Ports Thoughts

Just back from the Lotusphere2007 convention in Orlando. And what a cracker it was. First up, what were the movies I watched on the flight out to Florida? Well - since you ask ... The Departed - a ridiculously high body count in this Police/Mafia thriller with an undercover mole on both sides. - Excellent Snakes on a Plane - Samuel L. Jackson fights snakes - on a plane! - Silly, Cheesy and Excellent Pirates of the Caribbean II - Poorly acted and over long with little of the charm of the original - Poor So a mixed bag of films but it certainly made the 10 hour flight go faster. The opening general session of Lotusphere is famous for the new product announcements and a special guest speaker. It didn't disapoint in either respect. Lotus Quickr is our new team collaboration product linking team places and content through existing desktop applications like Lotus Notes, MS Office and Portals. Lotus Connections is the first web 2.0 social software suite designed specifically for ...

Anyone who has been in the UK over the last couple of days will know that it has been a bit breezy. Specifically the strongest storms for 17 years, killing 11 people, leaving thousands without power and causing hundreds of millions of pounds of damage to houses. Whilst this is very sad especially for the bereaved it is important to focus on the real tragedy here, which is that the wind has taken the cover to my beloved table tennis table. Even though it was tied on and everything, this evil zephyr has ripped the cover away and left my poor ping pong table open to the elements. What is worse is that I'm flying to America tomorrow for Lotus' annual beanfeast Lotusphere2007 so I won't have a chance to get down to a sports shop and buy a replacement cover for over a week. I'd bring it into the living room but I don't think Ali would approve.

I was visiting a customer in Milton Keynes today. It is a terrible eyesore made of ugly buildings and vast numbers of roundabouts . An example of a 60's new town it is based on an American style grid system so the roads are all numbered as being H (Horizontal) or V (Vertical). This works very well in New York but is just perverse in Buckinghamshire. You may have gathered that I'm not a big fan. Anyway, having left the customer meeting my colleague and I started walking back to where I has parked the car. As we got near I saw with horror that there was a Traffic Warden looming over my motor with his PDA out furiously tapping away. I understand that being a Traffic Warden is a thankless task which is required to keep our town centres moving, but they don't seem to do themselves any favours by being obnoxious jobsworths . The last parking ticket I got was whilst parked on an empty road outside my parents house this Christmas. What odious little killjoy would do that? As I rus...

So Twelfth Night is upon us which means that it is time to take down our Christmas decorations. Last year we didn't bother with a tree since we were concerned that our two new kittens may think that it was a climbing frame. But now that Barney and Boo are all grown up we thought that they would quickly realise that they should be respectful to the tree. Our old cat Ben used to totally ignore it. Despite being artificial (pine needles are not compatible with cats paws) it is a pretty nice tree that we have had for over 10 years. As you can see from this picture, the cats were suitably impressed when the tree went up. This was not to last. Whilst Barney would occasionally bat a bauble about a bit, Boo moved into full on demolition mode. Even though the tree is six feet tall and Boo is only little, he has managed to strip at least three quarters of it. Even thought the branches are just made of wire and have the weight bearing properties of tissue paper he managed to slither his way...

I've been on vacation this week, reading a few book, catching up on a few odd jobs and generally taking it easy. Where possible I have tried to avoid work so I have forbidden myself from downloading new builds of Lotus software to play with. This is quite hard because I love watching as new products take shape, how the new features are added and the design evolves. I'm not just talking about the next version of Lotus Notes either. We have loads of fantastic stuff in the development labs that I can't talk about - but many of them will get their first public peek at Lotusphere 2007 later this month. So if I can't sate my "need for nerd" by looking at work stuff what can I do? Well on a whim I decided to create my own MySpace account. Knowing it was really for Kidz and that it was owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp I hadn't previously considered it, but I had a surprise. It is actually quite fun. Going from person to person is quite like the old da...