February 26th, 2006
Teamstudio Seminar in New York
Last week I presented "Notes Management
Best Practices" at the Teamstudio seminar in New York. Decided to
take the red-eye on Tuesday night, flying Jet Blue. Well, Jet Blue was
great; but flying the red eye was not such a good idea! After a 4 hour
flight from San Diego I arrived at the Dylan hotel, only to crash and sleep
until after lunch. Then went for a short walk - toured Grand Central station
(I love trains, so this was great fun) and walked down Park Avenue until
the cold got a bit much. Wednesday evening I had dinner with the Teamstudio
team at the Chemist Club restaurant- it was great to finally meet the folk
behind the emails & phone calls. I must say that the bread in New York
tastes much better than most of the bread you find on the west coast.
Thursday morning saw us assemble at 8:00am in the Dylan conference room. First off with the Keynote address was Ed Brill from IBM with a look at where Notes is going for the next few years. As somebody who didn't make it to Lostusphere this year, the presentation was very interesting. After a short talk by Nigel Cheshire on "Building a Strategic Plan for Best Practices" it was my turn to present "Best Management Practices for Lotus Notes". Using the analogy of a ship, this presentation focused on how to steer the ship rather than how to make the engine run efficiently. Based on the audience feedback at the end of the day, it seemed that most people found the presentation useful. Jesse Segovia from Elanza Group had the tough after lunch session, and was later followed by Rob Axelrod from Technotics. Rob is an excellent speaker, and made a very enjoyable presentation on the development process and build automation. We finished the day at about 4:00pm, just in time to catch heavy traffic back to the airport. The flight back to San Diego to over 6 hours, and culminated with an aborted landing due to fog. I finally crawled into be at 1:00am after a very long day.
For reference, my presentation is attached in Power Point format.
Click link to download file
NotesBestPractices43.ppt
February 20th, 2006
New laptop & New York presentation
Although I have used Dell PCs & laptops
for years, the newish HP Pavilion really appealed, A few weeks ago my resistance
crumbled and the dv8000z model was ordered. This really is the nicest laptop
I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Let's start with a screen
that is 1680 by 1050 pixels - larger than my desktop. Then add the fact
that all the ports are down the sides, and not round the back, and a full
101 key keyboard. This is more than a laptop - it is a personal workstation.
As you might gather I am very happy with it, especially when working on
PowerPoint presentations. All that screen real estate really is useful.
This week I am presenting at the Teamstudio Seminar in New York: "Bring
Control to the Process: Implementing Best Practices for Your Lotus Notes/Domino
Environment". I'm flying
from San Diego with Jet Blue for the first time, and am interested to see
how they compare to the other airlines.