In December 2006, through the wonderful kindness of the wider IBM Lotus community, I was able to buy my first professional grade (and new to boot) machine. This started something big. Within eight months of receiving that splendid little laptop I had formed my own company and resigned from my employer of some twelve years.

I haven’t looked back!

But what of Kinky, the famous little black MacBook? Well, he lives! We’re on hard drive number three, and the keyboard is a little iffy, but Kinky is still pressed into daily service at Poole Towers :-)

The next piece of musical excitement for me this year was the long-anticipated debut prog-tastic release from Lifesigns. John Young has written a blinder here, also singing lead and covering all keyboard duties most impressively. There are some wonderful solo lines flying over this album along with some splendid piano. John has an impressive list of credits to his name and it’s clear he knows exactly what he’s doing, with exceptionally strong vocals and a fab sense of knowing where to take each tune. John is joined by two music veterans: Nick Beggs does an amazing job on Chapman Stick (check out the intro to the album’s closer, “Carousel”) plus bass and backing vocals and Frosty Beedle is on drums—again, really giving it some on “Carousel”! The album also features performances from guitarists Jakko Jakszyk, Robin Boult and Steve Hackett, plus the shimmering flute of Thijs Van Leer (Focus)—quite a prog pedigree for this album!

And then there’s Riverside. This Polish outfit are on album number five with their latest, Shrine Of The New Generation Slaves , and I love it. I only possess one other Riverside album, Second Life Syndrome. Now that one’s good, but S.O.N.G.S. (geddit?) is just excellent: a few plays and you’re hooked. There’s some Deep Purple-esque Hammond-laden wonder (“Celebrity Touch”), some jazz-proggery (“Escalator Shrine”) and just general relentless riffing. Oh yes, also some excellent sax from Marcin Odyniec (“Deprived (Irretrievably Lost Imagination)”). A great album, they’ve really come into their own, and Mariusz Duda’s vocals are excellent.

Last, but not least, we come to one of my all-time favourite artists, Steven Wilson. The man’s a machine, and his third solo album, The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories), is imminent. The album was largely recorded live in Los Angeles under the watchful engineering eye of no less than Alan Parsons. Wilson tracked it with his gigging band, made up of Theo Travis, Nick Beggs (yep, him again!), Marco Minnemann, Guthrie Govan and Adam Holzman (rather than regurgitate what all these chaps have been up to, just look at their sites. Amazing musicians all of them). I cannot wait to get my grubby mitts on this—going to see him live next month too—but in the meantime I shall leave you with the video to the album’s title track, The Raven That Refused To Sing. This doesn’t fail to bring a tear to the eye, it’s such a beautiful track, and the animated video by Jess Cope and Simon Cartwright really does complement it wonderfully:

Gurupalooza was followed by “Ask the Product Managers” which started with Ed announcing his move away from the IBM Notes product and into IBM’s mobile enterprise team (read more in Ed’s post, My new role: Moving to IBM Mobile Enterprise marketing). Ah, the end of an era. I well recall Ed starting up his blog a decade ago (initially hosted in Movable Type by that good mother vowe), and I wish Ed the very best in his new role. Ed also introduced Scott Souder who looks after Notes, iNotes and Connections Mail. Count the likes of Pete Jantzen and Dan O’Connor too, and I think the Notes / Designer world is in good hands.

A spot of lunch in the sun was just what the doctor ordered (not those flaming pretzel cookies though), before nipping off to attend the final Q&A session, “Ask The Developers.” All three of these panels were well-compered and full of good humour, with some excellent questions.

Byeeeee

I thoroughly enjoyed the closing session with the excellent John Hodgman and Steven Strogatz. I was especially delighted to see our very own Mr. Robichaux acquit himself so admirably on the big screen when discussing the proof for how 1 actually equals 0.9…. After the traditional blogger photo on stage (complete with reclining Hodgman!) it was time for the bit we all hate: a whirlwind of hugs and goodbyes, followed by (in this case) ten minutes of frantic packing and a mad dash through the Dolphin Rotunda (not for the first time) to catch a cab to the airport with Julian “Math Whizz” Robichaux.

All done then, for another year. It went too fast.

Highlights (people!)

There were sad and sombre times, but there was also jolliness scaled the very heights of joyful. Particular highlights:

• The Nerd Girls’ Spark Ideas session
• The Nerd Girls’ The Great Geek Challenge: a great job by Gab, Tim, Carl, Paul, Abigail and co.!
• Seeing folks like Joe, Rob McD and jonvon who came to Orlando to catch up with everyone: you chaps are the best :-)
• Friday night was an unexpected riot and set the tone for the rest of the week
• Chats, hugs and coffee (thank you Mrs. Elsmore!) in the rotunda
• When a seagull shat on the Wookiee
• Swigging superb homebrews and apple pie vodka around the pool courtesy of Devin, Ray and Karl-Henry…
• … then ending up in the hot tubs after said brews
• Seeing so many old and new friends
• Late night (and early morning) chats
• Hugs from Mat Newman!
• Flying out with Matt, Tim and Mark. Especially when the Wookiee got his IBM keyboard out and plugged it in to his Nexus 7. The stewardesses thought our little quarter of the plane rather hilarious

Uh, so… technology?

Oh yeah. Several people reported an upsurge in XPages-related activity, and I can well believe it. Having largely watched from the sidelines whilst doing other stuff (mobile web, Java and PHP), I now find myself getting involved in a reasonable amount of “modern” Domino development. Less forms, views and agents, more XPages and server-side Javascript and Java. The conference also exposed me to something I had hitherto ignored—DOTS—which I am most keen to get to grips with (assuming IBM see fit to include it in the server, scheduled hooks and all).

Beyond IBM, as I mentioned in my first post, I ended up buying a Nexus 7 at the airport, and used it a lot during the conference—definitely recommended. It beats out the iPad mini for me in a few areas: it’s slightly narrower, has a few more dots per inch to the screen, and is somewhat cheaper. Besides, my phone takes care of iOS things; as a technologist it’s good to have an Android device too (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it).

As an aside, the Wookiee used his Nexus most successfully to write and publish blog posts—if you want to know more about how he does that from pretty much any device that can use a text editor and Dropbox, you should read the following posts forthwith:

1. Migrating to Markdown Pt1-The Rant!
2. Migrating to Markdown Pt2 Nuts and Bolts
3. Migrating to Markdown Pt3 From Domino To Markdown

Wonderful. Can’t wait to catch up with everyone again. Which brings me to my last point: if you feel the same, and are in London next week, come and join a load of us at some informal #LotusBeers in The Counting House from 6pm on Thursday (the 21st).

First up, a load of work, and chat in the rotunda. Always good!

And then, just before lunch we had a gem of a session: Spark Ideas, put together by the Nerdgirls. It was just wonderful. I nearly ended up blubbing like a baby (thanks Graham :-)) and also laughed like a drain. Nothing technical, nothing about IBM. Just a group of people I respect (more than ever) laying a little of themselves bare—and all power to them. Francie was a compere beyond compare (do you see what I did there?) and everyone who spoke was deserving of a massive round of applause. So thank you Susan, Carl, Gab, Tim C, Graham, Jenn, Andy, Kathy and Tim D.

Come the afternoon I cracked on with some more work (so diligent), thus missing out on a number of good sessions, boo! That said, I managed to attend a presentation chock-full of Domino Designer tips courtesy of senior members of the Designer team Kathy Howard and Dan O’Connor. This was a good ’un, some handy nuggets of info and a few Eclipse tweaks I had hitherto missed.

As the day drifted into evening, things really got going. The Penumbra Group put on their mighty Milkshake reception, which was made especially delicious (and not at all fattening) with some new custom milkshake flavours: whiskey and bacon being one of them if you please. It tasted amazing, although for the most part I stuck to a rather splendid boozy coffee concoction. The Wookiee managed to put away his own body weight in fruity vodka shakes, and as a result felt somewhat peculiar all evening (not that we noticed).

Tuesday night got even better with participation in another Nerd Girls event, The Great Greek Challenge which was just so much fun. Kudos to all the organisers, question-setters, and question masters! Team LDC managed to scrape prizes in a couple of rounds (despite a dire performance in the music round from yours truly)—in fact, we acquitted ourselves more admirably than we ever could have hoped. LDC were also very proud to be sponsoring this event alongside many other splendid organisations in the IBM world (check out the GGC site for a full list of sponsors).

But Tuesday was not done! Not by a long chalk! Many repaired to Kimonos (of course) along with half of the conference, but the evening topped-out for many of us with some wonderful homebrew (courtesy of Devin Olson, excellent apple pie vodka (thank you Karl-Henry Martinsson!), and of course fab company, all round the Swan-Dolphin pools (and later hot tubs. Class will out).

And so to Wednesday. This was by far the most session-mungous day undertaken. I attended excellent talks from Bruce Elgort and Serdar Başeğmez (“Meet the Java Application Server you already own…”), Matt White and Warren Elsmore (“Deploying & Managing Your XPages Applications”), and Craig Schumann (“Take a REST & Put Your Data To Work With APIs”). One other notable presentation was from Tony McGuckin and Martin Donnelly, all about XPage patterns. Very useful info, and helped validate my own approach to a lot of work recently, but sometimes a tricky presentation to follow—these gentlemen are very quietly-spoken!

Last, but by no means least, we flew the LDC flag and came along to the Wookiee’s presentation. The poor sod was placed in the last slot of the day (5.15pm) and was up against Paul and Bill’s “Worst Practices” session. How unfair was that?? Anyway, the loon acquitted himself well, talking about alternative languages on the IBM JVM, principally Scala. Bravo Wookiee! Have an arm to gnaw on…

We opted to skip the park in the evening and instead dined with good chums. After the meal, can you guess where we went?

And so to Sunday. I suppose one would class this as the first “proper” day of IBM Connect as Jumpstart sessions get going, and there’s business development stuff going on. In the Woodward / Myers / Poole suite pit things were somewhat muted and slow to start. We all had things to do, so the day was spent gently faffing. Mark and I even got a decent brunch in (one of the few proper meals enjoyed during the week).

Predictably, the evening started early at the pool-side reception, and finished late (by “late”, I mean around half an hour before the opening general session began. Oof!)

During the course of the evening, we found out that distant good people and closer good friends were going through hell after an appalling tragedy earlier. There is really not a lot one can do or say in such situations, but I hope the quiet chats and big hugs helped a little as the week passed.

…so to Monday, and IBM Connect “proper”! The general impression was that this year’s Opening General Session (OGS) was pretty good (certainly compared with the last couple of years). A few whacky ads-in-disguise and some rambling nonsense, but also some great content and… They Might Be Giants!

As for sessions, I particularly enjoyed Mikkel Flindt Heisterberg and Ryan Baxter talking about APIs and API design: a good summary of the issues involved with some excellent tips (I think these sessions, which don’t focus on a single platform or product, are extremely worthwhile). I also attended Teamstudio’s overview of their Unplugged product which was very informative (well worth a look—not least because our very own Matt White has done so much good work on this suite).

Monday evening got going with Speed-Geeking in the product showcase, followed by—what else?—UK Night! Once again we at LDC sponsored along with many other worthy firms, and everyone filled Shula’s bar with noise and laughter.

And what a trip! As long-time readers will know (!) I don’t do the Lotusphere thing very often. I went courtesy of my old employer in 2006 and then thanks to team Elguji got to go again in 2010 as the indy coder I am now. Despite this paucity in my attendance record, Lotusphere always feels welcoming, it just feels “right”—and every time I leave, like everyone else I get the post-conference blues.

I decided to attend Connect 13 on a whim towards the end of last year. I think it came about because I went out for beers with Matt and the Wookiee, and their excited LS chat convinced me.

In other words, it’s all their fault.

Anyway, on to the conference. We flew out on the Friday before, in a surprisingly empty Virgin plane, which was just tickety-boo. The stewardesses were most amused by the ridiculous set-up witnessed in row 64: the Wookiee and I were in full geek flow, with Nexus 7s (I bought a new one on the way out—recommended!), laptops and various charging leads all over the shop.

Once landed, a car hired by Mr. White saw us all to the Dolphin for a swift check-in, and beers (of course). We opted to try and plough through the night in a bid to kill any jet-lag once and for all. This was achieved in memorable style with help from our colleague Mr. Woodward together with Mr. Alan Dalziel and Mrs. Abigail Roberts (never give me another Jägerbomb).

Saturday started gloriously, and we were on a mission: to purchase the remaining contents of our London Developer Co-op give-away this year. Controversially, we decided to move away from our t-shirts, and come up with something else. The Wookiee is a genius at this sort of thing, so everything was meticulously planned, and the “LDC Conference Survival Kit” was duly born—cue a morning pootling around various stores, followed by an afternoon of vigorous assembly:

These babies proved to be most popular as the week progressed; we have a tough job for future give-aways now.

The remainder of Saturday was passed in time-honoured tradtion at the Big River and in ESPN (the Dolphin bar also featured quite heavily as I recall). Of course, the highlight of Saturday was (re)acquainting myself with many many folk, some not seen in three years—including finally meeting the man himself, Mr. Mat Newman! (who was more than ready with a bear-hug of course, none of this shaking hands nonsense).

And so dear reader, I bring post #1 to a close, and shortly move to post #2…

It is not possible to discuss the weather with a person whose head is placed where sunshine never falls, and yet who feels themselves to be a climate expert.

Read more…

Happy 2013 everybody. Sorry for the radio silence for so long. It has been one hell of a mad year! I hope to see many people during the course of the next. Sorry, this. Yes.

Some more substance—read the best “Letters of Note”. Wow.

My advice: re-establish the morning sitting. Life without the morning sitting is like trying to walk without legs. This is the beginning, the foundation, of strengthening personal presence. If we are absent, then life is all stuff. Nothing real happens; so when things go wrong, it’s not possible to deal with them. If we are present, things will continue to go wrong; but, increasingly, the things that go wrong are real.

Robert Fripp’s Diary, Thursday, 1st November 2012.

Love it.