Yep, it's true, I'm avoiding work....

This is a shout-out to anyone who knows Notes 6.5 and Outlook 2003 well, or has worked on a conversion either way. I am looking for a user quick reference guide (or even some rough points) on the differences from a user perspective between the two mail clients.

While I'm a Notes power-user in many respects, I'm not a heavy user of mail features - particularly C&S, To Do's etc, so I'm looking for any help from people who may have used both. Of course, I would love to point out features Notes has which Outlook does not ;)

Any help would be appreciated...

PS.. No Sametime, we don't have IM at all.

The last three days of competition saw both the highs and lows of sport. First we saw Nathan Deakes complete his double gold, with his win in the 50km walk. This was really the only track highlight for Australia on day 9, with heartbreak for Sally McLellan falling in the 100m hurdles final. We had success on the field though, with wins in the Men's hammer throw, and the Men's pole vault. Friday night also saw the thriller men's basketball final with Australia coming from behind in the final quarter to win over New Zealand by 5 points. Revenge for New Zealand today though, as the Silver Ferns defeated Australia in the netball final.

Australia complete the double in the hockey with both the Hockeyroos and Kookaburras victorious, and we also had great success in the squash - with wins in both mens', women's and mixed doubles. We also had a great end to the cycling with wins in the mens and womens road race. Brad Pitt (yes, Aussie boxer Bradley Michael Pitt) also had a golden day in the boxing ring, winning the heavyweight division.

Saturday night - the final night of athletics was really the highs and lows for several countries. First there was drama in the relays - every single relay event saw a team drop or fumble a baton in either a heat or final, and that wasn't the end of the drama. With Ghana dropping the baton in the womens 100m relay, Australia was lucky to benefit by ending up with bronze, but this was nothing to the huge drama in the womens' 4x400m womens. With Jamaica fumbling the baton, Australia was lucky to finish second. However, the disqualification of England saw Australia end up with the gold. We got the double as the Aussie men took out the 4x400, although it was eased with the Bahamas also dropping the baton. Unfortunately it wasn't all good news for Australia. Matt Shirvington missed his big chance to race in the 4x100 mens relay, as a fumble on the last change cost us a good chance of a medal. Disaster also for Craig Mottram in the 1500m final as he was tripped from behind by falling English athlete and could only recover to finish in 9th place.

Just so it's not all Australian news, special notes of the following - Jamaica had a clean sweep of all the sprint events - mens & womens 100m, 200m, and 4x100m relays. Also of note was Canadian Alexandra Michel Orlando taking all 5 individual gold medals, and also winning as part of the teams event in the Rythmic Gymnastics.

So, how did it all end up? It was a pretty good games, admittedly very Australian-dominated, but the opening and closing ceremony were pretty cheesy. There were highs and lows as always, and the tv coverage made it pretty hard to view anything but the events in which Australia either won or had a chance to win. All in all I'm pretty happy to see the end of the games, and will start to look forward to Beijing.

The final tally - Australia ended up with 84 gold (right between my 79 and the media's 88), 69 silver and 68 bronze. Nearest competitor was England (36g, 40s, 34b), Canada (25, 29, 31) and India (22, 17, 11).

Well, we've moved out of the pool and onto the track and field. The last couple of days have seen some great results. We've kept doing well in some of the less followed (or televised) sports - with gold in shooting, lawn bowls, and weightlifting.

Australia has had great results in the diving, with wins in both the synchronised and individual dives. Chantelle Newbery and Loudy Tourky have continued to set the way, but plucky 13 year old Melissa Wu managed a perfect 10 dive from the 10m platform, even though she wasn't consistent enough to pull a medal.

On the track Australia has a new superstar in John Steffensen winning the 400m final, and Jana Pittman overcame all the drama and took an impressive gold in the 400m Hurdles. It was really something to see her embrace the crowd and enjoy her win after a pretty rocky lead-up. Scott Martin kept our field medals alive with a final throw gold medal in the discus.

In team sports the Opals, led by Lauren Jackson, had a convincing gold medal win over New Zealand in the basketball. Unfortunately there's a good chance that's the only gold medal she'll win, unless Australia can find a way to beat the US in Beijing.

Our netball girls had to do the unthinkable and run rampart over last placed Singapore to ensure their for-and-against record would see them top of the pool after a shock draw with Jamaica. This will ensure we can avoid the semi-final against favourites New Zealand.

At the start of day 9 competition, the gold medal tally is starting to slow. Australia is sitting on 65, with nearest competitor England on 24. India and Canada round out the top 4.

Ok, this is another shout-out to the admin weenies. I'm looking for some more information about the Notes client single sign-on after my initial questions the other day.

I had been using the standard Windows single sign-on option which comes with Notes happily for a couple of months and it was working fine for a couple of months until a password change when it suddenly stopped working. This morning I tried re-installing Notes to get it to work again. When this didn't work, I did some notes.net investigating, and it seems there are some issues with single sign-on, so I am hoping for some confirmation of the following:

- The single sign-on service may stop working, and then can't be restarted (or reinstalled) unless the user has administrator access to the PC. This is perhaps my problem, but I don't have access to the control panel/admin tools/services section so I don't know how to confirm this, or restart the service.
- Single sign-on has mixed results when working off a networked data directory, and is not supported by IBM.

As our users are both using networked data directories, and don't have administrator access to their pc's does this mean single sign-on is not an option for us here at all? Has anyone had success within environments similar to this?

Any help is much appreciated.

Australia has continued to dominate, and we have had some big wins over the last couple of days. For the first time in an Olympic or Comm Games, we got the gold in the triathalon, and it was made sweeter by winning the mens & women's double on Saturday.

Kerrie McCann won the women's marathon in a thriller, and our swimmers and cyclists continued their gold medal hauls. Gymnastics also helped along our medal tally as both our women won the teams event, and some individual, and our men got silver in the teams, but pulled in some individual gold medal performances.

We had a complete sweep of the 20km walk - pulling in a trifecta in the men's and women's events. It was especially nice to see Jane Saville take the gold, with sister Natalie in silver.

Last night saw Leisel Jones complete the breaststroke trifecta - claiming gold in the 50, 100 & 200m. Also in swimming, Michael Klim was pipped in the 100m Butterfly by Ryan Pini, giving Papua New Guinea it's first ever gold medal.

Jamacia won both the mens & womens 100M sprint in the athletics, but we did have a win in the womens' hammer throw with Brooke Krueger setting a Comm Games record. The men's 5000M was a thrilling race, with Aussie Craig Mottram coming in a gutsy second to Kenya's Augustine Choge, also setting a games record.

So, after 5 days of competition, and the event half over the medal tally is currently 42 gold, and my prediction not looking so good anymore. England, India and Scotland round out the top 4.

There was some more shooting gold for Australia, and a gold/silver win in the womens' squash as the Grinham sisters battled it out.

Well, it's the end of day two and so far the Commonwealth Games needs to be renamed the "Aussie Games". As always at the start of the Comm Games, Australia is off to a flying start. At the end of day 2 we have 8 gold more than India, our nearest competitor. No fear though, the rest of the countries can rest assured that athletics kicks in next week and things will start to even up.

So day two features swimming, as always. The biggest disappointment was not getting the Men's 200m Free - with Grant Hackett & Ian Thorpe both out it just didn't seem right. Jim Piper was unlucky and got disqualified, leaving him out of the 100m Breaststroke final. We also proved we're not too bad with a gun, winning a couple of golds in the shooting, but just weren't quite good enough in the Rugby 7's - losing in both New Zealand and Fiji, after suffering some injuries and proving that it's a good idea to have the right players on the field, rather than superstars of a different game (7-aside vs 15-aside).

via news.com.au

It seems that it's not just Notes which is getting attention from Microsoft. Now they are after IBM's Global Services...Jeff Raikes, President of Microsoft's Business Division:

"Innovation is home-grown, it's not outsourced," he said. "IBM has an army of relatively expensive consultants. They enable their people to run your business. We enable your people to run your business, not take our people to run your business."

The response from IBM (no name provided) is nice:

"Microsoft's marketing campaign - you can't really call it a strategy - is Window dressing for a pitch to keep a one-size-fits-all, proprietary Windows world."

Unfortunately, while the article specifically mentions some of Microsoft's products, IBM gets a generic "IBM, which offers computer services, software and hardware..."

I've said it before - it would be nice if IBM spent more time pushing their brand names in the general public (outside IT & CEO circles) - I saw an ad the other day on the back of a bus for a Thinkpad, which didn't even mention IBM. Everyone knows what Microsoft sells, even if it's not appropriate for home users - it would be great for IBM to spend some time & money ensuring the same for it's products.

NOTE: Ed has just pointed out that IBM don't own thinkpads anymore, so sorry for that.

I always think I'm not going to get involved, but I just can't help it! I've only been watching for a couple of hours and I've already had some tears (for Ben Kersten winning against the odds in cycling). We've had some highlighs (trifecta in the womens 200m IM), some disappointments (Libby Lenton missing the gold), and some "that's a shame" (Craig Stevens missing out on a medal after his late call-up in the 400M free).

So far my biggest disappointment, as always, is the coverage. I know that it's hard to cover all the events (even just the events with Aussies), but surely today we could have a ticker or something with score updates and results. Suspiciously Ch 9 is saying they can't show any footage from the "regional centres" where the Opals (Aussie womens basketball) are playing. I say suspiciously as I wonder if this is being broadcast by Foxtel??

This disappointment was compounded by the internet - all day the ability to get updates has been sluggish at best. I've been following 3 sites (smh.com.au, abc.net.au and melbourne2006.com), but all are slightly different and seem to be a couple of hours behind on updating results and medal tables. Hopefully this will get sorted out over the next day or so.

Overall day one has been fairly standard - Australia, Scotland and England top of the medal table. Australia currently has 3 gold, picking up one we didn't expect, but dropping a couple we usually get, so I think my guess of 79 is still looking closer than the 88 goal.

Ok, I know on Show-n-Tell Thursday I'm supposed to give information, but I'm looking to get some information. At my work, we are moving to Outlook for mail (I know, I know), but keeping Notes for applications (because what else is there?). Anyway, one of the issues this has brought up is Active Directory synchronisation (creation/deletion of Notes ids and renaming from within AD), and the second is single sign-on. Now, while I have still have a CLP in Admin, I'm a developer, so I only get involved in these discussions on the fringe, so I'm just looking for a little information to flesh out the discussion.

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Today, in Melbourne, begins the quadrennial sporting event which is the Commonwealth Games. For those not part of the (former) British Empire, the Commonwealth Games is a chance for the 71 member nations & territories of the Commonwealth of Nations to compete on the sporting field. For the cynical among us, it's really a chance for Australia, Canada and Britain to do well at a global sporting event which doesn't include the US, China and Russia.

The Opening Ceremony was fairly standard opening ceremony fair - flying "Aussie icons" - tram, koalas, thongs, fireworks, dancers, and, of course, a young child flying on wires. My favourite part is always the parade of athletes. It doesn't matter how many I have watched between the Olympics & Commonwealth Games, it seems there is always at least one country I have not heard of before. This time, I'm mentioning Tuvalu, a small island in the Pacific.

Interestingly, as a supporter of the republican movement, I was quite touched by the singing of "Happy Birthday", followed by "God Save The Queen". It was handled in a lovely, respectful way. Cathy Freeman, Ron Clarke, Marjorie Jackson and John Landy delivered the Queens' baton, and Austrlia's new pop-princess, Delta Goodrem sang the uplifting song. All in all, it was ok, but nothing spectular. For that I think we have to wait for Beijing 2008.

So now the competition begins - Australia is trying to win 88 gold medals out of the 451 available. For what it's worth, I'm predicting more like 79. Unfortunately, I think we've become a little complacent about our chances here, and we are carrying some key injuries. Hopefully I will be proved wrong.

Let the games begin!

via DominoPower

According to this article Robert Propst, inventor of the office cubicle, regrets his invention. As one of those who is currently "stuck in a box", I regret his invention as well.

Now we just have to figure out who to blame for only giving us a two day weekend and how to change it and we'll all be better off...

Far be it from me to promote something cool from Microsoft, but I saw this demo, called "Live Clipboard" via Ray Ozzie's blog. I'm not sure about everything behind it, but it just seems cool.

Oh to have a brother with gun team of developers, and a few spare weeks (read thousands of dollars!) to spend on creating some cool new thing I thought of.... ah, well, back to the grind....

Today was "Lotusphere comes to you" for Sydney. I have to admit that I went with some trepidation for two reasons. First, I went to the "real" thing. I was worried that I could only be disappointed because there is no way that a half day session can match up with the 5-day, information-overload, geek-fest which is Lotusphere. Second, the agenda scared me - Ken Bisconti (VP Workplace, Portal & Collaboration Products), Workplace Forms, Webphere Portal, Domino & Workplace in SOA strategry, Activity Centric collaboration, Web Content Management, and just one 45 minute session on pure Notes/Domino.

Was I disappointed? Yes, and No.

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It's been around for a while now - talk of copyright and DRM and how to protect copyrighted works in a digital age. This really hit the public consciousness a few years ago with Napster and the RIAA trying to stop illegal downloads of music. While that battle is still being fought, the new one for movies and tv shows is starting. Generally I think most people acknowledge that downloading songs, movies and tv shows may be stealing (or at least copyright infringement), but it continues nonetheless. Why? Mostly because the organisations protecting the copyrighted works refuse to come up with reasonable solutions to enable people to legally purchase these works in a digital form which does not hamper fair use rights.

The fight is currently being fought mostly on American terms, using U.S. copyright laws. Of course, these laws are not the same world wide (yet!), so companies such as AllOfMP3.com can continue to thrive, operating under Russia's very different copyright laws, but are slowly making their way around the globe.

These issues have been on my radar lately, after last week reading about a proposed boycott of the new HD DVD players which come with inbuilt, unfair DRM. Then, this week, I found two articles on Boing Boing talking about copyright/DRM issues here in Australia.

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File under "how to work yourself out of a job".... this job is currently on the Australian job market. I'm not actually looking for a job at the moment, but I do keep an eye on what's going around. This initially got my attention because of the pretty large salary package, until I realised that they want you to work miracles (and sell your soul):

...
- Experience migrating Lotus Notes systems to the equivalent Microsoft Platform
...
- Have an ability to articulate clearly the business case around migrating Lotus Notes to the Microsoft Platform
...

umm, is there an equivalent Microsoft platform? And even if there was, am I going to be out of a job once I've migrated all the apps? Enquiring minds want to know.... actually no, we don't. I decided this job just isn't for me.

NOTE: Just updated the link, it should work now - Thanks Ed.

There's "bad", "really bad", "so bad it's good", and just plain indescribeable...

Tim & I try hard not to reference each other's blogs too much, but this was just too good not to propagate as far as our reach will allow...

You know the feeling - you're away from home, missing the comforts of home, and you think "I'll just logon and check out what's going on". But your hotel is charging you 50cents a minute for a lan connection - which just seems crazy. So you turn on your wifi to see if there are any available wi-fi networks around. Sure enough, about 5 or 6 show up. Do you start trying to see if any are open networks? Or do you think, "no, that would be stealing" and pay the hotel for their provided access?

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