Greyhawk's Meanderings

You scratch my back I scratch yours!

Greyhawk68 — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:05:12 +0000

You scratch my back I scratch yours!, originally uploaded by Greyhawk68.

You scratch my back I scratch yours!

Enhance Your Lotus Skills on the Cheap

John Roling — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:35:00 +0000

My latest for Intranet Journal came out last week and I forgot to mention it. It's called Enhance Your Lotus Skills on the Cheap and it covers three big user group meetings that are happening this summer: UKLUG, IAMLUG, and MWLUG. It outlines how you can get tons of killer training on Lotus products at these conferences generally by paying no more than travel and lodging. I also talk about how LotusUserGroup.org is a great way to find user groups in your area as well as a great virtual resource for Lotus info. So what are you waiting for? Go get signed up!

Myself? I'll see you in St. Louis at IAMLUG!

The swing of your hips...

John Roling — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:21:48 +0000

Today marks 14 years that I've been married to my wife. It's hard to describe how much I love this woman, but she's given me a companion, a lover, a friend, two beautiful daughters and happiness beyond words. I love you Jen, Happy Anniversary. And now, the chorus of a song I've loved for awhile (and is just now becoming popular) that makes me think of my wife every time. Come On Get Higher by Matt Nathanson:

so, come on get higher
loosen my lips
faith and desire
in the swing of your hips.
just pull me down hard
and drown me in love

Drown me in love indeed. And damn, the swing of those hips. Rawr!

Review: Harmony Adapter for PS3

John Roling — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:30:56 +0000

I own, and love, my Logitech Harmony remote control. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Harmony remotes, here's a little explanation. Harmony remotes connect to your computer through a USB cable, and then your computer connects to a Harmony web application. In that application you tell it what devices you have (TV, Receiver, Blu-Ray player, Game system etc.) and then it downloads all of the codes for that device into your remote. You also set up Activities (Such as Watch TV, Play XBox) that control all of your systems functions. For example, when I press Watch TV, it turns on the TV, sets it to the TV input, turns on my Receiver, Turns it to the TV input and then makes sure the cable box is on.

So as you can see, the Harmony remotes rock pretty hard. You can take a non programmer and have a completely customized remote control within 15 minutes. Now the thing here is, the remote does Infrared (IR) remote codes. That's great for 90% of the things you want to run. But the Playstation 3 kinda screwed that up.

When the PS3 came out, Sony decided to forgo IR remote commands and instead make everything Bluetooth. What that meant for me was, I had a remote that controlled everything in my system except for my PS3. As I use my PS3 almost exclusively for Blu-Ray and DVD movies, that meant that every time I wanted to control a movie, I needed to use a game controller, or buy a bluetooth remote from Sony. This was annoying to say the least, but Logitech has finally come up with a good solution.

Logitech has released the Harmony Adapter for PS3. It's a small device that you plug into a power outlet, and then sit within view of your IR remote. All it does is accept IR commands for the PS3 and convert them into Bluetooth to control the PS3. You pair the adapter with the bluetooth on the PS3, and then you add the PS3 to your Harmony remote and are good to go. I used it all weekend long, and it worked flawlessly. Now I no longer have to switch remotes when doing PS3 stuff. And that's damn well worth the $60 in my opinion. If you have a Harmony and a PS3, this couldn't come more highly recommended!

Augmenting Backups with Replication

John Roling — Sun, 31 May 2009 13:25:00 +0000

I believe that replication is, and always has been the strength of Lotus Notes and Domino. Nothing else has ever really been able to touch it. Because of this, you can get pretty creative with how you use it. In my latest article for Intranet Journal I talk about ways for Domino Administrators to augment their normal backups with replication. Give users local replicas of their mail files, make data redundant across servers, or even replicate backups to a central server. Basically I'm giving you a poor-mans way to back up your data. That said, the following from the article applies:

Now I'm not advocating this as your ONLY backup solution. That would be pretty reckless of me to do so with your data. So, here's the disclaimer. You should ALWAYS utilize good backup software that has agents specifically designed for backing up open Lotus Notes applications. This is essential to protecting your data. So do it, okay?

If you've ever run into data loss and you've had to wait for the "system" admins to get you your data back from tape, having some extra replicas might be a preferable alternative.

Why I think Kris Allen wins American Idol

John Roling — Wed, 20 May 2009 12:45:14 +0000

I make no excuses, I love American Idol. I have since it first came on the scene 8 years ago. It's something I really enjoy and can watch with my children and talk about with anyone. I think it comes from the old performer in me. I tend to put myself in the contestants positions and enjoy living vicariously through them. I also tend to be thinking exactly what Simon is thinking, so his analysis is generally my sarcastic bad side with a British accent.

Anyway, this season, as I watched, I caught glimpses of this goth guy during Hollywood week who was unbelievable. We didn't really see much about him early on. They focused on other contestants, but after hearing him a couple of times I predicted he would win. He was that good.

Once we started moving through the weeks, it was evident that this guy, Adam Lambert, was head and shoulders better than his competition. His vocals were always amazing, he had a killer stage presence, a glam look, and could hit notes that no one else on the show could even dream of. Oh, and pictures surfaced of him kissing guys. So he was either gay or bi-sexual. *GASP*

One of the other favorites early on was Danny Gokey. Danny is a widower (something we were reminded of approximately five billion times) and could wail pretty well. He was also very religious, and was a music director for a church and had recorded some gospel music. He got a huge following, and for quite some time, everyone expected a Danny Gokey / Adam Lambert finale.

During this battle, a nice unassuming guy by the name of Kris Allen quietly put in great performance after great performance. He turned songs like 'She Works Hard for the Money,' 'Ain't No Sunshine' and even Kanye West's 'Heartless' into awesome acoustic/adult-alternative tracks. He could play guitar and piano, and on some tracks he did so without any help from the Idol band. Creatively he matched Adam Lambert and blew Danny Gokey out of the water. To me, he very much reminded me of Jason Mraz, one of my current faves. And in kind of an upset, he beat out Danny Gokey for the finals.

So now we had two genuinely nice guys, Adam and Kris, both very creative with arrangements and such with Adam having the better vocal ability, and Kris having the ability to play musical instruments. But Adam, vocally was still phenomenal and Kris could sometimes falter and not be able to push through soaring choruses. Adam also worked a stage like he owned the place, and Kris seemed kind of shell shocked at times to be there.

So to me, the American Idol victory should still go to Adam. He's the better singer and showman, and has been far more consistent all year long than Kris. But I think Kris will win. And the reason is simple. The Danny Gokey voting juggernaut, many of whom are deeply religious, will never vote for a gay man. So many of this huge voting contingent will go Kris Allen's way, and I think that will sway the victory for him.

If Adam actually wins, I will have a lot of faith in our country to have voted for the openly gay guy. But right now, I don't have that faith. Kris, although he's very good and deserves to be in the finale, wouldn't have quite the votes to win this, but I fear bigotry will push him over the edge.

I hope America proves me wrong.

Now make no mistake, both will get good recording contracts so it really doesn't matter that much in the grand scheme of things. And quite frankly I love both Kris and Adam and look forward to buying both of their albums. I just think that based on talent, most everyone agrees that Adam is the best. It would be a shame for him to lose simply because of his sexual orientation.

100 Days of 'Fair and Balanced'

John Roling — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:06:40 +0000

Wow. Fox News Channel cannot rag on Obama enough! If you trust what they are saying, US citizens cannot hate Obama and his socialist agenda enough, yet Obama's popularity remains fairly high. Hmmmm, funny how those things seem to contradict.

I don't think MSNBC is any better on the other side, but that is the problem for me. We have two networks that are zealots for political parties. It's laughable that Fox says they are fair and balanced, neither they or MSNBC are at all. All this does is divide the American people more, and quite frankly it's bullshit for NEWS organizations to act this way. News should report news, not spin it through their vast conservative or liberal filters...

IE8 and Lotus Notes 8.5 do not play nice

John Roling — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:30:11 +0000

Okay, I'm sure this is old hat to some, but we just happened upon it, so I thought I'd share.

We recently had a power user here who upgraded his Internet Explorer to version 8. Once he did that, any email he opened in Lotus Notes 8.5 with HTML embedded would take 30-45 seconds to open before it would render. We looked around and found a lot of people having the same issue, and most of them were fixed simply be reverting the browser back to IE7. Well our user's computer would not uninstall IE8 for some reason, so he was stuck with it. So, there are two ways to use the Notes browser rather than the OS default. The first is a notes.ini parameter:

browserrenderdisable=1

The second is in Basic Notes Client Config under the Additional Options at the bottom:

Disable embedded browser for MIME mail

That option actually places that .ini setting into the notes.ini so you can accomplish it either way. I don't like the wording in the Additional Options though. Disable embedded browser to me means that it is disabling the browser embedded in Notes, not the OS browser. Anyway, you can read all about it in the IBM Technote.

Cancer Claims Another - RIP Laur

John Roling — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:09:57 +0000

I'm getting fucking tired of writing about Cancer. My good friend Amy's little sister, Lauren, died yesterday after a bout of colon cancer.

Laur was 30.

Yes, Laur was only 30 years young. A couple years ago she started getting sick, and they found out she had colon cancer. She fought it tooth and nail over the last couple of years. The family did everything they could, including experimental medical trials. In the end it just wasn't enough. Oh and get this: Amy's other sister is an oncologist. So her other sister chooses Oncology after her residency and then Laur gets sick. Let me be the first to say, fuck you irony.

The good thing is that Lauren and the family knew what was going on at all times because they had a doctor in the family. That definitely had to bring some comfort. Also, they knew that they really did all they could. If there was anything else they could have done, they would have. So I hope that brings them some peace, it really should.

I'd known Laur since my early college days. You see, Amy was my college roommate in my third year of college. I met her family then, including Lauren, and she may have only been in eighth grade. I saw her several other times. On visits to Amy and her family in Kansas City, at our college graduation, my wedding, when she visited us here in Chicago. In person, I may have been in the same area as Laur a dozen times, but she left an impact.

Everyone says nice things about people after they're dead, whether they were deserving or not, but I'm here to tell you that Lauren truly was the real deal. You would not meet a nicer, more smiley, more goofy person in your life. She was always that person that brought everyone else's spirit up. We also shared a bond over the love of Weird Al Yankovic. He was one of her favorite artists and it was completely fitting. So tonight I'm going to listen to some Weird Al in her honor. Join me if you can.

My deepest condolences go out to her parents, Amy and her sister, and all of the people who loved Laur. I am so sorry for your loss.

Cancer hasn't been kind to people I know, and people I care about. It is, and always has been a brutal disease without conscious. Isn't it time we kick it's ass? If you've ever been touched by cancer, please donate to cancer research when and if you can. Nothing will make me happier than to see this disease eradicated in our lifetime.

America Tortured - Surprised?

John Roling — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:31:35 +0000

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

We Don't Torture

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

All the conservatives are up in arms because the Obama regime released CIA memos that showed that America tortured prisoners. They aren't up in arms that Bush flat-out lied about it, and they aren't up in arms that we actually are barbaric enough to torture people. They are pissed that Obama released these documents to make Bush look bad. Really? Bush couldn't look much worse and this is just another in a huge laundry list of items. As per usual, the Daily Show nails it.