positive or negative....

One thing that has always bugged me about Notes is the negative logic. "Hide when"/"Do not maintain unread marks"/etc. In newer properties, I've been making that logic positive, and in a few cases in the application properties editor, I have reversed previously negative logic to be positive. So "Do not maintain unread marks" turns in to "Maintain unread marks."

The problem... Whether or not to update the infobox. In an ideal world, sure (probably). In the beta, you'll see we have not yet changed the infobox, just moved the application properties editor rendition to be positive. Long term, the db infobox will be obsolete, so I am a bit hesitant to put much investment there. But will the inconsistency here be so bad that we really have to change the infobox? Personally I'd rather put the energy elsewhere, but if the new UI differing from the old UI is really going to be an issue, it is certainly possible to align them (though that would ripple through documentation, etc).

Thoughts?

my favorite debugging technique

Over the past few years, I've spent more time debugging Java than C++. I like things about both languages, and I don't really have a strong preference. In general, both languages work, and both languages let me say what I need to say. But when debugging Java, there is one feature from C++ I sorely miss...

Set Next Statement

I can't tell you how many hours that one technique has saved me... Now that I get to debug C++ again, every time I use it (like just a minute ago), I smile.

so says the whippoorwill...

My song for today. He's better. Still in the hospital, but change is in the air!

atonement

if last weekend saw me shirking maternal responsibility, this week saw me swimming in it. One of my boys has been in the hospital since Monday night, and is projected to be there til next Friday. He'll be ok, though the path from here to there is still a bit uncharted, and some paths are easier than others. It's not easy to see your child connected to endless IV lines, and you know life has turned around when you're happy to hear him complain about it.

When the big stuff hits, there's no denying what a mom needs to do....

maternal failure

I'm having one of those "I'm the worst mother in the world" moments. I have six sons. I don't like sports. And that's a really bad combination.

My youngest loves basketball. At least it moves at a faster pace than baseball, which set me to walking laps around whatever field those games were in, as I just couldn't sit and watch a game that went so slowly. So I should be feeling fortunate he has settled on a sport I can almost stand to watch.

Whenever I do watch one of my kids play a sport, my attention stays focused on the game only as long as my child is actually doing something. Not for a moment longer. And, one of the things that makes me a bad mother, sometimes less. I watch the other parents, apparently really into the game, and feel like I must be from another planet.

There's a basketball tournament this weekend we learned about just this Wednesday. Thursday night ferry tickets got moved to Saturday night. Now, oh, the tournament goes to Sunday, too. Rory says he can skip the second day. Even I know he can't.

I really should try to be one of those mothers who cheers loudly from the sidelines. But I'm just not that person! I'm leaving basketball for the guys this weekend. I'm going to the island without them. I hope bad mothers are welcome there.

halloween redux

I got away from my laptop for a bit this afternoon and tried to find the garden. It has gotten way overgrown due to my neglect. I decided to clear a 6 foot patch again.

I was pulling and pulling, making quite a pile of weeds. I got to a strange looking couple of plants. I pulled one, then looked at it carefully... It looked like a squash plant. That's odd, new kind of weed, I guess. OH! That pumpkin from last Halloween that spent the winter in the garden must have had some fertile seeds. The plant in my hand was one of two little pumpkin plants. I replanted it back in the garden next to its sibling - if part of the garden becomes a pumpkin patch, I can live with that. With this kind of start, it will surely be one of the most sincere pumpkin patches around!

single/double click dilemma

Sometimes defaults are really tough to figure out. Right now we're really going back and forth on whether single click should open things in the Designer navigator (as it always used to) or whether double click should open things (as is the default in Eclipse). We do pay attention (post-beta) to the Eclipse default.

People used to Domino Designer want single click. People used to Eclipse want double click. People who started out used to DD and then started using Eclipse (me, for one!) adjusted to the double click. But we've also had people get blocked thinking there's no way to get a list of forms because single click didn't work.

So the question is... Now that we listen to the Eclipse preference, should that Eclipse preference in a Domino Designer install be set to single click to open or double click to open? And remember that this behavior affects *all* perspectives in the Eclipse instance.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

old vs. new

I realized that I keep saying that Designer 8.5 will have no LotusScript editor. When I say that, I am thinking about the brand new LotusScript editor we are building based on the Eclipse framework that has a class browser, etc. In my head, because that isn't ready for 8.5, "it" isn't there.

But I've heard that some take my statement very literally - that they think Designer 8.5 won't have any LotusScript editor at all. What we do have (still) is the old LotusScript editor, while we continue to work on the brandy new one.

In my heart, it's the new one that counts, but that's different from not having any LotusScript support at all, and of course we still support the old one!

Just thought I'd clear that up :-)

twittering about

I've been experimenting with twitter lately (late to the party, but that seems to be my style..) Not sure what I think of it yet, but giving it a try. The one thing I find I do like about it is that it is easy to do. Sometimes the thought of writing a *blog post* is daunting - it feels like a blog post must have some profound meaning, and sometimes deep and meaningful just doesn't fit in the day.

So we will see what twitter brings. On twitter, I'm mvgirl, of course!

in Bremen!

Haven't seen much of it yet, as I just arrived a few hours ago. But I went for a long walk in a park across the street from the hotel, and found a reliable source of diet coke....

It was a pretty easy flight, even my 50 minute connection worked, even though I DID have to go through passport control/security again. Will mostly be preparing for the talk tomorrow, but I hear there's a boat tour tomorrow night that sounds like a neat way to see the city!

quite a day

my head is full this morning. It's beautiful outside, and my list of things to do today is way longer than the day. My thoughts are like a pinball right now, trying to decide which idea to tackle first. Replacing cabinet pulls on the kitchen cabinets, planting gladiola bulbs, preparing a presentation for DNUG (I thought I was done, but have some new ideas!), coding up a feature I've committed to for our next iteration, breakfast, let the dogs out, and back in... So I'm starting with a blog post, which wasn't on the list at all, but so be it.

I fly to Bremen late Tuesday night, arriving Wednesday mid-day. I've never been to Bremen, and I'm looking forward to it - to see the river that leads to the North Sea. I'd love to see the North Sea, but that will have to be another trip - my son graduates from high school on Sunday, and I need to get right back home.

I'm also looking forward to showing all the neat things we actually are doing for Domino Designer. Our team has been working very hard, and there is a LOT to show. I'll post screenshots after the talk :-)

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 :-)

cname records, oh my....

A while ago I grabbed the mvgirl.net domain thinking I'd give this blog its own domain name rather than just be a blogspot prefix. Blogspot has some pretty good instructions on how to send your blog to your domain name, and I figured this would be pretty easy. I did notice that they didn't have instructions for Network Solutions, but I figured it all must be pretty generic.

I am not an expert in cnames and aliases and hosts and all that stuff. Just not enough UI to keep my interest :-) But how hard can it be? Apparently, hard enough.

Armed with the documentation, I went to setup advanced DNS settings for mvgirl.net. It seems I need a CNAME record that sends it to ghs.google.com and then after that works, all I should need to do is a few steps on blogspot.

So I set up blog.mvgirl.net to map to ghs.google.com in their domain management tool. It warned it would take a while to replicate around... A few days later when hitting blog.mvgirl.net still gave an error, I went back and looked.

It was mapped to ghs.google.com. With the period at the end. I edited it to remove the period, and figured I had made a typo. Looked at it again, the period was back.

And I'll admit it, that was months ago. There are too many other things on my plate to spend time on that. But I tried again last weekend. I noticed the UI was different, maybe that bug was fixed. Nope, still there.

Now it might be a bug, and it might just as easily (or more likely) be user error. But at this rate it will be a while before blog.mvgirl.net sees the light of day!

The stove was off...

so we were free to take a walk...

We walked to the lagoon today - a beautiful blue Spring day.  It was too cold for humans to swim, but Wendy and Eve thought the water was just fine...

 

I had wondered where the Cassie had gone - all last summer she was docked with the Grace in Vineyard Haven harbor, but for the past month or so, Grace was docked alone.  Cassie turns out to have been hiding at Sailing Camp Beach!

 

As Wendy and Eve took their swim, a sailing race was beginning.  The season is beginning!

... See my Tabblo>

bug or feature, I can't decide....

Several of the new design elements in 8.5 are variants of file resources. That means that unless I do something, if you open a database with some of these elements created in the 8.5 Designer in the 8.0 Designer, these elements will show up as file resources.

Now from some points of view (including mine on alternate days), this is a bug. And from others, also including mine on alternate days, it's a feature... You can at least look at these elements as text like files in notepad in older versions of Designer.

So should I fix this or celebrate this?

thanks :-)

first light

So yes, I've been quiet on Designer lately. We've been intensely busy transitioning to our proper home in the Notes environment. I must admit, it's pretty! While our initial work has been done on "plain" Eclipse, but we need the Notes framework to have little things like location switching...

We'll be doing further work to customize the look - trying to strike a balance between making it feel like home and exposing the power of Eclipse. I'm proud of what the team's been doing on this - so thought I'd give an early look of its new look, even though it is still evolving :-)

Threads

A peaceful, evening crossing. Dark night on the ocean, empty ferry, quiet night. The ferry is pulling in to the dock at Woods Hole. All relaxed. Then it happens. Did I turn the stove off? I know I did. Yes, I'm sure, really sure. I checked the burners before we left. But did I check the oven?

I remember as I took the last pan of cookies out thinking how on this stove I had to press Cancel...

Steve tells me he's sure it was off.

It's off, I know it. Mostly.

Or maybe I just have to go back to check :-)

Other than that thread running in my head, it was a nice day on the island. Oh it certainly was gray, cold, and windy. But the tulips are coming up in my garden, we got a nice walk before the drizzle started in earnest.

Maybe I do just have to go back to check!

speaking of the world...

do something to make a difference to global warming... Turn out the lights on Saturday 3/29 from 8-9 (your time). Imagine how beautiful the stars could be without extaneous light...

See this link for more info!

and then all was right with the world.....

I am on the island. Evil spirits indeed do not cross the water. My legs are tired from a two mile walk in wind to see the Katama breach. It's almost a year old now, but somehow last summer I never found the time to walk out and see it. It's amazing... The currents are going every which way, and the sand continues to erode - mini cliffs along the water's edge. A seal followed us along the beach, bobbing his head up from the water laughing at the silly humans walking in the wind.

I'm home and it is good.

when you walk through a storm....

I remember my grade school class having to learn that old song for one of spring/fall/concert events... I didn't think it would ever ring so true. It's been running through my head pretty steadily in recent weeks.

Life has been feeling like quite a test. Our peacable canine kingdom has suffered from the decision of two of the spaniels that they really hate each other. They're fighting over dominance - and we are the focus objects. We've had three emergency vet trips, several scheduled trips, and a trip to a behavior specialist... Two of the crew had surgery today - one scheduled for a lump removal (unrelated to the combatants), the other needed emergency repair to the first repair of the fight that happened a week ago. I'll spare any readers the details as it's just been awful, but the canine behavior specialist did have some good suggestions that seem to be working so far.

Long ago (but well after they made me learn that song), I learned that when things get really awful, it's best for me to just keep going no matter what. Maybe that's because when your kids are little, mom has no choice, regardless of what's going on, you just have to keep everything moving forward. Life goes on, nothing is permanent, no point in dwelling on what's going on, just keep moving ahead. Sometimes I think it makes me feel like I'm ignoring the issues, but it beats dwelling and drowning in them.

And code is a great place to hide... Let's just say I've gotten a lot of code written this week!

when a hard disk dies...

it's odd what you want to recover most.

I should have known - I was in denial, for sure. Even during Lotusphere, there were some unexplained events with my laptop, but denial is a very powerful force. Since Lotusphere, with increasing frequency, my laptop would misbehave. An error on boot... Access Connections disappearing from the toolbar... But I circumvented each obstacle... If I can get by it, it can't be that serious, right?

Last Thursday, when IE suddenly refused to connect but Firefox was happy, I decided it was maybe time to heed Steve's advice and do a chkdsk, which of course involves a reboot. Blithely I tried it. Reboot, chkdsk successful, but as it launched, blue screen... Tried it all again, not a fluke. Tried it again in a different T60 shell, same thing. Dead disk.

Then the panic starts.

Source trees - ok on that count, submitted my code a few hours ago. Work mail - all on the server, no problem, can always make another replica. Presentations - ouch. But if I have to write them again, I still could. Personal email - now THAT is only on the machine as I so neatly remove it from the server... That's a real problem. My history is in my email - it's a journal of conversations, and I felt its loss deeply.

I actually felt kind of disoriented. It's probably pretty unhealthy for a laptop to be so much a part of one's comfort zone.

But there is a pretty happy ending. Someone was able to put it in a drive tray, and if you don't try to boot off of it, the data is accessible. My personal email has a new home on my home machine. My presentations have been preserved. A new disk is on its way from the mothership. All's right with the world again.

Album Craze

After seeing Pete's and Brian's album covers, my curiosity got the better of me...

Here's mine!



A Chestnut Mare... Ironic, as that song will always be close to my heart. It is my song, from long ago, but will always make me smile.

Change of Seasons

As soon as I returned from Lotusphere, I felt spring on its way. This contrasts sharply with the reality of New England winter, but I can't help it, I feel it. It didn't make sense to me until I realized why I was feeling the seasons were changing - Lotusphere is a season unto itself. When it's over, it must be the next season, which if you blur it with reality, the season after winter is of course spring....

You can start feeling Lotusphere in the air when the call for abstracts go out, but it doesn't truly arrive until you start getting notices for slides being due... Once the presentations start taking form, the season is in full swing... It continues til you arrive home from Orlando. November, December, January... Lotusphere Season.

And now it is Spring. No matter what the groundhog said today.

a few thousand words....

or a few pictures... I was so happy to be able to show not only the work to put Designer in Eclipse at Lotusphere, but also to reveal the new XPage design element that we've also been working on. In a way similar to how reworking the Designer UI lets us address longstanding issues in the Designer client, the XPage design element gives us the freedom to create a new way to render Domino data in a modern way, taking into account all that we've learned along the way...

And I said pictures not words, so here are some screenshots from Lotusphere for the curious...

bonnie & clyde

Bonnie & Clyde's first picture :-)

at the airport, looking back....

I'm soaking up my last view of leaves on trees, green grass, and warm skies.... The past week at Lotusphere has been amazing - insanely busy every moment, but so nice to get the validation that Designer is on the right path. I've been in Orlando since the 16th, first preparing for the OGS and my Designer session on Monday, then preparing for the app dev mini main, and in between doing my best to answer customer's questions in lab. Missed the Wednesday night party this year in favor of minimain rehearsal and preparation, but I must admit the quiet on the Swan/Dolphin campus on Wednesday evening is a breath in a busy week....

Soon the warmth will be replaced by New England winter, and the peace I feel at the moment will be replaced by the intensity of building the product.

When I was in school, I never would have imagined that I would ever stand up in front of 4000 people and get any words out of my mouth. It's still not easy, as the shy little girl is still inside, but it is getting a little easier...

totally addictively evil

http://www.chainfactor.com/

the cards not written....

I started my Christmas cards this morning. Very late, I know, but got a good start.

I go through my address book, writing out the cards pretty much alphabetically (somehow my mom's card is always first!) But this year, I paused when I got to two names... My Aunt Carol, who died too young at 71 in August.... One of the sweetest ladies to ever inhabit this planet... And Steve's grandmother, who died in April at almost 103... An amazing lady! I felt their absence as I wrote the cards out... I send them Christmas wishes in spirt, if not with cards and stamps...

database properties on my mind....

I'm looking at the database properties infobox, looking to move it to a property panel in Designer. When I say property panel, I mean putting properties in an Eclipse view at the bottom of the center of the screen, underneath the active editor. Like the infobox, this panel tracks the current selection. Someday the client may share this work, but for now this is for Designer.

The paradigm for changing properties in Eclipse is different from Notes. Both ways have their advantages... The non-modality and the volume of modifiable information available is a real benefit for the infobox.

But as I look at the db infobox, I see two kinds of information. One kind is informational or a launch point for a dialog (think archive settings, etc), and the other is actually editing the design. If I look at the same infobox for a db for which I don't have design rights, it's all mostly greyed out information.

So I'm thinking of a divide and conquer approach. In the Designer navigator, have a pseudo-design element, probably right under the database name, that lets you launch a database property editor. This editor would let you edit the stuff currently on the design tab, the advanced tab, the launch tab and a few strays - all very much part of database design. The properties box becomes more informational (and support the copy command for things like replica id!!) Things like size/archive settings stay in the property panel with buttons to change them today as they are discrete operations, not really design operations and are also allowed for nondesigner users. Header/footer stuff probably needs to stay in the property panel if the client will ever share this work, but would show the current settings (for BOTH header and footer) and then to change, you'd probably press a button that popped up a little dialog.

At first I was quite resistant to this train of thought - I like how the infobox works! But it's been growing on me (badly enough I woke up thinking about it), and I think should the client ever borrow this work it could greatly simplify the interface for the client, and that it gives a more natural editing experience for designers.

So was this a dream or a nightmare?

proposed UI change for agents, etc....

In Designer today, you can change your mind about what language you are writing an agent, web service, or script library in. (On button events, etc., too, but we're not going there yet!)

Would it be a huge hardship to lose that? Do you really change your mind about what language you're writing something in? If you do, would it be horrible to have to go create a new agent or whatever in that case? (Bonus - you wouldn't have to live through the "Are you sure/all existing code will be lost" message, and actually you would no longer necessarily be losing anything unless you chose to delete the item you were in!

It is a simpler design (that's what's in it for us!)

We made a similar change to script libraries in Release 6, and I didn't hear any issues, but taking it this much farther bears a question...

and then there were five.....

Our stairway has six picture frames, as does my office shelf. Each year in the fall, there's a ritual - open up the back of each picture and put in the new school picture for the year. It is a nostalgic moment as each picture frame holds all the previous years' photos. As time goes on, it can be quite a struggle to close the back of the frame again.

It started with one frame, when my oldest had his first school pictures taken. It built up to six picture changes for the years when they were all in school. Then there's senior year in high school... Time freezes for four years until the college yearbook picture (or longer if said son doesn't believe in such things).

The frame for my oldest son contains the picture from his college graduation day, walking down the steps with his diploma in hand. The next three have been frozen in time as high school seniors as they are still in college or working.

Today my fifth son's senior picture went up on the wall. We went through each of the pictures in the back - a frame by frame documentary of his metamorphisis from day care to almost eighteen year old man.

I likely won't see Tom's grade school pictures again for at least four years. Next fall, we'll only go through Rory's pictures. And the year after that, this moment repeats with Rory.

The fall after that... I have to believe I'll just open up all those pictures and remember anyway.

does anyone use the Tools menu?

In Release 6, we added a feature to allow people to add their own menu items to the Domino Designer tools menu. It would allow you to set the contexts in which these tools should run, and you could specify a formula or a simple executable to be available on the menu in these contexts.

This is different from how one would normally extend Eclipse so I'm not convinced it's a good fit with the new Designer. It's "just code" so we could bring it over, but is it worth the effort? Is it helpful to allow users who may not yet be Eclipse savvy enough to extend it with another mechanism, or is it just confusing to have more than one way?

Inquiring minds want to know first if anyone ever used this function, and second, what to do with it now?? thanks :-)

how much energy does a meeting take?

I've noticed that the more meetings I have in a day, the more exhausted I am at the end of it. I am far less tired by a day filled with coding. I don't believe that I am so old that the activity of walking between meeting rooms in the same building 5-6 times per day is sufficient cause to create the difference in energy levels.

After a day of coding, I feel (assuming things worked!) energized and as if my brain is well-worked. After a day of meetings, I feel anxious, restless, and exhausted. When I see a day that is "all blue" on my calendar, it is much harder to get psyched about getting to work. Ten hours of coding is easier for me to do than five hours of meetings.

One manager suggested that this was because of my INFP personality type... That meetings are hard work for introverted people. I think that's a large part of it. Another component is that I crave coding... I am hooked on the joy of making something work!

As I look to the next week, it has a better balance (so far) than last... I have a list a mile long of things I want to code. And a shorter list I have to code... This INFP will have to find the discipline to do the things on the shorter list first! With just a few things mixed in from my longer list....

barrington revisited

When I was a freshman in college I had a purse named Barrington. When I saw it in the store, I knew it was *my* purse, but had a crisis of conscience in buying it, for Barrington was made of rabbit fur.

I was horrified by the thought of having a fur purse, that something had to die for me to have an "accessory." I went back and forth... The rabbit had already given its life, it was so soft a purse...

In the end, the purse was mine. I carried it all through college and through part of grad school, long past the time when it had seen better days. Rumor has it that he was thrown out the window of a bus taking Canisius students (including me) to Philadelphia to see a basketball game... Some guys I knew clowned around with it while I slept. Or they just told me that they threw it out the window and the bus had to go back and get it - I'll never know for sure.

Barrington was named for the bunny in this story - warning, it's a very sad story....

Tuesday night, I indulged in a little retail therapy after dropping Steven off at his new dorm room. I found a beautiful purse.

But it was made of rabbit fur. It was soft, the right size, and I loved it immediately.

A familiar crisis of conscience ensued. This time, I couldn't buy a rabbit purse. At least not so far.... My conscience has evolved sufficiently for me to leave the store without it. But not so far that I'm not still thinking about it...

there are two kinds of people

those who love the repeat settings on a cd player/ipod/etc, and those who don't.

When a song worms its way into my head, it's the only song I want to hear. I have been known to keep a normal length song on repeat for up to an hour... This is fine if I'm driving alone, but doesn't always work so well when I am with others. Steve is fairly patient (up to about the third repeat...) but the kids are less so...

I've always loved music, I get completely drawn in to music that catches me. Conversely, I react physically to music I dislike - like opera. When subjected to particulary shrill opera, I curl into a defensive ball and/or look for the closest exit. Infinite tolerance for music I like, zero tolerance for music I don't.

I usually will listen to a cd at a time, and don't often get into these "repeat" moods. But once in a while, a song will hit a particular resonance, and I'm lost in it til it lets me go....

and grace is just a measure

I've been listening to Richard Shindell's version of Jeffrey Foucault's Northbound 35 a lot recently. It's a sad song, reflecting my feelings about this, the lyrics don't really apply in any real sense, it's mostly the mood of the song. I just haven't been able to get the song out of my head.

But I've always been a believer in making lemonade. Everything you ever do becomes part of you, what you learn changes you forever. And my time on LCD taught me a great many things; I return to Domino Designer a much stronger engineer than I left it. Domino Designer was likely to take much of my time anyway, putting it into Eclipse is a realization of a long held dream, and now my attention will not be split.

The details are an evolving story for another day. But thank you, LCD, for a great ride.

all for one, one for all?

It's been years since I've played D&D, and I never will again - it was one of those things I did to try to make a doomed relationship work... Still I remember enough of the lingo to be amused by this result:

What is your d&d alignment?

You are a Benefactor, Neutral Good.

Neutral good characters are devoted to helping others, but do not always do so through the institutions (such as church and government) created for that purpose. They are perhaps the most flexible among the good alignments, able to bend their approach to suit the circumstances in which they find themselves. They are honorable, but may sometimes behave dishonorably for a good cause. They may lie to an evil person, for example. As a general rule, neutral good characters do not attack unarmed opponents, harm the innocent, torture, kill if it can be avoided, refuse an honest appeal for aid, take bribes or betray their friends. The Three Musketeers are examples of neutral good characters.
Take this quiz!

sometimes it's the little things....

I'm in Miami at the Advisor conference, and I just wanted to show one more little thing than we've been working on... I thought back to the things on "my list" that I know have always bothered me and others... This one came to mind... A teeny bit of code, and there it is. If you change your mind about the "don't show me this again," you can set it back with a preference, or you can continue to still be prompted if you've ever been burned with having design changes overwritten and you never want it to happen again....

Last week someone said we were "porting" Domino Designer to Eclipse. It's this kind of change, as well as the more dramatic editor replacements, that to me make it far more than a port. It's a rethinking, a reinvention... And it feels really good to make that dialog box go away!

oh where or where...

should database (application) properties go in Designer??

We'll be adding some new ones, so we'll need more room to complicate the issue further.

Historically, they've been in the selection hierarchy of any infobox. Changes are immediate, and not batched in a transaction like form or view or any other design element editor.

With the first release of Designer in Eclipse, we'll have a mix of infoboxes and property panes (unless of course users decide they'd rather wait for us to rewrite all the infoboxes before releasing it...)

Two questions:

- is it ok to remove database properties from the infobox selection hierarchy in Designer (where infoboxes remain)?
- is it ok to have to click on the database header in the bookmarks or make another gesture to get to database properties?

thank you :-)

batman returns

a year ago, at the dog show in falmouth, Batman got his very first point. he finished his championship in january at american spaniel club. Since then, he's been chasing birds at the bird feeder and hunting stray tennis balls... until today :)

Today Batman returned to the dog show in Falmouth as a champion entered in the best of breed competition. We both need practice, so I chose a Friday, which tends to be quieter. there were 4 other dogs there who were still working on their championships.

still, batman looked and behaved great, and I didn't fall down, and he won best of breed!!!

A certain black dog just dropped a tennis ball in my lap - time to reward him with some play!

multigenerational magic

Last night, Steve and I went to the Ben Taylor concert at Outerland here on the island. It was a really great show in a very nice venue. Not huge, general admission, but we had great seats at just about acoustical center. Much of Ben's family also spends at least part of the year here, so several relatives joined in - his very pregnant sister Sally, his Aunt Kate, and his mom - Carly Simon! Ben, Sally, and Carly did a great version of Neil Young's Ohio, Sally (and sometimes Carly, too) sang backup on many of his tunes, and Ben sang backup for a song by Kate (which I really liked, but I can't remember the name!)

We went to pick up the tickets we'd bought online at Outerland in the afternoon - and Ben was there setting up. As we were getting our tickets, he came up to the front to ask the lady in charge a favor, but very politely said Hi in the smoothest voice - Carly and James did well with their boy!

it's happening again....

We're nearing September, the kids are ignoring the reality of the new school year. But I can't. Twice today I've found myself on the Harvard Extension school site, trying to figure out what course to take... Data Structures? Been there, done that. The Science of Google Searching? That's a course? Unix/Linux System Programming? Probably should, but if I have to, I can probably figure it out as I go....

Introduction to Old English Literature? Hmmm... Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales? Introduction to Modern Irish? One of those could be fun... But is there time?

Every fall I go through this. Every fall there seems to be too much else to do to tackle a course... This year promises to be busy, too. But still, September beckons....

visiting an old friend....

This has to be role reversal in a most serious way. My seventeen year old is off helping his older brother move from Brooklyn to New Haven as he goes back to grad school. What is the first thing I do? I take his car for the day....

Tom normally drives Blueberry, my precious 94 Camry wagon, so I haven't been able to drive her in months. Yesterday I drove her to work, as I will today. She has 195,600 miles now, and except for a vibration in the wheels when she goes over 70 (maybe a tire threw a weight?) she's in great shape.

In three years (when Rory goes off to college), I get her back. In the meantime, I'll keep stealing her for short snippets while I can to make sure she's ok. And enjoy driving a car that is as comfy and fits as well as an Aerosole shoe.

still free

I've been walking around for the past week with a little bandaid on my leg. There was a little bump that wasn't going away, and with my history, I found my mind was spending cycles on it, so I had to go have it checked. The dermatologist said it was almost certainly nothing, but given my history, it was best to remove it and biopsy it.

I haven't been as nervous about waiting for the results as I was for similar events in the first years after dealing with Merkel Cell Carcinoma. But it's been in the back of my mind... What if I have to fight *that* battle again. What if...

But the message on my answering machine when I got home said "benign." There is no more beautiful word.

What doesn't kill you does make you stronger :-) But you never forget.

I'm not winning the desktop battle

No, not that one. The one on our own computer at home. The computer used predominantly by my teenage sons that I wouldn't dare do any banking on.

A few days ago I walked by it, and it had a desktop picture on it that I ordered removed as inappropriate. After the predictable statements that it wasn't offensive, I turned into Imperious Mom and ordered it off anyway.

I just walked by it again. It does have a new desktop. It's a tiled picture of Stalin with a cartoon bubble saying "I am not offensive."

I should be glad he knows enough history to consider that "blatant sarcasm"? There's a bright side here somewhere, I just don't see it yet....

I was hoping it wasn't quite this bad...

but I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Seems like minoring in English should have helped a bit more, though!

puppy love

I finally got to see Georgia's new litter yesterday - and it was lots of fun to see them and cuddle them and take their pictures. Here's the result, because the pictures are worth a thousand words!

Georgia and James had three boys and a girl on June 7, 2007.  The pups are seven weeks old now, and soon will be off to their homes.

If only I had room for one more....

... See my Tabblo>

the old girl lives on

http://www.mvgazette.com/commentary/editorials/?doc=20070724_editorials

An 800 yard run is child's play for the Islander, but it is a far better next step than the scrapyard.

I may have to make a trip to Manhattan!

processes and directories, oh my....

I am determined to separate the Notes client and Designer processes at the same time we put Domino Designer into Eclipse (I can't say when yet, but we are still hard at work on it!). This will require a few decisions... I was pretty sure I knew the right path, but then I talked to some customers at the recent NE Notes User Group meeting I realized I needed to validate some ideas.

As I thought about how to solve this problem, I came upon one thought that is very important to verify. My belief (please say if I'm wrong!!) is that the "typical" Notes developer *uses* a different set of databases than he or she *designs*, and based on several Lotusphere conversations, people who design also often want to design using a different ID than they use in the client.

That would mean that the data directories (and desktops) could be different between the client and designer, making the process separation much, much, MUCH simpler. We could still do a Notes preview in this world by launching a separate instance (in Eclipse-speak, target platform) for the Notes client to view the preview of interest.

Things get less simple if you actually want to preview a database that you use in your local client data directory, with the data that's there. So I need to know how important that case is...

Do you most often design databases that you simultaneously use locally in your client or are they typically different?

Your responses will really help me work this issue through! Thanks!

happy birthday, Nana

Today would be my grandmother's 110th birthday. She only made it to 84, but she packed a lot of personality into her 84 years, and she lives on in at least my mother's and my memories of her... Her lifelong mischief streak started with her birth.

It is a great family mystery as to whether she was actually born on the 12th or the 13th. July 12th is of course Orangemen's Day and my grandmother was of 100% southern Irish descent, and it would be completely inappropriate to be born on that day. Rumor has it that she was born on the 12th (albeit near midnight) but that *her* grandmother deemed that a completely unacceptable birthday, so her date of birth was officially recorded as the 13th, and we certainly always celebrated it on the 13th.

She was quite an artist, and I am lucky enough to have a few of her paintings in my house. They are rare - she painted just enough for her house, and then stopped painting when she started raising her family.

She threw elaborate parties, and hated to be left out... When my grandfather had a company Christmas party that did not include wives, she called the party anonymously to tell them that their headquarters was on fire, sending all the partygoers racing to their building to discover all was well.... When they still didn't invite spouses the next year, they were surprised with the delivery of an unfathomable amount of ice cream.

It is her name, Grace, that is my middle name. May I live up to it :-)

maybe I just shouldn't fish....

Steve loves to fish, and starting last summer, I have been trying to learn how to surfcast. I'm mostly getting better, and fortunately haven't actually caught anything, so haven't had to deal with how I feel about actually causing a living thing to stop breathing.

I have caught a crab, which was safely returned to the sea, a bit annoyed, but fine.

I can mostly deal with the reel and the lure, and I know I don't like to cast from the uneven rocks of a jetty, I need the steady sand beneath me whenever possible.

My cast goes out a bit farther each time, though I still struggle with having it land where I want it to.

Today, casting from the rocks by the side of the bridge at the Oak Bluffs/Edgartown border, on the very first cast of the day, I watched to see where my plug landed. I couldn't see it anywhere. Then my line started going out pretty fast and I couldn't figure out what was going on. Til I realized that the line was going towards the road above me. And that it was going about the speed of a car. I had hooked an SUV headed in the opposite direction. Steve told me not to drop the rod (which I thought was a perfectly good idea, but I figured he knew better). The line got tauter and tauter, and after what seemed an eternity, relaxed.

Steve told me to start reeling in the line, but it was caught in the bridge. The lure was gone, but eventually we got everything back together and I moved much farther from the bridge before I dared cast again.

I didn't catch anything else.

Driving back home, about a quarter mile up the road, I saw my lure at the side of the road. That was an immense relief, as I was really worried that it could have hurt someone.

My "one that got away" was a 2 ton SUV. I think I'm going to leave the fishing to Steve.

living up to my blog's name

today I really am an mvgirl again :-) I'm on island, breathing in the sea and the sky, listening to the birds in the trees, feeling peaceful. The shallow stressed breathing of the last few days before vacation is being replaced with deeper, more cleansing breaths...

Life is good.

private in desktop views

In a DDE (Domino Designer in Eclipse) meeting yesterday, when I was talking about how important it was to separate the client and designer processes at this time, Andre asked what I had in mind for private in desktop views... Part of the solution for separating the processes means a separate workspace/desktop for the Designer client, so that does indeed present a challenge for private in desktop views.

Driving in this morning (since I had to drive in by myself, and could be relaxed rather than clinging to the armrest because Steve doesn't like to brake as early as I do, but that's another story), I had the thought that we could probably get away with editing such views only within the context of a client. It is my belief that most of the users/editors of such views are those users who have an ACL access where they can create views, but do not have design rights to the database. They do their view design in the client anyway.

So I am seriously considering removing the ability to create private in desktop views when in the Designer, and only providing that function if you are editing a view in the Notes client itself (we'd probably have to have some UI to open the design in the client then even if you had design rights). The alternative for all this is some kind of replication between desktops.

Is my belief correct that that is the predominate use case for that kind of view? If so, I am leaning hard towards having them be client only. Anyone think that's a terrible idea?

question....

We're trying to prioritize some tasks for LCD, and I could use some help.

Particularly, we're trying to figure out in what release to include the support for the Notes client as a target development platform for LCD. In 6.0, we could deploy to portal, and with our alphaworks edition, to WASCE. My own sense is that supporting Notes client applications is tremendously important, but it would really help if I could reference a cast of thousands who agreed with me :-)

Is it important to you that LCD build Notes client applications? If so, do you plan to predominantly use Domino data in them, or would you want to use LCD's onboard XML document store, or both? If you would need the XML document store, would it be ok or not to wait for offline access to that data from the client?

I'll try not to prejudice the answers with my own views other than my already saying I think supporting Notes is important :-)

thanks for your thoughts!

we didn't forget....

LotusScript & HTML editing - I just didn't post the pictures before. Due to popular demand, here's the LotusScript editor:


And here is the HTML editor:



Cool, isn't it?

I guess I still sound like home....

Thanks to Bob, I found this quiz... There's no doubt, I still have a Buffalo accent. And if you heard me say the "a" at the beginning of accent, it would be quite clear :-)

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far) Northern You have a Northern accent. That could either be the Chicago/Detroit/Cleveland/Buffalo accent (easily recognizable) or the Western New England accent that news networks go for.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Domino Designer DNUG presentation

Today I had my Domino Designer presentation. Showed all the new stuff in 8, then got to show all the progress on the Domino Designer in Eclipse effort. We have more things working now... A Java editor:

A JavaScript editor:

and just a little bit of fun:

There's more to do for sure, but it's fun and moving forward!!!!

Safely to Dresden, via Prague

First time ever in Prague, what a beautiful city! I know we only scratched the surface of what to see, but I was amazed by the churches and the castle... The city is incredibly beautiful, and there is history at every turn. I didn't even get through half of the castle, so I just have to go back! Lots of pictures, I'll create a Tabblo once I'm home (where the cable to my camera is...)

We took the train from Prague to Dresden, negotiated the Metro several times, including a final ride to get from the wrong train station to the right one... Who knew?

Haven't been in Dresden very long, but so far seems like a very pretty city. Have heard that it is all rebuilt to look as it did, but it looks quite authentically old (or I'm easily fooled!)

Drifting off to sleep, but so far a great start to the DNUG adventure!

on my way to DNUG

Tomorrow night I fly out of Boston on my way to Dresden for the DNUG conference. I am giving one presentation on Domino Designer (yes, there's some neat new stuff to show!!!), and Martha and I are doing a talk on Lotus Component Designer together. New stuff to show in LCD, too :-) Enough to make me lug two laptops across the ocean!

On our way there, we're stopping in Prague - which I have heard is an intriguing city. Hoping to see Prague Castle and get a new stamp on my passport!

Puppies!!

Georgia delivered four puppies this morning! Three liver males at 7:00am, 7:30am, and about 8:10am, followed by a liver female around 9am.

Mom and pups are resting comfortably, Julie (Georgia's breeder and other owner) is exhausted! Pictures as soon as I get one!

memorial day

I can't say it better than John Gorka did in his song "Road of Good Intentions" on his Writing in the Margins CD.

I always come back to the soldiers
with their courage and ideals
I’ve seen them smoking in the airports
there’s no telling how it feels
on the road of good intentions
all gets justified to hell
the price revealed in stories
too short, too sad, to tell

One of those soldiers was my dad.

He was sent to the Pacific just before the end of WWII, served in the army of occupation in Japan, went back to school, returned to the army, went back to school, went to the Korean war, went back to school....

His story was too short, but I remember it.

Prom Day!

Tom's Junior Prom was today - a beautiful May evening at Mechanic's Hall in Worcester.  That part of the evening was their own - this part, as they awaited their limo-chariot ride to the prom, was shared with the parents who were uniformly marvelling at the transformation of their children.  I hope their evening is as magical as they are!

 

... See my Tabblo>

The measure of a man

I'm just back from taking my fifth son to be measured for his tux for his junior prom. I'll never know what it is like to help a daughter shop for a prom dress, but I expect the experience is very different.

I couldn't really get Tom to look at any of the tuxes while we were waiting - he waited until he was asked by the clerk what he had chosen to actually investigate. "Black" was the primary criteria, and I can't say there was much concern for stripes or pattern or number of buttons or material... He did say the word green about a vest and tie, and did find one that he was happy with.

Then you watch the little boy be measured for his thoughtfully chosen tux. Instructed by the store clerk to put his arms at his sides, to stand straight... When he tried on the pants, he was told to wear them at his waist at least for the pictures at the prom...

When I saw him in a try on for size tux and shoes, I wondered who is this man they just measured? That experience is likely to be the same as the mother who gets to see her daughter try on the first prom dress. He looked so grown up!

something funny with Google maps

I've noticed an odd behavior on my machine. I have two VPN programs currently installed, one of which is obsolete. Normally, this causes absolutely no problems. However, any time I go to a website that has a Google map on it, and some other google based sites (a Google group), my other VPN program launches itself and asks me to authenticate.

Now I'm happiest in UI code and networks and connections are pretty far from my comfort zone and even farther from my area of expertise. But I can't help feeling suspicious that there is some kind of network querying going on in Google's html....

how important is LotusScript?

Is JavaScript good enough, or is it important for LCD to think about what it would take to support LotusScript? Is it better to support LotusScript or other languages such as PHP, etc?

Inquiring minds want to know :-)

when it rains...

you discover what matters most.

The recent Nor'easter caused a flood in our basement. Nine inches deep of water everywhere... We had never totally unpacked from moving here almost five years ago, so there were many too many boxes, and much too much in harm's way.

Lots of things are headed to the dump, but many are still ok. And it's been a nostalgic trip through our history - that Mark Knopfler song "This is Us" keeps running through my head.

The value of things lost is not at all measured in monetary terms. Some college books are ok, others are not. I found I felt little nostalgia over my graduate school texts, which are probably far more valuable than my undergraduate texts. But I didn't enjoy BU like I did Canisius, it simply reflects the value I place on the memories.

Ironically my graduate diploma is fine; my bachelor's is irreparably damaged. I would not have bothered replacing my graduate diploma; I will be contacting Canisius to find out if it's possible to get a replacement....

In a very wet volume of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Letters to His Daughter is a priceless letter my mother's college roommate on my 14th birthday, the first birthday I had after my dad died. The book may need to be replaced (the jury is still out), but the letter will be ok, and it will be carefully placed back in the book (or its replacement) when it can. The book *can* be replaced, the letter cannot.

Baby pictures, some picture albums, genealogical research, fortunately much of that is ok. Toys, some books, some older electronics, are destroyed, indeed some pictures, are destroyed, too.

It's also fun to tease my husband about his carefully attempting to rescue letters from some of my old friends, but not the ones from an old boyfriend :-)

It's a horrible amount of work to clean all this up. But revisiting our past has been a gift, too. It slows the task down to read the old letter, or to look carefully at the picture of my grandmother... But it offers spring cleaning of the soul in return.

Not much is heard about grandmothers-in-law, but I was blessed with an amazing one. Steve's grandmother would have been 103 in June. She left us yesterday morning.

She was a very bright lady (a Smithie), who knew and spoke her mind. I hope I can be half as spunky as she when I (hopefully!) reach her age. When she could no longer drive, she just took taxis to Legal Sea Foods, not to be denied her favorite lunch. A voracious reader, she also loved the ocean and Cohasset. I didn't know her when she was young, but I know she loved her family, and I can see her influence in Steve and in our boys. I am grateful for the influence she has had on me.

I am very sad she has left us, but happy for her that she is now with her husband again. I will see and feel her spirit when I watch the ocean with her grandson.

a new rythmn

It used to be that the night before Easter meant assembling six identical Easter baskets, then hunting for six new dog proof locations to hide them before going to bed much later than I wanted to. Last night I was falling asleep early since I had to be up very early that day to take Eve (Batman's sister) to a dog show in Springfield in the morning (she didn't win, but she did well, so I was proud of her!)

Anyway, as I was starting to fight the battle of staying awake another hour or so, it occurred to me... Teenage boys sleep in. There's no need to assemble and hide the baskets tonight - I'll be up before they are in the morning, I can do it then. And that way the Peeps won't be stale!

This morning, I assembled four Easter baskets (the older two no longer live at home). One is yet unsearched for as its owner hasn't arrived home yet (college kid due in later)....

It seems the pattern of our lives is changing a bit. We're still pretty far from most people's definition of empty nesters with three kids living at home full time and an itinerant college student, but it is so much less populous than it used to be, and the kids are far more independent. One Friday this month on the way home from work we realized that no one was home... We impulsively stopped for dinner on our way. That must be what it's like to not have kids at home.

I think it's going to be ok.

the fear is still there

When I read the comment to my last post asking me to participate in the Merkel Cell Carcinoma discussion group, I think my heart stopped. That was a painful part of my past that I am proud of surviving, but have since tried to distance myself from. To a certain extent, getting over it meant forgetting about it.

But needing to forget means that at some level, the cancer still controlled me. I had been thinking not remembering was being cured. Maybe remembering and taking control is being cured. The scar on my left temple is my badge of courage, it is not invisible, it is part of me.

desperados waiting for a train....

I have a new old album on... Tom Rush with a reissue of Ladies Love Outlaws and Merrimac County, all on one CD. It helps me remember who I really am, or at least who I thought I was going to be. The delta is a bit unsettling.

I hear this music, and it's July 3, 1975, and I'm on a picnic blanket on the side of a hill out in Lenox, Massachusetts. It's an all day concert at the Lenox Music Inn with Tom Rush, Wendy Waldman, Leon Redbone, Orleans, and others I don't quite remember. I foolishly wore long jeans, and foolishly rolled them up and got a terrible sunburn on my legs. The lemonade was cold and sweet... I was with my first true love - and it could not have been more beautiful a day. A bit tinged with sadness around the edges - when Wendy Waldman sang about "nothing to do but let your wild bird go.." I already knew that love would end someday. But that was still a ways off.

I saw Tom Rush again last summer on the island. He's aged a bit, but is still amazing. Just him this time, indoors in the Old Whaling Church, so no sunburn. This time I was with the true love that lasted.

When I hear this album, I hear both the summers of 1975 and 2006. They're both all good.

No Regrets.

extension points....

OK, everyone keeps saying they want the new Domino Designer to have oodles of extension points. Based on Eclipse, extension points are of course a natural.

To help us out, though, since at some point a program actually has to have some immutable code, what pieces are a priority for you to extend? Since we are taking an iterative approach to moving Domino Designer over to Eclipse, starting primarily with the script editors, what extensions will you be looking to add, and what Designer behaviors do you want to contribute/attach to?

thanks!

I don't know how I feel about this...

I'm writing this post in line at the Steamship Authority in Vineyard Haven... They now have free wi-fi, even once we're on the boat!

I suffer from being online way too much, and it used to be that the boat was a safe haven, in so many ways. Now with the world so much with us, will it remain my sanctuary? How can we escape when there is no escape?

Just drove on the boat, and had to reconnect, but I'm still live, even on the freight deck of this massive four story boat...

Which means of course that the control must come from within... Time to go up on deck and look at the sky...

polls and rumors

Life has been hectic in February, and I was just catching up on my reading when I found this post and feel I should set some things straight.

I know Stephen created his poll with all the nicest intentions, but I did worry when I saw it that it would have exactly the effect that John describes. But I thought maybe I was worrying too much (worrying is one of my best things...) and put the thoughts aside til I read John's post.

At this point, it does seem important to state a few things. First of all, it isn't just me believing this needs doing, my boss does, my boss's boss... They wouldn't let me talk about it if they didn't believe in it. We have real people working on it (as their day job), as it clearly is so large of an endeavor that while I love to code, I could not possibly accomplish the project by myself in a reasonable amount of time.

So work is ongoing, and we are lining up the right release vehicle for the work. What release it will be will be a calculus of a critical mass of features and alignment with a Notes release. I don't know the answer to that yet, or I'd be screaming it from the rooftops. There are the usual caveats as in any engineering project that we might hit unsolvable problems, past performance is no guarantee of future results, etc. But the reality is that we are working very hard on it!

The last trip on the Islander

We took a day trip to the island yesterday, and I brought my camera with me on a last minute whim. When I saw we were taking the Islander, and realized this is her last week of service, I was glad I did.... I took over 100 pictures, here is a collection of the best of them:

she's home!

We picked Georgia up today and she's been home about an hour. Her rambunctious children, Batman and Eve, immediately became submissive to mom being around so while I was worried that having six dogs would be harder than five, it may net be easier.

She did well at Westminster: she won Best of Opposite Sex to her brother's Best of Breed for field spaniels. I couldn't be more proud of her if I tried - it was a wonderful day in NYC, and I am still floating on air.

She seems happy - she's been with a wonderful professional handler since September. She was well taken care of, and did well on the show circuit all along, but I can just see her in ruby slippers (four, of course), saying there's no place like home, there's no place like home.

She's smiling, and so am I.

Georgia's Big Day

is tomorrow. Georgia (Ch. Freedom's Always On My Mind) is Batman and Eve's mother - and the #19 field spaniel in the country as of 12/06. She's competing at Westminster against 8 other field spaniels, including her brother (#5). Two years ago, she won Best of Opposite Sex, this year, there is more competition, but I am still hopeful she'll do well. Regardless of how it turns out, it's an honor for her to be at Westminster, and I'll be very proud of her.

She's been with a professional handler since September - and after this she's coming home :-) This may well be her grand finale in the show ring, though sometimes I think I may show her once in a while (maybe I'd do better with a dog who actually knows what they're doing, that way one of us would!)

Her day at Westminster will be immortalized at this link - right now it just shows her entry, but tomorrow it should show the results, and a video of the breed judging!

Here's hoping #7 is lucky!

Hand me downs and birthdays

Last Saturday, my fifth son got his driver's license. My fourth son, who is working during his gap year, bought his own car, and the keys to Blueberry have been handed down to yet another young driver. Blueberry has been the first car driven by each of my sons so far. She didn't suffer for it at all until the third son, who was rear-ended by a Saab wagon. That damage was pretty easily repaired. The fourth son had two accidents of his own - both front end collisions that were his fault. As my fifth son takes the keys, I hope that this is not a progression of some sort and that his tenure in Blueberry will instead be as uneventful as that of the first two boys.

At least I got to drive Blueberry a bit in the interim. A car in the care of a teenager can suffer a bit. When I first drove her, she seemed quite rough on the highway, and overall not herself. An oil check revealed a likely reason - she was down two quarts of oil. That got fixed on Friday, and today I took her out on the highway, and she seems much better. I can't say she's as peppy as she was when new, but she's doing quite well considering her nearly 192,000 miles.

At 4:40pm today, my sixth son turned 15. Another year and he'll be behind Blueberry's wheel learning to drive. He was only two and in a car seat when we drove home in Blueberry for the first time - miles and miles in between, bringing him to this 15 year old young man who plays basketball and World of Warcraft today, and who will be driving Blueberry all too soon.

surprise :-)

Or maybe not so much of a surprise at this point, but a good thing nonetheless. Domino Designer in Eclipse did itself proud today - and I was so very happy to be able to show it. I think I got the distinct impression that we should keep going with this.

My Lotus Component Designer sessions were also fun - though there was far too much to show than could be done in 60 minutes! Tonight was full of celebration :-) More tomorrow, at this point, it is long past time for sleep.

ready... set....

Almost ready to leave the office, I'm almost sure I have everything I need for Lotusphere... I am sure I'll keep tweaking the demos, but I'm mostly ready. Tonight, time to pack and be with my family before I have to be away....

You can see to the left a little hint of something close to my heart... The full picture is quite nice :-)

And so it begins again!

Five things....

Tagged by Pete, here I go...

1) I grew up in Tonawanda, NY, in the full swing of the baby boom (I will not say what year). My kindergarten class had 60 kids and two teachers in it. I missed a lot of days in kindergarten and 59 days of first grade because, as an only child, I finally was introduced to a germ pool. By fourth grade, my parents transferred me to an all girls school, where there were 13 in my fourth grade, which shared the same classroom and teacher as the third grade. This was an improvement, particularly in fifth grade, when I could listen in on the sixth grade material. After nine years in the same school, I was the only girl not crying at graduation.

2) I can only light a match under great duress. As a chemistry major, this caused me much difficulty with my bunsen burner. For a while I was paired with a partner in lab, but after a while got tired of doing all the work EXCEPT lighting the match. I can light wooden matches now, if I really have to, but still can't light the matchbook kind. Birthday cakes are always lit by Steve or one of the kids. My graduate degree is in theoretical chemistry, where computers take the place of bunsen burners.

3) I dropped the only computer class I took in college, as it meant three labs that semester, which happened to be the first semester I had a serious boyfriend. Besides, toggling assembler programs into a Nova II console (with paper tape and a drum for storage!) just wasn't fun. No UI! For anyone trying to figure out my age, my college did not have state of the art computers :-)

4) I can get seriously addicted to games like Tetris, Katamari, or Sudoku but just cannot focus on other kinds of games. I'm sure that says something about how my brain works, but I'm not sure what. It also means that I have a seriously high barrier to even trying something like Second Life.

5) My first car was a blue 1970 Mustang convertible (used, for anyone still trying to determine my age). I loved that car, and even learned the Bic pen trick for starting it when the carburetor was feeling sticky. When I finally could afford a new car, I drove my Mustang home to my mom's house, where it stayed in her garage for three years. Three months before I got my own first house (with a garage), she finally had enough of keeping her car outside in Tonawanda winters and got rid of it. I still miss it.

OK, that's five. I tag Jen and realized everyone else in my bookmark list has been tagged! But I reserve my four remaining for future use!

be careful what you name things

they may end up being gifts to posterity.

I was doing a side project all on my own, so I named a directory something kind of silly. Soon others joined me on the project, and now this directory's silly name has been immortalized in source control....

It's a diversion to put cutesy names in your environment, but you can never be sure how widely used they may end up being....

two kittens a grandmother make?

My son called me last night with a request that I mail him a few things he left here over Christmas and some unexpected news. He and his girlfriend had adopted two kittens. Ever since, I have been unable to shake the feeling of being a grandmother.

Now two kittens really don't make me a grandmother. But my child has taken responsibility for another living thing (or two) in his own household. It feels like a baby step towards a future that still feels like it ought to be distant.

I am not ready.

Champion Batman!!

Batman (my field spaniel puppy) is at American Spaniel Club in Philadelphia this weekend without me. By mid-December, he had previously accumulated ten points towards the fifteen needed for his championship. My ability to handle him in a show ring has improved, and he's been learning, too.

Today, at American Spaniel Club, *the* place to be if you're a spaniel, he won Winner's Dog in an entry of 12 field spaniel dogs to gain another five points - making him a Champion. His official name is now AKC Ch. Freedom's Caped Crusader.

There's a little part of me that is sad that I wasn't the human at the end of the leash, but he was very well handled by his breeder and my friend Julie, and it is said he's becoming too much of a mommy's little boy, so this is good for him.

Earlier this week, I was feeling so guilty about sending him off without me that I almost didn't send him. I'm very glad that both he and I decided to be brave.

Maybe next year he'll be at Westminster :-)

writing prose or code, it's the same.....

I just read that Donald Murray died - I was one of those readers not in his age group who really enjoyed his writing. I had been too busy to read his columns lately, but boston.com linked to his recent columns - this one captures how I feel about coding. Coding feeds my innate insecurity - just as he says, every time I sit down to a problem, I'm never sure I can solve it. As a corollary, if I already know how to solve it when I sit down to code it, I'm bored before I begin and the task is infinitely harder. Sometimes people think they're doing favors to programmers when they tell them how to do something, but giving someone the answer ahead of time spoils the fun.

I echo his wish for us in 2007 - may we all find something we can't do. That's the only way we know we're achieving the most we can.

re-creation

I was as they say "bone tired" before Christmas. I was working hard and getting less and less effective because I needed a break. And getting more and more stubborn about not taking one. But finally the lack of Christmas shopping reached a sufficiently perilous state that I finally started vacation halfway through the Thursday before Christmas. Right up to Christmas Eve, I was very busily shopping.

Christmas morning, the boys actually slept til 9. All six were home, which was very rare, and we had a very nice day and dinner all together. I can't say I've accomplished all the things I wanted to since Christmas - I haven't played the viola every day, I haven't spent enough time on the elliptical machine, but I have slept in, baked some cookies, reached the yoke of the Icelandic sweater I'm knitting, and feel much better than I did a week ago.

In the first few days of vacation, my work would try to push through my mind, but I was able to push it back. Even Lotusphere could be put on hold - I know roughly what I want to say and demo, and while there's still lots to do, I'm not panicked (yet).

I remember Pete telling me once right after we shipped R5 that he needed to take a break so coding was fun again. That really rang true for me this week as coding had ceased to be fun before Christmas.

I haven't rebooted my laptop since vacation began. There in the task bar is my development environment. An hour or so ago, I maximized it, just to look at something quickly to put a thought to rest.... Before I knew it, I had a file checked out, a new file created, and here I am in the thick of it again.

I think it's fun again :-)

still a wii little boy....

The Wii I promised to my son on his birthday 3 days after its launch finally arrived yesterday (after persistent pursuit, I finally managed to find one online at retail price!) He's 19 now, but has definitely grown up with Nintendo, and this was his one wish for his birthday. It was late, but quite anxiously awaited.

He was so excited, it was really fun to see. He had his first Wii related injury within 5 minutes playing the tennis game - he managed to scrape his knuckles on the ceiling... He was still up when we folded for the night, and when we got up this morning, we found him curled up on the couch, the Wii remote dropped out of his hand. All I could think of was when he was four, refusing to nap, but finally falling asleep in place in a similar pose.

It was nice to see the little boy inside the gruff teenager. Good to know he's still in there.

the music is on again

My mother noticed long ago that she could tell how I was doing by watching how much I listened to music. In a particularly dark period, my stereo went unconnected for two years. That is so not me, that she knew that things were wrong.

I used to code to music most of the time. In the past year, with more meetings in my life, I have gotten out of the habit of turning on the music when I get those precious chances to code.

Today I remembered... And at the end of the day, my code was working, and I felt better and less fragmented. The music is going to be staying on!

cyber monday thoughts.....

I spent more than a bit of time on a variety of websites in desperate search for a Nintendo wii for my son's birthday this past weekend. That effort was fruitless, but I also found the UI of many of these sites was driving me out of my mind.

There are some great applications of mouseover effects, but it's being overdone, and not in a considered manner. I'm pretty darn good with a mouse, but I often found a popup obscuring what I was aiming at in the website's zeal to provide me with dynamic content. I'd hate to think how my mother (who frequently calls with "I lost my toolbar" kinds of mouse accidents) would navigate these sites.

Just because we *can* do something technically doesn't mean we should do it everywhere!

this was unexpected...

You have a classic style, but you're up-to-date with the latest technology. You're ambitious, competitive, and you love to win. Performance, precision, and prestige - you're one of the elite,and you know it.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

cycles

I am so glad I'm not a manager. Managing engineers (particularly those who are ex-quantum mechanics) must be very difficult. When will this task be done? Unless the task is as meaningless as a string change, the honest answer always has a probably in it. And I am particularly difficult to pin down - Heisenberg made a strong impression on me.

But as a product nears completion, you can feel a shift. The tasks are done, and you continue to polish til it is ready to go out the door, but part of the energy starts shifting towards the next release. As work begins in earnest on the next release, it becomes an annoyance to go work on the product that is done in your mind, but not yet in deed.

That's a good thing - we release a more stable product if development actually slows down before delivery, and that's how we build software. But a side effect of that is that when the product actually ships, it's more like a whimper to the engineer. When a product ships now, I sometimes feel like I've missed that moment of birth - it's an oh yeah, it's out the door now, rather than the excitement of being currently focused on that product and being completely overjoyed with its shipment. A release should still end with a bang, not a whimper!

disconnecting

When I first heard the news about the wind causing possible power outages this weekend, I turned into a flurry of activity. I did the dishes at midnight rather than wait til morning, started a load of laundry, filled some pitchers of water (we're on a well), and nested. All Saturday, a part of me was in wait while the power stayed on through heavy rain and wind.

Today the power went out for a couple of hours because a tree fell on wires on our street. When the power went out, my initial reaction was excitement - it feels like an adventure (at least if it's only for a few hours!) We made tea over a camp stove, and I walked away from the computer with a burst of energy that I didn't know was pending, and started sweeping the stairs, and when I finished that, I tackled the top of my dresser, which was beginning to look like a leaning tower of clothing. I heard the power come back on, turned on a light to be sure, but because I wasn't ready for it yet, I turned the light back off and kept going.

The world is different without electricity - and in some ways, it's better. I think when the power went out, my energy burst was a refocusing of the energy that usually gets focused on electronic devices. It's neat to do something different with that energy - to feel a different part of life.

poor blueberry

I wish I had just stopped him from driving today. It's a very rainy, stormy day. Steven was running just a quick errand.... I didn't want him to go out in the storm, but at 18 you have to start letting them go.

Too soon after he left the house, the phone rang, and he had been in an accident. Probably not his fault, and no one hurt on either side. Except Blueberry again (and the other car looked worse than Blueberry).

I could drive her home, so I think she's fixable. When she's fixed, I think he has to drive a car that means less to me. I have a newer car, but Blueberry is like that old comfy Aerosole shoe that fits just right.... And they don't make Camry wagons anymore, so she is truly irreplaceable.

I feel like my priorities are all messed up. I am grateful no one was hurt, especially Steven. I am fortunate that my biggest worry is my car - I haven't lost sight of that, and I feel guilty to be so upset over a car. But upset I will be til I drive her home in one piece again.

Gym class, revisited

I was never good at gym. I dreaded gym day throughout grade school and high school. I just was not interested enough in any of the activities to actually care enough to put any effort into them. And I felt not very good at it, which gave me another reason not to put effort into it. Even now, when looking at my kids' report cards, I just don't care about their gym grades - it's not academic so it's just not important to me.

I have not had a lot more luck showing Batman. He got two more points at a second show, but in the shows since, I've had trouble getting him to stand still when he's supposed to... Today he won his puppy class, but when it came time to go back in the ring with the winners of the other classes, he just didn't want to cooperate.

A lot of this is in my own head, I think. I'm feeling like I'm not good at this, so I don't approach the task with confidence. I feel far more confident in front of 6000 people with my computer at Lotusphere than I do with Batman in a show ring with only 10-2o people watching. Just like I would have far preferred to go to any class other than gym at school...

I have to show him again on Thursday - I'm going to try a new approach - confidence. He's my dog, I'm entitled to walk him wherever I want. If I want him to stand, he will. I want him to do well, and he needs me to be confident to do that.

And if that doesn't work, I can always retreat to my laptop.

we did it!

Midweek this week, I had a good solid case of post-partum depression.

This would be why: https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/cc/earlyprograms/lotus/ilcd60/

I'll join the fray

Pete and Dave have posted their top ten favorite songs. This is actually very hard to do and I think the list may vary greatly with my current mood. But at this snapshot of time, my top ten are:

James Taylor - Gaia
James Taylor - In My Mind I'm Goin' to Carolina
Ellis Paul - Conversation with a Ghost
Ellis Paul - Weightless
Dar Williams - Playing to the Firmament
John Gorka - Flying Red Horse
John Gorka - Morningside
Eric Clapton - Layla
Byrds - Chestnut Mare
Tom Rush - No Regrets
Carly Simon - Bound for the Island

Yes, that's 11. I thought of the Carly Simon song after I was done, but couldn't take any other off the list. If it works for Spinal Tap, I can do it, too. The order is only slightly significant - if I heard any of those, the words coming out of my mouth when I heard it would be "that's my favorite song!"

Ask me tomorrow and you may well get a different list. As I look at that list, many (but not all) of those songs are associated with different events in my life. Odd to think of music as a soundtrack to a life, but it's true :-)