Category Miscellany Media
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I was cruising around, catching up on news, and came across this story. What an incredible act of sportsmanship...

Opponents carry injured home-run hitter around bases, from Fox Sports:

With two runners on base and a strike against her, Sara Tucholsky of Western Oregon University uncorked her best swing and did something she had never done, in high school or college. Her first home run cleared the center-field fence.

But it appeared to be the shortest of dreams come true when she missed first base, started back to tag it and collapsed with a knee injury.

She crawled back to first but could do no more. The first-base coach said she would be called out if her teammates tried to help her. Or, the umpire said, a pinch runner could be called in, and the homer would count as a single.

Then, members of the Central Washington University softball team stunned spectators by carrying Tucholsky around the bases Saturday so the three-run homer would count - an act that contributed to their own elimination from the playoffs.

Central Washington first baseman Mallory Holtman, the career home run leader in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference, asked the umpire if she and her teammates could help Tucholsky.

The umpire said there was no rule against it.

So Holtman and shortstop Liz Wallace put their arms under Tucholsky's legs, and she put her arms over their shoulders. The three headed around the base paths, stopping to let Tucholsky touch each base with her good leg.

With so many athletes having a "me first" attitude, there really aren't many great role models left. These girls are the very definition of good sportsmanship and good role models.

Rock

Posted by Rocky Oliver At 11:19 AM Location - Flowery Branch, GA | Permalink | Comments (4)

   
Category Fun
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NOTE: I think I'm in a funny mood today. Hope you enjoy this one too!

According to a news report, a certain private school in Washington was recently faced with a unique problem. A number of 12-year-old girls had begun to use lipstick and would put it on in the bathroom.

That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick they would press their lips to the mirror leaving dozens of little lip prints. Every night the maintenance man would remove them and the next day the girls would put them back.

Finally the principal decided that something had to be done. She called all the girls to the bathroom and met them there with the maintenance man.

She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian who had to clean the mirrors every night (you can just imagine the yawns from the little princesses).

To demonstrate how difficult it was to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required. He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it.

Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirror...

There are teachers... and then there are educators

Enjoy!

Rock

Posted by Rocky Oliver At 5:10 AM Location - Flowery Branch, GA | Permalink | Comments (1)

   
Category Fun Religion
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What would happen if the Ghostbusters were around for Jesus' ascension on the third day?

NOTE: The image is humorous, but may be viewed as inappropriate by some of my readers. If you are offended by religious juxtapositions such as is suggested here, then please don't click the link. If, however, you are not offended by mildly sacreligious humor, then I invite you to take a look at the image. **Rock

Have a great day!


Read More

Posted by Rocky Oliver At 3:28 AM Location - Flowery Branch, GA | Permalink | Comments (13)

   
Category Fun
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Update: I found a slightly longer version of this, so I updated the link. It is by the same person. **Rock

The local radio station played this unbelievable Dell Sales Support Call. Is is supposedly authentic (not on Snopes) call made to Dell sales. The call starts out normally, and then goes awry - I won't spoil it for you, but you really need to watch the YouTube link below. It had me rolling on the floor laughing so hard.


Dell sales call from YouTube

The full version is available at YouTube as well - the link above is a condensed version that simply clips out the regular start-of-call stuff (i.e. name, phone, unit you want, etc.). The version above is funny because it includes pictures with the call.

The sad part is, and why it is so funny, is that we've all been on calls similar to this. OK, maybe not this bad, but I know I've been on a few that were close. And hell, when I was in Lotus tech support I've felt like blasting the customer on numerous occasions; however I did refrain myself.

Hilarious.

Enjoy!

Rock

Posted by Rocky Oliver At 9:10 AM Location - Flowery Branch, GA | Permalink | Comments (3)

   
Category Media Fun
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Reuters reports of a panic that has hit Kinshasa, Congo. It appears that there is a widespread belief that sorcerers are "snatching" penises (yes, you read that right) from unsuspecting males. It has turned into a widespread panic. According to the story, Penis theft panic hits city...

Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

So, if you're in the Congo, beware sorcerers wearing gold rings, or you may lose your most cherished "posession"!!

Rock

Posted by Rocky Oliver At 6:59 PM Location - Flowery Branch, GA | Permalink | Comments (2)

   
Category This Site
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Shortly after I first started Lotus Geek I created a blog button for it (), and also used a "big" version of it as my logo (the one you see at the top of this page). It became pretty popular, and people began putting my blogroll button on their sites. Then it was added to the Blogsphere template itself, and it showed up everywhere. I thought it was pretty neat that people did that, and I encouraged it - I am "a" Lotus Geek, not "the" Lotus Geek - there are many, many of us, and using that button simply identified you as a technologist that is passionate about Lotus collaborative technologies. Well, around the same time I got tired of constantly trying to keep up with my blogroll, so I decided to turn it into a "LotusGeek Honor Roll", and only listed sites that displayed the LotusGeek button. Before doing this I felt like I had to list every Domino blog out there; it was a self-inflicted condition, and creating an "honor roll" made the process much easier.

This worked pretty well for many years; however there have been critics of this practice as well. I have been giving the situation some careful thought, and have decided to change my "honor roll" back to a "blog roll". I finally realized that I don't have to list every Domino blog; there are now quite a few places where you can easily get all of the Domino blogs out there (namely PlanetLotus.org). So, since I realize I don't have to be all-inclusive, I am going to go back to a blog roll format. I will still automatically list anyone who displays the LotusGeek button, and they tell me about it; however I'm also going to begin including blogs that I find useful, relevant, interesting, etc. as well.

So, if you're currently not listed, let me know about you and your blog, and I'll give it a look and possibly add it to my list. No promises, but we'll see how it goes, OK?

Thanks!

Rock

Posted by Rocky Oliver At 4:38 PM Location - Flowery Branch, GA | Permalink | Comments (6)

   
Category Technical Lotus
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Yesterday my biggest fan, Betsy Thiede, contacted me via BleedYellow's Sametime service (which is friggin' AWESOME - thanks Lotus 911!) to ask me about a technical problem she was having with a particular form's LotusScript. Here's the problem.

The Problem
Her form had some code in the QuerySave and QueryClose event that checked the NotesDocument.Responses property to see if there was a response; this particular form required a response be created for it as well, before it is saved and closed. However the NotesDocument.Responses property wasn't populated the first time the document was created and saved in the QueryClose event. Remember, if the NotesDocument hasn't been saved (i.e. NotesDocument.IsNewNote = FALSE) then there are certain properties that won't be initialized, including the NotesDocument.Responses property. When the NotesDocument object is new, the Responses property is NOTHING, so there is NotesDocumentCollection object available in that property.

So, let me restate the sequence, to make it clear:

• The form is loaded to create a new document.
• The user fills out the form, then either clicks the "Save & Close" button (which contains simple @formula code to execute the Save and Close), or hits ESC to get prompted to save the document.
• The document has some code in the QueryClose event; this code fires, but isn't related to this problem.
• The document has code in the QueryClose event that performs the check of the NotesDocument.Responses property for the newly saved document.
• NOTE: If you put code in the PostSave event to check the following properties, the results are as follows:
  • If you check the Source.IsNewDoc property, it returns FALSE, which confirms that, in fact, the document was successfully saved.
  • If you check the Source.Document.IsNewNote property, it returns TRUE - which means that the back-end document doesn't think it has been saved
• Because the back-end document doesn't know it is saved, the NotesDocument.Responses property is not populated - it isn't populated until the document has been saved, and it doesn't know it is saved for some strange reason

I find it unusual that the Source (which is a NotesUIDocument object) object knows it is saved (Source.IsNewDoc), but the related Document object (Source.Document is a NotesDocument object) doesn't know it is saved (Source.Document.IsNewNote). Weird, huh?

The Solution
Rather than trying to figure out why Notes is doing this, I decided to take another tact - convince the NotesDocument object that it has, in fact, been saved. We simply added an additional save call to the PostSave event - Call Source.Document.Save(True, False). By explicitly calling a back-end save on the NotesDocument object, it convinced the NotesDocument object that it has been saved, and this in turn caused the NotesDocument.Responses property to be properly populated (wow, alliteration, and I wasn't even trying ).

By adding this extra save Betsy can now check the Source.Document.Responses.Count to see if it is greater than zero, and perform her validations, etc.

Incidentally, she can also check to see if the Responses property is populated (Source.Document.Responses is Nothing), or she can even check the Source.Document.IsNewNote to see if it is TRUE, because if either of these is the case, then the Responses property will not be populated, and therefore there won't be any responses.

But, since she already had code written to test this property, she decided to simply add the save call to ensure the Responses property is populated.

Rock

Posted by Rocky Oliver At 12:29 PM Location - Flowery Branch, GA | Permalink | Comments (2)

   
Category Lotus Media
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I was catching up on my DVRed shows, and my wife and I were watching CSI (Season 8, Episode 12 - Grissom's Divine Comedy, which originally aired on 03 APR 08). Well, right at the beginning, just after the show's intro credits, CSI Willow sends Grissom some photos from her iPhone. Grissom is at home sick, and he opens his laptop, and then his email, and there it is - Lotus Notes! I think it is Notes 7.x, but there is no mistaking that it is Notes. Now, when the document is opened it is either greatly modified in design, or they faked it (which is more likely) - but there's no doubt that Notes is the client.

Here's a screen capture to show you what I saw:


CSI's Grissom proves again how smart he is - he uses Lotus Notes! (Screenshot courtesy of Karl-Henry Martinsson)

I screen captured that from a different site than CBS's video site because I couldn't get it to play from there. I found the episode at show-links.tv.

I know I shouldn't get so excited about Notes sightings, but I must admit I still do - especially in popular shows like CSI. It just warms my heart .

Rock

Posted by Rocky Oliver At 11:34 AM Location - Flowery Branch, GA | Permalink | Comments (8)

   
Category Family
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This weekend the Hall County (GA) Middle School Track Championships were held at Chestatee Middle School. Kelsey is a distance runner on the girls' track team - she runs the mile and 4x400 meter relay (as the "B" team; there is an "A" team as well). The results were fantastic - both for Kelsey and for the West Hall Girls' Track Team. Kelsey came in 3rd in the mile with a time of 6:24 while Kelsey's friend Laykin came in first with a time of 6:12; the 4x400 A team came in second with a time of 4:45, and the 4x400 B team came in 4th overall with a time of 4:54. The WHMS Girls' Track Team, however, could not be stopped - they put on a clinic on how to completely dominate a track meet. The WHMS Girls' team placed 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in every event at the meet; the result was a dominating score of 189 points. The next closest team was 130 points behind. We haven't confirmed it yet, but we believe that the WHMS Girls' Track Team set a county record for the most points scored by any track team, ever. This was the culmination of a dominating year for this team - they won every single meet this season, and then put on a clinic of how to completely own a track meet at the county championships.

I am extremely proud of Kelsey and her friends on the track team. They worked very hard this year, and it paid off quite hansomely. Here are some pictures from the end of the meet, after the team had been crowned champions.


Kelsey and Dr. Justus, the Principal of West Hall Middle School, with the championship trophy.


Laykin and Kelsey - Laykin won the mile, Kelsey came in 3rd


West Hall Middle School Girls' Track Team - 2008 HALL COUNTY TRACK CHAMPIONS

Once again congratulations to Kelsey and the team - I couldn't be prouder of each and every one of you.

Rock

Posted by Rocky Oliver At 11:37 AM Location - Flowery Branch, GA | Permalink | Comments (4)

   
Category Fun
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I'm in Beverly, MA this week, visiting Teamstudio headquarters. The office complex where Teamstudio resides is very nice, and there are many business that "live" here. As you walk through the halls, there are various ads placed throughout the complex. One such ad is near the elevators on our floor - this ad is pictured below:



It's a nice ad, but the geek in me has a problem with it. I took this picture to show it to my sons, because I know they are into this type of thing; however I thought it would be an interesting question to pose to my readers as well.

Now, to most people, there's probably nothing wrong with this ad. It is appealing, colorful, fun, etc. However there's something that really bugs me about this ad - a glaring error in my eyes. Now I know this is probably only a problem to other geeks like myself, and normal "humans" could care less about the problem I see.

So my question is this: What is the problem with the ad pictured above?

I am sure someone will post it almost immediately; if not, I'll post the answer tomorrow.

Whether you participate or not, have a great weekend!

Rock

Posted by Rocky Oliver At 3:30 PM Location - Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (19)

   
Category Devcons Fun LotusSpeakingStories
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UPDATE: Karl-Henry Martinsson was kind enough to remind me that this was actually in October 1998, and the Notes/Domino release in question was ND5, not ND6 as I indicate in this post. Many thanks to Karl-Henry for setting me straight! **Rock

A few days ago Alan Lepofsky posted a great blog entry entitled, "Some advice on public speaking". I responded to his post with a rather longwinded followup, giving some additional suggestions. However, another comment in the blog (by Thomas Bahn) suggested that Alan and other speakers should post their "speaking horror stories", based on Alan's #6 suggestion:

6. Always prepare and be ready, but accept the fact that things go wrong. When they do, don't panic. Be calm, work through it, the audience understands. (Perhaps this should be a blog post of its own, where we all recap our funniest stories!)

Well, I thought it was a good idea, so here's my horror story...

Setting the Stage
This was quite a few years ago, when the Lotus ADVISOR devcons were very popular. This particular instance of that devcon was being held in Palm Springs, I believe. I was a speaker there, as well as Gary Devendorf. Now this was around the release of Notes/Domino 6. I had a new book out, and ND6 was supposed to be bringing us a ton of new ways to build Web applications. However, Gary and I were there to talk about the stuff we knew best - I think I was covering COM, C API in LotusScript, and Formulas; Gary was covering another aspect of COM, and I don't remember what else (he was still with IBM at the time). Everything was going great - there were many attendees (over 1,200), there was palpable excitement in the air, and we were having a blast. Until...

The Gary and Rocky Show
One morning, I believe a Wednesday morning, I was down at the conference getting breakfast. It was around 7:45 or so, and I see Jennifer, the conference organizer for Lotus ADVISOR, running around in a panic. It turned out that one of the speakers was ill, and wouldn't be able to speak. The session was on "What's New in Web Development in Notes/Domino 6", and it was slotted to be the first session of the day (at 8:30AM). The room was already filling up, and the other session slotted that morning wasn't nearly as popular - virtually everyone was attending that session. The speaker wasn't going to be able to give the presentation - no problem, I thought, and I told Jennifer to go and get the slides from the sick speaker, and I would volunteer to give the presentation. Now at this time I was still strictly a Notes client developer, and I had done very little Domino development at all. Jennifer contacted the speaker to get the slides, and that's when the hammer fell - he didn't have a slide deck for the presentation. Nothing.

Oh crap.

There was no one else who could give the talk, and the only two people available at all who were willing to even try to do something was Gary and myself. Now, keep in mind what I said earlier - I wasn't a Domino developer at that time, and neither was Gary. We were client guys. The room was full, and they were expecting a session.

So, Gary and I came up with a plan. He had some stuff about Web Services, I believe, and he started talking about that. While he was talking I was looking in the ND6 Release Notes db and the "What's New" section of the Domino Designer Help for new Web dev stuff, and quickly building demo applications to show it off. When Gary ran out of stuff to say, I took over and demonstrated and explained what I had found and built, and while I was speaking Gary was also searching the same resources for ideas and building samples. I would stretch out my talk until Gary told me he was ready, and then it was like "tag, you're it" and he would talk and I would search for something else - and we basically did the entire session, a full hour talk, in this fashion.

Here's a funny story about this. During one part of our talk, when I was talking - I think I was covering some new features in the @formula language for Web development - Gary became interested in what I was talking about, and quit working on his next topic. I was wrapping my part up, and I looked at him and asked, "Are you ready?" He looked at me and said "Oh crap!" and had to quickly finish what he had been working on before he got interested in what I was saying. I stretched my talk a little longer so he could finish, and we pressed on.

After we were done, the room erupted in thunderous applause. They were very impressed in what we were able to do, on the fly, with a subject we really knew nothing about. Our session evaluations were exceptional as well, and overall I must say that this experience was both the most harrowing session I had ever given, and also one of the most fun - especially after it was over.

I know Gary agrees with me when I say that we truly had a good time - Gary and I have similar presentation styles, and we were already good friends off the stage, which made this experience much much easier. And I would happily share a stage with Gary again any time, any place.

Rock

P.S. OK, time to hear from you other speakers out there. I'd love to hear stories from Alan, Ed, and Rob, and Bob. And I know Andrew has a good one - about how water and laptops don't mix .

Posted by Rocky Oliver At 4:55 PM Location - Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (7)

   
Category This Site
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My comments are broken right now. For those of you who have commented the last few days, I'm sorry to say that those comments are lost. Please don't post a comment until I figure out what's going on - I'll let you know when it is safe to comment again.

UPDATE: OK, I think I have it fixed. Feel free to comment away!

Thanks.

Rock

Posted by Rocky Oliver At 2:59 PM Location - Flowery Branch, GA | Permalink | Comments (2)