June 19th, 2010
A Good Week
Every now and then it happens at work. You have A Good Week. I had one this week.
My current job involves travel. Most of my 11 years at Lotus/IBM have been spent working road jobs, some by choice, this last one as the result of a reorganization a couple of years ago. In the past, I might go onsite to teach, help with system planning, or now and then for emergencies of some sort. It was a fun job for a while, but the travel, especially after 2001 was/is brutal and I just got burned out and moved to a desk. As I told my manager then when I left that job, "I love this work, I hate the job."
The current job puts me on site with customers almost exclusively when something is wrong. The calls usually come at the last minute, some days the same day you need to get on the plane. This makes the job uniquely stressful for me and for my colleagues in the same group and our teammates in the worldwide groups. On the worst days, you walk in with a Big Blue target on your back and you take the bullets and try to fix things and you stay there as long as you need to - sometimes weeks. Sometime you win, sometimes you lose - you get jaded. You go home a wreck. On the best days, you are seen as Mighty Mouse, "Here I come to save the day!", and you walk in, fix things and walk out an average of 3-4 days later. All else is in between.
Hotels look the same, airports blend together and all airports are awful. You remember customer's faces and forget their names. You see them later and stumble, stammer and try not to look stupid. The best your brain can come up with is: Customer - nice one, or Customer - mean one. You go to places you've never heard of and you go to boring places and now and then you get to go to New York City and visit friends every night. Mostly, its a lonely existence with a lot of late hours working in hotel rooms because you have nothing else to do, you eat the same food everywhere. You call home for comfort. Those with kids sometimes miss birthdays and events - although to our collective credit, most push back now on this kind of stuff. Everybody with a significant other gets hammered on the home front because they too are lonely, left to handle things and want your attention and focus when you get home - at the exact time you want to simply walk into your house, find a quiet place and get your legs back under you.
Every now and then you have what's classified as a Good Week. I had one this week. I walked into a customer who needed some help, but who wasn't sinking. They recognized me from my speaking gigs at Lotusphere and for the View conferences. They liked my sessions and were (I think) glad to see me. Best of all I was able to pull together what they needed using my resources and friends and get most of their issues handled and left them in a better place. I will write up a report with more detailed stuff later. But the place and the people were great. The hotel (a Hilton) was outstanding - they had a bathrobe laid out on my bed when I checked in (how nice!) and there was fresh fruit, cheese and crackers in my room (that just never happens in these days of corporate cutbacks.) The hotel had a walking track out back and the weather was fantastic.
The guys at the customer site (#nerdgirl ratio 7:1) were all super nice, very competent, just a little over whelmed. One guy in particular pushed me to get out to a local Asian restaurant with him for a quick lunch one day instead of the usual eat-at-your-desk normal days I have on the road. His reason? "I'm worried about you being lonely and eating by yourself all the time when you travel." It was seriously all I could do to not bust out in tears. Of course I went out for lunch. One joke that these fellows kept making was that they didn't want to go onto my slides for how NOT to do things in Domino. I told them that Paul Mooney does those, and they didn't rate on a worst practices scale - at all.
Also this week I got an individual shout out from my manager on our internal quarterly virtual meeting held by our director for my ability to stay upright for 11 years on this job, for completing my Master's Degree this month while doing it, and for helping out with training our internal groups. It was an unexpected pat on the back, nothing more and much appreciated. It doesn't take much to make me happy sometimes.
My job is what it is and I'll make the best of it. I love helping, I love fixing, I freaking hate airports. I got a pat on the back - that helps. I met some really nice and kind people whose names and faces I will NOT forget. I walked into an Apple store down the road that had a 16G iPad in stock and did NOT buy it and my credit cards thanked me. I caught a standby seat on an earlier flight and got home 3 hours before expected and managed to make it out to hear some live music last night. Thanks to the people and the things that made this week an official Good Week.
February 2nd, 2010
Free Code: Not Just your average book review
I too have been asked by Packt publishing to review the book: IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 by Tim Speed and an army of other ISSL folks. We reviewers get a free electronic copy of the book to read, which I find very handy since I'm getting most of my books that way now.
I finally had time to sit down and read the book, and I like it a lot. And not just because I got it for free. I seriously thought I would be underwhelmed, but its the extras that the authors put in here that make it worth your time and money. There's really nothing that you can say about Notes 8 , 8.5 and 8.5.1 that hasn't already been written somewhere BUT this book has free code among other things not found elsewhere.
That's right - FREE CODE! and its free code for us administrators (who for the most part are not good at writing it) In Chapter 6, the section on Upgrading to Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5, there is code that exports the information in DCT (Domino Configuration Tuner) into a report. It allows you to run DCT then take the data elsewhere and study it. How cool is that? It's worth the price of the book in my opinion. The code work too - I set it up on my test system. It creates a nice HTML report at the root of c:/ Note: Make it run on No documents and watch out for the extraneous line breaks that happen when you steal - er rather - copy code from one place to another.
The book also goes through integration Sametime and the Quickr connectors. As a bonus, the book covers some 3rd party products that you've probably heard of , but wanted more opinions about.
The Upgrade chapter, Chapter 6 is rock-solid best practice stuff. These authors are a seasoned team who have done actual upgrades, so this isn't about something they tested in a lab. You should buy this book - use the link in the first sentence above and they'll know you read about it here (no I don't get anything extra if you do). Also - here's the free chapter you can read. It's about development - I almost got hives just copy and running that agent I talked about above, so read this chapter at your own risk
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Chapter No.8 – 'What's New In Notes/Domino 8.5 Development
January 7th, 2010
Nerd Girls Rule
Earlier this week, the Lotusphere Blog posted about the 2nd annual Nerd Girl Panel at Lotusphere 2010 - NERD101 in your programs. They (mistakenly) listed me as a panelist, but this is not so - I've been merely helping to recruit the panelists.
The well known and popular Gabriella Davis of the Turtle Partnership will be the Moderator of this year's group.
Last year, we decided to have the panel represent both IBM women and non-IBM women, and decided to keep that format this year. I'd like to announce this year's confirmed panelists......(cue the drumroll, please)
Mary Beth Raven, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member, Lotus Product Design
Sandy Carter, Vice President, IBM Software Group Channels
Akiba Saeedi, Program Director, Unified Communications and Collaboration, IBM Software Group
Marie L. Scott, Director, E-mail Services, Virginia Commonwealth University
Eileen Fitzgerald, Vice-President Product Management and Customer Delivery at GSX
We will also have front-row seats reserved for last year's panelists and other invited guests to make sure they get a seat - because the stage simply isn't big enough and an hour isn't long enough to feature every one we'd like to.
If you know who these fabulous women are, you'll know you need to get there early to find a seat. If you don't know who they are, start clicking the links or hit Google or YouTube and find out - you need to know......then get there early to get a seat.
So no, I won't be on this year's panel. I will be one of the ones near the front of the room, listening, learning and being a little star struck by this crowd. Come visit us - but get there early.
We also have other Nerd Girl activities planned and we'll blog and tweet those as they get confirmed. There will be a BOF where we'll offer mentoring and discussion, and a meet and greet function. Look for other Nerd Girl postings from other Nerd Girls - watch your tweeter feed - stand by. This Lotusphere will be great.
Oh yeah, I'm speaking this year also - I have 3 sessions - will post those later.
September 4th, 2009
Resource Reservation New Documentation and Open Mic goodness
I've been busy updating existing documentation on Lotus Notes C&S and even creating new documents this summer. I've been doing this in between several customer visits (hey y'all!). The latest new Resource Reservation document is in the Domino Wiki. It's
Clustering the Resource Reservation database in IBM Lotus Domino
It covers the finer points of clustering the system and includes a new server command you probably don't know about. (You're just going to have to read the article to find out what it is.)
If you have questions, you can obviously comment in the wiki. (You can also heap praise upon the author, she won't mind.) Better yet, join me and a bunch of other folks from Support to Development for an Open Mic call on Thursday, September 10, 2009 and ask questions about the Resource Reservation System.
The details for this call are below. There is link below that says this part, but PLEASE - go ahead and post your questions here if you have them.
URL: http://www.lotus.com/ldd/nd8forum.nsf/DateAllThreadedWeb/1c963bd3dec8fbfb8525762700597716?OpenDocument
That way, if you miss the call at 10 AM Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, we can post an answer in the forum for your issue. Also, it helps us to keep the call moving during the long silences where everybody is thinking of things to ask. It makes us feel very good if nobody asks questions, but the replay of calls like that are very boring for the listener, so ask ahead of time. Some questions are already there!
And if you're just too bashful to post questions, email me at work or gmail or skype me or friend me or anything - I"m not hard to find.
Official Stuff here:
The IBM Open Mic calls are intended to provide you the opportunity to interact directly with the IBM Lab developing IBM software products,
On Thursday September 10th 2009, at 10 am eastern US time, the Lotus Domino team will host an Open Mic call on "Calendar & Scheduling Best Practices using the Lotus Domino Resource Reservation database". Open Mic calls are Question & Answer sessions with a panel of subject matter experts from the Development & Technical Support teams.
For details about the Open Mic call, please see the invitation document:
Title: Open Mic Conference Call: Calendar & Scheduling Best Practices using Resource Reservation database - 10 September 2009
URL: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=3651&uid=swg21402262
Dial-in numbers and the pass code are listed in the document above. NOTE: You will need a touch tone phone to be able to ask questions. You can submit your question in advance via our Notes/Domino 8 forum:
Title: Open Mic call on "Calendar & Scheduling Best Practices using Lotus Domino Resource Reservations database" September 10th 2009
Note: Please post questions as responses to this document
URL: http://www.lotus.com/ldd/nd8forum.nsf/DateAllThreadedWeb/1c963bd3dec8fbfb8525762700597716?OpenDocument
You can keep up to date with other upcoming Open Mic conference calls on our Lotus Technical Exchange landing page:
Title: Lotus Support Technical Exchange Events
URL: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg27011126
During the Open Mic session September 10th, we will answer questions about the Domino Resource & Reservations database. Questions should be of general interest and by their nature help you install, configure, manage or optimize your software. We will collect questions, which have been posted to the forum and address as many as possible on the call. We will also take questions on the call, which have not been submitted in advance.
May 22nd, 2009
On Travel, Friends, and Work
I've been traveling more for work with my new assignment. I'm on the SWAT team now at IBM. We're the group they drop into your place when there's a crisis and you need a technical helping hand. We're also Support at about L3 level. So when your C&S issues or your client issues get 'escalated' by support, they're likely to come through my hands now. It's been exciting and hectic and the workload is astronomical. It also means that I'm back on the road after a few years with not much travel. Such is life. I have more tools now than when I was traveling for Field Support.
I still have the blogmonkey. He's a great comfort and companion when I'm traveling alone. He mostly stays in his bag except when he's at the hotel. Twitter, which I use rarely has been a great tool for road work. Sitting in an airport alone with a few thousand other travelers is lonesome and boring, but with Twitter, I sat in Logan after Admin2009 and knew that Andy was getting his flight home, Chris was over in another concourse and 3 pals were back at the hotel having one last meal together before heading out. Upon landing, we all checked in the see if we got home, and by some minor miracle, we did. It's nice to be able to stay connected.
Skype has become my office community. There are 3 or 4 little chat groups that sprung up for various reasons that serve as "the office" for a lot of us home-based types. Its great to be able to reach over and tap someone on the shoulder to noodle tings out when you need to. The communities span the Atlantic and the Caribbean, so I can talk to friends at all hours. Sometimes you forget the distances. Like last night I realized that Gab must be up at ...wait 4AM in London?
LinkedIn and Tripit offered me a great treat this last week. I noted that I was headed to Detroit on business thru TripIt, and friend, former colleague and all around good guy Rob Wunderlich saw this and offered to show me a GREAT Greek restaurant and give me a tour of Downtown Detroit from a native son's point of view. Rob, thanks for that fantastic tour - it made me sort of sad, but I see that people do still care about that city - and that's cool. The food at Pegasus was wonderful too! And if anyone reading this needs a Rob to work for them right now, hire him!
The customer I visited this last week supplied me with a list of local restaurants in the Detroit suburbs, so for the past 2 weeks I've had some pretty tasty, non-chain food. Chris, thanks for the tip on the burgers at Miller's Bar and thanks for the company!
Now its a nice long weekend here in the states. I could work, but if I worked all weekend, I'd still be behind on Tuesday, so I won't.
Cheers
March 26th, 2009
Free Stuff
We all like free stuff! I like free time, a free lunch, free money. Now, those things are mythical, but free articles from the View - that's for real. Paul Mooney told you about it already. Go here to get free articles from the View for 4 weeks. And while you're there - sign up for Admin2009 or LotusDeveloper2009.
I'll be doing 4 sessions this year, including a new Jumpstart session in C&S Troubleshooting. I'll teach you my techniques for getting to the root of the problems. I'm also doing a 30 Tips session on C&S. What type of tips you say? Well here's one for free. I call it:
Protect your free minutes
You’ve had those days when you rush from meeting to meeting, right? There are several ways to protect that precious hour - or half hour between meetings. You want to keep people from booking 'just a few minutes" with you. You REALLY need to just grab some coffee and hide for a few.
Do this: for meetings your are invited to, make a habit of accepting the meeting and then editing it to add 7 or so minutes onto the end time. It doesn't put a meeting on your calendar, but when people look for a free hour to meet with you, its not there - most people won't bother to dig deeper, they'll just look for another time. Any updates to the meetings from the chair will remove your little 'buffer', but most of the time, this works great. So look at your calendar and fix those 'crazy days' now while you're thinking about it.
And while you're still thinking about things of value, sign up for Admin 2009. Times are tough right now, and while its not free, this event is by far one of the best values there is. Especially if within commuting distance of Boston, now is the time to sharpen your skills. Come on up and see us - and get free stuff!
January 21st, 2009
Late Wednesday/Early Thursday
Wow - 33,922 steps I've taken since Sunday here at Lotusphere (according to my pedometer). I gave 3 sessions - including the singularly most insane one I've ever done - Speedgeeking - where I gave the same 5 minute presentation 12 times in a row. I have 2 hours of lab duty left tomorrow, then its Meet the Developers and the closing session, then dinner with friends and home on Friday morning.
Thoughts
Its cold here
There's a lot of new stuff - many announcements, most of which I didn't know were coming - not unusual.
I'll post the tips I gave at speedgeeking eventually.
Mail me for the code if you want it.
At least I haven't caught Kathleen's cold yet.
I really enjoyed the nerd girl sessions.
You can have my staff shirts - and those of several of my friends if you stop me and ask for them or stop by the Lab that's till down on the Exhibit floor tomorrow morning after 10. I will take a backpack in trade, but its not necessary.
If you don't want your backpack - give it to me.
Late night for the monkey at Kimonos - Pictures tomorrow - I promise
I'll post more next week - after the exhaustion fades - and pictures too.
I love this gig, I'm just always exhausted though
January 15th, 2009
Lotusphere Schedule
Lotusphere is going to be busy for everyone who is working there, and anyone who is trying to attend all the sessions they want, while attending all the social activities. Since others are telling, I'll tell my schedule here.
By the way, bring warm clothes for maximum fun on Sunday and Wednesday night - it IS going to be cold - not Florida cold, but almost REAL cold.
I'll be attending other sessions when I have time, but those are last minute decisions - I get distracted easily........I will also be using Chris Miller's new tracking tool, Brightkite to announce my location. Check his web site for details.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
03:00 PM - until Big River, then ESPN
Sunday, January 18, 2009
01:30 PM - 03:30 PM JMP102 IBM Lotus Domino Administrator Jumpstart - presenting with Kathleen McGivney
06:30 PM - until Reception until frozen - then Kimono's
Monday, January 19, 2009
10:00 AM - 04:00 PM Staffing the IBM Solution Developers Lab - Come See Me
8:00 PM - 10:45 PM Jamfest - Dance Hall
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
12:30 PM - 05:20 PM Staffing the IBM Solution Developers Lab - Come See Me
06:00 PM - 07:40 PM SpeedGeeking - C&S Tips
07:00 PM - 08:00 PM Symphony Karaoke
8:00 PM - until Somewhere.....
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
08:30 AM - 02:30 PM Staffing the IBM Solution Developers Lab - Come See Me
03:00 PM - 04:00 PM BP210 Making the Most of the Administration Process - presenting with Kathleen McGivney
06:30 PM - until Universal Studios
Thursday, January 22, 2009
10:30 AM - 12:30 PM Staffing the IBM Solution Developers Lab - Come See Me
01:30 PM - 02:45 PM ASK101 Ask the Developers
03:00 PM - until If still standing after the CGS, somewhere holding an adult beverage.
December 28th, 2008
The year ahead
Not wanting to do a year end review like everyone else, I thought I'd look ahead. I recently received an invitation to attend a "Break your Resolutions" party in NYC in early January. It seemed like such an absurd expenditure (although most of it is being done with FF miles), that I decided to do it. What with the economy in the gutter, my 401K so potentially toxic that I haven't even looked at it since about March, the insecurity of any job, and the general gloom and doom spewing from the TV news channels, I decided to turn to the only thing that's helped me in the past - humor. And possibly stupidity.
The last time the economy was really really bad in the 1980s, I worked at a major electric utility. We had layoffs, we had management resistance to change, we were scared and cynical it felt a lot like now. What I did back then was to take over a struggling underground PROFS newsletter called "Friday's Note" and proceeded to publish a weekly broadcast of management and employee foibles and fun, risking promotions and employment because people thanked me for writing it and for the sheer joy of walking down the hallway on Friday morning to watch my colleagues laughing out loud at a green-screened terminal. We got through it. (Side note - I got through it still employed only because of friends in high places and a CEO who actually read and liked the newsletter.)
Flash forward to now. It's grim out there, and many - maybe most of us are worried about things. Each week brings news via LinkedIn updates of another friend or colleague who has changed jobs. None of us really knows if we're going to be essential to our companies in the near term. Blogs have taken the place of underground newsletters, so there are things to read when we need humor, but its still not easy to stay positive.
So next year awaits at the end of this week. Awesome - it's about time. Whether you like it or not, political change has come to the US. Change is different, its good. The economy will do what it does, most of us will try to spend less, do what we can to keep money trickling in. Me? I am working hard to remind myself that I can control only one thing - me. I'm older than the last time the economy tanked, but still worry doesn't help, so I'm just working harder to learn more stuff. I've had a line from a song called "Watusi" stuck in my head for a month or so now. It was written by good friend, songwriter, storyteller, and singer Michael Reno Harrell. and goes:
"People say time flies when you're having fun
Hey - it flies if you have fun or not
So blow out your candles and give me a call
And we'll dance till we both drop" *
So find me on the 2nd weekend in January in NYC, breaking my resolutions, then find me in Orlando on the 3rd Saturday in January where I'll be preparing to work hard at Lotusphere, and in the evenings will be breaking my resolutions and maybe dancing the Watusi.
* "Watusi", from the CD, The River , Michael Reno Harrell, 2007
October 17th, 2008
Here’s your chance - talk back about Notes C&S
I get a lot of feedback from you when I do presentations on Notes C&S, particularly when I do them at places like the upcoming Admin2008 Europe conference. Mary Beth's team has been incredible at seeking your input at places like Lotusphere also. One item that almost always comes up when I talk to you is categories in Calendars and the colors that are offered.
The design team is asking for guidance on these issues right now - so go fill out this survey and send a link to all of the admin assistants in your companies who work with Calendars every day - Link to survey here
