Back online

Well after a couple of truly relaxing weeks on IamLUG, visiting Bruce and Gayle, driving down to San Francisco from Vancouver, WA and finally having my brother and his family visit for the weekend, (phew!) it’s time to get back to the real world.

Over the next couple of weeks we have the Lotus Knows IdeaJam kicking off, more work on IQJam, finishing off the development for the next version of IdeaJam and plenty of other fun projects to fill in the gaps in between. The build up to UKLUG is also about to start in earnest as well.

Life is busy, but life is good. Now if only I could shake off this damn jetlag then all would be perfect.

Cannon Beach x 2

We headed out to the Stephanie Inn at Cannon Beach for the weekend and had the most relaxing few days of the year so far, wine, good company and just general chill-axing.

So relaxing, in fact, that I managed to forget my jacket which I had left my passport in! So after heading back to Bruce and Gayle’s house yesterday, this morning it was up early to head back out to the beach to get the passport so I can get home later in the week. To be honest, it wasn’t a bad thing to happen as the drive through the hills outside Portland was stunning and it meant I got to enjoy even more of Route 101 which runs right down the west coast of the States. Lots of cliffs, beaches, forests and sun make for an interesting and enjoyable drive.

I really am going to struggle to get my head back in gear when I get home on Thursday. But until then I have another couple of days to enjoy. So back to the balcony here in Gold Beach to watch the sunset.

GSX Day, travelling and Portland

After IamLUG finished up about 30 people stayed on for the GSX Day which was all about setting up your environment to monitor what’s going on, prevent significant outages and make everything run smoothly in your organisation. Even for a lowly developer such as myself this is useful content to know. The GSX software itself looks very interesting from a performance monitoring and scalability planning point of view and of course now that Elguji is running more and more hosted sites we need to make sure that our servers are in tip top shape.

The day itself was very well planned to not be a sales pitch, so the presentations were valid even without the GSX software. A very clever way of doing marketing I’d say.

Then yesterday really was the end of the trip to St Louis, with a very relaxed start to the day and some fun and games on the travel following that. US Airways cancelled the second leg of my flight to Portland so when I got to the front of the queue to re-book the lady looked a little shocked and said “But you’ve been booked onto the flight that leaves in 45 minutes from Terminal 2!”. Oh it was very entertaining getting my bags, changing terminals (in 111 degree heat), checking in, getting through security and boarding all within 30 minutes. But I did manage it at least so I was only half an hour late to meet Bruce and Gayle, so ultimately a successful day.

Today we head off to Cannon Beach on the Oregon coast to relax, catch up and spend some quality time working on IQJam. Interestingly, this is the first time that Bruce and I have actually worked in the same place before in the two years that we’ve been working together. Either we’ll get lots done or I’ll need to go back to being 5000 miles away 🙂

IamLUG Day 2

The second and final day of IamLUG was jam packed with sessions including Mary Beth Raven, Jack Ratcliff talking about EXT.ND (which is looking great by the way) and, of course, Rob Novak’s Free American Beer session.

The point being here that there was great content from some industry leading speakers. The best thing about all of the User Groups that I’ve been to, though, is the community aspect. Lots of the usual suspects are there and it’s great to catch up with them, but then you always meet interesting new people as well, it’s all about the networking.

The IamLUG crew did an amazing job, they really deserve what sleep they managed to get last night!

Today it’s onwards to the GSX day which promises to be interesting. I know it’s admin stuff, but the server performance monitoring side of things looks really useful when you want to make a very performant Domino web application. More on that tomorrow I hope.

IamLUG Day 1

Into the user group conference proper yesterday. I have to say that the organisation of the hotel, the speakers, registration, food and so on have been amazing, having seen behind the scenes of ILUG and UKLUG I know how much hard work is going on, but as an attendee here it all just works very smoothly. So a big well done to the Chris, Francie and the rest of the team.

The keynote by Kevin Kavanaugh was perfectly pitched, no techie content but a very good summary of what’s going on in the Lotus world at the moment. And then, of course, we got the early announcement of the “Lotus Knows…” marketing campaign that is going to be kicking off in a couple of weeks time. I’ve been among the most cynical over IBM’s commitment to getting the Lotus brand into the public consciousness over the last few years, but I have to say that this does feel like the right approach to me. Over the next 18 months hopefully we’ll begin to see some improvement in the public perception of Lotus Software.

The sessions that have been laid on are so far very good, I especially enjoyed Julian Robichaux’s getting data out of Domino presentation, and Ed Brill’s strategy session was also good.

Today it’s a day full of sessions so it’s about time to go and get some breakfast before we get going.

IamLUG Day 0

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The early arrival on Saturday was so that a group of us could head to see St Louis play at Busch Stadium. With beautiful weather, a nice shaded seat, a couple of beers and some good company, I’m very glad we came along, a great afternoon. Followed by a very good steak and an early night (the jetlag really kicked in at about 10pm), it was a great setup for the conference proper which starts in a couple of hours.

According to Chris there will be live coverage of the Opening session here, so if you’re interested to see what’s going on then it may be worth tuning in.

Matt is out of the office

I flew out to St Louis yesterday, a long but relatively easy journey. As soon as I arrived I started bumping into IamLUG attendees and shared a few (surprisingly nice) beers with a few of the gang before crashing quite early due to the long day.

Today it’s off to the baseball to see St Louis play Houston which should be fun. And then tomorrow it’s into the conference proper. From what I’ve seen so far Chris and team have done an amazing job, the hotel is ideal with large rooms, nice public areas and helpful staff. Can’t wait to get into it.

Following the conference I’m heading off on tour to go and see Bruce and Gayle so I’ll be checking email but not nearly as much as normal. If I don’t get back to you, then you’ll know why!

IQJam Announced

IQJam by Elguji Software, LLC

After all the cruel teasing, today it has become obvious what Bruce and I have been working on for the last couple of months. IQJam is still very much a work in progress but we are getting there and so far we are really proud of what we’ve achieved. it looks great, performs very well and will be a great tool for many companies and communities.

Over the next weeks there’ll be more news as we progress and of course we’ll be running our beta programme for people to get involved, get an early peek and help shape what we hope will become a mainstay product on the Lotus Domino platform.

Once again we’re happy to prove that you can create kick-ass web applications on Domino. And this time it’s made even easier with the use of XPages.

Until we’re ready to go into beta, if you’d like any more information, or have a potential use for the application in your company please contact us and we’d love to get into more detail with you.

IamLUG Agenda Posted and maybe a baseball game?

There’s less than two weeks until IamLUG now and the Agenda has just been posted. If you’ve not registered yet and have a couple of spare days it’s looking like a great event.

A lot of the stalwarts of the Lotus Community will be there presenting which is great as it gives me the chance to catch several of the sessions I missed at Lotusphere this year!

On the Twitters yesterday I asked if anyone fancied going to the baseball on Sunday 2nd. Several people replied so if you’re coming along to St Louis and want to come along with us just add a comment here and I’ll add you to the list. At the moment we have @davidleedy @kjbrown13 @johnhead @mitchcohen confirmed.