Creative code and cuisine

committed

2012-01-03T08:33:00.000-05:00

It's a new year so it's time for some resolutions.

I resolve to make commitments, not resolutions.

That was easy. The difference between a commitment and a resolution is the former is a plan, the latter a promise. Last year I picked three words as promises and I didn't keep any of them. This year I'm turning those three into commitments.

Do - This has started already. I have a plan for getting my environment to be one that energizes rather than drains me. It includes a lot of change and diplomacy, two things I don't usually do well. I am also putting together plans to make my job more enjoyable and to do what needs to be done.
Share - I made a promise to share something I create with five people. I only completed it for one. The rest will get theirs by the end of March. It's part of that doing thing. I have also neglected this blog for far too long. I will be sharing on a weekly basis because that keeps me motivated to do more.
Joy - Like my friend Tom I get a lot of joy from being anonymously helpful. I volunteered to help build a park in my neighborhood, and every year we do our annual Dining With Friends dinner. I need to do more. This one is the hardest to plan because part of my joy also comes from the spontaneity of acts of kindness. I can't really plan to track down someone who needs my help. I can make myself open to it and put myself in a place where I find it more easily.

Here's to a year of energized commitments.

This is going to take a while...

2011-11-15T00:08:00.001-05:00

Ike's Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings

2011-10-02T17:12:00.003-04:00

Last night we had a party for Myron's alumni from Bishop England High School. One of the appetizers was Ike's Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings, which is a recipe from Food & Wine Cocktails 2008. I don't know who Ike is but these are some fantastic wings. They are crunchy, salty, sweet, and the fresh herbs and fried garlic make them absolutely delicious.

In Charleston you can buy Vietnamese fish sauce at most Asian markets. I like the Three Crab brand, and get it at H&L Market.

Chicken wings

3lb chicken wings, split at the drumette and tips trimmed off

Marinade

1/2 C fish sauce
1/2 C granulated sugar
2 cloves crushed garlic

Frying

4C to 6C vegetable oil, approximately
1C cornstarch

Garnish

2 cloves minced garlic
2 T vegetable oil
1 T chopped cilantro
1 T chopped mint

Preparation

Whisk all the marinade ingredients together in a bowl until the sugar dissolves.
Put the prepared chicken wings into a 1 gallon zip-top bag.
Pour the marinade over the wings and refrigerate for at least three hours, turning occasionally. They can be left overnight, just be sure to put the bag into a bowl or baking dish in case it leaks.
Remove the wings from the refrigerator 30 minutes before you plan to start cooking them.
Drain the marinade from the wings and reserve the marinade. It will be reduced to make the sauce.
Place the wings on a layer of paper towels to dry.
Pour oil into a large pot to a depth of approximately two inches and bring to 350F (177C) over medium-high heat.
While waiting for the oil to heat, put the marinade in a pot and bring to a simmer over moderately high heat. Skim off the protein raft that forms on the top. Reduce to a syrup consistency, about 5 to 10 minutes.
Pat the wings dry with paper towels and dredge in cornstarch. Making sure they are covered thoroughly but shake off any excess cornstarch. Work in batches of four to six pieces, if you dredge too many and they sit for too long the cornstarch will get gummy and they won't be crispy.
Fry the wings in batches of four to six pieces until crispy and chicken is done, about 8 to 10 minutes. Monitor the temperature of the oil because it will drop when you add the wings. You can turn up the heat to help the oil return to temperature more quickly, just keep an eye on it. You don't want it to go above 360F (182C).
Remove the wings from the oil onto a cooling rack or a platter lined with paper towels.
When finished frying the wings, heat 2T vegetable oil in a small skillet over medium-high heat.
Add the minced garlic and fry, stirring frequently, until the garlic is golden brown. Remove the garlic from the pan and allow the garlic to cool.
When the wings have cooled enough to handle, put them in a bowl and drizzle with half the syrup. Toss to coat, then cover with remainder of syrup and toss again.
Transfer wings to serving bowl or platter and top with fried garlic, chopped cilantro an chopped mint.

I planned to take a picture but by the time I made it to the table they were gone!

Simple smoked salmon spread

2011-09-03T15:10:00.000-04:00

Even though the temperature is still in the 90's and the humidity envelopes me like a hot wet blanket, September means cool weather is around the corner. While working as a fishmonger in college I learned that most salmon spawn in the Fall. What better way to combine the promise of Fall with the reality of the heat and make a delicious cold smoked salmon spread?

Smoked Salmon Spread

Ingredients

1.5 lb fresh Pacific salmon fillet
8 oz sour cream
1 lemon
1 small to medium shallot
2t salt, more for seasoning
2t sugar
1T capers
cooking oil, enough to coat the bottom of a saute pan
1T unsalted butter

Equipment

Microplane grater
4 quart mixing bowl
small bowl, approximately 1C
wooden spoon
saute pan
Cameron's Cookware stovetop smoker*

Procedure

Peel the shallot and cut into a fine dice. Split the shallots into two piles of roughly 1/4 and 3/4.
Use the Microplane to zest half the lemon into the mixing bowl.
Cut the lemon in half and squeeze the zested half into the mixing bowl, being careful to keep the seeds out. Reserve the other half of the lemon.
Add 1/4 of the shallots, sour cream, salt and sugar to the mixing bowl with the lemon and stir to combine. Set aside.
Set up the smoker with 1T wood chips over medium-low to medium heat. I use apple, cherry, alder, or pecan. Don't use mesquite, hickory or oak, the flavor is too heavy for salmon.
While the smoker is heating up rinse the salmon under cold running water, pat dry, and sprinkle lightly with salt.**
When the first wisps of smoke come out of the smoker spray the rack with nonstick spray, place the salmon on the smoker rack skin side down, and close the smoker.
Set a timer for 18 minutes.
Heat the oil in the saute pan over medium heat.
When the oil ripples add the butter and swirl it around the pan while it melts.
Add the remainder of the shallot and saute until golden brown. Be very careful, it won't look like anything is happening then they will go from golden brown and delicious to burned and bitter very quickly.
Pour the shallots and any oil into a small bowl and set aside.
When the timer goes off turn off the heat and open the smoker slightly. Let stand for a few minutes, then open the lid fully and remove the salmon. Place the salmon flesh side down on a cutting board and allow to cool for 15 minutes.
Peel the skin off the salmon and scrape off the grayish-brown layer that separates the muscle and skin. A spoon works well for this. Be gentle so you don't scrape up too much of the salmon flesh. Let the salmon cool for another 10 to 15 minutes.
Add the salmon and the sauteed shallots to the sour cream mixture in the mixing bowl and break up the salmon with your spoon. Stir vigorously, breaking up large chunks, until the salmon and sour cream mixture are fully incorporated.
Add the capers and stir gently. You don't want to crush the capers.
Cover and refrigerate for at least an hour. Check for seasoning, adding more salt or lemon if needed.

Yield: 20 to 30 cocktail party servings

* You could use an outdoor smoker, but since I don't have one I'm providing instructions for a Camerons Cookware stovetop smoker. This is an easy way to get smoky delicious food in the convenience of your kitchen. Note that it does leak some smoke, so if you're in an apartment or a small house you might want to open a window. If it billows like a locomotive it means you have the heat too high.

**Another variation would be to grill the salmon instead of smoking it. The last option I'll leave you with is to bake the salmon, and for smoky flavor you could add a sprinkle of smoked sea salt. The recipe will work no matter how you cook the salmon.

My brushes with the space program

2011-07-13T17:02:00.001-04:00

With the last shuttle mission underway a lot of people are recounting their experiences growing up and following the US space program. I never was that into it. I read sci-fi and dreamed of escaping to another world, but I never paid much attention to the space program.

That changed a bit in seventh grade because my science teacher was one of the ten finalists to be the first teacher in space, a spot ultimately won by Christa McAulliffe. She took every opportunity to share what she learned in her training and it was fascinating. We watched the Challenger launch in science class the morning on January 28, 1986 and were horrified when the shuttle exploded. The first thing that went through my mind was "That could have been Ms. Salyers!" She was my favorite teacher and it was gut-wrenching.

My partner Myron's father was a Captain in the US Navy. One of his missions was to lead the flotilla that would have picked up the capsule from the first moon landing if they had to land in the Atlantic instead of the Pacific. He spoke only vaguely of the experience, and said he was temporarily granted Cosmic Clearance so he could be debriefed. Unfortunately he never got to meet the astronauts, or at least he never talked about it. I'm still in awe that he was there for such an incredibly important point in human history, and there was a reasonable chance he could have played a role in it.

I wasn't glued to the TV for launches and I can't even name all the space shuttles, but the space program has still been an inspiration.

If Sarah Palin was a waitress

2011-06-04T12:54:00.000-04:00

Customer: "What's the special of the day?"

Waitress Palin: "Our special...uh...cod. The Cod Special."

Customer: "Okay. How's that prepared and does it come with anything?"

Waitress Palin: "Well...uh...that's a good question and...uh...I appreciate you asking that question because it's good. The Special Cod is specially prepared by our fantastic chef who's just a real good, real hardworkin' American. He'll cook that right up for you, special-like, and it's just delicious. And then I'll bring it out and you'll like it, it's just real tastey."

Customer: "Okayyyyy...I'll just have the fish and chips with a Diet Coke."

Thirty minutes later, no fish and chips, no diet coke.

Customer to random other waiter: "Hey, can you get my waitress...Sarah, yeah her name was Sarah. I ordered the fish and chips with a Diet Coke thirty minutes ago and I haven't seen her since."

Random Other Waiter: "Ooh, sorry bro. Sarah just quit. Just up and quit and it was only halfway through her shift."

Taken from NomNom83's comment on Gawker.

Dining With Friends 2011 - Ciao Baby!

2011-05-08T11:15:00.002-04:00

It's that time of year again: Dining With Friends. This is the thirteenth year my partner Myron and I have hosted a party for this event. This year we're having our party on Saturday, May 14th. We selected Italian as the theme and Myron combed through over 30 cookbooks and magazines to come up with a master list of over 120 recipes. We eventually whittled that down to 19. Below is what we came up with, with links to the recipes.

Crostini bar:

Main courses:

Side dishes:

Other recipes:

Basic tomato sauce, used in the rigatoni and eggplant ceviche
Roasted garlic puree, used in the chicken alla Griglia

A call for passive activism

2011-03-31T17:00:00.000-04:00

IBM is celebrating their 100th anniversary by highlighting their top 100 contributions. One they selected is World Community Grid. From the World Community Grid website:

World Community Grid brings people together from across the globe to create the largest non-profit computing grid benefiting humanity. It does this by pooling surplus computer processing power. We believe that innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can help make the planet smarter. Our success depends on like-minded individuals - like you.

Here's how it works: IBM donates the hardware and coordinates the projects that get submitted to WCG. People like you and me install an application on our computers that downloads work for these projects -- such as curing cancer, AIDS, and polio, or finding more nutritious strains of rice -- and then churns through it (or as I like to say "and a miracle occurs"). Once it's all analyzed the data is sent back to WCG where the IBM servers aggregate it for the researchers.

You don't have to leave your computer on all the time, or have it running constantly so it slows down your computer. The hour your screensaver is running while you're at lunch or in a meeting is an hour you could be contributing to solving the world's problems.

Incidentally, there is a WCG team for Lotus Domino Bloggers. There are 26 members but only three of us have been active in the last couple of months. If you're reading this through PlanetLotus please consider joining your peers.

Motorola Atrix is the reincarnation of IBM Meta Pad circa 2002

2011-03-01T17:10:00.008-05:00

It's no secret that I'm a slow adopter of mobile technology. It comes down to one reason: IBM spoiled me with the Meta Pad. This little gem debuted out of IBM Research in 2002. That's right, nearly 10 years ago IBM was touting a mobile computer you could carry with you and connect to various docks for different purposes. Antelope Technology licensed the Meta Pad and sold it as the Mobile Computer Core. People stayed away in droves. It was incredibly expensive, heavy, bulky and slow. Antelope Tech closed its doors within a couple of years.

IBM's idea of carrying your computer with you and just plugging it in to different form factors has stuck with me for the last decade. I knew what was possible and I wouldn't settle for anything else. I never bought a smartphone because I didn't want a phone. I wanted a mobile device that was a lot more flexible.

Other devices entered this space, most notably the Oqo and FlipStart. To me they were awkward compromises, and they're still prohibitively expensive. The closest I have found to meet my wish list was the SmartBook from Always Innovating. The only problem with that is it's only WiFi. I wanted something I could use as a phone, but since the SmartBook was so close I was seriously considering purchasing it. I never expected any manufacturer to build what I wanted.

Then Motorola announced the Atrix. I read a review of it and I was stunned how closely this mirrored IBM's goals from a decade ago. It's a phone. Dock it and you can play music and videos to your home entertainment system, using a remote. Connect a keyboard and fire up a full version of Firefox. Insert into a laptop chassis and enjoy a larger screen while traveling. And it's not insanely expensive.

Thank you, IBM, for showing the world what was possible. You're often ahead of your time, but I'm glad in this case it has come full circle.

your zone of influence (is much bigger than you think)

2011-02-03T17:00:00.012-05:00

Last night I attended a volunteer training session for the upcoming Charleston Wine + Food Festival. A large portion of the session centered around customer service. There will be over 18,000 people attending the festival this year and there are more than 400 volunteers. We will be wearing burgundy aprons and we will be the most visible face of the Festival.

Over half the Festival attendees are traveling from out of state; one-third have never been to the festival before; and fifteen percent have never been to Charleston. If they don't have a positive impression of me it will reflect on that person's opinion the Festival as a whole, Charleston, the South, and who knows what else. It is critical that every volunteer leave every guest they influence with a positive impression.

David McNair, co-author of Exceptional Customer Service, is a Charlestonian and was there to talk about our zone of influence. This was defined as:

The number of people you actually speak to. Volunteers from last year said to expect to talk to 500 people in a 4 hour period.
People are highly visual and at events such as this anyone official-looking immediately draws attention. So add the number of people who pass within 10 feet that we don't actually talk to. This was estimated to be twice the number you do speak to, so that's 1500 people total. Yes, people you will form an opinion of you from 10 feet away. It's not fair, but that's life.
Most of the events happen in tents where people file through, but some are outdoors. In open spaces people will notice you from up to 30 feet away. The number of contacts jumped to 2000. So not only do you have to worry about the people you directly talk to, and the ones who pass 10 feet away, but the people three times as far who can't even hear your voice will also form an opinion of you.
And finally, he threw out the number 5, which he used as a multiplier. This is because on average every person we influence will tell five other people. If it's a positive experience they usually tell two to three people, and if it's negative they tell ten to twelve. On average it works out to five. That brings us up to 10,000 impressions made in a 4 hour period.

David went on to say that people form their first impression within seven seconds of engaging someone. That doesn't mean talking to them, that's simply from the point of first sight. If you have a 60 second conversation the other person has made a final judgment about you, including whether they find you trustworthy. How to you make sure someone you don't even notice but who sees you from 30 feet away forms a positive impression of you?

David talked about how simple things can make or break a good customer service experience. Since most of the people we are influencing are not even going to talk to us we need to be aware of the message we're sending. Are we smiling or do we look bored? Are we slouched over or are we standing with good posture? Do we appear energized or tired? These seemingly small details have a tremendous impact, up to 30 feet away.

It is a little daunting to think that I may be influencing 10,000 people in a single four-hour period. It's an incredibly important seven seconds.

three words

2011-01-13T17:20:00.004-05:00

I don't do resolutions. The idea of a point in time when you commit to lofty unattainable goals, or even realistic achievable ones, just doesn't interest me. I work toward what interests me, and that changes as my relationship to the world around me changes.

My friend Kat French posted about a meme among her friends of doing a three-word resolution. Encompassing your broad goals and intentions with bare language leaves more to interpretation. I can get behind this.

My three words are:

Dreaming and wishing only get you so far. Doing actually makes things happen. All that doing yields results. Keeping them to myself isn't why I'm doing all the doing. I have learned that sharing brings me joy. When I share the results of my doing, know that I'm actually being selfish. It isn't about you, it's about me.

* Update 1/14/2010 to fix link Blogger screwed up.

Please take the time to read this

2011-01-07T11:12:00.001-05:00

I had never heard of Bill Zeller until today. He created a bunch of projects that a lot of people use, though. He was also apparently incredibly smart. He committed suicide January 5th, 2010.

Bill's suicide note is long, but please take the time to read it. Bill endured horrors no one ever should and his note describing them is painful to read. I can tell you from my own first-hand experience it's much, much worse from his side. It struck a chord with me because I felt like he did for much of my life. I'm thankful for everyone, and especially Myron, who helped me see that life is worth living. It's tragic that so many people never get the chance to feel loved.

Recipe: Celery Root and Cauliflower Soup

2010-12-28T17:30:00.010-05:00

A lot of people aren't familiar with celery root, also known celeriac. It is a type of celery that is grown for the root rather than the stalks, so it's not the same variety that gets stuffed with peanut butter or served alongside hot wings. The root has a mild celery flavor and a texture a bit like a soft potato, and it makes a delicious and velvety puree. I wanted turn it into a soup, but I needed to balance the flavor with something else. My original idea was parsnips but the store didn't have any, so I switched to cauliflower. It turned out delicious.

1 large celery root
1 head of cauliflower
1 bay leaf
4 - 6C low sodium chicken stock
1C heavy cream
2oz (1/2 stick) butter
salt and white pepper to taste
white truffle oil for garnish (optional)

6 - 8 quart stock pot with lid
colander
blender
fine mesh strainer
whisk

Yield: 4 quarts

Start by scrubbing the celery root with a brush under cold running water. They are knobby roots and they take some effort to get clean.
Next peel the celery root. This is best done by using a sharp chef's knife to cut away the larger knobby parts and the peel, followed by trimming with a paring knife. Don't worry if you can't get rid of all the peel in all the nooks and crannies.
Cut the celery root in quarters, then cut each quarter into 1" - 2" thick slices. Move to the stock pot and add enough water to cover. Set the burner to medium heat, add the bay leaf, and cover.
Remove the core from the cauliflower and separate the florets. You don't have to take them too small, just don't leave it in fist-sized chunks. Put these in the stock pot with the celery root, and add more water to cover the cauliflower.
Let the vegetables come to a boil while covered. Remove the lid and let them simmer until tender, about 10 minutes. To test for doneness, use the tip of a paring knife to pierce the stem of a cauliflower floret. If it slides off without holding, it's done.
Drain the vegetables into a colander and discard the bay leaf.
Put half the vegetables in the blender and 1C chicken stock. Put on the lid, removing the stopper on top. Cover with a kitchen towel and blend the soup until smooth. Add more chicken stock until everything blends smoothly.
Place a fine mesh strainer over the stock pot and pour the puree into it. Use a whisk to stir the puree around and force it through the mesh. Any lumps or fibrous bits will stay in the strainer.
Repeat with the other half of the vegetables.
Place he stock pot of soup over medium heat and add the cream and butter. Stir occasionally until it starts to simmer.
Adjust for thickness, adding more chicken stock or water if it's too thick, or allow it to reduce if it's too thin. Adjust seasoning with salt and white pepper. If you haven't used white pepper before, be careful. It has a lingering heat and is stronger than black pepper.

I garnished the soup with a few drops of white truffle oil because it echoes the flavor and aroma, but that is purely optional.

Folder Permissions requirements difference when upgrading from Office 2003 to Office 2010

2010-11-29T16:11:00.001-05:00

At work we're in the process of upgrading from Office 2003 to Office 2010. The pilot users on Office 2010 were unable to edit spreadsheets on a network location while the Office 2003 users chugged right along. After a few days of troubleshooting we finally found the solution.

In order to edit files in Office 2010 the user must have Delete permissions for the folder with the document. For Office 2003 they simply required Update permissions. Hopefully our pain can be your gain.

In memoriam - Glenda Joyce Robinson - December 29, 1942 to October 8, 2010

2010-10-09T13:19:00.000-04:00

The song Seasons of Love from the musical Rent asks the question "How do you measure a year?" It makes the following suggestions:

In daylights - in sunsets
In midnights - in cups of coffee
In inches - in miles
In laughter - in strife

This is part of the larger question: "How do you measure the life of a woman or a man?" For the case at hand, that would be 24,755 daylights and sunsets but only 24,754 midnights. The cups of coffee (and packs of cigarettes) are uncountable. A lot of road was covered and there was a lot of laughter... and unfortunately even more strife.

The person of whom I'm speaking is my mother, Glenda Joyce Robinson. She died at approximately 10:15 PM on October 8, 2010, at age 68. I truly hope she found the peace she never knew in life.

I blocked comments on this post. I know everyone is sincere in their compassion and empathy, but I am just too raw emotionally to deal with it. I apologize for being selfish, it's been a common theme this week.

the bastards ground me down

2010-10-06T00:35:00.000-04:00

It seemed innocent enough. I was offered $20,000 to go to culinary school. What an amazing opportunity! Little did I know the toll it would take. I started classes in July. After the first week I was panicked because I didn't fit in, not even a little bit. My classmates were half my age and incredibly rowdy. Every class period was like a junior high lunch room, with people yelling, cursing, carrying on conversations throughout class (both with each other and on their cell phones) and engaging in horseplay. I'm serious about learning, passionate about culinary arts and respectful and professional. Few of my classmates share any of those traits.

I talked to some of them, explaining I hadn't been in school for twenty years so it was harder for me to concentrate when they were loud and. A few of them seemed chastened and behaved more maturely. A couple became belligerent and called me everything from uptight to a racist. Most just ignored me and kept on being disruptive.

Next I went to my teachers, who agreed it was out of hand and started shushing the classes when they got too loud. That wasn't very successful so it escalated to threats of ejection from class. Nobody got kicked out but the obnoxious behavior continued, so I went up the chain to the chair of my department. The next class meeting everyone was seated alphabetically. It took four weeks but this finally broke up the worst of the cliques and the Romper Room atmosphere was toned down enough for me to make it through my first quarter.

Monday night was my first class of this quarter and I walked into even more chaos than I had back in July. When I enrolled at AI I was told my kitchen classes would have no more than 15 to 18 students. Last night we had 26. We only have work stations for a maximum of 20 and the kitchen is stocked for about 15 students so we quickly ran out of everything. It was a mad dash to grab what you could, when you could.

When the teacher left to get more ingredients or equipment more than half the class would erupt into horseplay. The last straw for me was when I was helping a fellow student wash all the dishes. I was putting them away from the drying rack and there was a cluster of our classmates standing beside us in a circle doing freestyle rap while people would enter the circle and breakdance. I asked one of them to help me put away the dishes and responded, "You ain't my massa."

I withdrew from classes today. I simply can't endure another quarter like last one. It's not worth my time or effort when The Art Institute can't create an environment in which I can learn. Rather than being the pissed off grumpy old man I decided to remove myself from the situation. I appreciate the opportunity I was given by the Food Network. I sincerely wish I could have taken advantage of it.

I don't know what my next step might be. It probably won't be culinary school, at least for a while.

The best meal of my life

2010-09-08T18:52:00.001-04:00

My (37th) birthday was Thursday, August 19th. Being mid-week we opted to delay the official celebration until Saturday the 21st. My favorite restaurant in the world is McCrady's, headed up by Chef Sean Brock, so it was the obvious choice.

I have met Chef Brock a few times, and about a year ago he said to let him know when I was coming in to McCrady's and he would do something special. I have the most over the top case of hero worship for Chef Brock that you can imagine. It would be like Geddy Lee offering to sing "happy birthday" to a Rush fan, or a tween girl getting a hug from Justin Bieber. So I was over the moon when he made this offer, but I was too timid to do anything about it. We dined in anonymity at McCrady's several times until I finally worked up the courage to e-mail Chef Brock and take him up on his offer. He responded and we exchanged a couple of e-mails so he could get an idea of what to do.

So it was with an incredible level of excitement and more than a little nervous anxiety that we arrived at McCrady's for 6:30 dinner reservations. We were seated and offered a wine list but no menus. The waiter knew Chef Brock had a special menu for us which was going to remain a secret. Our only choice was whether to do wine pairings, which we did.

What followed was a dining experience the likes of which I never imagined existed. We have dined at Providence, one of three Michelin 2 star restaurants in Los Angeles, and La Pergola, which at the time was the only Michelin 3 star restaurant in all of Italy. When we travel we seek out highly regarded restaurants around the world. I can say without hesitation that this meal at McCrady's set the standard for all future fine dining experiences I will have.

I didn't write down the courses and I didn't want to take a camera to interfere with the experience, so I don't know exactly what we had. As the courses kept coming we joked about which course we were on. We lost count somewhere around seven or eight. Chef Brock came out three times to do tableside preparations and explain dishes. The last time he asked if we knew how many courses we had already had. We guessed nine. "This is number thirteen, and there is only one more," he said with a wry smile.

The first time I looked at my watch it was 9:30. I think that was around course eight. We finally left a little after 11:00, making this the longest meal I have ever had, and it eclipses any other dining experience I have ever had. It wasn't just the personal attention and it wasn't just my hero worship for Chef Brock. The food and service were spectacular. The plating was breathtaking. The flavor, texture and temperature combinations were simply sublime.

And I have to give a very special thank you to my life partner, Myron. He treated me and one of my dear friends to this spectacular experience. It was not the most expensive meal we have ever had, but it is the best. I am glad I was able to share it with him.

Why I always brine meat

2010-09-01T19:04:00.025-04:00

Normally meat loses about 30 percent of its weight during cooking. This is because as meat cooks the fibers bind to each other more tightly, which forces out moisture. Also, as the meat cooks and the proteins bunch up the meat shrinks. That's why it's important to rest meat before you serve it. It gives the protein time to relax and the juices flow back into the meat. You can exert some control on this process by brining the meat.

Here is what happens: The salt in the brine causes some of the proteins to break down, or denature. As the proteins denature the salt binds directly to them, which prevents the proteins from binding to each other when they cook. As the meat cooks and the muscle fibers tense up they can't grab other muscle fibers and wring out the moisture. The end result is a jucier steak, pork chop, chicken breast or piece of fish.

Did I just say fish? Why yes I did, because there is also an aesthetic reason for brining. Have you ever noticed when you cook meat -- but especially fish -- that some weird looking foamy white stuff comes out and looks like egg whites when it cooks? That's because it's the same protein that's in egg whites. As the muscle tenses up during cooking the albumin liquefies and gets forced out. This is the protein that brining breaks down. So if you brine your meats first this protein won't ooze out, giving you a nicer-looking end product.

Below is a chart showing some general guidelines for brining different meats.

I also brine steaks and roasts in a 10% by weight brine for 24 - 72 hours. That is 3.5oz salt to 1QT (32oz) water. (Technically it's 3.555 oz, I round down to make it easier on me. And yes, I use a scale.) You can add other ingredients to further enhance the flavor, such as garlic powder, onion powder, cardamom, cloves, tamarind powder, cayenne, preserved lemon, or just about any other spice. Just be careful about adding too much. Since it will get soaked into the meat you can end up with a very oddly flavored end result.

I find that meat brined in a lower sodium brine for longer is more tender and flavorful when cooked, but that's simply my observation. Your mileage may vary.

Image from http://www.finecooking.com/articles/why-brining-keeps-meat-moist.aspx. Check out that article for more information and tips on brining.

How not to do customer service

2010-08-13T09:34:00.000-04:00

I order a lot of stuff from Newegg. They have good product selection, exclusive promos, and good pricing. On Monday of this week they had a 15% off promo on all keyboards. I had my eye on a Logitech G15, and the final price with the promo discount and shipping was $77. Considering it retails for $100 I felt good about my purchase.

On Wednesday Newegg had a new promotion: $20 off the Logitech G15 keyboard, with free shipping. This brought the final price down to $59. I was a little peeved about my Monday purchase so I did a web chat with Newegg to see if they could adjust the price.

In short: no. They offer no price protection and their policy is to not offer pricing adjustments. I explained to the customer service person that I could refuse delivery of the keyboard and order a new one, and even with the shipping charges and restocking fees I would end up saving money. We could avoid that situation -- and a lot of unnecessary costs and lost of customer goodwill -- if she would just offer the adjustment. Nope, that's not the policy.

I asked to have a manager call me, and she transferred the web chat to her supervisor. He copy and pasted the same policy to me. He did offer me $5 off my next order, which I never would have accepted, but by now I was pretty ticked off and found it insulting. I asked to have the order canceled and was told they couldn't do that since it was already shipped. I know shippers can recall orders from UPS, I've done it myself.

Unable to get any satisfaction from Newegg, I ordered another keyboard with the better promotions and put a note on my door refusing delivery of the first one. When it's all said and done I will have saved $9. At this point it's not the money, it's the principle.

Warning: SQL Server database files are not backwards compatibile

2010-07-19T20:35:00.106-04:00

This is something I just learned the very hard way. Here's the scenario:

You have a database you created on SQL Server 2005 or 2008 SP1
You detach it from the SP1 server and attach it to SQL Server 2008 R2
You then try to reattach it back to the original server
You get an error about the server only supporting up to version 655 (or 612 for SQL Server 2005)

The reason is every version of SQL Server has its own file version number: SQL Server 2005 is file version 612; SQL Server 2008, either RTM or SP1, is file version 655; and SQL Server 2008 R2 is file version 660. As soon as a server touches a file it upgrades it to that server's file version. In this case once you attach the database file to SQL Server 2008 R2 it's version 660. SQL Server can read files that are at the server's version number or lower, so you can't take a SQL Server 2008 R2 database file and attach it to any prior release.

It isn't uncommon for a new releases of server software to have a new file format to support new features. The problem is SQL Server gives you no option to go back. You can't do a backup and restore, either, because the newer backup file cannot be read by the older server. At this point your only option is to create a new database and copy the data across. Due to customer outcry over SQL Server 2000 to 2005 migrations Microsoft added a scripting feature in SQL Server 2008 that can copy the structure and the data. For my 6GB database it generates 20GB of scripts that take nearly three hours to run.

For most people it isn't that big of an issue. I'm in the process of testing a migration from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 and wanted to use the same data on both versions. Microsoft has made this scenario incredibly difficult.

Sidebar: Most Domino releases include a new file version, which is called the on disk structure or ODS. Domino does not automatically upgrade to the new ODS so you can decide when to upgrade. You can also downgrade ODS versions by using "compact -R". I would much prefer this to Microsoft's forcing the issue and not giving you any reasonable downgrade options.

Tip for VMWare Workstation on Windows 7 Enterprise

2010-05-20T17:15:00.000-04:00

I'm running VMware Workstation 6.5* on Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit. It works well but I keep getting the dreaded warning about the clock speed not matching. To fix this it's usually a matter of just updating the config.ini, as documented here.

Except that under Windows 7, you can't save the config.ini. In fact, you can't write to the C:\ProgramData folder at all. Not even if you change the owner of the folder to your account. So what do you do? You have to temporarily change the User Account Control settings to Never Notify.

Go to Start Menu -> Control Panel -> User Accounts and Family Safety -> User Accounts.

Select User Accounts

Select Change User Account Control Settings

Move the slider all the way to the bottom

Now restart your computer. Once it comes back up you should be able to edit the config.ini. After you are finished you should kick the UAC back up at least one notch.

* VMware Workstation 7 uses a different method for determining host CPU speed and does not need this manual adjustment.

Dining With Friends 2010 recipes

2010-04-30T08:13:00.001-04:00

I have the recipes for this year's Dining With Friends event online. They're in ODT format, which should make some of you happy. I don't have Word or Excel installed on my home computer anymore. I was delighted to discover that box.net has a built-in file viewer for them. :-)

Dining With Friends 2010 - A Trip to Germany

New Massachusetts data security law

2010-04-28T15:00:00.004-04:00

Have you heard about Massachusetts law 201 CMR 17.00? It went into effect on March 1, 2010, but seems to have flown under most of the reporting radars. If you store personally identifiable information (PII) about a Massachusetts resident, it affects you. It doesn't matter where you live. Here is how the law defines personal information:

A Massachusetts resident's first name and last name or first initial and last name in combination with any one or more of the following data elements that relate to such resident: (a) Social Security number; (b) driver's license number or state-issued identification card number; or (c) financial account number, or credit or debit card number, with or without any required security code, access code, personal identification number or password, that would permit access to a resident’s financial account; provided, however, that “Personal information” shall not include information that is lawfully obtained from publicly available information, or from federal, state or local government records lawfully made available to the general public.

If you do store this information get ready for some fun. The information must be encrypted end to end during transmission and even when at rest. If you store the information on a portable device the whole device must be encrypted. You must file a written statement with the Massachusetts state government stating that you have a plan for dealing with information security. You don't have to file the plan itself, just the statement.

The fines associated with this law are massive. Someone steals a laptop with unencrypted data on 200 residents: that'll be $1,000,000 please. If you are discovered to be passing PII in clear text that will cost $5,000 per resident's information exposed. Write down a Massachusetts resident's PII and don't shred it -- that's $5,000, too.

I will readily concede a lot of this is common sense, but some of it will be onerous for a small business to implement.

SnTT: A LotusScript StopWatch Class With Nanosecond Precision

2010-03-25T06:00:00.000-04:00

I was doing some work in Access and wanted to time how long it took to do something. I was doing a small scale test so the timing was pretty minuscule. After poking around a bit I discovered a way to use the Windows API to count CPU clock cycles. I converted it to LotusScript since virtually nobody who reads my blog cares about Access. :-)

Declare Function QueryPerformanceCounter Lib "kernel32" (lpPerformanceCount As Double) As Long
Declare Function QueryPerformanceFrequency Lib "kernel32" (lpPerformanceCount As Double) As Long

Public Class StopWatch
    Private m_StartTime As Double
    Private m_EndTime As Double
    Private m_Freq As Double
    Private m_Overhead As Double
   
    Private m_Days As Integer
    Private m_Hours As Integer
    Private m_Minutes As Integer
    Private m_Seconds As Integer
    Private m_Deci As Long
    Private m_Centi As Long
    Private m_Milli As Long
    Private m_Micro As Long
    Private m_Nano As Long
   
    Private m_TotalSeconds As Single
   
    Public Property Get Hours As Integer
        Hours = m_Hours
    End Property
   
    Public Property Get Minutes As Integer
        Minutes = m_Minutes
    End Property
   
    Public Property Get Seconds As Integer
        Seconds = m_Seconds
    End Property
   
    Public Property Get Milli As Integer
        Milli = m_Milli   
    End Property
   
    Public Property Get Centi As Integer
        Centi = m_Centi
    End Property
   
    Public Property Get Micro As Long
        Micro = m_Micro   
    End Property
   
    Public Property Get Nano As Long
        Nano = m_Nano   
    End Property
   
    Public Property Get TotalSeconds As Single
        TotalSeconds = m_TotalSeconds
    End Property
   
    Public Sub StartTimer()
        QueryPerformanceCounter m_StartTime
    End Sub
   
    Public Sub EndTimer()
        QueryPerformanceCounter m_EndTime
       
        Dim ElapsedTime As Double
       
        ElapsedTime = (m_EndTime - m_StartTime - m_Overhead) / m_Freq
        m_TotalSeconds = Csng(ElapsedTime)
       
        m_Days = ElapsedTime \ 86400
        If m_Days > 0 Then
            ElapsedTime = ElapsedTime - m_Days * 86400
        End If
       
        m_Hours = ElapsedTime \ 3600
        If m_Hours > 0 Then
            ElapsedTime = ElapsedTime - m_Hours * 3600
        End If
       
        m_Minutes = ElapsedTime \ 60
        If m_Minutes > 0 Then
            ElapsedTime = ElapsedTime - m_Minutes * 60
        End If
       
        m_Seconds = Int(ElapsedTime)
        If m_Seconds > 0 Then
            ElapsedTime = ElapsedTime - m_Seconds
        End If
       
        m_Deci = Clng(Round(Clng(ElapsedTime * 10), 1))
        m_Centi = Clng(Round(Clng(ElapsedTime * 100), 2))
        m_Milli = Clng(Round(Clng(ElapsedTime * 1000), 3))
        m_Micro = Clng(Round(Clng(ElapsedTime * 100000), 6))
        m_Nano = Clng(Round(Clng(ElapsedTime * 1000000000), 9))
       
    End Sub
   
    Public Sub New()
        Dim mStartTime As Double
        Dim mEndTime As Double
       
        'First figure out the API overhead
        QueryPerformanceCounter mStartTime
        QueryPerformanceCounter mEndTime
       
        m_Overhead = mEndTime - mStartTime
       
        'Now get the frequency
        QueryPerformanceFrequency m_Freq
    End Sub
   
End Class

This LotusScript was converted to HTML using the ls2html routine,
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.

playing the hand you're dealt

2010-03-06T09:30:00.001-05:00

To cut to the chase, I'll be starting classes at the Art Institute in July. Trust me, you couldn't possibly be any more surprised than I am.

By now you know I was selected as one of five finalists in a Food Network and Art Institutes scholarship contest, but I couldn't accept because the cost of acceptance was too high. The events that led from there to here still seem like a dream.

The contest rules state the scholarship can only be used for an associate or bachelor degree program, which cost $53,000 and $80,000, respectively. When I spoke with the contest coordinator I explained I couldn't cover the gap between the scholarship and the total cost of the degree. She took this back to the Food Network and AI, and they agreed to change the rules of the scholarship.

The Art Institute also offers a culinary arts certificate program, which is only three quarters long and only covers the core culinary classes. It also only costs $23,000, and I can cover $3,000 a lot more easily than $33,000, so I accepted the scholarship.

Even though I have known I was the winner for a while I was waiting for someone to pull the rug from under me. Stuff like this doesn't happen to me. As of yesterday, it's really official: Food Network Scholarship Announcement.

what if 2000 characters could change your life?

2010-02-07T16:37:00.000-05:00

In the Fall of 2008 Food Network aired The Chef Jeff Project. This show featured Jeff Henderson, a drug dealer and prison inmate turned chef who was trying to turn around the lives of six disadvantaged people in Los Angeles. The participants who completed the program were each offered scholarships to The Art Institutes culinary arts program. The Food Network also sponsored an essay scholarship contest for viewers, with a prize of $20,000 to the winner. I entered and never heard anything.

A year later, in Fall 2009, the Food Network was conducting their search for the next Iron Chef. In conjunction with this they did the same essay competition for another $20,000 scholarship to The Art Institutes. I thought back to my previous entry, and after seeing the ads for weeks I finally entered again. Weeks went by and I didn't hear anything, again, so I exhaled and went on with my life.

You can imagine my surprise when I got a call a few weeks ago and was told I'm one of the five finalists in the competition. Once I got over my shock I started looking more seriously at The Art Institutes. To be honest I had not looked at their curriculum... or their tuition costs. I was gobsmacked to learn that a two-year associates' degree program costs $53,000; a four year bachelor's degree is over $80,000.

The exorbitant cost made me take a hard look at what I want to do, as well as what I can afford to do. After a lot of soul-searching I finally decided not to pursue the scholarship competition. I appreciate getting as far as I did, I simply can't justify putting myself that far in debt.

I'm back to my old plan now, which is to pay off all my debt and attend culinary school in 2011. I'm going to continue experimenting and finding my culinary voice and point of view. Going through this got me thinking about how people are just as afraid of success as they are of failure. The first step truly is the hardest.

A cloud-based document sharing service that should be on your radar

2010-01-22T08:40:00.003-05:00

I have been using box.net for a long time. They started out as another "me too" file sharing service. Over time they have adapted to the changing landscape and now have an incredibly compelling set of cloud-based document editing capabilities. I'm testing it out now and I'm very impressed. If you're in the market for cloud-based document sharing, box.net has an excellent toolset.

Finding the cluster size on Windows iSCSI targets

2010-01-19T21:40:00.000-05:00

We're preparing to extend our SAN at work and use the new space as an opportunity to clean up our earlier sins. We are using an HP AiO 1200R iSCSI SAN, which runs Windows Storage Server 2003. This is connected to our HP BLc-3000 via iSCSI. The BLc-3000 has six blades all running VMware ESX 3.5.

As we start the process of rearranging our storage, we need to figure out was how the AiO presents the storage to VMware. We can see the RAID volumes on the AiO, but they aren't assigned drive letters. This makes it difficult to work with them because most of the Windows disk management tools assume there are drive letters.

After a lot of fiddling around we finally found it:

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo "c:\data volumes\[volume name]"

This syntax is necessary because the iSCSI volumes are mounted through junctions that are defined in the C:\Data Volumes\ path. There are two key things to note here. First, the folder names listed in the C:\Data Volumes\ folder have nothing at all to do with the volume names you'll find in Disk Management or diskpart. They are simply mount points and could be called anything. In the following image I have Disk Management open as well as the properties of one of my C:\Data Volumes\ entries.

You'll notice there is an entry in Disk Management called Data Volume but nothing with that name in C:\Data Volumes\. If you look at the leftmost dialog showing the disk space you can see this is a 1.93TB volume with the name Data Volume, which means it is mapped through C:\Data Volumes\Data Volume 2. I know it is confusing and it may be unique to our environment, but it caused us some frustration so I wanted to mention it. To match up the volume names you need to right-click the folder in C:\Data Volumes\ and select Properties, then click the Properties button beside Type: Mounted Volume to show the iSCSI disk properties. This will show you the volume name as it appears in Disk Management and let you match the volume names to C:\Data Volumes\ mount points. Just to be clear, it is the folder name in C:\Data Volumes that you want to feed into fsutil. Here is the output from my server:

C:\>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo "c:\data volumes\data volume 2"
NTFS Volume Serial Number :       0xe0b404f1b404cc4a
Version :                         3.1
Number Sectors :                  0x00000000f85df672
Total Clusters :                  0x000000001f0bbece
Free Clusters  :                  0x0000000006823dee
Total Reserved :                  0x0000000000000000
Bytes Per Sector  :               512
Bytes Per Cluster :               4096
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment    : 1024
Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 0
Mft Valid Data Length :           0x000000002b358000
Mft Start Lcn  :                  0x00000000000c0000
Mft2 Start Lcn :                  0x000000000f85df67
Mft Zone Start :                  0x00000000000ea960
Mft Zone End   :                  0x0000000003ed77e0

Secondly, and this is a lot simpler, don't use a trailing slash on the volume name.

Recent cooking experiments

2010-01-13T20:11:00.004-05:00

After the 42 hour pot roast I did two more. These were sirloin instead of chuck (they're from a different part of the cow). Sirloin has less connective tissue and is much leaner so it's often ground to mix with fattier cuts or cut up to use as stew meat.

The first sirloin roast went in for 21 hours and we ate about half of it, but it didn't have the texture I wanted. It was "done" but a little tough. I put the other half back in the bag and let it cook for another 24 hours, for a grand total of 45 hours. It came out with a texture like pastrami, which was great, but it was a little dry. Here were the final results:

After all this I finally decided that pot roast is just better done in a conventional oven so those experiments are over. Last night I put a chunk of boneless pork loin in at 58C and left it until I got home tonight. The total cooking time was about 20 hours. This was one of the best pieces of pork I've ever had. It was tender and succulent and had an incredible flavor. I browned it in a cast iron skillet after it was done to give it a bit of texture, and spooned some reduced apple juice over the top to serve. It was divine!

Right now I have some chicken breast cooking at 63.5C. I'll be sure to share how those go. I will be moving my cooking posts to a new site shortly and return this one to technical content. That way the people only interested in one or the other won't have to sift through the rest. Stay tuned!

How to cook pot roast in 42 short hours!

2010-01-02T13:47:00.005-05:00

I did my osso bucco experiment this past Thursday. After I pulled that out, in went a 6 pound chuck roast. I put some salt and pepper on it, and thinly sliced a stalk of celery to go with it. I read online that said a beef roast should be cooked at 58C to 64C for four to 18 hours. I set the temperature at 58C, put in the chuck roast at 6PM on Thursday, and checked on it around midnight. It was still tough so I left it until noon on Friday. That was 18 hours, and it was still tough.

Frustrated I turned to the Internet to find out the why piece of the failure puzzle. I finally came up with what seemed like reliable sources that said you had to cook tough cuts between 64C and 68C for 12 to 18 hours. I set my cooker to 68C at about noon on Friday, and left it alone until noon on Saturday. Here are the results.

This was after cooking for 18 hours. The pot roast is in a regular non-vacuum-sealed Zip-Lock bag. I squeezed as much air out as possible, then inserted a straw to suck the rest out. It's kind of gross and I probably won't be using that technique again. We use the double-layer bags to prevent freezer burn and the two layers have air between them, so it kept floating. I weighed it down with some small plates to keep it submerged.

The final product after a total of 42 hours cook time.

Breaking it down for plating. You can see that there is still a bit of fat marbled in the roast, but it wasn't cooked at such a high temperature that it all melted out. It created a succulent and delicious flavor.

The definition of fork tender.

The final plate. Corn bread, hoppin john, whipped sweet potatoes, and pot roast with brown gravy.

The score is now tied 1 to 1. :-) Next up: poached pears.

My first experiment with my Sous Vide Supreme

2010-01-01T22:30:00.005-05:00

For Christmas Myron got me a Sous Vide Supreme. The idea is you put food in vacuum sealed bags, then let them slowly cook to the proper temperature in a very precisely controlled water bath. It is widely used in high end restaurants because you can cook food to the desired temperature and it just stays at that temperature. You can cook a perfectly medium rare steak and leave it for days without hurting it.

My first experiment was veal osso bucco. This is a cross-section of the lower leg, and typically you braise it for two to three hours in the oven. The closest thing I could find in the cookbook that came with the Sous Vide Supreme was bone in pork, which said 58C to 60C for four to six hours.

I put a little salt and pepper and a small pinch of saffron on each piece of osso bucco, put two per bag, and sealed them. Then I set the temperature on the Sous Vide Supreme to 58C and dropped them in and left them for six hours. Here is how it looked before I pulled it out of the cooker. Yes, it is done at this point and yes, I know it looks like brains.

I made a sauce from sauteed onions and celery with a touch of browned butter, chicken stock and heavy cream, and served the osso bucco with honey glazed carrots with pine nuts and green beans with sherry vinegar. Here are the results:

So, how did it taste? The flavor was okay, but the texture was weird. Sous vide cooking doesn't create crispness or browning, so you have to try to get that after the fact. You run the risk of overcooking it, though, since it's already completely cooked. The other issue is osso bucco has a lot of connective tissue. After doing more research I have learned that 58C just isn't hot enough to dissolve it, you need at least 60C.

One experiment, one mediocre result. I have a chuck roast cooking now, and I'll follow up after I pull it out. I already know I started out totally wrong so now I'm hoping to salvage it. The joys of experimentation. :-)

Problem with Acrobat Reader Active X control on a Notes 8.5.1 Form

2009-12-15T10:12:00.008-05:00

Whenever I add an Adobe Acrobat Reader ActiveX control to a Notes form, save the form, then try to open it, I get an error. I can't actually use the control. I get the same error if I load the database in the Notes 8.5.1 client and try to create or load a document based on the form. No other ActiveX control gives me this problem. Anyone have any suggestions?

UPDATE: I can use the Acrobat Reader control from Access 2003, VB 6, VB.Net and C#. I am working on setting up Notes 7 so I can see if this problem is specific to 8.5.1.

UPDATE #2: Confirmed it is also a problem on 7.0.4. Opening a PMR now.

Gone fishing

2009-11-05T22:38:00.001-05:00

I'll be on vacation for the next two weeks.

The fishing trip will be in Panama.

SnTT: tracking down space hogs in Notes

2009-11-05T06:00:00.003-05:00

You all have them. People who keep every stinking e-mail they ever received for the past 10 years. They can't possibly delete that e-mail response that simply says "thanks" because it would destroy their CYA audit trail. Your storage budget looks like the national deficit so finally management is asking why you need that much space. You want to give them a clean report showing who is using their mail as a vast garbage dump.

Creating a Notes agent to loop through the mail directory, open each database, and extract the space used and percent free is trivial. But on your server with 1000+ mail databases and dozens or hundreds that are over a gig, it takes a while to run and bogs down the server. So what can you do?

Enter the Lotus C API. Notes doesn't use the same entry point you do when it's working with databases. Notes uses the spiffy C API, which runs at a lower level. LotusScript code has to be interpreted, so there is some lag. And once it's interpreted it ends up calling the C API. You can bypass the middle man and hit the C API directly.

In this case you only need three C API calls: NSFDbOpen, NSFDbClose and NSFDbSpaceUsed. Add in a NotesDBDirectory and a loop and you're good to go. The following will create documents and put them into a view that has the first column set to "# in view". The second column is the dbsize. It then walks the view to write the position in the view to each record.

(Declarations)
Declare Function NSFDbOpen Lib "nnotes.dll" Alias "NSFDbOpen" (Byval dbName As String, hDb As Long) As Integer
Declare Function NSFDbClose Lib "nnotes.dll" Alias "NSFDbClose" (hDb As Long) As Integer
Declare Function NSFDbSpaceUsage Lib "nnotes.dll" Alias "NSFDbSpaceUsage" (ByVal hDB As Long, retAllocatedBytes As Long, retFreeBytes As Long) As Integer

Sub Initialize
    Dim s As New NotesSession
    Dim rdoc As NotesDocument
    Dim mfile As String
    Dim success As Variant
    Dim pmail As String
    Dim dbdir As New NotesDbDirectory("server/domain")
    Dim db As NotesDatabase
    Dim thisDb As NotesDatabase
    Dim view As NotesView
    Dim nvec As NotesViewEntryCollection
    Dim eOne As NotesViewEntry
    Dim eTWo As NotesViewEntry
    Dim dbHandle As Long
    Dim usedBytes As Long
    Dim freeBytes As Long

    'Using NotesDBDirectory gives us a handle to the database
    'and limited information about it. The rest of the
    'information, such as PercentUsed, won't be populated until
    'db.Open is called, which we don't want to do because
    'that's what drags the server down. Instead we'll combine
    'information from the closed database and some Notes C API
    'calls to get the specific information we want.

    Set db = dbdir.GetFirstDatabase(DATABASE)

    While Not db Is Nothing
         mfile = db.FilePath
         'Only get databases in the mail subdirectory
         If Left$(mfile, 4) = "mail" Then
              'Get a handle to the database. The NotesDatabase object
              'has a LotusScript handle, we need a C API handle.

              Call NSFDbOpen ("server/domain!!" + mfile, dbHandle)
              If dbHandle <> 0 Then
                   'Peek inside and get the used bytes and free bytes
                   Call NSFDbSpaceUsage(dbHandle, usedBytes, freeBytes)
                   'We have what we need so close the C API handle to prevent a memory leak
                   Call NSFDbClose(dbHandle)
              End If

              Set rdoc = New NotesDocument(s.CurrentDatabase)
              rdoc.form = "EmailRecord"
              rdoc.dbFilename = FilePath
              rdoc.title = db.title
              rdoc.mailfile = db.FilePath
              rdoc.dbsize = db.size
              rdoc.pctused = Round((usedBytes / db.size, 2) * 100
              rdoc.server = db.Server
              rdoc.Username = db.Title
              Call rdoc.Save(True,False)
              mfile = ""
         End If

         Set db = dbdir.GetNextDatabase
    Wend

    ' Next we walk the all docs view and write the user's ranking to their document
    Set thisDB = s.CurrentDatabase
    Set view = thisDb.GetView("AllDocs")

    Set nvec = view.AllEntries
    Set eOne = nvec.GetFirstEntry
    Do Until eOne Is Nothing
        Set doc = eOne.Document
        Print "On doc " + Cstr( eOne.GetPosition("."))
        doc.Ranking = Cstr( eOne.GetPosition("."))
        Call doc.Save(True, False)
        Set eTwo = eOne
        Set eOne = nvec.GetNextEntry( eTwo )
    Loop
End Sub

This LotusScript was converted to HTML using the ls2html routine,
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.

[UPDATED 11/5/2009 9:25 AM to include the NSFDbClose code to prevent a memory leak.]

Another resource for the Notes community

2009-11-04T06:30:00.001-05:00

There are several online communities for the Notes community: developerWorks forums, BleedYellow Sametime, PlanetLotus, and IdeaJam just to name a few. There is another one that not as many people visit, the #notes channel on IRC. Consider this your invitation to join the discussion there. In case you don't have an IRC client or even know what IRC is, here is a widget that will get you going quickly

Chat here

This is all AJAX, no Java or ActiveX required. Just open the link, enter a nickname, and join the conversation. If it looks like nobody is active just say hi or ask a question. Someone will probably respond. :-)

What do you do when Notes 8.5.1 just won't install?

2009-11-03T17:30:00.000-05:00

My friend Adam has a problem. He can't install Notes 8.5.1. Every time he tries he gets the following error:

0x1B1 - Version mismatch between executable and preexisting shared memory versions! EXITING. You may need to stop RTVSCAN or reboot.

It is documented as SPR# DDES7L9SEV, and IBM thought they had it fixed in 8.0.2 FP2 and 8.5 FP1. SPR #TONN7WTQQE was opened based on reports this is happening in 8.5.1, which I can confirm it really is.

Adam called Lotus support and they had him uninstall Notes, manually remove all the directories and Registry entries, and try again. It still failed with the same error. He sent in NSD's and other logs and there was no resolution. The final response he received was that it is under investigation. At this point he is stuck not being able to install 8.5.1 at all on his computer, which means he can't test his applications for compatibility.

This morning the same thing happened to me. I upgraded a test VM from 8.5 FP1 to 8.5.1 and got the same 0x1B1 error as Adam. I tried the same cleanup he did but it didn't help me, either. I'm writing this while I'm waiting for Windows to install in a new VM so I can see if it was just a fluke. Whether it is or not, this hardly inspires confidence.

Lotus Center for Advanced Collaboration

2009-10-29T09:04:00.003-04:00

IBM opened one in Pune, India. Is there one in the US? I'm not being snarky, I'm genuinely curious. I have never heard of such a thing from IBM. I know other vendors, such as Avaya and Cisco, have customer-focused campuses, but I am not aware of anything like that from IBM.

Notes 8.5.1 - All Documents shows Folders!

2009-10-19T12:38:00.002-04:00

As far as I know this is new in 8.5.1

SnTT: How to tell if the Notes client is Standard or Basic

2009-10-01T07:00:00.000-04:00

A lot of people have been asking on the forums lately how to tell whether the Notes client is running in Basic or Standard configuration. You can use @IsEmbeddedInsideWCT or NotesUIWorkspace.IsEmbeddedInsideWCT. The Workplace Client the help refers to morphed into Lotus Expeditor, which is the framework for the Notes 8 Standard client.

Windows 7 Enterprise first look

2009-09-19T14:30:00.003-04:00

Those of you who are Facebook friends might recall me talking about problems with my home computer's motherboard. In particular the audio drivers would crash and I'd have to reboot to restore sound. I also could not get it to recognize 4GB RAM, and I had to do all sorts of strange things just to get Windows XP to install.

Motherboardectomy

A few weeks ago I finally bought an open box Asus M3N-HT. It was about this time that Microsoft offered a 90-day trial license of Windows 7 Enterprise for IT professionals. I have two Western Digital 1TB drives and one was mostly empty, so I decided to go for it.

I swapped out the motherboard rather easily, with only three small problems. First, while I was pulling the CPU out of my old motherboard I smeared CPU thermal grease across the pins on one side. I wasn't sure if it was conductive or not, but to be on the safe side a toothbrush and some rubbing alcohol took care of that. The second was figuring out which SATA port was #1. I needed to know because the #1 port is where you connect the boot drive. The six SATA ports are on the edge of the motherboard, in three columns of two ports each. Was the bottom #1 or the top? It turns out it's the top.

Finally, many new motherboards have what's called AHCI mode, which is used to enable some advanced features including more SATA ports. My motherboard has 6 SATA ports total, but I can only use 4 of them unless I enable AHCI or RAID mode. When did this I could not get my computer to boot from my SATA DVD drive. It turns out that this is not a supported configuration for this motherboard. If I want to install an OS with AHCI enabled from the start I would have to boot from an IDE optical drive. I'm not particularly concerned because I'm only using 4 SATA ports right now amd Windows Vista and Windows 7 support enabling AHCI later.

GO!

I had already burned the Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit ISO to a DVD, so after I had all the above sorted out I popped that in and fired up the installer. It was completely painless. The installer loads in a graphical screen instead of the old DOS style like Windows XP used, and it loads much faster. I deleted the partition already on the drive I was installing to and let the installer recreate it. It added a 100MB system partition whose purpose I don't know yet, then created the primary partition on the remainder of the drive. The entire installation process took about 30 - 45 minutes. I left it running while I loaded the dishwasher so I'm not sure of the exact time. I heard my computer reboot twice during the process, and I came back and it was at a login screen.

Finishing Installation

The very first thing I noticed was Windows had automatically set itself to my monitors' native resolution, which is 1440x900, and both monitors were working. That was interesting. When I logged in my computer made a noise and I had to ask Myron if that was my computer or his. It was mine, so apparently my sound was working, too. With Windows XP I always had to install video and audio drivers before anything worked, so I wondered what else had the Windows 7 installation done automatically?

I finally tracked down the device manager and was stunned to see that everything had a driver. My audio worked, my video worked, and my network worked. I didn't have to install a single driver. It listed my video card as an nVidia GeForce 9800GTX+, my keyboard as a Saitek Eclipse and my mouse as a Logitech TrackMan Marble. It even loaded the nVidia Control Panel software.

First impressions

The first thing I did from here was install Thunderbird so I could get to my e-mail. IE8 prompted me to make sure I wanted to download the file, then Windows prompted me again when I ran the installer. This was the first time I had gotten any security prompts. Thunderbird installed fine, I copied the contents of my Thunderbird profile to the clipboard... then couldn't find where to put it. A quick search (using Bing) showed they had moved it to a folder called Roaming in my user profile. I found the Thunderbird folder there, pasted in my old profile, loaded Thunderbird, and e-mail started flowing in.

While I was working with the new Windows Explorer I noticed it wasn't showing me file extensions. And I didn't have toolbars. I tried right-clicking the area where the toolbars should be and nothing happened. Another Internet search and I learn I have to go through the Control Panel to set folder options. I changed those and they took place immediately in my open Explorer window.

Wrap up

As you may have guessed, I haven't worked with Windows Vista yet, so there is going to be a bit of a learning curve. So far I really like Windows 7. It's fast, it looks nice, andit's not so different that I want to scream in frustration (yet). My initial impression is Windows 7 is to Windows Vista what Notes 8.5.1 is to Notes 8: what it should have been from the beginning.

My impressions of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 beta

2009-09-06T12:48:00.001-04:00

For those of you looking for my food-oriented writing, keep moving. This isn't going to make much sense. :-)

Why Am I Here?

You might be thinking "Hey... I know you... aren't you that formerly relevant guy who hates Notes and Domino and now just pokes fun at Ed Brill and taunts Nathan?"

It is no secret that in my day job I work with Visual Studio, Access and SQL Server and we use Outlook and Exchange for e-mail. But we don't have a collaboration platform. We tried Sharepoint and it became apparent it wasn't for us when I couldn't even get a demo environment set up in a reasonable amount of time. I tried out Notes and Domino 8, but I have been very disappointed with the performance and overall build quality of every release so far.

The worst bugs were in Domino Designer, and I happen to be a developer. Since the other user populations -- end users and administrators -- were getting lots of new features that actually mostly worked, I finally decided that IBM simply didn't care. Here's how the cycle would go: we would yell at them at Lotusphere and they'd make a promise to do better and we'd cheer. Several months later they'd give us something half-baked, we'd yell, they'd make a promise to do better at Lotusphere and we'd cheer. Lather, rinse, repeat.

As if to prove this point, the first Domino Designer in Eclipse is an atrocity. It just doesn't work. Period. There are scores of regression bugs and much of the new functionality is not complete. Things that were promised and demoed at Lotusphere 2008 were not shipped in this release, which came out in January 2009. I had participated in usability sessions during which I was told the functionality I was working with would be in 8.5, but it wasn't. I took it very personally. I felt like Lotus looked me in the eye and lied.

So when I heard that supposedly one of the primary goals in 8.5.1 was to fix was was left undone in 8.5 and to finally make Domino Designer a usable development environment, my first reaction was look back at the long history of broken promises and broken software and be dismissive. I finally decided that after harping about this for the better part of a decade I had to see if they were really doing it or just giving more lip service. I requested to participate in the 8.5.1 managed beta. I had to know.

Notes Client

The first thing I noticed is performance is much improved. From the time I double-click the Lotus Notes icon until I get the password prompt is consistently 3 - 5 seconds. After I enter my password the time to load my "My Work" home page is another 15 - 20 seconds. I used to have startup times of over 45 seconds so this is a huge improvement.

Working with mail, calendar, to-do's, and follow-up items is smooth and efficient. In previous releases I had pauses of up to 20 seconds while the calendar or e-mail loaded, but that's completely gone. Now it's a second or two and it's loaded. I really like the new UI for mail and the improvements made to the icons and visual clutter since 8.0. I have not had any weird errors or application hangs and so far the toolbars haven't been moving around randomly like they used to. I haven't had a single crash yet, either. The performance and stability of the Notes client by itself has improved tremendously across the board.

Domino Designer

How about Domino Designer, the application I hated so much I changed jobs to get away from it? DDE 8.5.1 is much more responsive and much more stable than 8.5. It's still not as speedy as the old Domino Designer, but it also doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out (yet). I haven't had code go missing, and I have only had one crash. The Eclipse LotusScript editor is a little quirky and isn't what was promised, but still an improvement over what was available in previous releases. Code assist works for custom classes and will autocomplete method and property names. You can type out a function or object name, hover your mouse over it, and help pops up in a little window. I'm definitely impressed. This is close to what I expected when release 8.0 came out in August 2007.

What? No Sturm and Drang?

Some of you may be shocked to see me saying mostly positive things about Notes and Domino. I've always liked the idea of the products, I just haven't liked the implementation. 8.5.1 is a game changer. It's showing the promise of the platform and is a great jumping off point. Sure it's two years late, but at least it's finally here.

I do have a list of issues with 8.5.1, some of which are quite serious. Originally I started writing a vitriolic exposé of these as well as what's been left on the cutting room floor. The license on the latest beta build dropped the secrecy requirement, so I could do that. After taking a step back and looking at the whole picture, I came to the conclusion that ultimately there is more good than bad in 8.5.1. Sure there are problems, but after screwing around for two years IBM/Lotus finally came up with something that doesn't make baby Jesus cry.

And let's not forget this is beta software and there are several weeks of development between the last beta release and the final gold build. Some of the problems I have reported may be resolved. There are a few things I already know are being deferred or simply aren't going to be available, so you can be sure a more critical writeup is coming.

Final Thoughts

Coming full circle, the reason I'm writing this is because I am shocked by what I have seen in 8.5.1. I have been one of the harshest critics of R8 and I'm not a raving fan yet, but there is finally hope. I wrote off R8 as a lost release, one that was basically an entire beta cycle between 7 and 9. I never expected any R8 release to be usable. If you did the same you owe it to yourself to give 8.5.1 a try. It has issues and there is a lot left to be done, but is head and shoulders above any previous R8 release.

Disclaimer: IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.1 is prerelease code and there are no guarantees from IBM that the functionality presented or discussed will be in the final shipping product.

Problem with Windows Server 2003 NIC's after running VMware Converter

2009-09-03T17:08:00.001-04:00

When you convert a physical machine to virtual, VMware Converter will create VMware-compatible network interfaces. It does not delete the old hardware interfaces that are no longer used, it simply hides them from Device Manager. When you try to assign an IP address to the new interface, you may find yourself in one of these situations:

You get the error "The IP address is assigned to another adapter which is hidden. In order to allocate the actual IP address of the server to the network adapter/s you'll need to remove the hidden adapters."
You can assign the IP address, but the Network Properties dialog shows it is DHCP. ipconfig will show the static IP. Resetting the static IP in the Network Properties doesn't stick.

If the first one happens it's pretty shocking because you can't give your server the IP address you want, and you can't find the interface that has it assigned. In the second case it doesn't hurt anything because it still works, it's just inconsistent and can cause some issues when troubleshooting.

To fix this follow these steps:

Open a command prompt on the affected VM
Type set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 and press Enter
Open Device Manager by typing devmgmt.msc and pressing Enter from the same command prompt
In Device Manager click View > Show Hidden Devices
Find the old devices and delete them
Restart the server

I found most of these steps in the VMware Forums. The downside is it doesn't always work. I've had about a 50% success rate with getting it to actually delete the incorrect NIC.

Dining With Friends 2009 Recipes

2009-07-21T19:09:00.002-04:00

For your reading pleasure, here are most of the recipes from this year's Dining With Friends party. If you were at the dinner, try to figure out which ones are not posted. :-) Enjoy!

And here are two more dishes that I meant to make but ran out of time.

Lotus Support is clearly overwhelmed

2009-06-15T12:45:00.001-04:00

My friend Ninke logs PMR's with Lotus Support on an almost weekly basis. He checked one of his PMR's today and found this note:

Called client and explained the reason for the delay. Enormous
amount of PMR's currently opened and ongoing, impacting
unfortunately all, especially lower prior/sev 4/4.

There are two things this brings to mind. First, Ed Brill keeps saying that there have been fewer issues reported for R8 than previous releases. That being the case it's odd that both I and the four Domino admins I talk to almost daily, including Ninke, have all opened more PMR's for R8 than they did for any others. I'm sure Ed's statistics are more representative than my limited sample, but it's still hard for me to reconcile the official reports with what I see firsthand.

Second, why would one customer having a large number of PMR's open slow down resolution on all their PMR's? I didn't think IBM dedicated staff to resolving individual customers' problems. Even if they did that should speed things up, not slow it down. If they don't, why would the volume of open PMR's have any impact on resolution? Something seems to be broken besides Notes and Domino 8.x.

VMWare ESX, virtualized DNS and an ISCI SAN

2009-04-27T11:00:00.009-04:00

Since the fire we had last year we have replaced all our old servers with a new virtualized infrastructure. We're running VMware ESX 3.5, an HP BLc-3000 blade chassis with six blades, and an HP AiO1200R ISCSI SAN. It is working great and I have a writeup about that decision-making process that I will be publishing shortly.

Today I wanted to bring up one of the potential pitfalls when you're creating a fully virtualized environment. This past weekend we had to cut building power for an extended period of time, so the network administrator brought down everything in our server room. As he brought everything back online he realized that Virtual Center, the control console for VMware ESX, could not talk to the SAN because it required DNS resolution.

The Problem

Our DNS servers are virtualized with storage on the SAN. He ran into a chicken-and-egg situation where he had dependent services that relied on each other.

It took him a while to realize that DNS was the issue. The logs on the SAN side simply said "Could not connect ISCSI LUN". On the VMware side the virtual machines said "storage not available". Figuring out why the two were unable to connect took some careful analysis. Solving it proved difficult because our departmental wiki also used SAN storage, so he had no access to our documentation. In a flash he found himself back in the same situation he was in after the fire, when he could not access critical documentation because the servers with it were not available.

The Solution

So how did he solve it? Luckily he still had the old primary domain controller hanging out, which had all the DNS information. He was extremely lucky, and he knows it. To keep from having to rely on luck, how should you configure your VMware environment so this doesn't happen to you? There are a couple of ways to tackle it.

Use local storage for your virtualized name servers.

Pros

Name servers will load without SAN access.
Resilient to SAN outages.

Cons

Cannot mix guest VM's that require SAN storage. The ISCSI initiator in VMware ESX loads when ESX boots. By having your DNS server on the same physical host as another VM that requires SAN storage, the guest on SAN storage will not be able to start.

Use a non-virtualized DNS server.

Pros

Resilient to SAN outages.

Cons

If using a Windows server, also requires you run Active Directory services.

Use hosts files.

Pros

Resilient to SAN outages.
May improve performance slightly since lookups will always be from local cache.

Cons

Requires you add hosts files to the Virtual Center server, SAN server, and every ESX host server.
Can be a maintenance burden if your environment changes frequently and you have to constantly add/remove ESX hosts.

We have opted for the last option. Our VMware host environment is fairly static, so maintaining hosts files will be a minimal maintenance issue. The resilience we gain from it make it very worthwhile. Oh, and we printed a copy of our wiki page that has all the hostnames and IP addresses of every server we have, and put it in the safe. :-) You do have a similar list, and a fireproof safe... right?

A script to check remote computers for directories

2009-04-20T14:48:00.003-04:00

At work we needed a way to check servers to see if certain software had been installed. The easiest way was to check for the software's installation directory. There isn't an easy way to do this remotely, though, so I wrote a script to take care of it: dircheck.vbs.

While I was writing this tool I learned a lot about VBScript. For starters, you can't interact with stdin or stdout using the default VBS command interpreter. If you try to write information to the user's console it will display everything in a popup. To fix this, you can use the special cscript interpreter:

cscript dircheck.vbs

If you execute the above command you will get command line help for the utility. Full source code is obviously included, so please feel free to use it however you need to.

How to copy SQL Server DBMail configuration to another server

2009-04-13T17:06:00.002-04:00

I'm setting up a new SQL Server from scratch and wanted to copy the existing DBMail configuration from the old server. I did some searches and the best I could find were pointers to the msdb.dbo.sysmail_* system tables. I did some trial and error and got everything copied over, so here's how I did it.

Log into the new server
Create a server link from the new server to the old server
Copy the DBMail configuration

I had to log into the new server and do the server link there. From my workstation SQL Server considered it a redirection, and that is a security violation. Save yourself some headaches and just start at the new server. Note that the following SQL script will delete any existing DBMail configuration in the target SQL Server. If you want to keep the existing configuration you'll need to take out the DELETE and SET IDENTITY_INSERT statements and manipulate the account_id and profile_id in the related tables.

SET IDENTITY_INSERT sysmail_account ON
INSERT INTO sysmail_account (account_id, [name], [description], email_address, display_name, replyto_address, last_mod_datetime, last_mod_user)
SELECT * FROM oldserver.msdb.dbo.sysmail_account
SET IDENTITY_INSERT sysmail_account OFF
GO

DELETE sysmail_configuration
GO
INSERT INTO sysmail_configuration (paramname, paramvalue, [description], last_mod_datetime, last_mod_user)
SELECT * FROM oldserver.msdb.dbo.sysmail_configuration
GO

DELETE FROM sysmail_profile
GO
SET IDENTITY_INSERT sysmail_profile ON
INSERT INTO sysmail_profile (profile_id, [name], [description], last_mod_datetime, last_mod_user)
SELECT * FROM oldserver.msdb.dbo.sysmail_profile
SET IDENTITY_INSERT sysmail_profile OFF
GO

DELETE FROM sysmail_principalprofile
GO
INSERT INTO sysmail_principalprofile (profile_id, principal_sid, is_default, last_mod_datetime, last_mod_user)
SELECT * FROM oldserver.msdb.dbo.sysmail_principalprofile
GO

DELETE FROM sysmail_profileaccount
GO
INSERT INTO sysmail_profileaccount (profile_id, account_id, sequence_number, last_mod_datetime, last_mod_user)
SELECT * FROM oldserver.msdb.dbo.sysmail_profileaccount
GO

DELETE FROM sysmail_servertype
GO
INSERT INTO sysmail_servertype (servertype, is_incoming, is_outgoing, last_mod_datetime, last_mod_user)
SELECT * FROM oldserver.msdb.dbo.sysmail_servertype
GO

DELETE FROM sysmail_server
GO
INSERT INTO sysmail_server (account_id, servertype, servername, port, username, credential_id, use_default_credentials,
enable_ssl, flags, last_mod_datetime, last_mod_user)
SELECT * FROM oldserver.msdb.dbo.sysmail_server
GO

free alternative to defrag.nsf

2009-03-23T18:00:00.000-04:00

My friend Adam asked me recently about defrag.nsf. In case you don't know, this is a Windows-only tool for Domino that will do a file-level defragmentation of Domino databases. According to the product page the theory is this will increase performance. I haven't tried the product so I can't state whether this is true or not, but I do know that you can get the same results for free.

defrag.nsf is using the Windows defragmentation API to do file-specific defragmentation. Microsoft baked this into Windows NT 4 and the same API has been in Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 and 2008. It is robust, stable, and has been proven over time. Because all the necessary libraries are included with Windows you could write this application yourself if you wanted to.

But you don't have to. Sysinternals, a division of Microsoft, has the free contig tool that does the exact same thing. You can defrag a single file, a directory, or recurse directories. And it accepts wildcards, so you could defrag "c:\program files\ibm\lotus\domino\data\mail\*.nsf".

If you decide you want to find out if file fragmentation is an issue for your Domino server it wouldn't hurt to try out the free contig tool and compare it to the results from defrag.nsf.

P.S. While I was researching this I came across Ulrich Kraus' write up of contig. The comments there include links to more free defragmentation utilities.

blueberry lime sauce

2009-03-15T12:24:00.003-04:00

You can use this with anything that needs a slightly sweet, fruity, and citrusy pop of flavor. I served this with braised pork belly.

1 C Riesling wine
1 C unsweetened blueberry juice
2 cardamom pod, or 1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
2 kaffir lime leaves, or the zest of 2 limes
juice from 1 lime
sugar to taste
salt to taste
2 small saucepans
strainer

Put the Riesling in a small saucepan. Heat over medium-high heat until it reduces to 1/4 to 1/3 of a cup.
Remove from the heat
Thinly slice the kaffir lime leaves and stir the ribbons into the Riesling reduction, or add the lime zest
Add a pinch of salt, stir, and let sit.

Put the blueberry juice and cardamom pod (if using, ground cardamom later would be added later) into a second sauce pan. Heat over medium-high heat until it reduces by about 1/2.
Add the Riesling reduction to the blueberry reduction. Add the ground cardamom now, if you're not using a whole pod.
Reduce the entire mixture to about 1/2 a cup
Stir in sugar to taste. How much you need depends on how sweet the Riesling and blueberry juice was to begin with.
Add salt to taste
Continue cooking until sugar and salt are fully dissolved, about 1 minute

Allow to completely cool, then strain into a storage container. Stir in the lime juice.

buttermilk cake with spiced vanilla icing

2009-03-10T20:56:00.003-04:00

This is the buttermilk cake I have been making for dinner parties recently. It's delicious, easy, and a little unexpected with the buttermilk and butternut squash. I organized the ingredients into the groups you will need to prepare this recipe.

For the cake

10 cup bundt pan
1T unsalted butter, softened
1/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

4 oz (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

1/2 cup canola oil
2 large eggs

1 Tbs distilled white vinegar
2 tsp pure vanilla extract

13 1/2 oz (3 cups) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp table salt
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
3/4 cup buttermilk
2 1/4 cups peeled and grated butternut squash (about 8 oz)

For the icing and garnish

9 oz (2 1/4 cups) confectioners' sugar
3 Tbs buttermilk; more as needed
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 tsp table salt

1/4 cup finely chopped crystallized ginger

Make the cake

Position a rack in the center of the oven and heat the oven to 325. Butter and flour a 10 cup bundt pan, tap out excess flour
Using a hand mixer or a stand mixer with a paddle attachment beat the butter and sugar on medium speed in a large bowl until well combined, about 1 minute
Add the oil and beat until combined, about 15 seconds
Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well on low speed
Add the vinegar and vanilla and mix until just combined
Add half the flour and the baking soda, salt, ginger and nutmeg, mixing on low speed until just combined
Add half the buttermilk and mix until just combined
Add the remainder of the flour and buttermilk, mixing until combined
Stir the squash into the batter
Transfer the batter into your prepared bundt pan and smooth the top with a rubber spatula
Bake the cake until a tester comes out clean, about 1 hour
Remove from the oven and cool the cake in the pan for 30 minutes
Carefully invert the cake onto a wire rack. You want to do this while the cake is still slightly warm to minimize sticking.
When the cake is completely cool transfer to a serving plate

Make the icing

In a medium bowl using a whisk or hand mixer on low speed blend the sugar, buttermilk, vanilla, nutmeg and salt until smooth
Continue mixing and add more buttermilk a few drops a time until the icing is still quite thick but pourable
Pour the icing back and forth over the cake in thick ribbons, or drizzle using a spatula
Sprinkle with crystallized ginger
Let the iced cake sit at room temperature for about 45 minutes before serving

Rufous, the red-lored Amazon

2009-02-22T00:41:00.000-05:00

In September 1989 Myron got a new parrot. It was a red-lored Amazon that he named Rufous. Myron got Rufous when he was so young Myron had to hand feed him three times a day. Over the next twenty years Rufous learned to speak, saying "what are you doing", "bye", "hello birdie". In the last year or so he started mimicking my laugh.

Tonight as we were getting our dinner party underway we went into the kitchen and Rufous was in the bottom of his cage with his wings spread and his beak open. Myron picked him up and Rufous bit him, which Myron took as a good sign. Myron gave Rufous some water with a spoon, which he drank, and Myron returned him to his cage. Within a few minutes he was sprawled with his wings spread, panting.

Myron called the emergency vet, which did not have an avian vet on staff but said they would do what the could. By the time he got there Rufous was barely breathing. Rufous died shortly afterwards. The cause of death is unknown.

I can't imagine what Myron is going through right now. Having a pet for 20 years and losing it so suddenly is an unthinkable horror.

R.I.P Rufous, 1989 - 2009

Dining in the Vail area

2009-02-17T00:10:00.000-05:00

In Colorado we stayed in Avon, which is about 8 miles from Vail proper. This is a playground for the super rich and the dining scene follows suit. That's not to say that the old Colorado cowboy culture has been completely subverted, though. During our stay we enjoyed everything from rustic cowboy fare at The Gashouse to the ultimate in fine dining at Kelly Liken's eponymous restaurant. In between we had soft-shelled crab po boy's, tenderloin sandwiches, amazingly good Chinese, and a spectacular dinner at a slopeside mountain cabin. Our least expensive meal was breakfast at Daylight Donuts in Breckenridge ($17) and the most expensive was at Kelly Liken in Vail ($440).

The Good

Our first night in town we looked through the dining guides and came up with a few ideas, then asked the front desk staff which one they liked. They all raved about Fiesta Jalisco's, which you may have guessed is a Mexican restaurant. It was a short (but very cold) walk to the restaurant, where we had to wait about 15 minutes for a table. The restaurant was packed and insanely crowded, and we heard several locals who were leaving say they had never seen it that busy.

The (American) traditional chips and salsa was served with a coleslaw made from shredded cabbage dressed in lime juice. It was incredibly good, and our waiter said it was a traditional accompaniment with fish tacos in Puerto Vallarta, a coastal town in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

The food was very good but the standout was the Original Margaritas. They consisted simply of tequila, cointreau, and lime juice. That's it. They were also shaken with ice and served in a martini glass, not on the rocks or frozen. It was a delicious concoction and one I'll be sure to work hard to perfect. Do I have any taste testers who will volunteer?

The Better

Colorado is known for wild game. They hunt everything that walks, flies, swims or crawls, and you can find it on a menu somewhere. Many restaurants specialize in wild game, so we sought one out. We were very happy to find The Gashouse in Edwards, about 15 minutes away from Avon. The decor features mounted animal heads of everything from deer and antelope to cape buffalo.

The must-have dishes were the buffalo carpaccio, which was lightly smoked but still served raw, and the truffle and parmesan cheese fries. Both were superb.

The Even Better

One night Myron booked us at Zach's Cabin, which is located behind the Ritz Carlton in Bachelor's Gulch, a part of the Beaver Creek ski resort. We arrived a few minutes early and had wonderful pre-dinner drinks at Spago's bar. At the designated time we went out to a sled that was drawn by a snow cat (for those unfamiliar think bulldozer, but lower to the ground and wider), which took us up the mountain to a cabin in the woods.

The restaurant is a classic log cabin, complete with a double-sided fireplace. We were seated in a cozy corner table and the magic unfolded. The decor and ambience were wonderful and the service spectacular. The elk tenderloin was butter tender, and baklava cheesecake was to die for. It was a dollop of delicious cheesecake filling in a fillo dough shell, drizzled with honey. Sublime.

The only disappointment was that the wine list was shockingly overpriced. Bottles I have bought for $20 were over $100. The least expensive wines were still over $30 and I wouldn't even buy them at $6, which is what they are in Charleston.

The Best

Kelly Liken has been called rising star among female chefs and she has been featured in magazines ranging from Bon Appetit to Sky Magazine. I'm not sure where I first learned of her, but I was reminded of her presence in Vail by the in-flight magazine. We had done dinner at Zach's Cabin, which was fairly pricey, so we weren't sure we wanted to do something even higher end. Finally I decided that since we were there I was going to splurge and worry about paying for it later. That's the American way, right?

One of the options was a custom tasting menu with custom wine pairings. We put ourselves in the hands of Chef Liken and the very capable sommelier, Jeremy, for a completely blind five course tasting menu. We started with the cobia crudo, continued with braised pork belly, honey marinated duck breast, Colorado rack of lamb, and finished with an Earl Grey tea infused chocolate truffle cake. It was a nearly orgasmic progression. All five courses were delicious, the wine pairings were perfect, and the service superb. The only complaint I could offer is it was a little loud and sometimes hard to hear, but even that is highly subjective and dependent on who is dining that particular night. This was one of the most memorable dining experiences of my life, rating up there with our dinner at La Pergola.

The most striking thing I came away with was being introduced to banyuls, which is essentially a French port made from grenache. It is lighter and brighter in fruit than port and pairs wickedly well with chocolate (we had it with the chocolate truffle cake). If you like port you owe it to yourself to seek this out.

advertising and marketing

2009-02-16T23:30:00.000-05:00

There has been much talk in the Yellowverse about advertising, marketing and how the two interrelate -- or not. Most of the people I know still seem to correlate the two, and (ironically) equate the attempts at making a distinction just marketing spin. To be honest, I was one of them until I had an epiphany today. Before we get into that, let's start with some definitions:

Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market, as in shopping, or going to a market to sell goods or services.

Advertising is a form of communication that typically attempts to persuade potential customers to purchase or to consume more of a particular brand of product or service.

Okay... that still sounds about the same, right? First, advertising is a subset of marketing. Therefore all advertising is marketing, but not all marketing is advertising. Second, the distinction lies in the intent. Marketing is about disseminating information; advertising is about persuasion.

Still not clear? Suppose you're at a farmer's market and you want tomatoes. You see someone with tomatoes displayed, and you go buy them. He doesn't have to tell you to buy them or announce their availability, him simply presenting them is all the marketing you need. It would be advertising if he were yelling out loud "Get your fresh tomatoes here!" since he is trying to influence you to purchase his tomatoes. The announcement would be marketing, the persuasion (via the command "get") is advertising.

So, circling back to where I started, what led me to finally grasp the distinction between advertising and marketing was a blog post by Seth Godin titled "which comes first, the product or the marketing". In it he points out that most of the time you actually need the marketing first since that will drive product creation. Once I read that I recalled a Facebook status update by Matt White and a blog post by Ben Langhinrichs illustrating how this has started happening. IdeaJam is marketing because a community is exchanging information in an attempt to achieve something of value to them. Some entrepreneurial types are taking this and capitalizing on it by delivering products to meet the market demand.

my epic fall

2009-02-13T00:24:00.003-05:00

Some of you have seen my Facebook posts about my epic fall today at Breckenridge. Here's the deal. We were going down Monte Cristo, our first run at Breckenridge. The terrain is rolling hills, some big and some small, and it's really varied. Myron was ahead of me and when it looked like things had flattened out I went into a tuck to catch up.

When you tuck while skiing you put a lot of weight on the front of your skis, not the back as one might think. You want weight on the front of your skis because that's what makes you go. Resting on your heels slows you down. So it was while in a tuck with my weight shifted forward that I hit an unexpected bump and went airborne. When I landed it was on the front of my skis, still in a tuck. Not the right position to be in since the force of the impact caused both my skis to pop off.

I was launched forward, leaving my skis behind, and landed on my face, primarily on the left side. My ski goggles scraped down my face and my chest slammed into the snow. The next few minutes/hours/decades were both a blur and frozen in time. I remember pulling my ski poles and gloves off, and ripping my goggles and hat off, all while rolling to my knees to try to catch my breath. My chest felt like an elephant was standing on it.

I know I was making some pretty horrible noises because I simply couldn't breathe, and I was scared shitless because my chest hurt so bad. My first thought was I had broken a rib and punctured a lung. I struggled for a long time to catch my breath, kneeling in the snow and wondering if I was going to die there.

Maybe two minutes after I fell someone came along and asked if I was okay. By then I had regained my breath and my composure and was gathering my scattered equipment. I skied on down and met up with Myron, who was about half a mile ahead of me. He said it was such an easy run that he didn't think to look for me since I usually ski better than him.

Here's what the damage looked like at lunch today.

We finished out the day and I skied amazingly well. We both love Breckenridge and the fault here is entirely mine. Not to say it doesn't hurt, but if I can take a fall like that and walk away with some bruises and aching ribs, I'll call it a good day.

I'm gonna get kicked off the island for this...

2009-01-23T16:00:00.003-05:00

... and probably hunted down by lovely women with knives (possibly from a Caribbean island), but so be it.

I was hanging out in an online chat with some rather unsavory characters and they started talking about Post-Lotusphere Stress Disorder, leading to the inevitable top 10 list. I did not participate in the creation of this list, I'm merely the scribe capturing it for posterity. You will notice not every entry is numbered, there are more than 10 entries and there is no number 10. Creativity like this can't be bound by rules. Names have been redacted to protect the oh-so-deliciously guilty.

Top Ten ways you know you have PLSD

1. You have a sudden urge to put up a tent in your backyard, in Maine, in February, so family dinners will feel more natural.
2. You insist that all of you children's backpacks be yellow
3. All of your children's backpacks ARE yellow
4. You insist on rows of uncomfortable chairs in the living room for movie night.
5. You fill out an evaluation form after every television show you watch at home.
6. You fill out an evaluation form for completely inappropriate things. Out to the dining tent for you, mister.
7. You see a tchotke at a neighbors house and ask if you can have it if they swipe your card.
8. You get invited to a party, and don't tell your spouse just in case she wasn't invited.
9. You drink your coffee REALLY FAST so the Disney bots don't take it away mid-swallow.
for six months, every time you leave your bedroom you check to make sure you remembered your badgeholder.
You line up for lunch, even when eating at home.
you think it's normal to show up for work after only 2 hours sleep
You ask your spouse if you can stay in the same room you were in last year.
You are willing to listen to 5 minutes of crap talk just to get a free pen.
You keep asking your coworkers, kids, and spouse where you can get this year's CULT shirt from; they look at you in horror.
You ask the neighbors if it's ok to use their pool without a room key
You ask your spouse if she's coming to your session.
And if it merits a repeat.
You ask your neighbors if it is OK to use their driveway to park.
You ask your kid if he's filming your session
You put RFID badges on the cats.
you mutter "I can't remember if I'm swan or dolphin this year"
and then look for your two huge carp on your roof
you build a 3 stage waterfall from same said roof
In Maine, in February
You scream out SAKE! at the top of your lungs after finishing each drink
you wished they'd put your room number on your key, in case you ever need to go there
You applaud when your wife introduces a new dish for dinner, even though you seem to remember you should have had it years ago.
and you keep asking her, "Can I have this to go in a box, I'm late for my session"
You applaud after sex even if it wasn't that good. Then you hog the microphone for Q&A.
you have a favorite seat in every meeting room in 3 different disney hotels
You knock on neighbor's houses asking if they know where Jamfest (or SpeedGeeking) is.
You walk into your bedroom announcing, "OK, before we begin, please turn off all cell phones and pagers".
11. Every Wednesday night for four months, you randomly get on a bus.
12. You know what CULT stands for
13. You're jazzed because you have a CULT shirt for every day of the week.
you are hard-core because you have the original "Notes World Order" shirt.
14. You go home and claim to your spouse that you're going to be agile from now on.

hmm, "Brokeback Novak"... another CULT theme
beats my original suggestion, FSCK Portal.

Cranberry lambic and root beer braised beef

2009-01-22T08:39:00.009-05:00

The young lady who house sits for us loves root beer, so whenever we travel we buy some for her. There is usually some left and I find it too sweet to drink, so I was trying to think of a way to use it. While I was pondering this I remembered Myron bought a sampler of Samuel Adams beers and it included a cranberry lambic. A lambic is a type of beer from Belgium that started out 500 years ago as peasant home brew. The version produced today carries on the coarse and have an unrefined flavor. Fruit is often added to help counter the bitter aftertaste. It is too bitter for me to enjoy, so I wondered what it would be like if I combined the bitter lambic and the sweet root beer. The answer: DELICIOUS!

Ingredients

Preparation

1 12oz bottle of root beer

1 12oz bottle of Samuel Adams Cranberry Lambic

1 – 1.5 lb stew beef

2T cooking oil

1t black pepper (for the beef)

1t black pepper (for the sauce)

1t salt (for the beef)

1t salt (for the sauce)

A medium-sized non-reactive pot with a lid in the 4 to 6 quart range. Nonstick is fine, but don’t use unenameled cast iron.

A simmer plate (assuming you’re cooking with gas)

A bowl or plate for holding the beef after browning.

Toss the stew beef with 1t each of black pepper and salt

Let stand 10 to 15 minutes at room temperature

Heat the oil in the pot over medium-high heat until you see it ripple, about 60 – 90 seconds

Add the beef and brown on all sides

Remove the beef to a bowl or plate

Reduce or turn off the heat so you can put the simmer plate on the burner, then return the heat to medium-high.

Put the pot on the simmer plate and add the root beer and lambic into the pot.

Bring to a boil and use a wooden spoon to scrape up the brown bits from the bottom

Reduce heat to medium and simmer 15 - 20 minutes, or until the liquid reduces by a quarter to a third

Add the beef, cover, and reduce the heat to its lowest setting

Leave it to simmer for 90 minutes, stirring a couple of times to make sure there is enough liquid. Add water to keep the beef nearly, but not completely, submerged.

Check it for doneness. You are looking for it to be tender enough that it comes apart when you press it with a spoon, but not so much so that you can see the beef separation simply by stirring it. This will take between and hour and a half and two hours, but you need to start checking early so you don’t overcook it.

Stir in the remaining salt and pepper, adjusting to taste

Serve with rice, pasta – or one of my favorites, Israeli couscous

a change of focus

2009-01-13T14:48:00.004-05:00

I started this blog in 2006 mostly to vent about IBM and Lotus and poke fun at the zealot fanboys. In 2007 I was frustrated both with my job and the direction IBM was taking Notes and Domino so took a job doing Access and SQL Server development. I continued doing Notes development as a consultant to keep current with it. That continued until mid-2008. Shortly after ILUG I stopped all Notes and Domino work altogether.

Several things led to that decision. It was partly a final severing of the ties to my old job. It was also an admission that I will never be satisfied with Notes and Domino. The things that are important to me just aren't important to IBM, so it's time for me to move on. And about this time we had the fire at work in and that sapped all my spare time for several months.

We got our new HP blade system delivered at the end of December and I am in the process of learning how that works along with VMware ESX. I am also preparing for a complete rewrite of our internally built ERP software and transitioning to Ruby and postgreSQL.

On a more personal level, I am feeling very strongly drawn toward the culinary field. I have learned to love cooking over the past decade and it has reached the point that I am finding that is where my passion lies. Software development doesn't energize me anymore.

The focus of this blog will be changing. I will be posting about Ruby, postgreSQL, Linux, VMware, HP hardware, and cooking. It's going to be a hodgepodge and you'll never know whether you're going to get programming code or a recipe for soup.

Oh, and for the three of you who might care, I asked Yancy to remove me from PlanetLotus. Since the content hasn't been Lotus related for a long time and never will be from here on out, I thought it was best if I didn't clutter things with my off-topic chatter.

Domino 8.5 hot fix 1

2009-01-07T15:25:00.003-05:00

If you're using Domino 8.5 be aware there is a hot fix already available. In a nutshell, adminp may not properly handle renames or deletes. I found a blog with a decent write up about it, including a link to Fix Central where you can drill down through six levels and finally get to the hot fix: http://www.lntoolbox.com/content/view/95/2/.

conspicuous charity

2008-12-21T23:00:00.001-05:00

I have been thinking a lot lately about philanthropy and charity. Even though I'm not a Christian I am very influenced by the Christian faith and by the traditional Christian holiday season. Despite my disdain for most people who call themselves Christians I do believe in many of the ideals the Christian faith puts forth. One of those tenets is that philanthropy is a duty, and giving selflessly is a virtue.

It seems like everything these days is about greed and ego. You take what you can and leave nothing behind. It’s not enough to do the right thing. You have to make sure everyone else to sees you doing it. When did everyone turn into attention seeking whores with a personal brand? So what if I Google my name and someone else turns up in the top of the list?

It isn’t the same, though, when you very visibly pull a community together to achieve an idealistic goal, then turn around and just as visibly hold your hand out for your reward. Doing something philanthropic then shouting it from the rooftops spits in the face of philanthropy. As someone else asked, "is it strictly charitable giving if you know up front you'll get an award for it?" In this age of self-aggrandizement there needs to be more doing and less quid pro quo, sine qua non. Loosely translated that means "something for something, without which there is nothing."

The recent election and economic meltdown seems to have brought out the absolute worst in many people. Nobody is feeling the least bit ashamed about demanding what they feel entitled to for the good deeds they do. Gays are up in arms because the preacher doing the invocation at Obama’s inauguration supported California’s Proposition 8.

“Let me get right to the point," Joe Solomnese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a harsh letter to the president-elect, "Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans."

Some members of the Hispanic community were complaining because not enough of their people were in the higher offices in Obama’s cabinet, so he appeased them.

"We're glad he listened to our voices and listened to the Hispanic community that came out and delivered for him on election day."

[I am not saying that the Hispanics chosen were not qualified. I'm merely saying that some members of the Hispanic community feels this was repayment for them helping Obama win the Presidency.]

The HRC, which I have donated to in the past, doesn’t speak for me (which is why I don't donate to them). And excuse me; isn’t the idea supposed to be that we are all just Americans and nobody should get special treatment? Why the racial divisiveness?

I really don't get it. It's beginning to look like I'm a dreamer, and I am the only one.

McCrady's: Sparkling Wines & Exquisite Dines

2008-12-09T17:00:00.001-05:00

From McCrady's website:

Chefs John B. Shields and Karen Urie of Town House in Chilhowie, VA will join Chef Sean Brock in preparing a special dinner. Town House Sommelier Charlie Berg will join McCrady’s Sommelier Clint Sloan in pairing a variety of exclusive sparkling wines for each course.

I was asked by my friend Ann (the same person who helped us with Dining With Friends) to join her at this special event. Her husband doesn't drink and is allergic to shellfish so he wouldn't have enjoyed it much. A recent experience at McCrady’s dimmed my enthusiasm for the restaurant, but I was willing to give it another shot with some guest chefs. Both guests have impressive backgrounds. John worked at Alinea and Charlie Trotter’s, and Karen worked at Tru before spending five years as the lead pastry chef at Charlie Trotter’s. Those are all highly rated restaurants so I went into this with very high expectations.

Dinner was to start at 7:00, with a chef meet and greet at 6:30. Ann’s husband, Dennis, volunteered to be our designated driver since we were anticipating a Bacchanalian event. We arrived at McCrady’s at about 6:15 and sat at the bar and had a pre-dinner drink. McCrady’s makes the best Manhattan on Earth and Ann had her first Pimm’s Cup, which she thoroughly enjoyed.

At about 6:40 we were told we could go upstairs. As far as we can tell the chef meeting never happened, but the tables were about half full so I don't know for certain. It was open seating, so we approached a table with two couples already seated and they invited us to join them. One couple was Curt and Marti, the other was Eric and Debra, and they were all absolutely delightful. There was a bit of awkwardness as Anne and I explained that we were just friends, how we knew each other, and why we were there together.

While we were waiting for the dinner to start someone came around and asked if there were any food allergies or other issues the kitchen needed to know about. This led to a discussion at our table about foods we didn’t like. Eric and Curt had traveled together in South Korea, and agreed that neither liked kim chee. Their wives agreed, but both Ann and I said we liked it. Ann, being the delicate person she is, asked Curt if he had served in the Korean Conflict. Everyone laughed and I don’t think he was offended, and it kept coming up throughout the night.

I won’t do a blow-by-blow of every course since there were eight of them and this post would be even more obnoxiously long. Five courses were prepared by Chefs John and Karen, the remainder by Sean Brock. The overall consensus from our table was we preferred the flavors of Sean’s dishes. The others were interesting and very intellectual, but they failed the first rule of food: it has to taste good.

From the raw scallop with banana mousse to the sour milk with crispy milk bubbles, it was a challenging menu, to say the least. The highlights were Sean Brock’s chicken liver and hazelnuts, his blackened short ribs, and his truffle. The wine pairings were similarly difficult. I don’t have a list of the wines that were served and don’t remember them off the top of my head, but from what I recall the standout was a sparkling shiraz that we all thought was very good with the blackened short ribs.

We were all disappointed that this was supposed to be a celebration of sparkling wines but three courses were served with something else. One course was served with a white sherry that had the wonderful heady bouquet of sherry but the finish of retsina (which smells like turpentine). I don’t think any of us enjoyed that one. another course was served with Sapporo. Yes, Japanese beer. I could kinda buy that it was sparkling, but it didn’t pair well with the dish. And the final drink debacle was a concoction made of Meyers’s dark rum infused with sarsaparilla and vanilla, then topped with Mug root beer. It was served warm, which only enhanced the sweetness and cloying flavor. I saw another table ask for a second round, but only two at our table finished it.

Overall it was a delightful evening because of the company and I truly hope to spend more time with my table mates. When I’m paying $100 for dinner I expect to be wowed, and I simply wasn’t. I enjoyed every dish Sean Brock prepared and the service was stellar. The drink pairings were a rollercoaster, as was the food from the guest chefs. I won't be making a pilgrimage to Town House any time soon, and I'm not so sure I want to bother with Alinea, Tru or Charlie Trotter's, either.

But it did rekindle my hope that perhaps McCrady's can return to its former glory in my eyes.

Why I'm done with PostSecret

2008-11-23T20:14:00.006-05:00

I have been a fan of PostSecret since it launched in 2005. Every Sunday one of the first things I do is open up the site to read the new secrets. The point of PostSecret is for people to send in postcards that reveal a secret that nobody else knows. Since its inception some of the secrets have been funny or strange, and many have included disturbing personal experiences about trauma and abuse. Some have included PG-13 verging on R rated imagery.

For the last few months some of them are simply statements of fact about how someone feels. These have always annoyed me since they aren't really secrets, but none have really bothered me. Today the moderator of PostSecret, Frank Warren, posted what I felt was a horribly gruesome image, and the note from the submitter simply said it was disturbing. That was obvious and not a secret so Frank posted it for shock value, not because it was a compelling secret.

There is a separate site called the PostSecret Community, also moderated by Frank, where people comment on the week's secrets or share secrets of their own. Very quickly the disturbing image blew up with dozens of complaints and a mostly negative "WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!" reaction.

As far as I can tell Frank never participated in any of those discussions, but he did send an e-mail to all the members of this site asking:

Have you seen the secret and postcard that literally made one woman vomit?

For me the whole thing ran off the rails today. A non-secret was posted purely for shock value, then Frank spammed the entire PostSecret Community to make sure the flames are sufficiently fanned. I'm disgusted by the image as well as the fact that it was obviously posted for sensationalism, and by how Frank has handled the uproar. I won't be visiting PostSecret again.

You will notice that I have not provided any links to PostSecret. This is for two reasons. First, I don't want anyone to follow the link and see the image and blame me for their trauma. I'm nauseated every time I think of it. Seriously. Second, I don't want to drive traffic to any of the PostSecret sites. If you're determined to know what all the fuss is about I'm sure you'll find it without my help.

For anyone who wants to comment and tell me I'm overreacting, don't. I have a right to set the boundaries I find appropriate. This crosses several of them.

I need cordless phone recommendations

2008-11-20T09:16:00.005-05:00

I think I saw someone else post this a while back but I can't find it now. I've been trying to find decent cordless phones to use at home for years. All the 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz I have tried have poor range, poor reception, or poor volume. I have purchased various Sony, AT&T, VTech, Uniden and Panasonic phones through the years and pretty much all of them have had issues. Most recently I bought a VTech IA5824 5.8Ghz phone, set it up last night, and I only get about a 15 foot range before the static starts.

Can anyone recommend a cordless phone that actually works well?

business insurance and personal effects

2008-11-20T08:41:00.004-05:00

I'll be posting some follow ups in the next few weeks regarding our progress in replacing equipment and moving to a fully virtualized infrastructure. We have been wrapping up our dealings with the insurance companies, and something very interesting came to light.

Last year we installed centralized network printers and copiers, and as individual desktop printers died we did not replace them. There were some people who insisted on a printer on their desk and brought in their own. The company did not purchase them or provide supplies other than paper and IT refused to support them, but management allowed it.

You can probably see where this is going...

We learned that personal effects coverage is an add-on for business insurance policies. In our case the maximum amount was $50 per employee. Nearly all the employees who had personal printers are claiming they cost $100 or more and they were very upset by this. While I feel badly that they lost personal equipment it really drove home our policy of not bringing it in to work in the first place.

So if you have something expensive (that you own) or of personal value at work, take it home or get comfortable with the idea that . All it takes is a faulty heating or air conditioning unit and it could be gone in seconds.

It's sad that it takes something like this to get management on board with IT policies, and it also made me aware of another piece of the DR puzzle that I had not even considered.

It's official - no Lotusphere for me

2008-11-13T08:30:00.003-05:00

I submitted my ILUG session for consideration and it was not accepted. Therefore I will not be attending Lotusphere 2009. Congratulations to everyone who was accepted, and I'm truly jealous of anyone else who is going to Lotusphere.

I do intend to still try to coordinate the Over The Rainbow group. It wasn't my idea in the first place, so there is no reason to should die just because I'm not there.

Lotusphere Over The Rainbow - 2009 edition

2008-11-03T14:34:00.003-05:00

For the past couple of years there has been an Over The Rainbow group at Lotusphere to help GLBT attendees find other like-minded people. It's back again for 2009, this time as a Facebook group. Consider this your invitation to join in the festivities. Last year we got together for dinner on Saturday night, then again for drinks one night and met up to do the rides together on Wednesday night. I'll be trying to set up some more concrete events for Lotusphere 2009, but I wanted to get the word out early.

Republican Principles

2008-10-31T13:20:00.002-04:00

I've steered clear of the current political mess, but this is just too good to pass up. I've never heard of salon.com and I came across this in my marumushi news map and it is an excellent read.

Republican Principles, from the GOP website:

I'm a Republican Because...

I BELIEVE the strength of our nation lies with the individual and that each person's dignity, freedom, ability and responsibility must be honored.

I BELIEVE in equal rights, equal justice and equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, creed, sex, age or disability.

I BELIEVE free enterprise and encouraging individual initiative have brought this nation opportunity, economic growth and prosperity.

I BELIEVE government must practice fiscal responsibility and allow individuals to keep more of the money they earn.

I BELIEVE the proper role of government is to provide for the people only those critical functions that cannot be performed by individuals or private organizations, and that the best government is that which governs least.

I BELIEVE the most effective, responsible and responsive government is government closest to the people.

I BELIEVE Americans must retain the principles that have made us strong while developing new and innovative ideas to meet the challenges of changing times.

I BELIEVE Americans value and should preserve our national strength and pride while working to extend peace, freedom and human rights throughout the world.

FINALLY, I believe the Republican Party is the best vehicle for translating these ideals into positive and successful principles of government.

Does the Republican Party really believe that? I think the evidence would point to a resounding "no". And now the funny part...

2008 Republican Principles (Chuck Lasker's perception)

I'm a Republican Because...

I BELIEVE the strength of our nation lies in military might and God's help, as long as we do His Will and make this a Christian nation while supporting Israel until the day Israel is destroyed and Jesus returns.

I BELIEVE that each person's dignity, freedom, ability and responsibility must be honored unless we can encroach on these in the name of safety or other short-term excuse that the idiot populace will accept.

I BELIEVE in special rights and justice for Republican politicians, Christian leaders, the extremely wealthy and lobbyists, regardless of cause as long as the money is right.

I BELIEVE in equal justice and equal opportunity for everyone else, regardless of race, creed, sex, age or disability, unless we're talking about lazy black people, illegal Mexican people, uneducated women, homosexuals, or, if justice and opportunity for disabled people costs businesses money.

I BELIEVE large corporate profits, stock market wealth and protection of monopolies will bring this nation opportunity, economic growth and increased prosperity for the upper one percent of incomes.

I BELIEVE government should talk about fiscal responsibility and allowing individuals to keep more of the money they earn, but should actually borrow and spend recklessly and place the full burden of taxes on those with lower and lower incomes and future generations for short term gain. Any taxes on the rich are socialism.

I BELIEVE the proper role of government is to advance Christian evangelical morals through tax code, control of education, judicial appointments, privatization and the proper Christian philosophies of wealth and warfare.

I BELIEVE the most effective, responsible and responsive government is government run by those who know best, and all means necessary must be used to work against poll access by the lowly, the lazy, the stupid and the poor.

I BELIEVE the Republican Party was founded by America's founding fathers to fight Roe vs. Wade, to protect "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance they wrote, to put "Under God" on our money, and to keep the Ten Commandments in our Courtrooms and government buildings.

I BELIEVE that we must never speak to our enemies, unless they're very big enemies with money and cheap labor agreements.

I BELIEVE in free trade with lower nations that provide cheap labor and higher profits and any attempt to induce labor or environmental equality on these nations is liberalism.

I BELIEVE you're either with us or you're with the terrorists. If you do not have the same beliefs we do, you are un-American and worthy of derision, abuse, vandalism, placement on no-fly lists and investigation.

I BELIEVE anyone labeled "liberal" is a socialist, which is actually communist, which is actually Marxist, which means evil.

I BELIEVE abortion must be made illegal, but stopping extramarital and teen sex is more important than reducing abortion rates, so I support abstinence-only education, blocking of access to birth control by teens, and punishing poor people for being lazy by blocking access to health care to those women who want to keep their babies.

I BELIEVE Americans must retain only those principles that we consider important while developing new and innovative ideas for bringing power to a Republican executive branch and reducing the power of the annoying Congress and the activist Courts.

I BELIEVE Americans value and should preserve our national strength and pride while working to extend peace, freedom and human rights to good Americans only, and to create international opportunities throughout the world to develop inexpensive manufacturing for American companies.

FINALLY, I believe the Republican Party is the best vehicle for translating these ideals into positive and successful principles of government, and I believe we must use any means necessary, including lies, smears, voter suppression, federal police, the Secret Service, warrantless spying, even the destruction of lives and reputations, to progress our God-endorsed agenda.

I don't know who Chuck Lasker is and I don't know the political leanings of salon.com. I think this is hysterical. The entire article is quite sobering, though. The Republican Party has shifted its ideals since Reagan started making changes, and now bears little resemblance to the party it was 30 years ago. Bush II's regime is almost diametrically opposite where the party started.

New feature for my blog: translations

2008-10-23T00:05:00.003-04:00

One of the suggestions at the blogging BOF at Lotusphere 2008 was to offer translations of your blog to encourage non-English speakers to read it. It's been on my list but never bothered to invest any time in it.

Ironically, I was reading a blog this evening and was a frustrated that it was only available in French. I looked around the page and noticed a block with language translations. When I clicked it I was surprised to see it was using a Google translator, which I didn't know about. I pulled apart the URL and very quickly had translated my blog into the most common languages spoken by my readers, then added them to a block on the left.

If you can spare a few minutes I'm sure your readers would appreciate it if you did the same thing. :-)

How to print full pages of records in Microsoft Access

2008-10-21T15:53:00.001-04:00

Recently I was recreating a government form in Access that included some columns with background colors. Each row was a fixed height, and if a page was not completely filled there was a large blank space before the page footer printed. I needed a way to print extra records to fill the empty space. I did some digging and came across some sample reports from ACG Soft that included one for duplicating Detail rows. There wasn’t any documentation or comments in the code so I had to pull it apart and figure it out myself. It turns out it is surprisingly simple.

Count how many records fit on a page. No programming involved in this and it should be a constant value.
Count the number of records you will be printing.
As records are printed compare how many have been printed with how many will fit on a page.
When you run out of records to print, stop Access from advancing to the next record until you reach the number that will fit on a page.

Here is the code I ended up using.


Option Compare Database
Option Explicit

Dim RowCounter As Integer
Dim TotalRows As Integer

Const MAX_ROWS As Byte = 17
Const COLOR_WHITE = &HFFFFFF
Const COLOR_BLACK = &H0

Private Sub Report_Open(Cancel As Integer)
  Dim ThisRecordset As DAO.Recordset

  'Get the number of rows to be printed
  Set ThisRecordset = CurrentDb.OpenRecordset("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM [qFuel Log Summary by State2]")

  If Not ThisRecordset.EOF And Not ThisRecordset.BOF Then
      TotalRows = ThisRecordset.Fields(0)
  End If

  Set ThisRecordset = Nothing
End Sub

Private Sub PageHeader_Format(Cancel As Integer, FormatCount As Integer)
  'Reset the row counter for each page
  RowCounter = 0

  'When you hit a new page decrease the total rows to be printed by one page worth
  If Report.Page > 1 Then
      TotalRows = TotalRows - MAX_ROWS
  End If

  'Make sure the text is visible
  Call SetForegroundColor(COLOR_BLACK)
End Sub

Private Sub Detail_Format(Cancel As Integer, FormatCount As Integer)
  'This event is called every time a record prints.

  'Keep track of the number of rows printed
  RowCounter = RowCounter + 1

  If RowCounter < TotalRows Then
      'There is still more to do
      Exit Sub
  Else
      'Make sure you do not overfill a page
      If RowCounter < MAX_ROWS Then
          'This keeps Access from advancing to the EOF marker and printing the Page Footer
          Me.NextRecord = False
      End If
  End If

  'Since you are not advancing to a blank record you have to hide
  '  the text so it does not print.
  If RowCounter > TotalRows Then
      Call SetForegroundColor(COLOR_WHITE)
  End If

End Sub

Private Sub SetForegroundColor(Color As Long)
  Select Case Color
  Case COLOR_BLACK
      Me!St.ForeColor = Color
      Me!Mileage.ForeColor = Color
      Me!Mileage2.ForeColor = Color
      Me![Taxable Gallons].ForeColor = Color
      Me![Tax Pd Gal].ForeColor = Color
      Me![Net Gal].ForeColor = Color
      Me![Tax Rate].ForeColor = Color
      Me![Tax].ForeColor = Color
      Me![Surcharge Rate].ForeColor = Color
      Me![Surcharge].ForeColor = Color
      Me![Net Tax].ForeColor = Color
      Me![NetTax2].ForeColor = Color
  Case COLOR_WHITE
      'Some of the columns use a colored background so I can't just set
      '  all the foreground text to white.  Also, some of the textboxes
      '  have a transparent background and others have white, so I can't
      '  just set all the foreground text the same color as the background.
      Me!St.ForeColor = Me!St.BackColor
      Me!Mileage.ForeColor = Me!Mileage.BackColor
      Me!Mileage2.ForeColor = Me!Mileage2.BackColor
      Me![Taxable Gallons].ForeColor = Color
      Me![Tax Pd Gal].ForeColor = Me![Tax Pd Gal].BackColor
      Me![Net Gal].ForeColor = Color
      Me![Tax Rate].ForeColor = Color
      Me![Tax].ForeColor = Me![Tax].BackColor
      Me![Surcharge Rate].ForeColor = Color
      Me![Surcharge].ForeColor = Color
      Me![Net Tax].ForeColor = Color
      Me![NetTax2].ForeColor = Color
  End Select
End Sub

This LotusScript was converted to HTML using the ls2html routine,
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.

Facebook fail chicken

2008-10-14T23:37:00.001-04:00

I've never seen this before (unlike the Fail Whale)

Lotusphere 2009 housing is still good

2008-10-14T22:55:00.000-04:00

Last year I ended up in a world of hurt trying to find a room for Lotusphere at the last minute. (Many thanks to Francie Whitlock and Jamie Magee for helping me with that.) This year I decided to be a little more ahead of the curve and went ahead and booked my room at the Dolphin.

Earlier tonight the Swan was waitlisted, and at various times in the last two weeks both the Swan and Dolphin have been waitlisted. You may want to book your room sooner rather than later.

SnTT: Merging web form data with a template PDF

2008-10-14T12:00:00.001-04:00

The following was written by my friend Duston Suits. We discussed options and he was kind enough to share his solution and allow me to post it.

The problem

To apply on-line for insurance coverage from my organization, you have to: 1) Fill out the web form, and then 2) print it, sign it and mail it in. The problem is that creating an HTML form that is both useable and (more or less) universally printable is an exercise in futility. As an alternative, we have a PDF form with all the fields defined. If we could take the data from the web form, use it to populate the PDF form, then we can let the Adobe Reader handling printing, giving us a more consistent result with far less effort on our part. Merging a PDF form with an FDF file is a trivial task, the challenge was to get this to happen on a Lotus Domino server in the background.

The solution

The key part of the solution is an open-source (Windows-only) tool called PDFTK. PDFTK is a command-line tool with a number of capabilities, the key one for us was the ability to merge a PDF template file with an FDF data file and save the result in yet a third PDF file. My goal was to run a WebQuerySave agent to gather the data from the web form, write it to an FDF file, execute PDFTK in the background and then return a link to the PDF (or potentially a redirect to the PDF itself) back to the user. The next question was how to write the code to create an FDF file.
My colleague already had code to create an XFDF (FDF using XML) file from a Notes form, but alas, PDFTK couldn’t handle XFDF. Some research found the answer: http://www.tgreer.com/fdfServe.html. FDF files, as it turned out, were simple to create. Here’s the code for the WebQuerySave agent:


Sub Initialize()
 Dim s As New NotesSession
 Dim db As NotesDatabase
 Dim doc As NotesDocument
 Dim docid As String
 
 On Error Goto Errorhandler
 Set db = s.CurrentDatabase
 Set doc = s.DocumentContext
 Call doc.save(True,False)
 docid = doc.UniversalID
 ' Create the PDF File
 PDFFileName =  createFDF(doc)
 ‘ Now send a link back to the user along with any other HTML you want.
 Print {<a href="/} & PDFFileName & {">Click here to open your application</a><br><br>}
End sub


Function createFDF(doc As NotesDocument)
 Dim docID As String
 Dim fileName As String
 Dim fdfFileName As String
 Dim pdfFileName As String
 Dim tempFDFPath As String
 Dim destPDFPath As String
 ' Directory where we will write the FDF files that are created.
 tempFDFPath = {C:\FDF-TEMP}
 ' Directory where the PDF files will be placed for the end user
 destPDFPath = {C:\notes\data\domino\html}
 On Error Goto createFDFError
 ' Use the docID as a file name to make sure it's unique.
 docID = doc.UniversalID
 hFile = Freefile()
 createFDF = docID+ ".pdf"
 ' Create the full FDF and PDF file names
 fdfFileName = tempFDFPath + {\} + docID + ".fdf"
 pdfFileName = destPDFPath + {\} + docID + ".pdf"
 Open fdfFileName For Output As #hFile
 ' Write the first part of the FDF file (the same for all of them)
 Call writeFDFHeader(hFile)
 ' Now iterate through all of the fields on the form, find the ones we want and write the name/value to the FDF file.
 Forall item In doc.Items
 ‘ In the case of our form, all the fields that we use in the PDF start with the letter S.
  If Left(item.name, 1) = "S" Then
   Print #hFile, {<< /T(} + item.name + {) /V(} + item.text + {) >>}
  End If
 End Forall
 ' Now write the FDF Trailer information (also the same for all of them.)
 Call writeFDFTrailer(hFile)
 Close hfile
 ' And now kick off a process to combine the FDF and the PDF.  Of course hard code the paths at
 ‘ your own peril.
 shellstring = {c:\pdf-template\pdftk  c:\pdf-template\stdapp.pdf fill_form } + fdfFileName + { output } + pdfFileName
 rc = Shell(shellString)
 ' and return the name of the file to the calling function.
 Exit Function
End function

Sub writeFDFHeader(hFile)
 Print #hFile, {%FDF-1.2}
 Print #hFile, {%âãÏÓ}
 Print #hFile, {1 0 obj}
 Print #hFile, {<<}
 Print #hFile, {/FDF}
 Print #hFile, {<<}
 Print #hFile, {/F (/formA.pdf)}
 Print #hFile, {/ID [ <826851cbc19b7f5fba86369c981fe040> <159c51c6e0b4814ca2552f89ab9a1ed1> ]}
 Print #hFile, {/Fields}
 Print #hFile, {[}
End Sub

Sub writeFDFTrailer(hFile)
 Print #hFile, {]}
 Print #hFile, {>>}
 Print #hFile, {>>}
 Print #hFile, {endobj}
 Print #hFile, {trailer}
 Print #hFile, {<< /Root 1 0 R >>}
 Print #hFile, {%%EOF}
End Sub

This LotusScript was converted to HTML using the ls2html routine,
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.

One special note, the WebQuerySave agent must be allowed to perform restricted operations (set on the security tab on the agent properties.) Needless to say error checking is also necessary, your mileage may vary.

Happy forming!

Duston Suits
duston_suits@chip.state.il.us

the reach of the Yellowverse is long

2008-10-13T09:02:00.003-04:00

Many of the links here contain videos that automatically start. I'm just warning you so you don't get blown out of your chair after rocking out to Dream Theater, Rush or Dethkl0k.

The closing speaker at Lotusphere 2008 was Alton Brown. Alton is a chef and TV personality best known for his long-running Food Network series Good Eats. He also works on the series Iron Chef America, where contestants battle each other by preparing five dishes based on a secret theme ingredient.

After Alton finished his presentation to us TAOSRI's, he took questions from the audience. The Yellowverse's very own Devin Olson suggested beer as a secret ingredient for Iron Chef. And guess what happened last night?

Bobby Flay vs Daniel Angerer in BATTLE BEER!!

If you want to know who won, check the episode list on Wikipedia. And thanks, Devin, for the suggestion. You never know when some crazy idea might turn into reality.

Vacation Writeup Part 2 - Antigua and Montserrat

2008-10-06T09:22:00.005-04:00

It's been forever since I got back from vacation but people are still bugging me so I'll finish my vacation writeup. If you recall from my last installment, we were leaving Anguilla and visiting Montserrat. So what's this Antigua business?

Antigua

The flight from Anguilla to Montserrat included a stopover in Antigua where we would switch planes. We thought there might be trouble when the plane that was to take us from Anguilla to Antigua was late arriving. We paced nervously and asked the gate agent what would happen in Antigua since that was the last flight to Montserrat for the day. She said she had called ahead and they were aware our plane was late and they would hold the plane to Montserrat. When we finally landed in Antigua with 15 minutes before our flight I saw a Carib Air plane with its props spinning, and I had a sinking feeling. I knew that was our plane, and I knew we were going to miss it. Myron was more upbeat and pointed out it was 15 minutes early. No flight in the Caribbean was ever early.

We finally made our way to the customs desk, told them our flight number, and the agent radioed the plane... which had already taken off. We were furious, but this was only the start of a very long and frustrating experience. The customs agent disappeared for nearly 45 minutes and the other agent at the desk very specifically ignored us, even when we asked her direct questions. When the other agent finally reappeared she said the airline would put us up at a hotel for the night and we would take the flight the next morning. We asked to take our luggage with us since 1) we didn't trust them not to steal us blind, 2) we pack our non-essential toiletries (i.e., toothpaste and deodorant) in our checked baggage and 3) we wanted to change clothes.

Three hours later we left the airport without our luggage, which they could not find. It was not on the ground in Antigua and they couldn't find it in Anguilla, either. We were assured it would be located, put on a ferry to St. Martin, and flown to Antigua to catch up with us the next morning. "Fat chance," we thought. They couldn't get our luggage from Anguilla to Antigua when we handed it to them, and now they were supposed to track it down, send it to another island, get it on a plane, and delivered to Antigua? And so we left by cab to our hotel, which was the City View in downtown St. John's. It was a horrible hotel that smelled like mold and cigarettes. The armed guard at the gate to the parking lot and another armed guard in the lobby didn't do much to make us feel safe.

The next day we went to the airport and I was stunned to see our luggage being put on the plane. We boarded the plane (a tiny prop plane with maybe 20 seats) and were rather amused when the pilot refused to start pre-flight checkoff until they got the passenger manifest straightened out. He had 13 people on the plane and only 8 names on the manifest. The flight to Montserrat was uneventful. Myron and I sat in the front seats behind the cockpit and could watch the instrumentation. It was a neat experience.

Montserrat

Our original plan was to spend four days in Montserrat. We were going to land in the evening of Day 1 and spend it getting our bearings, then spend Days 2 and 3 visiting properties and tracking down various people Myron had met online. That got compressed and we hit the ground running a day late. Sun, our gracious hostess at the Bunkum Beach Guest House, picked us up at the airport and took us to a grocery store then on to our villa. We spent a while chatting, then called a realtor and started the house hunting.

We saw a total of ELEVEN houses that day between about 11:00 AM and 5:30 PM, with a break for lunch. It was hectic and dizzying. I ended up taking a picture of the listing that had the property name before we entered just so I could keep the pictures separate. Most of the homes we saw were built in the 1970's through early 90's. The majority were built as vacation homes and the intent was only to be there a few weeks a year. With the volcano becoming active many had not been stayed in for several years, and nearly all were in dire need of repair and updating.

We paused at around 1:30 to have lunch at The Gourmet Garden, and funky shack of a restaurant run by Marete, a Dutch lady who had been on Montserrat for a few decades. Later that day while riding around we came upon Marete walking from her house back to the restaurant, and offered her a ride. Myron commented "We already had friends in Montserrat!"

That first night we had dinner with our realtor and a few of her friends at The Royal Palms. It was a Chinese buffet prepared by the only Chinese restaurant on the island and served by Sri Lankans who had paid for passage to the Bahamas but were thrown overboard off the coast of Montserrat. It was a fun night and the food was surprisingly good. Joining us at dinner were two more Americans, one from Phoenix and the other from Maine. It was interesting to get their take on things and both were extremely nice.

The second day we had three more properties to look at, bringing the total up to fourteen. We visited the first two, then took a break to go back to Bunkum to call Myron's online friends Bill and Tina, a couple from Texas who moved to Montserrat about two years ago with their teenaged daughter. They invited us over and we spent a long time talking to them before we had to go see the last house.

That night we went to Tina's, a popular local restaurant in Brades. Myron tried the ginger wine, which was better than either of us expected. While there a middle aged white woman and an elderly black man sat down for dinner. She was very loud in a New York or New Jersey sort of way, he was barely audible. After we finished dinner and were waiting for our check she called to us to join them. What followed was an extremely uncomfortable experience. We told her where we were looking for properties and she insisted we were stupid. Her friend said we had to follow our dreams, and our dream couldn't be anyone else's. The banshee was just getting wound up and didn't hear a word of this. We finally extricated ourselves and bid her a good evening as congenially as we could, when we actually wanted to kindly request that she sacrifice herself to the volcano.

Our final day in Montserrat we had arranged for a snorkeling trip with Scuba Montserrat. Another guest arrived at Bunkum the night before and we offered to let her tag along. She did, and we had a delightful day. Our snorkeling trip wasn't until noon so we called Bill and Tina, who offered to take us to the top Garibaldi Hill where we could look down into Plymouth and over Fox's Bay. It was spectacular and very interesting to hear Bill talk about what had happened just since they had been there.

The snorkeling trip was fun, but it was overcast and the seas had been rough so visibility wasn't that good. At least the overcast skies kept it from being too hot. We stopped at Rendezvous Bay for lunch and we were all excited to see the tracks from sea turtles, who had come ashore to lay their eggs.

We asked our guides where to go for dinner and they recommended Jumpin' Jack's, a restaurant which was run out of a couple's house (their restaurant was destroyed by the volcano). What we didn't know was we were supposed to call ahead, so when we arrived they were settled in for the evening. They very kindly offered to prepare dinner for us, which consisted of a tasty sauteed wahoo (a type of fish), fried plantains, and pigeon peas and rice. It was all good (if a little underseasoned) and very traditional local fare.

That night there was a tremendous thunderstorm that woke Myron up a few times. The next morning we woke to a thin layer of mud covering everything. The rainwater had run into fissures in the volcano and caused an explosion of ash. The ash continued after the rain finshed so it stuck to everything, leaving ashen mud everywhere. It was interesting to experience this and Myron was like a four year old with a new puppy. I was a little less enthusiastic.

Conclusion

The island vibe was very laid back and friendly, with an undercurrent of mild irritation. Everything takes a while on Montserrat, some things aren't available with any regularity, and the local politicians are corrupt in a way expected for any banana republic. Before we make any decision to move we would definitely spend more time there. And we didn't find any properties that thrilled both of us. Myron had one favorite, I had another, but either would have been a tremendous compromise. It's going to take something truly special to make us give up what we have in Charleston.

now the waiting begins

2008-09-23T10:58:00.001-04:00

Lotusphere 2009

Date : 9/23/08 10:48:40
Dear Charles Robinson,

Thank you for submitting your abstract for Lotusphere 2009.

Session Title: Domino Clustering and Server Migration Made Easy
Speaker Name 1: Charles Robinson
Speaker Name 2: Franziska Tanner-Whitlock

In early November, you will receive electronic notification of the status
of your session.

Looking forward to seeing you in Orlando in January.
The Lotusphere 2009 Content Team

Vacation Writeup Part 1 - Anguilla

2008-09-01T09:56:00.000-04:00

I'm going to do a total of three posts. The first two will be almost entirely text, and are geared toward those who want details of what we did on vacation. The final one will be mostly photo highlights, with links through to Flickr collections. We took nearly 1500 pictures so it's going to take a while to sort through everything and get them uploaded. Since I'm getting pestered for updates I figured I'd save myself some hassle and go ahead and do the writeups.

We made it back from vacation on Monday, August 25th, as scheduled. I add that last bit because some of you saw my Facebook updates and know that we had some travel issues. The plan was to fly from Charleston to Charlotte, then on to St. Martin. We would catch a ferry in St. Martin to go to Anguilla, where Francie would meet us. We would stay in Anguilla for four days, then fly to Antigua and continue to Montserrat for four days. We would return from Montserrat St. Martin via Antigua, then return from St. Martin to Charlotte and finally get home to Charleston. If you're confused, join the crowd. I was never sure where I was or where I was supposed to be. It was going to be a grueling number of flights in a short amount of time and there wasn't much room for error.

The flight from Charleston to Charlotte was delayed due to thunderstorms in Charlotte, but we had a long enough layover that it didn't matter. We made it to Charlotte, found our gate, and sat around for an hour or so. At about 11:30 we were told our flight from Charlotte to St. Martin was canceled. We already knew this was US Airways' only flight of the day from Charlotte to St. Martin so we fully expected to get stuck in Charlotte. We got on the phone and called US Airways and were told they couldn't get us anywhere else to connect to St. Martin, even on another carrier. Most of the flights leave earlier in the day so we'd get stuck somewhere else. We went ahead and re-booked for the same flight the next day, then spent two hours waiting in line so we could get a hotel voucher for a lovely Ramada Inn just off an Interstate and beside a mostly dead strip mall. If you want to know about the hotel, ask. I'm trying to block it out of my memory. The next day we flew out as scheduled and everything went fine.

Anguilla was a wonderful experience. Francie met us at the ferry terminal and showed us to our villa, then stayed for a while to help orient Myron and get us settled in. She had stopped at a market and picked up a few essentials. She was so thorough we didn't have to go to a store during our stay. We stayed at the Chinaberry in Cul de Sac, just above the ferry terminal. It is a lovely villa in a beautiful setting, conveniently located but still private. The most striking feature is the palm tree growing in the shower. Part of the wall is open and the top of the tree sticks outside.

Originally we had planned for three days in Anguilla, but lost a day on the front end. The first day was mostly spent traveling, and the following day (August 19th) was my birthday. I had told Myron and Francie I was game for anything and left it to them to plan whatever they wanted. Myron and I got up and went to Rendezvous Bay, which we could see from the deck at Chinaberry. It is a gorgeous beach with sugar-fine sand and brilliant blue water. We spent about two hours at the beach (long enough for me to get sunburned in the spots I missed with the sunscreen), then headed back to the villa to give Francie a call. She came by and we followed her to Cap Juluca, where we had lunch at George's.

As Francie's kids were unloading she gathered them together and introduced us to them. She said "This is Charles, today is his birthday. His friend is ..." and one of the twins added "Myron". Francie said she had told them who was coming but she didn't expect them to remember, but at least one of the kids was paying attention.

Cap Juluca was another stunning setting and the food was excellent. The kids played in the water while we talked, until Francie finally couldn't take it any more and had to jump in too. It was a fun and relaxing way to spend the day. We discussed what to do for dinner and Francie highly recommended Koal Keel, so we decided to go there. We left Cap Juluca and Francie led us on a brief tour around the island for about 45 minutes. We parted ways in The Valley (Anguilla's only town of any size) and headed back to our villa to get ready for dinner.

Koal Keel is in a covered outdoor space and has an interesting, eclectic menu. Most of the appetizers are very typically Caribbean, including pumpkin soup, conch fritters, and other seafood and tropical fruit dishes. Francie had raved about the menu being oriented toward native Anguillan food, and we were a little confused that nearly all the main courses were Indian. About a quarter were tandoori, another quarter were Indian curries, and several others were various Indian dishes we were familiar with. When I asked Francie about this the next day she said they had a new chef and the menu probably changed because of him. I selected seared scallops as a starter and crispy duck breast with maple syrup glaze for a main course. Both were excellent. When the desserts were presented, mine had a lit sparkler in the top and Happy Birthday written on the plate in chocolate.

The next day was another beautiful day in paradise. Francie had suggested we go to Shoal Bay, which was on Myron's list. We parked near a place named something like Elbonia, which made me laugh. [Myron corrected me, it's Elodia's.] We rented an umbrella and two beach chairs for $10 for the day. We would have paid twice that, so it was a relcome reprieve from other high prices we encountered in Anguilla.

The entire day was spent simply relaxing on the beach. We had lunch around 1:00 at Zazu or something like that. Grilled ribs and grilled chicken for $10 was the least expensive meal we had, and very good. Francie, Myron and I chatted while the kids played in the pool. We ended the day with some frozen rum smoothie concoction and went our separate ways; Francie and her brood back to her house and Myron and I back to Chinaberry to get cleaned up for our final dinner in Anguilla, at the Straw Hat.

I'm honestly not sure how Myron chose the Straw Hat, but it was an excellent choice. It is billed as Anguilla's only restaurant situated over the water. Three sides have large louvered shutters that cover the windows, giving a panoramic view of the water. We were there at night, but we could see St. Martin nearby and lots of boats. It was a romantic and spectacular setting. The food was what we were expecting from Koal Keel: very traditionally Caribbean. Myron started with a pumpkin soup; I had a delicious salad. For my main course I had a boneless goat curry, which was tasty but a little heavy on the allspice. Myron had grilled prawns, which were really good but a tad overcooked.

After dinner we joined Francie for her friend Hilary's going away party at The Ferryboat Inn. There we met Nicki and Clyde (they're just friends), who had visited Montserrat recently. Nicki was all about the dancing, so Myron talked to Clyde for a long time. Clyde painted a very bleak and desolate picture of life on the island. It was very different from what others who live there had told us, so we weren't sure what to make of his comments. The serious talk gave way to serious drinking and serious fun, and we ended up going from The Ferryboat Inn to Elvis' beach shack, a local hangout.

I'm not sure how long we were at Elvis', but it didn't matter. It was fun just standing around talking to locals. We met Rossie (aka Bush... that's not a reference to GW, but the kind of bush you think of in the islands), a local barber who also works in construction. He was interesting to talk to, to get his impression of what was happening in Anguilla and throughout the Caribbean. I only understood about half of what he said, but what I heard kept my attention. While we were there the police showed up. I have no idea what time it was, but it had to be pretty late/early. After several minutes Elvis left the bar and delivered drinks to the police car. Maybe they had a thirsty passenger who needed a tasty adult beverage.

And so our time in Anguilla wound down. The next day we had a flight at 2:40 PM, so we spent the morning packing and Francie came by to pick up the food we didn't eat and her cell phone. The twins were funny packing the cooler. One of the girls is very laid back, the other is very serious. The laid back one would hand things to the serious one, who had a very specific idea of where and how things should fit -- the laws of physics be damned!

We said our goodbyes, packed up our car, and headed for the Thrifty car rental near the airport to return our car. The lady there recommended Niko's, a nearby restaurant, for lunch and it was very good and the portions huge. I ordered the corn soup, which was more of a chowder, and was given about a quart of it. I also ordered the jerked chicken and it had the perfect combination of heat and sweet. Myron had a whole snapper in broth, which was also delicious.

We returned to Thrifty and were driven to the airport to await our flight... and the next travel debacle.

Coming up in Part 2 - Why I can't live in the Caribbean but ultimately will. Are some people are born bitchy? And the reality of living with a volcano.

lovely error when trying to demo Notes 8.5 beta

2008-08-15T16:39:00.004-04:00

I click OK, it goes away, so I open Designer, create a new database, and try to create a new agent.

I should know better than to try to be productive on a Friday afternoon before going on vacation.

upcoming vacation

2008-08-13T20:59:00.003-04:00

Next week Myron and I will be visiting the ever-popular Francie Whitlock in Anguilla. Hey, her blog demands you visit her, so how can I turn that down? It also has the byline Udder Chaos ... I'm sure my therapist would have something to say about that.

I'll turn 35 on August 19th, then on August 21st we fly to Montserrat. Take a minute to review the link if you're not familiar with Montserrat. Some of what follows won't make sense out of context. Okay, now that you're edumucated you're probably thinking to yourself "Charles has lost his marbles. He's visiting a tiny island in the middle of nowhere with an active volcano covering more than half of it!"

Well, there's a story behind it. We booked the trip to Anguilla back in December specifically to be there for my birthday. While discussing the trip with Francie she mentioned in passing that she had a friend from Montserrat who wanted us to visit there as well. Myron has been intrigued with Montserrat for over 30 years, and that actually heightened when the volcano became active in the mid-90's. I'm pretty laid back when it comes to travel so I was game for it.

In mid to late January we started researching Montserrat and a things got interesting. First we discovered housing prices in Montserrat have dropped precipitously because of the one-two punch of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, then the volcano becoming active in 1995 and erupting in 1997. A large portion of the island was evacuated for several years, so real estate prices plummeted.

The next interesting bit was our own housing situation. When we got back from Lotusphere we were surprised to find the house next door was up for sale... for $1.4M. We immediately started thinking "what if..." [As an aside, Myron bought our house in 1982 for $87,000.]

The final piece that fell into place is Myron's tenure at his job. He has worked in a state position for 35 years and can draw a retirement equal to 60% of his current salary. That can be transferred to anyone, so I will also get a chunk of his retirement, assuming he predeceases me and doesn't decide to get rid of me between now and then.

Everything pretty much came together between February and April to the point we decided to go house hunting in Montserrat. Myron will officially retire on August 16th, take two weeks off, and go back to work on August 31st earning his same salary while also drawing his retirement.

The past few months have been a dizzying whirlwind. If all this planning and life changes weren't enough, you can add this to the annual Dining With Friends benefit we did in May, my unanticipated solo presentation at ILUG in June, and the chaos at work since the fire in July.

I'll blog more later about what we're thinking of doing once we get there. For now we need to visit the island and see if moving there is a viable option, then we'll make further plans.

not following the money

2008-08-11T08:00:00.001-04:00

Seth Godin makes a really interesting point

No, people (most people) don't do things only for money. There's usually a minimum threshold that gets someone to pick a job and stick with it, but beyond that, the things we do are expressions of who we are and what we love and the impact we wish to make, not selfish acts designed to earn a few extra bucks.

In May 2007 I quit the only job I've ever had working with Notes and a few people have asked why I'm still participating in the Lotus community since I don't work with Notes or Domino in my day job. My response has been that I still do consulting on the side, but that will be ending soon. I still intend to participate in the community, though.

It's obviously not about the money. It's also not a matter of visibility or attention. Believe it or not I'm very shy and introverted and I don't do this because I want attention. No, the main reason I continue to participate is because of the passion I have for the community. I think I'm one of Lotus' biggest critics, but I'm also a raving fan. If I didn't care I wouldn't be as vocal, and if I felt that my position were adequately represented in the community I wouldn't be blogging.
I feel that I have something to add to the discussion and as long as I get feedback showing others agree I'll continue. When I become the lone voice in my crackpot corner of the world I'll choose another place to frequent.

What do you get out of participating in the community?

Eclipse shirt

2008-08-02T11:13:00.001-04:00

Sweatshirt + kitchen strainer = eclipse shirt. :-)

a break for my other passion (and iPhone envy)

2008-08-02T09:12:00.005-04:00

Many of you know that I love to cook. This past Thursday Myron and I attended a cooking class at Charleston Cooks, hosted by one of my favorite chefs in the world, Sean Brock of McCrady's Tavern. The menu was a celebration of fresh vegetables. McCrady's owns a farm outside Charleston and nearly all the produce used in the restaurant -- from the heirloom tomatoes to the faro -- are grown by Sean and his staff.

The experience was one part sharing the adventure of a chef becoming a farmer, one part explaining molecular gastronomy, and entirely about Sean's passion for fresh ingredients. Everything Sean does is about heightening an ingredient's natural flavor. There are some surprises, such as the whipped maple syrup that looked like whipped cream, but they aren't the star of the dishes.

So here's how it went down. We were given printouts of five recipes that we would be preparing, along with aprons and kitchen towels. Chef Brock explained the recipes, then we each selected a station where we would do one of the dishes. Myron and I, along with a young lady named Julia who is a Food Science major at Clemson, took on the crab salad with compressed watermelon.

This involved peeling a watermelon to get rid of all the green and white, then slicing it into one inch thick slabs. These were placed in bags then sealed in a chamber vacuum. The technique goes by the French name sous vide, which means "under vacuum". By compressing the relatively soft watermelon under high pressure it condenses the fruit and gives it a meatier texture and intensifies the flavor. It came out looking like tuna.

The next step was to create watermelon caviar. This was achieved by putting watermelon juice mixed with pectin (the same stuff used in canning) in a squeeze bottle, then slowly dripping it into a calcium lactate gluconate solution. The end result were small balls of watermelon juice with a delicate outer skin that looked like salmon roe. The crab salad was rather mundane. Crab, Greek yogurt, chervil, tarragon and lemon olive oil.

Now for some hero worship. :-) When Sean was describing the pectin technique I said "Oh, I saw that on Iron Chef." He said the technique was similar, but this was newer. On Iron Chef they used sodium alginate rather than pectin, but he had some sodium alginate so he could show me that technique, too. And he did! He took us through every step, then left us to play with it.

Working with chemicals like this requires precise measurements down to a tenth of a gram. Sean was discussing how we needed to blend the watermelon juice with 1% by weight of sodium alginate, and as he's saying this he reached in his pocket and pulled out an iPhone. I jokingly asked if it was a blender, and he pulled off the cover to reveal a scale! I have no use at all for an iPhone, but I've got gadget envy over this beauty.

As we were sitting down to eat Chef Brock talked about how he came across molecular gastronomy as a way to enhance the natural flavor of products. He used the example of gnocchi, which typically uses potatoes, flour, and eggs. The end result is tasty, but not very potato-y. He said by putting potatoes into sous vide bags then cooking them in an immersion circulator, you get perfectly cooked potatoes without washing away flavor by boiling them. Then you can add water and xanthan gum to create the dough and you have gnocchi that is entirely potatoes with no flavor-altering ingredients. It was very interesting to me, and finally got me on the molecular gastronomy bandwagon.

He also described a technique of creating flavored waters. You add five sheets of gelatin to 500 grams of something, such as a wasabi puree. Then you freeze it. The gelatin will cause the entire mass to solidify, but as the water freezes it pokes holes in the gelatin structure. Then you put the frozen gelatin in cheese cloth and let it thaw. The liquid that comes out is nearly clear but it has an intense wasabi (or chocolate or foie gras) flavor. You can put this in the sous vide bag with something else and it comes out looking like a regular piece of tuna or chicken, but it has this other completely unexpected flavor.

Before we left Sean invited us all to visit his kitchen any time and said he loved to see people passionate about food. I'll definitely be taking him up on that offer.

Disaster Recovery: Planning for success

2008-07-28T22:10:00.024-04:00

Can anyone think of anything else to put on my short list? Keep in mind we only support about 60 users internally and 30 customers externally.

The battery backup and cooling aren't as critical at this point since they will depend largely on what hardware we end up getting. We are already licensed for Symantec Backup Exec and will likely continue with that software. The backup hardware will depend on the other hardware selected.

I think our biggest challenge is going to be getting a SAN that can provide enough spindles to separate workloads without scaling out to several shelves or wasting a lot of storage.

Blade Chassis

Vendor / Model	Size	Bays	Comments
HP c3000	6U	8
HP c7000	10U	8 or 16	Can use full-height or half-height blades
Dell M1000E	10U	8 or 16	All servers are half-height, I/O blades can be either half-height or full-height.
IBM BladeCenter E	7U	14	Options List
IBM BladeCenter S	7U	6	2 dedicated disk storage module bays Options List
IBM BladeCenter H	9U	14	Options List

Server Blades

Vendor / Model	CPU	Max Mem	Local Storage	Size	Comments
HP Proliant BL460c	2x Xeon	64GB	2x SAS or SATA	half-height
HP Proliant BL465c	2x Opteron	32GB	2x SAS or SATA	half-height
HP Proliant BL480c	2x Xeon	48GB	4x SAS or SATA	full-height
HP Proliant BL685c	4x Opteron	64GB	2x SAS or SATA	full-height
Dell M600	2x Xeon	64GB	2x SAS or SATA	half-height
Dell M605	2x Opteron	64GB	2x SAS or SATA	half-height
IBM HS12	1x Xeon	24GB	2x SAS or SATA	N/A
IBM HS21	2x Xeon	16GB	2x SAS or SATA	N/A
IBM LS21	2x Opteron	32GB	1x SAS	N/A

Storage

Vendor / Model	Protocols	Bays	Drive Type(s)	Max Capacity	Max Hosts	Comments
HP StorageWorks 1200r	iSCSI	12	SAS or SATA	12TB, 1 enclosure, 12 drives		There are expansion options, I just didn't understand them.
HP Storageworks SB600c (blade)	iSCSI	8	SAS	1.16TB (8 x 146GB 10K SFF SAS)
Dell PowerVault MD3000i iSCSI	iSCSI	15	SAS, SATA	45TB, 3 enclosures, 45 drives	16
Dell/EMC CX3-10c	iSCSI, FC	15	FC, SATA	24TB FC, 60TB SATA, 4 enclosures, 60 drives	64
Dell PowerVault NX1950	iSCSI	15	SAS, SATA	30TB, 2 enclosures, 30 drives
IBM DS4700	FC	16	FC, SATA	33.6TB SATA, 112TB FC, 7 enclosures, 112 drives	16
IBM DS3400	FC	12	SAS, SATA	14.4TB SAS, 48TB SATA, 4 enclosures, 48 drives
EMC CLARiiON AX4	iSCSI, FC	12	SAS, SATA	60TB, 5 enclosures, 60 drives

Network Switches

Vendor / Model	Ethernet Ports	GBIC/SFP Ports	Speed	Routing	Comments
HP ProCurve 2900-24G	24	4x SFP	Gig	Layer 3/4
HP ProCurve 2900-48G	48	4x SFP	Gig	Layer 3/4
HP ProCurve 3400cl-24G	20	4x mini-GBIC	Gig	Layer 3/4
HP ProCurve 3400cl-48G	44	4x mini-GBIC	Gig	Layer 3/4
Cisco Catalyst 3560-24TS	24	4 SFP	Gig	Layer 3/4
Cisco Catalyst 3560-48TS	48	4 SFP	Gig	Layer 3/4

Firewalls

Vendor / Model	VPN (Incl/Max)	Comments
Watchguard Firebox X750e UTM Bundle	50/100
Sonicwall NSA 3500	50
Cisco ASA 5510 Security Plus	250
Cisco ASA 5520	750

Cooling Solutions

Vendor / Model	Comments
Knürr CoolAdd
Knürr CoolTherm
APC Rack Air Removal Unit SX

Battery Backup (UPS)

Vendor / Model	Comments
Liebert GXT2
Liebert PowerSure PSI
APC Symmetra RM
APC Symmetra LX

P.S. I apologize if anyone's RSS reader went haywire as I edited this like mad for the last 45 minutes. I copied the above out of our wiki and pasted it in, and Blogger did some crazy stuff with the tables. I had to put negative top margins on them or they had anywhere from 150px to 350px of extra space above them.

Excel to Wiki converter

2008-07-28T16:00:00.003-04:00

I've been documenting like a fiend lately and I couldn't have done it without this amazing Excel to Wiki converter. It makes it a LOT easier to deal with tables in MediaWiki markup.

FCC rules against Comcast for blocking file sharing

2008-07-28T09:30:00.000-04:00

You can read the details here. What's interesting is Comcast is getting knocked for blocking P2P traffic but there is no mention of the collateral damage they caused. Comcast's language is also highly conflicted.

From the WSJ article linked above:

The company has acknowledged it slowed some traffic, but said it was necessary to prevent a few heavy users from overburdening its network.

"We continue to assert that our network-management practices were reasonable, wholly consistent with industry practices and that we did not block access to Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services," said Sena Fitzmaurice, a Comcast spokeswoman.

And from an AP article in October 2007 (as excerpted by Ed Brill since the original article is no longer online):

Comcast has repeatedly denied blocking any Internet application, including "peer-to-peer" file-sharing programs like BitTorrent, which the AP used in its nationwide tests.

On Tuesday, Mitch Bowling, senior vice president of Comcast Online Services, added a nuance to that statement, saying that while Comcast may block initial connection attempts between two computers, it eventually lets the traffic through if the computers keep trying. ...

However, users also reported Comcast blocking some transfers of e-mails with large attachments through an application that is fully in the legal sphere: Lotus Notes, an IBM Corp. program used in corporate settings.

Kevin Kanarski, a network engineer for a major law firm, noticed the disruption in August and eventually traced the problem to Comcast. But he got the cold shoulder from the company's customer support department.

On Tuesday, Bowling acknowledged the problem, saying it was unintentional and due to a software bug that has been fixed. Kanarski said transfers started working again last week.

So they acknowledge they slowed some traffic, but they claim they didn't block anything. Yet they also admit to blocking. Except they don't do that. But sometimes they do. That's a heaping helping of WTF?! Danny Lawrence sums it up well in comments on Ed's site:

Comcast was summarily killing the connection at both ends, and they call that a "delay"? I think Mr Bowling's statement should be enshrined in the annals of corporate doublespeak.

Installing VMWare Server 1.0.6 on Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit

2008-07-25T11:16:00.000-04:00

First things first: I did not choose Vista. My boss bought a Gateway DX4710, which is a quad-core CPU with 6GB RAM, with the idea that we could install Windows Server 2003 on it. Unfortunately there are no drivers for Win2k3 and I'm stuck with Vista Home Premium.
Since we're without a test environment at the moment I decided to try installing VMWare Server 1.0.6 on it. Even though I can't add the Vista Home machine to our Active Directory network, I can add virtual machines. The host OS doesn't matter to me in the least, just the virtual environment.

Getting VMWare Server installed proved a challenge because Vista Home ~~wants~~ demands digitally signed drivers. VMWare doesn't come with those, so you have to disable the driver signing requirement. Vista also enables some TCP/IP options on the NIC that you have to disable in order to connect to the local VMWare host with the VMWare Server console.

Disabling driver signing

Press F8 after your BIOS POST screen to get to the Vista boot menu
Scroll down and select the Disable driver signing requirement option.
Log into Vista
Open a command prompt and enter the following commands:
bcdedit /set nointegritychecks ON
bcdedit -set loadoptions DDISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
Restart Vista

Updating the NIC settings

Start > Control Panel
Locate the Network and Internet entry and click the View network status and tasks link under it
Locate your NIC in the list and click View Status
Click Properties in the status dialog
Click the Configure button located at the top of the properties dialog, below the hardware listing
Click the Advanced tab
Change all the following to Disabled
Flow Control
IPv4 Checksum offload
TCP Checksum offload (IPv4)
UDP Checksum offload (IPv4)

Installing VMWare Server

A reasonable person may think that after changing these settings you should be good to go. Alas, you'd be wrong. You must go to the Vista boot menu and disable the driver signing requirement every time you reboot the computer. You will also get errors when installing VMWare server about the drivers being unsigned. If you click through the errors it will install the VMNet adapters just fine.

After you get VMWare Server installed and you launch the server console you need to select the Localhost option. If you don't see Localhost you either didn't boot Vista with the driver signing option disabled or you didn't change your NIC configuration.

Conclusion

After going through all this, I don't think we're going to use this system to run VMWare Server. It works... with a healthy dose of hacks and crazy workarounds. Heaven forbid the power goes out in the middle of the night. When the box comes back up VMWare can't automatically load any of the VM's since it will load with driver signing enforced, even though I have confirmed with a MS support person (who is a personal friend) that it should be disabled.

Using Vista has been incredibly painful. I understand things have to change, but options I have used for years no longer exist. Start > Run is gone. The Start menu is one long laundry list instead of a cascaded menu. I never found a way to get Explorer to show file extensions. There may be a way to turn some things on , but I find the OS too slow to bother learning.

This is an Intel Quad-Core with 6GB RAM running a 64-bit OS and a 7200 RPM SATA-2 drive. I shouldn't have to wait for it. Restarting takes between 2 and 3 minutes, opening the Network dialog hangs the computer for 2 - 3 minutes. Yes really for minutes, I timed it.

Windows server times are very, very important

2008-07-22T15:47:00.002-04:00

We have a custom VB.Net app that connects to a customer's web service so our users can exchange information with the customer. I spent most of today struggling to get an Active Directory Certificate Services code signing certificate working, and once I had that working I turned my attention to this one.

The Sr. Network Admin had been working on it for a while, and users were becoming increasingly panicked. They hadn't been able to connect for over a week and the customer was getting impatient. We understood that some apps wouldn't work until our infrastructure was back up, but we finished that on Saturday. Everything should work.

When users tried to connect they got the following error

System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (407) Proxy Authentication Required. ---> System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: The clocks on the client and server machines are skewed

I checked the client PC and its clock was fine, so this meant a server clock is off. Not surprising considering everything in our computer room has been through a fire, cleaned in a solution of some kind, dried, reassembled, and stuffed in a rack. But which one? We have a total of four possible proxies involved. I installed the application on my computer, generated the error, then checked my Event Viewer. Looky what I found

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Kerberos
Event Category: None
Event ID: 5
Date: 7/22/2008
Time: 3:18:45 PM
User: N/A
Computer: CROBINSON
Description:
The kerberos client received a KRB_AP_ERR_TKT_NYV error from the server host/isa-vpn.domain.com. This indicates that the ticket used against that server is not yet valid (in relationship to that server time). Contact your system administrator to make sure the client and server times are in sync, and that the KDC in realm DOMAIN.COM is in sync with the KDC in the client realm.

I logged into isa-vpn and lo and behold its date was June 13, 2001 and its time was 10:21 PM. I fixed this and the application started working. As an added bonus users were able to log into the VPN, which the Sr. Network Admin had also been working on for the last three days.

This highlighted three things. First, our servers were not set up to use a central time server. Second, nobody checked the server times after they were brought back online. And finally, the CMOS battery in the server is dead.

Something else to add to our DR and maintenance plans.

Disaster Recovery: Planning for failure

2008-07-21T21:44:00.003-04:00

At the time of our fire we had a very shaky DR plan. It consisted of tape backups, external USB-connected hard drives, and a couple of hastily jotted down lists of the most critical things that needed to happen. Overall it's probably the same in most SMB's... if they have anything at all.

It is unconscienable that the previous IT Manager left with absolutely, positively, no disaster plan at all. We weren't even storing backup tapes offsite. Hell, we were doing nightly backups of changed data, then every Saturday a full backup... on the same freaking tapes, week after week, month after month, for at least two years. Our SQL Server was backing up to the same external RAID array that held the production data, and the entire backup directory was saved to tape weekly. Cleaning up old backups was a manual process undertaken when the drive was close to running out of space.

My boss started in December 2006, and I was the first person he hired in May 2007. He hired the network administrator in June 2007. It took until August 2007 for us to finally get a solid backup strategy that still includes the CFO taking the weekly backup tape home every Monday morning. It's not a good solution but it's better than what we had. All in all, though, our disaster recovery plan was actually a plan for utter failure.

The last week has been a blur, but a common topic of conversation is how to plan better to make a disaster such as this mostly an IT non-event. Now that we have about 100% of our services back online we're digging into what this means. It's a given that some things are going to have to be replaced; the idea is to try to create as resilient and survivable an infrastructure as possible balanced against the cost of the solution and the business' risk tolerance.

So now we have moved beyond the previous failures in planning and are now planning for failure. The options are nearly limitless, the questions overwhelming and difficult to navigate. We know we want a virtualized infrastructure and we want a blade solution with a SAN and possibly a NAS. We have narrowed down the vendors to Dell and HP, with IBM sometimes mentioned but not being seriously considered. I'll get into that discussion later.

Luckily I have gone through a similar process previously. At my last job we spent a year going through the process of selecting what ended up being an IBM BladeCenter and DS4300 SAN, then another four months implementing it. The difference here is we have 90 days to hand over our current equipment to the insurance company since it is being written off. This is going to be fast and furious.

Disaster Recovery: Knowing what you know

2008-07-20T09:18:00.002-04:00

Imagine an asteroid hits your place of work and you can't recover anything. What do you do?

After our fire we realized that we had a lot of documentation that was stored in an electronic-only form. We had backup tapes off site, but we did not have a tape drive to recover them. So whatever method you use to store your documentation, make sure it is accessible in the worst case scenario. Tape or other electronic backups may not be enough.

Think about every service in your infrastructure and plan for what you would do if any service were unavailable.

Once we started bringing servers online we discovered that there were situations we hadn't even considered. In our case we were using the Windows certificate authority to authenticate computers against the domain controller. This we knew, but what we didn't realize is that without the CA the other servers could not talk to each other. It was a tense 4 hours while we waited for the CA server to come out of the cleaning process. While we were waiting I researched and documented the process for removing the CA from our environment and set up some VM's and tested it so I would have at least a passing familiarity with the scenario. Luckily we didn't have to do it, but it is something we should have been aware of much sooner than this. Try taking different servers offline and seeing how much of your infrastructure is survivable.

Communicate when you need to, do what you have to.

Some decisions can be made in a vacuum. There are huge lists of things to be done, and some should be common sense. You see a stack of empty boxes. Ask if they can be broken down and taken to the dumpster. You're in IT and you see servers stacked for testing. Nobody is around and you're done with your last task. Get to testing. I was bringing our NAS appliance on line and it crashed, then came up with an error. I didn't run to the system admin. I researched my options for recovering, including looking up support information online and calling the vendor then spending two hours reinstalling the OS. The point I'm trying to make is if you need information ask for it, but don't ask when the task is obvious. If you're not sure, find something that is.

Speak with one voice.

One of our biggest problems was that everyone thought they were in charge. We had priorities for bringing servers online and getting users set up and they were preempted at every turn. We established a chain of command and it was not adhered to. Our efforts were severely hampered by this lack of consistency. Everyone has to move in lock step with each other or things fall apart quickly. This isn't the time for politics or empire building.

we had a fire at work

2008-07-19T11:52:00.004-04:00

I'm not going to mention where I work since the insurance investigation is ongoing. The next few posts are going to be a mix of business and personal since there is a lot I need to vent about, but there is also a lot that I have learned going through this process. Hopefully you'll find some good information mixed with the frustration. :-)

Last Friday, July 11th, at 2:11 AM a faulty air conditioning unit located in the attic area of the administrative building at work started an electrical fire. Fire trucks arrived at 2:20 AM and power was cut to the building while they fought the blaze. By 2:40 AM all servers had exhausted their battery backups and were offline; some gracefully, most not. The fire department allowed people into the building at 4:00 AM to start the recovery effort. There was about 2 inches of water in the building by that point.

The fire swept along the roofline and down the exterior walls. Everything in the attic was either burned or had heavy smoke damage. We had some wireless networking equipment and repeater switches that melted. About 30 file cabinets were stored in the attic, in an area directly opposite where the fire started. Luckily they didn't catch on fire, but they were very smoky.

The Process

A forklift was brought in and the entire server racks (we had three) were lifted out and moved into a building across the street. A disaster cleanup service was contacted and they had a crew on site on Saturday to start cleaning the servers. More people were flown in and by Saturday evening we had a team of about 10 people who were disassembling and cleaning servers. It was slow going, taking 3 - 4 hours per server.

All the PC's in the building suffered extensive smoke and/or water damage. We were told by the fire department that when PVC melts it releases a gas that when electrified causes electronics to become unstable. In other words, even if a PC had no apparent smoke or water damage it likely have come in contact with this gas that would cause the electronics to fail over time. The CPU fans on the computers located nearest the start of the fire (including everyone in IT) had melted. The decision was made early on to replace every PC and pull hard drives from old computers for those people who really needed their data.

The Good

When this happened we were in the process of establishing a comprehensive disaster recovery plan and had mapped out an order in which servers would need to be recovered to get people back working. We had also gotten managers to identify the order in which their direct reports would need to get new computers. A paperless initiative had been started about three months ago (nobody told IT) and about half the 30 file cabinets I mentioned were empty.

The company I work for started out in the late 90's renting a small area in the back of one building. As it grew, the owners bought the building, then three others adjacent, and finally one across the street. So we had a nearby place to go. What had been the wood shop where they crated things for shipping was converted into a new office environment. A supply closet became the new computer room. Electricians, cabling guys, carpet layers and painters were brought in and by Sunday evening you would never have known it wasn't always an office space.

Shortly after I started in May 2007 we began a PC refresh cycle and I was horrifed to realize it was a completely manual process. One of the first things I did was convince them to invest in Ghost Enterprise Server so we could do standard PC images. This has proven invaluable since we first got it, and in this case it was an absolute life saver. In two days we got 51 computers up and running. There is absolutely no way we could have done this without a cloning solution and Ghost worked flawlessly.

The Bad

TOO MANY CHIEFS!! I'll admit our DR plan wasn't fully fleshed out, but the parts we did have complete were ignored. Managers with no responsibility for IT were telling the people doing the server cleaning to switch around server priorities based on what the manager needed -- without considering that the server they wanted couldn't be put into production until its dependent servers were. Even the IT Manager was involved in shifting things around without consulting the Senior Network Administrator or me. This caused significant delays in getting our infrastructure back online.

The blame game. The PC Tech was given a list of specs and called around to local retailers to find a suitable model of computer that we could get 40 - 60 of within a couple of days. The only thing he found were Dell Inspiron 531's. If we waited three to four days we could get some additional models. He relayed this to our interim IT Manager, who is a consultant, and he said to go ahead and get them. The problem is these are AMD Sempron's and lower end than what people had before. The IT Manager insisted he didn't know they were Sempron's; the PC Tech was equally adamant he was very clear about this and even questioned whether we should get them or wait for a better model. In a meeting with the two co-owners of the company the IT Manager said he had chosen them because it was the only thing we could get in the quantity and timeframe we needed and suggested that some may need to be replaced within a year.

The tunnel vision. Some IT staff proved to be too highly specialized. There are only four of us: Senior Network Administrator, PC Technician, Senior Programmer (me), and Junior Programmer. The Jr. Programmer who reports to me was nearly untrainable. His task for three days: unbox PC's, unbox UPS's, connect the computers to the UPS, insert a Ghost boot CD I created, and initiate a GhostCast session. Once done, log in with the domain administrator account, change the computer name, and add the user as a Standard User. Have the user log in and set up his or her e-mail.

First things first: he didn't know you have to connect the battery in the UPS. The UPS's all had a bright yellow sticker telling you this with pictures showing you how to do it. I didn't tell him and he didn't read the instructions, but he did pull off the sticker. Out of a total of 51 PC's we Ghosted in two days, he did about 10 and took nearly 45 minutes per PC. The PC Tech and I were going through a PC every 20 minutes. Of the ones the Jr. Developer set up I had to either fix or offer assistance on about half of them. He struggled with one for 20 minutes before calling me over, and I pointed out he hadn't plugged in the network cable even though I had suggested he check it 10 minutes prior. We ended up with two different models of PC's and he installed with the wrong Ghost image on the final two PC's he set up. That took him nearly an hour to troubleshoot.

This lack of flexibility wasn't limited to just IT. Other people were sitting around waiting on us to do simple things like unbox their computers. Once told their managers about this there was a flurry of activity, but it had wasted the better part of a day while the four of us in IT were killing ourselves. So much for an "all for one" mentality.

The second-guessing has already started. There is the PC specs issue I highlighted above, but it goes much deeper. The current IT staff have only been with the company for a little over a year. The last network manager was using the corporate network as a playground to test various theories he would then present at conferences such as Black Hat. The result is a highly convoluted infrastructure that took us the better part of a year to fully understand. Much of it makes absolutely no sense and we can find no documentation of it except in the previous admin's presentations. I am pretty confident saying that nobody has anything resembling our network infrastructure in production, and that's not because it's exceptionally good.

With this as a background I was greivously offended when the consultant interim IT Manager sat in a meeting with the CxO's, the Sr. Network Admin and myself and chided us for not doing automated offline backups or implementing a redundant data center. Those were things on our radar and we were investigating them but the reality is we had things to get done on a day-to-day basis. I have put out a new version of our ERP software every month for the last 12 months, and we have made significant improvements in reducing the complexity and maintenance of our network environment. Our boss went from congratulating us on these efforts last week to kneecapping us this week.

The Ugly

I'm burned out and really pissed off and the Sr. Network Admin feels the same. In the last week we both have been thrown under the bus more times than we can count by our boss. Nearly every recommendation we made was overruled. We suggested that we get all the computers in and set up before we brought all the staff back in. Instead our boss caved in to management who thought it would be better for morale if the staff was brought in and could see the progress we were making. So we had 50 people in the way asking questions while we set up equipment and brought servers back online. We arranged meetings at 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM with management to discuss our progress and plan of attack. Our boss couldn't be bothered to attend those, but he would call us for updates while we're trying to get stuff done or interrupt us when he did show up.

By the end of the day yesterday we had reached full-on mutiny. We're doing what needs to be done, we're telling upper management only as much as they need to know (and explained we'll come back and give them full details when things aren't as critical, and they're okay with that), and we have cut our boss out of the loop entirely.

it's a vicious cycle

2008-07-10T08:07:00.004-04:00

I was doing some research about the history of IBM and came across a blurb that struck me. Which of these do you think is the correct quote?

Between 1971 and 1975, IBM investigated the feasibility of a new revolutionary line of products designed to make obsolete all existing products in order to re-establish its technical supremacy. This effort, known as the Future Systems project, was terminated by IBM's top management in 1975, but had consumed most of the high-level technical planning and design resources during five years, thus jeopardizing progress of the existing product lines (although some elements of FS were later incorporated into actual products).

Or...

Between 2002 and 2006, IBM investigated the feasibility of a new revolutionary line of products designed to make obsolete all existing products in order to re-establish its technical supremacy. This effort, known as the Workplace project, was terminated by IBM's top management in 2007, but had consumed most of the high-level technical planning and design resources during five years, thus jeopardizing progress of the existing product lines (although some elements of Workplace were later incorporated into actual products).

Believe it or not, the first one is straight out of Wikipedia. All I did was change the dates and the name of the project to come up with the second.

The scope of the Future Systems project was very different than Workplace (FS sought to make all existing computers obsolete; Workplace just wanted to do the same to Notes and Domino [yes, that is an editorial comment]) but both left IBM scrambling to salvage something from their efforts. Future Systems eventually led to the System/38, which evolved into the AS/400. Workplace yielded Expeditor, which is the framework underpinning the current Notes 8 release. Time will tell where that ends up.

Even though both efforts had some positive benefit I'm still left wondering why such vast amounts of time and resources are being spent on distractions that sometimes take decades to recover from. Innovation is one thing, bending your existing customers over a barrel just because you want to maintain or achieve market dominance has proven to be an unwise move. Hopefully IBM will eventually learn from that.

My time with Twitter

2008-07-02T10:24:00.003-04:00

Some of you have discovered that I have been using Twitter for the last couple of weeks. It has been interesting to see how Twitter is used in our community. People tweet about everything. Literally. From the automated updates that tell you every single place they are (complete with links to maps) to random pictures they take with their phones, to the occasional technical question, to links to blog posts (linking through PlanetLotus, of course, to hopefully end up on the hot list). Some of it is interesting, some of it is useful, a lot of it is pure ASW.

Then there were the errors and outages. The all too commonly seen cute image of a dead whale getting hauled skywards by birds confuses and enrages me (to quote Morbo).

And what the hell is this about? Why on Earth is this acceptable? Just shoot me now if I ever have to rely on any service that is down as often as Twitter.

I was trying to break from my Luddite ways. I tried Twitter. I didn't find it at all useful and the service is a steaming heap of utter failure, so I deleted my account. I'm glad some of you find it worthwhile, it's just a huge waste of time for me.

P.S. As I was deleting my account I got the over capacity fail whale again, then Status: 500 Internal Server Error Content-Type: text/html . It took me five tries to finally delete my account.

SanDisk mail-in rebates through June 29th

2008-06-15T09:18:00.000-04:00

SanDisk has a mail-in rebate offer through June 29th on several popular models of SD, CF and Memory Stick Duo cards. The rebates are on a sliding scale; the more you buy the more you save. The amounts range from $5 off a single 1GB SD card to $300 off three 16GB CF cards.

For example, I just ordered two 8GB SanDisk Extreme III SDHC cards for $74.95 each. Adorama's website lists the price as $34.95 after rebate, but that's for one. You get another $5 off each card when you buy two, lowering the per-card price to $30.95.

new domain and contact info

2008-06-13T08:35:00.004-04:00

The new URL for my blog is http://www.cubert.net. My new e-mail address is charles@cubert.net.

In case anyone is interested, I'm using Google Apps for blog and e-mail hosting, and EveryDNS for free DNS management. I'm still not a fan of Google Docs or whatever their spreadsheet bit is, but I may start using some of their other tools for putting content online. Watch this space. :)

ILUG 2008 Day 3: Friday

2008-06-12T07:22:00.000-04:00

The plan was we would get up so I could hit the 9AM sessions at ILUG and Myron would spend the day playing tourist. The alarm went off at 8 and my head felt like it was stuffed with concrete and my throat was so sore I couldn't talk. I turned off the alarm and croaked out that I wasn't going anywhere. I finally woke up around 10:30.

Myron was showered and headed out to a pharmacy to get some medicine for me, then went to do his final last gasp of sightseeing. I e-mailed a couple of people to let them know I wouldn't be at the conference and went back to bed. Here are some of Myron's pictures of his travels.

ILUG 2008 Day 2: Thursday

2008-06-11T13:29:00.003-04:00

My presentation was on at 9:00 AM. I didn't sleep much. I did one run-through last night and managed to complete in under an hour, but I have a few things I need to make sure I don't forget. I got up at 7:00 AM to make sure I had enough time to get those last things wrapped up and get over to the Conference Center.

I dragged Myron along and we arrived at about 8:00. The usual suspects were already there: Duffbert, Eileen (with "The" notebook attached), Mooney, Mr. & Mrs. Elsmore, Coatsie, Buchan, Matt, and probably a few others I'm missing. Eileen opened the door to Room 3 for me and I went in to set up.

I wasn't nervous as much as I was anxious to get it done in the time allotted. I got my laptop setup and started going through my notes from the night before, getting all my VM's ready. For those who don't know, here is how it was set up:

I started with a single Windows Domino 8.0.1 mail server, running in a VM. I also had the Notes client 8.0.1 in this same VM.
I pre-installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron and CentOS 5.1 with Domino 8.0.1 in two more VM's, but had not configured them yet
During the demo I registered the new servers to create their server docs and id's, configured all the records for them, then brought the new servers online
I clustered Windows and Ubuntu
I took Windows down and moved it over to CentOS

It was a lot to get done in an hour. So much, in fact, that I don't think I'll attempt it ever again. :-P

I kicked off the session a couple of minutes after 9, and and after a few initial jitters I think it went very well. I only made a couple of slip-ups, such as not checking to see if AdminP had created some replicas before I ended the server, and not updating my hosts files with the new IP after I moved the server over. I recovered from those, though, and managed to barely finish in an hour.

Myron took this while I was getting ready. Yes, I'm reading the help on decommissioning a server and I'm wearing a really loud shirt with macaws all over it.

After my session was over things were a bit of a blur. I got some good feedback, but I'm worried that I covered so much at such a high level that it wasn't as useful as it could have been. I want to thank Gabriella Davis for agreeing to sit in the front row to coach me when I really messed up. I joked that I was going to introduce her, then say she was there in case I fainted, vomited, or started crying. Which I actually did say, so I made good on that. But I didn't do any of the other things.

So at the end of the day I accomplished everything in my agenda, all in an hour. I'm just questioning whether it was really worthwhile. It would be a slick demo from a marketing perspective, but I'm not so sure it's really effective as a session at a conference.

ILUG 2008 Day 1: Wednesday

2008-06-08T17:22:00.003-04:00

Myron headed off for the zoo today so I didn't have a camera. The day started with Paul Mooney, Nick Shelness and Alan Lepofsky doing the keynote. Paul welcomed everyone to Ireland, insulted developers and threatened the lives of end users. Nick brought up a presentation he used in 1998 about the future of collaboration. It was very interesting that the same issues that were at the forefront in 1998 are still the main issues today: indexing and accessing content. Alan went on a Twitter / social networking bent that was interesting, but I'm still not convinced of the utility of this in the SMB space. That's all I work with (by choice), so I don't particularly care what the multi-thousand companies want or need. If you're so big you need software to root through everyone's tagged websites to figure out who knows something, you might want to consider changing your internal divisional communications.

I spent the remainder of the day working on my own presentation. At this point I still had not gotten all the parts of the demo working, but I did have an outline. I worked on finishing up the slides and Gabriella Davis was kind enough to answer some questions between her own issues getting a connection to her servers. (The security at the Conference Center was extremely tight. Nobody could VPN out, which caused some of the presenters a few issues.)

The evening ended with several of us going back to The Bleeding Horse, a pub beside The Camden Court Hotel where many of the attendees stayed.

After dinner we went back to our hotel and I made Myron endure a run-through of my presentation. I got my virtual machines to a ready state, did some snapshots, then went for it. I was close on the time, but I managed to get through it with only a couple of small snags.

ILUG 2008 Day -1: Tuesday

2008-06-08T16:54:00.004-04:00

We got up this morning and did a bus trip to Powerscourt Estate. While waiting for the bus we stopped in Marks & Spencer for a bit of breakfast, then sat on a bench and watched the world go by. I just have one thing to say: I'm glad I didn't drive in Dublin.

The trip to Powerscourt was uneventful. The driver talked almost nonstop and was full of information that I've forgotten now. There were a couple of ladies seated behind us who insisted on talking to each other for the 90 minutes of the bus ride. I was thankful for a break in the seaside town of Bray just so I could away from their incessant jabbering.

Powerscourt Estate was absolutely amazing. The house is beautiful and the gardens are stunning. If you get a chance to go, go!

After that trip we went back to our hotel, dropped off some stuff, then set out to find the Griffith Conference Center. For anyone who hasn't been to Dublin, there are two key things you need to know: manh streets change names every block, and there are rarely any street signs. You pretty much just have to aim in a direction and carry multiple maps so you can cross-reference where you might be.

When we finally found the Conference Center we came across a group of ILUG'ers sitting on the outside patio, marvelling at the bright ball in the sky. We had to explain it was called the "sun", and provides warmth to the whole Earth. The people from the UK and Ireland seemed impressed.

ILUG 2008: Day -2 (Monday)

2008-06-06T09:57:00.008-04:00

We flew in Sunday and stayed up until midnight local time, which was only 7PM for us. But that meant we had been up since 8AM Saturday, making it nearly 36 hours. Consequently, we managed to ignore all our wakeup calls and alarms and finally rolled out of bed at nearly 11:40 AM. We originally planned to do a bus tour to Powerscourt, a castle with wonderful gardens about two hours from Dublin. Instead I opted to do the responsible thing and stayed at the hotel working on my presentation while Myron headed off for the Bloom festival.

Later that evening we went to dinner with Jamie, Bob Balaban and Bob's daughter Samantha. We had a wonderful meal at Gallagher's Boxty House, then strolled back to our respective hotels.

ILUG 2008: Day -3 (Sunday)

2008-06-06T06:43:00.008-04:00

Travel delays plagued us all day Saturday, but we did finally arrive in Dublin only about 90 minutes late. We took a bus to our hotel, the Fitzwilliam on St. Stephen's Green at the end of Grafton Street. The hotel is 5-star and listed by Conde Nast as one of the top 20 coolest hotels in the world. Myron found a deal on Skyauction and got the room for $180 US per night. The regular rate is $505 US.

When we finally got settled in I decided to get in touch with Jamie Magee, who had flown in on Sunday as well. It was also an opportunity to find the Camden Court Hotel, which is where a lot of attendees would be staying. Finding the hotel was relatively easy, and when I called Jamie's room I accidentally woke him up. We decided that Myron and I would get lunch while Jamie got his beauty rest, then the three of us would go to the Guinness tour.

We had a great lunch at a Lebanese restaurant, came back and collected Jamie, then were on our way to Guinness. Along the way we got turned around a few times since Dublin has very poorly marked streets, and street names change every block.

The Guinness tour wasn't really that interesting to me. We had been to the Bass Brewery tour, which gives you a much better idea of how beer is actually made. Guinness' approach was all about "we're better than everyone" "everyone wants to copy us" "you're stupid if you don't like Guinness". Once you got beyond the preachy rhetoric, the sections on merchandising were wonderful. It was fun to see how Guinness was marketed throughout the years.

After that it was a stroll back to our hotels, then out for dinner.

Spoleto Festival 2008: the break/s

2008-05-29T23:59:00.005-04:00

From the Spoleto website:

Forged by the charismatic poet/hip-hop theater sensation Marc Bamuthi Joseph and featuring live music by remarkable human beatbox/percussionist Tommy Shepherd and DJ Excess with video by David Slzasa, the break/s explores the ascendancy of hip-hop worldwide. This dynamic new work puts hip-hop culture into personal, historical and political perspective while erasing boundaries between movement, spoken word, personal storytelling, and poetic revelation.

I'm not sure what about that spoke to me, but when I read it in the program I knew it was something I had to experience. I'm of the generation that grew up as rap and hip-hop was being forged in a crucible of agitated inner city youth and gangster and drug cultures. I watched it turn from fringe street music into a massive business, with the requisite wannabe's and sell-outs. I was curious what led to it being kicked off at that specific point in time, what drove that genesis. That journey is what Mark Bamuthi Joseph explored.

"This story starts in the middle..."

The performance was divided into several stories, all of which started in the middle of somewhere. The locations were as diverse as Wisconsin, Senegal, and unconsciousness. Marc performed a mix of dance, spoken word, rap and storytelling against a backdrop created by three large screens playing various videos to emphasize key points.

Those points were at times funny, touching, biting, introspective and self-loathing. No subject was too taboo, no cows too sacred. It was enlightening for me, a middle-class white man, to get a glimpse inside the mind of someone with a very different racial and socioeconomic background. It was also refreshing to see someone who has street cred to admit his own failings of ego and racism, such as the time he walked into a Tokyo hip-hop night club and expected to be treated like royalty only to end up standing in the corner by himself, ignored.

"The more acceptance I get from others, the less I accept myself."

I walked away from this performance with a better understanding of how hip-hop came about, from its roots in Africa through the birth of jazz and eventual social acceptance. I also understand now how people who grew up in the struggle that birthed hip-hop can undergo an identity crisis when people who are not part of their socioeconomic class want to participate. Validation of their art isn't what they were originally after. They were telling the story of their oppression. Now we're seeing the people who do it for the artistry and that's causing some internal struggles.

It was an interesting performance that will be food for thought for a very long time.