Today, ANZAC Day, is one of the most significant days in Australia - the day we take time to remember the ANZACs (Australian & New Zealand Army Corps), and all the other men & women who have served our country through the defence forces since our inception as a country.

This day of remembrance is marked to remember April 25, 1915 when Australian & New Zealand troops landed at Gallipoli in Turkey during World War I. Due to a navigational error, the troops landed at the base of cliffs instead of on a beach, and were, quite frankly, massacred. There was a massive loss of life by all involved, but the bravery of the men has become the bar by which all are remembered.

As our last diggers from WWI have now passed, much of the remembrance is now focussed on WWII - (Kokoda, Sandakan), and the stories of the men & women from WWII are starting to be told in greater detail.

Every year, dawn services are held all around the country, at RSL (Returned Servicemen's League) clubs around the country, in the capital cities (Sydney hold it's service at the cenotaph at Martin Place), at the War Memorial in Canberra, and, of course, at Gallipoli - something which has almost become a rite of passage for young Australians who head to Europe & the UK en masse for travel & work in their early 20s. The dawn service is usually followed by a march through each capital city of all veterans and their families, and then the traditional of playing "two-up" at the local pub/club.

This has become a very treasured day in Australian culture, and even though not everyone agrees with the current involvement of our troops in Iraq and Afganistan, this day is one when politics is put aside, and all our service men & women are remembered, respected and honoured for their contributions to our country, and the world at large.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon

So, I've been pretty busy lately, and just haven't found time (or energy) to blog. It's amazing both how quickly you can get into a blogging groove, and how easy it is to fall out of the groove as well.

It's been an interesting period for me, as work is getting super-busy, but not super-enjoyable unfortunately. We are about to have all mail migrated to Outlook/Exchange, while keeping Notes for apps. As resident Notes expert, I've been roped into helping out with trying to highlight the differences between Notes & Outlook, and trying to find all the environmental issues which have been missed by the team managing the project. As the project is being run by our new-ish parent company (an MS-shop), there is very little understanding of Notes and the implications of the project on our environment. The number of times I've heard "It's just mail" over the last month has had me wanting to bang my head against a wall! Anyway, it's all pretty much fait accompli, so I'm just trying to minimise the disruptions to the user-base, but do I feel like I'm giving away little pieces of my soul just working with Outlook!

Next week will mark my official migration into the world of Outlook/Exchange, and results from my initial testing certainly isn't making me look forward to it. Rest assured more details will come as my work load/involvement decreases, and I can start to think about my opions about the transition.

In personal news, Tim & I have been pretty busy lately trying to get all manner of projects (both work and personal) completed - design upgrade to dominoblogs.com (which is just waiting on us sorting out the hosting), openslice is keeping us busy as more and more people are downloading, and we are acknowledging that we really need to get the functions more completely updated. Also, we have just bought a shiny new red car - a Mazda 3, which is just lovely. Check out this link on Tim's blog for a picture. We've also been spring-cleaning and trying to fix up our unit a bit, and busy socialising over Easter & Anzac Day.

After two silver medals at the last two Olympics, the perennial bridemaids - the Austrailan Women's basketball team - have finally broken through and beaten the US 76-65 in the 4-nations World Challenge yesterday.

While it may not be the top US team, missing superstars like Sheryl Swoops, it is still a huge psychological win for the Opals over their arch-nemisis.

In sadder news, that's the last time Lauren Jackson play on Aussie shores for a while as she has left the WNBL for a 3-year stint in Korea, which she is hoping will give her a better recovery in the off-season from the WNBA season.

Following on from Libby, and others, I finally found some time to do the Personal DNA test.



I am a Considerate Director who should dream a little more, and try to be more outgoing because people will "benefit immensely from your understanding and insight". I'm not sure Tim would agree - although I certainly keep telling him that I'm always right!

My Personal DNA Report

I have been working on creating a snapshot of our current Lotus Notes environment, and as part of doing this I have been pulling all the information I can about our users and applications into a couple of key databases. I had just completed pulling together a large amount of data and went to open a document to view the results when I got the following message:

"Field is too large (32K) or View's column & selection formulas are too large"

Ahh, of course, I didn't think about protecting the document against large field sizes. A silly mistake which could have been easily avoided if I'd thought about it first. Anyway, now I had about 20 documents which couldn't be opened.

Confident in my knowledge, I created a quicky @Formula agent to remove the problematic field from the documents. But alas, the agent won't run on the corrupted documents. Change the field to Rich Text and refresh-selected... nope. Hmm, well, I'll just delete them. Nope, couldn't delete them either.

...more »

So I was reading an article today about the success of i-Tunes for moving people from illegal downloading to purchasing music when two quotes from ARIA chief executive Stephen Peach, stood out as a perfect example of why non-technologists have no business making technology decisions:

"In the thousands of years of commerce there's never been a business model that gives away things for free."
...
Illegal services, he says, come bundled with spyware, pop-ups and "a lot of things that consumers don't know about or don't want attached to their computer".

Ummm...even heard of the opensource community - Mozilla, Linux etc have entire business models around giving "things away for free". And as for the second quote, wasn't it i-Tunes which was recently spanked for sending data back to Apple without user's knowledge - otherwise known as spyware?

The rest of the article offered some interesting observations, but nothing earth-shattering or new.

On a slightly related note, while buying a gift for a friends one-year-old I came across the Fisher Price "MP123" toy mp3 player - very iPod with it's spinning wheel. Never mind that many other mp3 players use something completely different, it's always good to get them young! PS - sorry for the link, it's the only one I could find...