Administrivia, General Chaos

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Lotus Position

I'm soooo glad I skipped Lotusphere. As IBM has slowly digested Lotus over the past few years, there's been less and less reason to go. Okay, so Lotus has apparently fully embraced J2EE (a year late and a product cycle short). BFHD*. And Sametime has a third of “conferencing marketshare”–in a space where most people use freeware, that's not exactly something that translates into a revenue stream.

I just got off of Notes recently. While it's only marginally worse than Exchange (which I also refuse to use now–I have all my mail forwarded to my own POP account), it was just too hard, apparently, for my IT department to support it. And nobody ever really used the document databases for anything, because users never learned how to and were never given publish permissions anyway.

Notes and Sametime, et al, are now dinosaurs. POP/IMAP/SMTP mail still rules the messaging roost, and P2P tools like Groove are starting to supplant Notes and other “groupware” environments, mostly because they don't require IT intervention to kick things off. And web tools like Radio are starting to offer even more grassroots collaboration options.

So I don't think I'll be worrying too much about next year's Lotusphere, either. Besides, I need a few more years before I go back to DisneyWorld to recover.

*BFHD = big fat hairy deal

General Chaos

Got Oryx?

Great moments in ecological tinkering:
The Wall Street Journal (registration required) reports,
“In the 1960s, the New Mexico State Game Commission enlivened hunting here by importing from southern Africa 38 oryx, the beefy, long-horned cousin of the African antelope. Hunters savored the 450-pound animals' sweet meat and prized their elegant 40-inch trophy antlers.”
Now, there are over 4,000 oryx in New Mexico, and they're overrunning White Sands National Monument and the missile test range. They often are hit by automobiles–some motorists say they charge cars. And the population grows 10% a year. And the Parks department can't afford to remove the 80 or so left on the parkland because it costs almost $200,000 per oryx captured.

General Chaos

“Enron'd” added as synonym to “dot-conned” in dot.communist style guide

While all the brouhahah continues over the sliminess of the management at Enron, nobody seems to be connecting with the fact that Enron's execs did to its employees and investors exactly what the venture capitalists did with WebVan,, and all those other “pure-play” IPO's–build the stock price through hype and bluster, hide the debt, and then cash out as fast as possible and leave the suckers holding the bag, Enron was just more effective at creating an illusion of stability–through lies, deceit, and shredding.

General Chaos

A picture named zoehead.gifSo, this morning, I'm working from the kitchen table, semi-supervising my 11-month old while my wife prepares to head out to run an event at our sons' school. It gets quiet. “Sean, where's Zoe now?” I check. I hear her voice far off. She's defeated the Baby Blockade System (BBS ™) that we've errected in our living room.
I come back with her. “Where was she?” asks Paula. “She was upstairs in the hallway,” I admit sheepishly. She had climbed the stairs before I caught up with her.
Today, the gate across the bottom of the stairs goes up.

Family, General Chaos

paula and zoe on slideWe (Paula, Zoe and I) went to the Baltimore Zoo today . It was a beautiful day; 67 degrees F in the middle of January is a little disconcerting, but we'll take it.
This is the first time Zoe's been to the zoo in at least six months, so it was really the first time she was really aware about her surroundings. She also had her first trip down a slide.