to actually migrate them, thinking that the new Eclipse working set ways of arranging design databases would lead people to rethink their bookmark structure anyway. And, in full disclosure, we have a lot of things to do, and I'm not sure this fits anyway!

But I have heard some internal users report that they expected their bookmarks to be migrated. It would be "just code" to do it, but is it important enough to do? Or would you be seizing the opportunity to rearrange your databases anyway? Thanks again :-)

Create/Design/Form/Outline/etc

One of the more common Designer actions, certainly. But we're encountering some challenges in making it work consistently from the client. So the question is, is this used often enough from the *client* that it is worth putting the effort into fixing, or should we just pull the menu from the client? I must admit I am leaning towards the latter... We'll still have View/Design to open up a specific db in Designer, so you can move from the client to the Designer in context... But you would then need to choose to create the form or outline or whatever once you were actually in the Designer. Would this be such a big move backwards in user interface we shouldn't even consider it? Or is this a rarely used convenience feature we can live without?

thanks!

it worked!

And I ended up settling on www.mvgirl.net, it's shorter... Thanks to all for the help. I think in the end, it actually was set up correctly before, I just never realized it as I expected that the cname record would make mvgirl.net go to google until I took the final step of connecting it to the blog. Another proof that user expectations can create an odd mix with software developer's expectations....

But www.mvgirl.net is now alive! And mvgirl.blogspot.com nicely redirects to it :-)