Greyhawk's Meanderings

We've had a cool spring for new life

John Roling — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 01:15:02 +0000

Been quiet for a couple weeks, sorry about that. In the middle of my dry stretch I had a work trip to Las Vegas where we set up our new VOIP system in the Vegas office. It works great, but it was three days of cable testing and plugging in phones in the desert. In the evening I got to gamble a bit and I came out ahead $22 after about 5 hours of $11/hand Pai-Gow Poker. So it was a productive trip both on the business and fun side.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting is because I thought something we went through here was really cool. My eldest daughter had a robin family set up a nest on the window sill right outside her window where her bed is. When we first noticed it, it had 3 blue robin eggs in it. Well my girls checked on the nest all the time until one-by-one, they all hatched into little chicks. One disappeared early on, but the other two were nurtured into little baby robins and yesterday they set off on their own. The picture below was the final baby before he left the nest.

This was the second cool circle of life we've seen this spring. Early on, the girls found a furry bear caterpillar. They brought it in and put it in a jar. Shorly after, it created a chrysalis. For two weeks the chrysalis sat until one day a bright orange moth emerged. They took it outside and let it fly away.

We homeschool, so to have two instances of life science like this just fall into our laps was a wonderful thing. The girls loved it and learned a lot.

Now I should probably tell them that the baby bird ate the moth

Collaborating in the Lotus Community

John Roling — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:48:56 +0000

My latest for Intranet Journal is out now. Collaborating in the Lotus Community is an article I had planned months ago, so it became rather timely when the whole iPhone discussion and John Head's call to action happened.

Hopefully the article is a great jumping off point for those new to the Lotus community. If you have someone who wants to expand their horizons, please point them to the article and also point them to John Head's community slides.

I'm really proud to be a part of this community, and the more people we can have join us the better!

You may ask yourself, why do I care about any of this? Well the reasons are simple. By becoming part of the Lotus Notes user community you can easily gain access to some of the best minds ever to wield a Notes client. You can make contacts with these people, interact and learn a lot.

For me, if you join in the fun, I get to hear another voice, another perspective and ultimately we all wind up stronger as a community. It may be pure unbridled selfishness on my part, but in this case, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Becoming a social butterfly

John Roling — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:32:44 +0000

There are so many new social networks and microblogging tools out there now, that it's hard to figure out which ones to use, so basically I've started subscribing to all of them to figure out which ones are good. Currently I have accounts on the following:

Facebook - Personal Social Networking
MySpace - Personal Social Networking
Linked In - Business Social Networking
Twitter - Microblogging
Pownce - Microblogging
Jaiku - Microblogging
Tumblr - Microblogging
Plurk - Microblogging
Ping.fm - Post to all of the above at once
del.icio.us - Personal Social Bookmarking
Digg.com - Social news site
Flickr - Photo hosting and social networking
Friendfeed - Aggregate all of the above content into one place

I imagine I'll keep all of the microblogging tools, so that anyone that wants to follow me can do so at whichever one they want. To me it's kind of like having IM accounts on all of the systems and using one client to hit them all. Most of my effort is spent on Twitter though as conversations generally take place there.

Friendfeed is better than I expected, and a nice place to kind of put everything. Gotta see if there's an easy way to widgetize it or put it on a webpage on my personal site too. Or is there a better overall aggregator out there that I should be using? Profilactic looks kind of decent, any of you readers using it?

So the question is, are there any really good sites I'm missing? Are there any that I should completely avoid? I've pretty much written off Orkut, and Brightkite and their ilk don't appeal to me. I don't need people knowing my physical location all the time. In fact, I prefer that they believe I just live in the ether... I'm not a big fan of MySpace either, but I maintain that just to talk with people who only have MySpace, or to check out band stuff.

So how about you folks, are you getting overwhelmed with all the options, or just using one or two, or avoiding social tools altogether. Am I a complete nutbag for using this many? Let me know...

Child Rapists Spared Death Penalty

John Roling — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:01:38 +0000

To me, there's nothing more despicable than violence against a child. People that sexually violate a child are the worst scum of the Earth. In fact, I've often thought that the death penalty should be applied in these cases. Child Rapists (as well as molesters who were entrusted with a child's care) should just be put down in my opinion. End of story. Unfortunately it looks like the Supreme Court disagrees with me (by a 5-4 margin.)

From the majority decision:

Based both on consensus and our own independent judgment, our holding is that a death sentence for one who raped but did not kill a child, and who did not intend to assist another in killing the child, is unconstitutional under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.

I don't like the decision at all, but it looks likes its based on constitutionality. [sigh] My only hope is that these bastards repeatedly get some karmic payback in prison, if you know what I mean.

Feed Readers > PlanetLotus.org

John Roling — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:10:49 +0000

I'd been meaning to post this for a little while, but a couple things today made me decide to finally do this. Now, let me clarify things first. I LOVE PlanetLotus.org. I think it's a wonderful contribution to our community and I think it's an incredible way to get people into viewing the Lotus blogging community. In fact, I have an upcoming IntranetJournal article where the first thing I share with the reader is PlanetLotus.org. So realize this, I think it's cool. There is NO hating going on.

That said, I will take a feed reader over planetlotus.org only any day.

I've seen a couple people recently say they've stopped using RSS readers and only use PlanetLotus.org now. That scares me, and leads me to believe a lot of people are missing some great content. So here's a few reasons I think a FeedReader is much better than PlanetLotus.org on it's own.

Unread marks - An RSS reader will have unread marks associated with all the posts. It's easy to see what you have and have not looked at.
Speed - An RSS Reader pulls down the text of post and stores it locally. So, when you go to read it, it's immediate. On planetlotus.org you have to click the link and actually GO to the website in question. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow, sometimes the site is down.
Offline ability - Since the posts are downloaded, you can read them offline. So sync your feed reader, then take it on the train, under a tree, anywhere you might not have access.
Archival ability - I can mark a post as flagged to keep it for later. That way I can keep all the best posts available.
Grouping - You can group blogs together in folders based on anything you wish. If I wanted all admin blogs in one folder and all dev blogs in another, or all Quickr blogs in another. I can do that and easily separate content I want.
Keyword searching - If I don't want to group, I can set up my feed reader to flag everything with a particular keyword. I can have it show me everything with Quickr in it if that's what I'm currently interested in.
Synching amongst locations - I use NetNewWire on Mac, FeedDemon on Windows and sync it all through the NewsGator online service. Unread marks and archives and everything travel between my various pieces of software. So no matter where I read stuff, everything syncs up.
I'm in control - I don't have to see blogs I don't care to read in the midst of my headlines. With PL, I get em all, whether I want to or not.

Those are just a couple technical reasons I like using feed readers better. Another one is this, and I believe this is the biggest thing:

If you don't read planetlotus.org every hour or so, you will miss stories.

It's true, because of the amount of posts, things scroll by fast on PL. If you aren't refreshing PL all the time, you run the risk of missing good stories. Also, I believe most users won't scroll past that one screen. Right now I see about 20 stories on my screen, and normally if I go to PL, I look at those stories and MAYBE I'll scroll past that to the bottom of the page. But I've never clicked NEXT PAGE.

And what if you make a post that isn't while half the world is awake? Will people around the world completely miss your post? It's a possibility, and that kind of sucks. With an RSS reader, you can walk away for a week and come back and still have access to all the content that happened while you were away. You can do that with planetlotus.org, but it's a lot of clicking. And it's clicking that I think people just won't do.

For me planetlotus.org is the gateway drug. It's the way to get people interested in Lotus blogs. And for casual readers, it's the perfect end solution. But for someone who really wants to follow the community more closely, I think adding feeds to your RSS reader will ultimately be a better solution for you. Right now, I use PL to search for blogs I don't already subscribe to. When I find ones I like, I add them to my feed reader.

So for me, I almost never visit PlanetLotus.org even though I find it highly valuable. And since I never click on a headline on PL, I never contribute to what is hot or not. Sometimes the numbers on what are hot kind of baffle me, and that's one of the other things we can talk about. Maybe in the next post.

So my answer is, promote the hell out of PlanetLotus.org and once you get people hooked on the blogs, get them into using a feed reader. They'll thank you.

RIP George Carlin

John Roling — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:51:14 +0000

I am incredibly sad to hear that one of my idols passed away yesterday. Comedian George Carlin died of heart failure at the age of 71. George was probably my all time favorite comedian, and the 68 in Greyhawk68 is directly from one of his jokes.

Being a former radio guy, the Seven Dirty Words sketch always hit home, and his view on religion were always very much in line with mine. Yesterday a wonderful counter-culture voice was silenced. I'll miss him.

Here is the NSFW followup to the seven dirty words on YouTube. Not for any of you who can't handle bad language. You've been warned:

The Comcast Resolution

John Roling — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:09:54 +0000

If you read my last post, you realized I wasn't overly happy with Comcast. Missed appointments, no callbacks when promised, failed phones transfers, lengthy wait times, etc. Well I also mentioned Frank who was @comcastcares on Twitter. Well he passed my info on to higher ups in Chicago, and I did manage to get a callback from the Executive office at about 4:30PM that day.

The rep asked if things were fixed to satisfaction. I wasn't sure yet because no one was home, but calling my home number went to voicemail instead of forwarding to my wife's phone, so I thought we were back in business (we were.) He also offered me something for my troubles, and it was something I had referenced in my blog post. I'm still not thrilled with the whole situation up to that point, but I think they nicely tried to make up for it after the fact. In addition, they actually READ my blog post on the situation.

So I will give the Comcast Twitter team their due, they deserve it. I'm actually very impressed that they monitor Twitter and try to take appropriate action. They are actually forward thinking in that regard, so that's nice. Thanks Frank and the @comcastcares team.

Comcast still has a ton of issues and I still dread outages, but maybe they are on the right path. For both of our sakes, here's hoping so.

No where NEAR Comcastic!

John Roling — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:50:18 +0000

I don't know why I'm surprised at all, but this week Comcast went above and beyond in annoying the living hell out of me, and leaving me without service. Here's my tale. Please feel free to send a link to anyone you know considering using Comcast as their cable provider. Hopefully they run screaming.

First off, I have cable internet, as well as cable TV with two DVR's. I use Vonage (NOT Comcast) as my VOIP provider. My Comcast monthly bill is $167. Yup, $167. So when I pay that much, I kinda expect things to work. Never mind that my DVRs (which cost more than TiVo) lock up all the time and pause unexpectedly for pretty much no reason. I don't even care about that at this point... I'll just get back to tale of woe in bullet point form:

Tues 1PM Cable TV and Internet are out. No TV, no internet, no home phone

Tues 3PM I call Comcast. They state there are no outages in my area and they will need to send someone out. Thursday between 4-7PM. Over 48 hours from the time of the call. Fine.

Tues 3:15PM I go outside to look at the cable to the pole and find that it's still connected to my house fine, but the connection broke at the top of the telephone pole next door. The cable is laying in my neighbor's driveway.

Tues 3:30PM I call Comcast back to tell them that the cable is broke at the pole and see if we can expedite the tech. The customer service rep says he can send someone out the next morning between 10 and 1 but there's a catch. He's only coming out to verify that the cable is broke and he'll call in the work order and the next tech will still come out on Thursday at 4PM.

Okay, so basically they are sending someone to my house to look at the cable on the ground and go 'Ayup, this here cable be broken' It's tantamount to calling me a liar, and I don't see HOW this can benefit Comcast at all. And if the tech is on site, don't you think he might be able to fix it? And if he can't, WHY send him out at all.

I get off the phonecall dumbfounded. But fine, I'll wait my 48 hours.

Thurs 1:49PM Comcast calls my cell phone to make sure someone will be at my home at 4PM for the appointment. I miss the call in the 60 seconds it took me to put my coffee mug away at work. No matter, the Comcast rep said they would call back closer to the time to make sure I would be there.

Thurs 4:15PM Haven't received a call, so I figure I'll call just to make sure they know I'm home. I get a rep, and he says everything's fine, I'm still scheduled.

Thurs 4:30PM Comcast calls my wife (my home Vonage forwards to her cell phone when the internet connection is down.) They tell her that a technician cannot make it to my house tonight and are re-scheduling for Friday at 10AM to 1PM. My wife pretty much lets them have it, explaining that I took a half day off of work to be home for this, and that tomorrow we won't be home during that time, and that it's unacceptable. She talked to a supervisor and told the supervisor how we would not be home and they could fix it at the pole anyway. They supervisor agrees, but never apologizes.

Thurs 4:40PM My wife calls to tell me the situation. I call Comcast and talk to a rep and explain the whole situation. Apologies all over the place and she will transfer me to a dispatch supervisor. I wait on hold for about five minutes and another rep picks up. My call is back at customer service. I have to explain the whole thing over again to the new rep, and she tries to transfer me. No dice. So she apologizes again and puts in a Escalation ticket and promises me a supervisor will call me back shortly.

At this point I wanted blood, but I tried to be as nice as I could be to the rep. She was only the messenger. I did tell her this though: 'I have absolutely no faith that someone will call me back tonight.' She seemed surprised at that, and assured me they would.

Thursday late: I go to bed, still haven't received a call.

Friday somewhere in the 8AM timeframe We get a call to make sure we'll be home. We tell them no, we won't. We explain that the problem was at the pole and we told the supervisor that the night before and they agreed to come out and fix it without us being home.

Friday 10:15AM A rep calls my wife to let her know there is a technician at our door waiting. She explains AGAIN that we told them that we would not be there, that the problem was at the pole and they needed to fix it. They rep said okay. Apparently the onsite tech goes to work (we hope)

Friday 11:26AM A supervisor calls regarding the ticket from the night before asking what he can do. My simple answer was, nothing at this point, the tech is already at the site. I did ask him to check status and he said the tech was still at my location.

So that's where we are currently. I may be back up, I dunno. I'll find out when I get home at 6:30PM tonight. Given my experience, I'm not confident in the least.

An interesting thing about all of this was that I bitched about Comcast on Twitter and was almost immediately followed by @comcastcares. He asked to help. It's funny if you look at his Twitter stream, it's nothing but apologies. I will give them credit on trying to manage things this way. I will be emailing him with a link to this post.

If you want more reasons for my frustration, feel free to read my Comcast Helpless Desk post from awhile ago. I'll let you know how this gets resolved. But even if I get home and everything is working, I'm absolutely disgusted at the process and don't have a very high opinion of Comcast at this point. Dunno if Frank can help or not.

RIP Stormy 2000-2008

John Roling — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:34:00 +0000

Earlier this week, we had to put down our cat Stormy. She had a growth in her stomach that was preventing her from eating. She was throwing up a lot, and the doctors believed it was cancerous based on the tests.

This is the third family pet that we've lost since the end of October. We lost Fridge then, then Shadow, and now Stormy. All that we have left is Peanut.

Stormy was a typical cat. She ruled the roost, and you couldn't keep her off of anything (especially me.) If you look at the set of photos, you'll see that she was on top of, and into, everything. Nothing you could do could dissuade her. And, to a point, that stubbornness made me love her all the more.

And yes, the stubbornness made her a real bitch at times. If she didn't like someone, she made it known. She would howl and hiss and be generally annoying, but the rather humorous thing would be that she would plop down right in the person's way and not move for anything. You would think that if she didn't like something she might run away, but oh no, not Stormy. This was her house damnit, and she wasn't going anywhere.

Jen said she was like that when she left us too. Stormy apparently hated the nurse at our vet. And hissed and howled her way into the next life, and somehow that was very appropriate.

Goodbye Stormy. We loved you, and I'll miss you every time I sit down on the couch. XBox and TV won't be the same.

Best place for iPhone feedback to Apple

John Roling — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:45:35 +0000

In addition to all the things in the last post, a poster on the Apple forum's pointed me to a place to give Apple feedback on their products. This seems like it might be the best place to get information directly to the iPhone team. So, please, if you want to Apple to hear your request, go to:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

This is the last post I'll make about Lotus Notes / iPhone. I don't want it to consume the blog, but I do think it's important for Notes as an "enterprise platform" to be recognized as such on the biggest handset phenomenon recently seen. At this point I've requested it and complained to both IBM and Apple. Let's see if something can get done.