i don't know whether i've yet made something that i would consider the ultimate (vegan) salad. but what i made today comes pretty close.

i have a friend who, when reading some of my recipes (like the magic cereal post and some other things i haven't published here), said, "it's like you are trying to make human rocket fuel".

yeah, actually, that's totally it. plant based, human rocket fuel. my philosophy has sort of evolved over the past couple of years into: every meal can be a healing, cleansing, powerfully nutritive event that literally rebuilds you while simultaneously protecting you from disease and lowering stress.

did you know food could do that?

i had a particularly productive day in the kitchen today, and i wanted to write down what i did so that i can replicate it later.

dressing (measurements are approximations, just do what makes sense to you...)

BASE (these are my usual suspects when it comes to dressing)
1/2 cup olive oil (first cold press organic - the "cold press" part is very important nutritionally)
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
juice of 2 or 3 lemons
1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar
1/2 tablespoon basil
1/2 tablespoon thyme
1/2 tablespoon rosemary

SALTY STUFF
5 or 6 cloves of garlic, minced
1/4 onion, sliced thin
4 shiitake mushrooms, stemmed, minced
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds
2 pinches or so of Celtic sea salt
2 tablespoons of tamari

put the onions and garlic into a pan with olive oil and let them simmer for 10 minutes. the heat is very low, just about where it would be if you were simmering some soup. it's setting "2" on my stove.

add the shiitake mushrooms, pumpkin seeds, tamari and Celtic sea salt. keep the heat low and let sit for another ten minutes or so.

SWEET STUFF
handful of blueberries
1/2 orange

put the base, the salty stuff, and the sweet stuff together in a food processor. mix it up with the big blade for a good long time, pulsing here and there and pushing the seeds and stuff back down the sides with a rubber spatula. you should end up with a consistency that is something like thousand island dressing. it will have a slightly purple color because of the blueberries.

put the dressing in the fridge, let it mellow for a bit.

topping (a nice vegan approximation to Parmesan cheese)

salba seeds (also called chia seeds)
unhulled sesame seeds
nutritional yeast

put the salba seeds in a coffee grinder to about the halfway point - 2 tablespoons maybe? grind them into fluffy powder. put in a bowl.

same thing with the unhulled sesame seeds.

now mix in some nutritional yeast, so that it's about half salba/sesame and half nutritional yeast. take a whisk or a fork and mix it up until it is well blended.

put this stuff in a jar and set aside.

note: you will want to store it in a dark place when you aren't using it. sunlight destroys the B vitamins in the nutritional yeast. in fact when you buy nutritional yeast it should be in a bottle that is completely opaque. i never buy it from a bulk bin for that reason.

the salad

ok here is what i used today and it was amazing:

1/2 cup fresh dandelion greens, minced
1/2 cup fresh spinach, minced
1/4 cup hemp seeds
2 big carrots peeled and grated (the food processor is my friend)
1/4 cup salba seeds
1 cup mixed greens (i buy these prepackaged/organic)
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
1.5 oranges (you used half an orange in the dressing)
1/2 cup strawberries
1/4 cup tamari roasted almonds (yes the raw ones are better for you but i can't resist the taste of these)

and that's it!

spoon yourself out some salad. put a few big dollops of the dressing on top. sprinkle a generous amount of the faux Parmesan topping on top of the dressing. mix it up and eat... omg so good.

it's probably impossible to completely understand what this combination of ingredients can do for us, but here is a breakdown of a few things just to give you an idea as to why this salad is, to my mind, a great example of plant based "human rocket fuel". :-)

greens are "super foods" unto themselves. they are packed with calcium and iron and protein (spinach is ~40% protein in easily digestible amino acid form!) and vitamins and fiber. i don't eat nearly enough greens. we should all be eating a big serving of greens in some form or another every single day. chimps (our closest genetic relative) eat 50% greens.

hemp seeds - packed with protein, they have all of the essential amino acids. they are also high in omega 3 and 6 fats. hemp seeds are considered a super food.

salba/chia - these tiny unassuming seeds have omega 3's and 6's in the 4-1 ratio needed for human health. they are also considered a super food. they also have quite a bit of protein.

blueberries and carrots - lots of cancer fighting antioxidants.

nutritional yeast - again, another super food, contains all the essential amino acids (proteins our bodies can't make) along with a plethora of B vitamins. there are so many B vitamins in nutritional yeast, if you eat enough of it, your pee will turn "vitamin yellow". this is not an active yeast; i've never had a problem digesting it.

the pumpkin seeds, dandelion greens and spinach are high in iron. the citric acid in the lemon and oranges facilitates absorption of the iron. great for the sisters around that time of the month. :-) also great if you run a lot and therefore spend a lot of time crushing red blood cells with your feet.

the unhulled sesame seeds are high in calcium.

the topping is a powerful mix of perfectly balanced omega 3/6 fats, B vitamins, proteins, and calcium! it's great on soups, salads, or anywhere you would use Parmesan. i put it on top of peanut butter sometimes if i make some peanut butter toast and it's great!

bon appetit! :-)

Some ten or more years ago now, I was living in Colorado. I told my mother that we were thinking about moving to Tampa, where she lives, and where I spent most of my young adult life. I'd moved to Atlanta, and then to Boulder. My daughter was due to be born and I/we felt it important to be close to family. We had some kind of feeling like we were "supposed to go".

Mom told me that she didn't think it was a good idea. She told me to stay put where I was. It would be better that way, she said.

This was, for me, a signal that hit me in a kind of underground way. I heard it loud and clear in the emotional spectrum, or else I would not have remembered it after all these years. But, it was a signal I didn't accept, somehow, intellectually, or maybe consciously, is a better way to say it. My own mother didn't want me around. I couldn't, wouldn't, hear her. We moved to Tampa.

I still live there. My daughter is nine. I don't talk to Mom anymore.

There were Christmases at her house that I, and my family, were not invited to. It should have been understood by me, I mean, clearly, but I didn't get it for a long time. I get it now. So, we don't talk. It's more complicated than that. A lot of stuff going on under the hood. But when it comes down to it, my old family life is long gone and over with.

They say if you don't understand the story you are in, the story will live itself through you. If you do understand your story, then you can do something about it. You become the lucid dreamer. You can change the course of your dream.

Due to divorce and remarriage, Mom became a sort of Medea figure.

In the ancient stories, Medea is abandoned by her husband, Jason. She takes revenge on him by, among other things, killing the two sons they had together. In some sense this same energy plays itself out in my family. Like I said before, it's more complicated than that. But when I think about what has happened to us over the years through the lens of this story, it becomes apparent to me that I can stop "killing myself" trying to be my mother's son. I'm not sure why, but that life is gone.

Mom doesn't know the story she is living out. And she doesn't want to learn anything from me. She never has. And I'm OK with that, now. I've gotten a little smarter emotionally, and I've healed some, and become stronger. I've got to live my own life.

What the heck does this have to do with Lotus Notes? Why bring my personal history into what is going on in the community now?

Because what is happening is, for me, and for a lot of other people, as personal in many ways as a family crisis. What is happening now is going to change what a lot of us do for a living, it is going to change who we hang around with, what conferences we attend, what communities we are involved in, and it will change what we do every day. For some people this isn't that big a deal. For some of us, it matters a lot.

So what is the story that we are living inside of?

The story is that many years ago, IBM abandoned Lotus Notes as an application development platform. It took a long time, but the competition finally figured out how to capitalize on this fact. And now, from what I can tell, Lotus Notes is absolutely being demolished in the enterprise.

Going back a little, in 2002 Al Zollar announced the "two lane highway". J2EE was going to be the way forward.

This was a huge signal to the community that Lotus Notes as an application development platform was dead in the water. But the notion of the demise of Notes was derided and laughed at by the community. We fought both IBM and the public perception that "Notes is dead". Folks within IBM Lotus fought that perception too, and they continue to fight it. But the ground has been shifting underneath all of our feet for a long time.

Like the signal I received in my personal life ten years ago, the underlying message from the guy in charge of IBM Lotus was as plain as day. It was obvious to the analysts, and to the competition, but it wasn't obvious to the faithful. We couldn't hear it. We wouldn't hear it. Why would they throw Notes away? Why would they throw away the incredible utility of the NSF?

For several years it seemed that IBM hadn't, after all, thrown anything away. Clearly, strong steps forward were made. Features and performance improved in versions 6 and 7. A modern look and feel and a whole new set of capabilities surfaced in version 8. But something else has been going on at the same time. Along came Connections - based entirely on Websphere and Java. The Sametime software has become, more and more, based on Java and Websphere as well. And Quickr, again based on J2EE, is replacing NSF-based Quickplace. The NSF just isn't present in any meaningful way in IBM's new Social Software stack.

But something equally important has been happening for a long time. IBM, as far as I can tell, sells Lotus Notes mostly as a messaging platform. They tried to sell a different email engine under the Workplace brand, but that effort folded when no one, anywhere, bought it. Goodbye Workplace.

A lot of us including me felt a little smug when that happened. We knew all along that Notes was an amazing piece of software. The powers that be at IBM didn't know it, but we did. But now, maybe they were finally getting it? Maybe with the demise of the Workplace brand, I thought, they'd finally get off our lawn and let us get back to doing what we do best.

But. Something about that thing about IBM selling Lotus Notes as messaging, and only as messaging, has finally caught up with us. Something about IBM fundamentally not believing in Notes as an application development platform, and refusing to market it as application development, has created the reality that we now face in the marketplace. And the competition is at long last eating Lotus Notes for breakfast. And honestly, I think at some level in the IBM organization, there are those who are relieved it's finally going away. Because what they want is to sell the really expensive Websphere stuff. Domino, I'm guessing, just doesn't net them the rivers of cash from the Fortune 100 like the big iron stuff does. But Domino getting its clock cleaned by Exchange and Sharepoint leaves a huge hole in IBM's strategy.

I didn't truly receive the signal that Al Zollar sent back in 2002. But I jumped on the bandwagon as best I could. I learned Java. I wrote Java code. I downloaded Eclipse, and wrote code in it too. I even wrote articles about IBM's new direction on SearchDomino, and they were positive. I was there, supporting whatever the direction was, as best I could. Our team at work is starting to write XPages applications. It's good stuff. But it seems, it's too little, too late.

See, where I work, they are abandoning Notes mail for Exchange. And last week we were told that the political winds at high levels in our company are whispering "Sharepoint". We responded by saying that we were ultimately agnostic about what code we wrote in. And this is essentially true. But we know in our heart of hearts that we will not be as productive as we were, no matter how good we get at Sharepoint development or any of the technologies in the Microsoft stack. We were also told, by the way, that any of us who wished to remain "pure Domino" developers would be given personal assistance in finding a new job.

Let that sink in for a moment.

I just didn't get it until it started to happen to me. But it's hit home now. Thinking through this, maybe from now on I'll be a little better at paying attention to the signals that my biases want me to push into the background, into the underground. Examining my biases is an opportunity to become more conscious. And when I become more conscious, I am able to make better decisions.

But here's the other thing. And this is what really got me thinking about this, and resulted in this blog entry. The same fellow who told us that he'd help us all find new jobs if we wanted to leave, also told us that on the Gartner "Magic Quadrant" concerning web development, or application development (not exactly sure what the "quadrant" covered), there were things like Java and .Net and Sharepoint. Lotus Notes was not on it, at all.

The reason, when asked, that Gartner gave as to why Lotus Notes isn't on the quadrant for application development, is that IBM does not sell or market Notes for that. When I understood that, it really hit me in the gut. Suddenly I got it. All of the stuff everyone has been saying forever about the lack of marketing sort of came together.

The community howled, for years and years, that if IBM would just market the product, the market for Lotus Notes would improve. IBM, to everyone's great surprise, started a marketing campaign in late 2009 centered around the slogan, "Lotus Knows". I didn't think about it until recently, but the Lotus Knows campaign is not about application development with Lotus Notes. The campaign is about "Social Software".

Step back and put the whole picture together. IBM does not sell Lotus Notes for application development. What do they have instead? Websphere. And Portal. And what is Lotus finally, after all these years, actually marketing? Social Software. Collaboration. I always assumed collaboration included Lotus Notes. But I'm not so sure anymore. But even if it does, it doesn't matter. Lotus Notes can be used for collaboration. But fundamentally it's about application development. And that can be just about anything.

Like a scene from an absurdist play, IBM engineers continue to work hard on Notes and Domino while IBM refuses to market its capabilities. The application development possibilities continue to grow in incredible ways. Who is it that is telling the world about those possibilities? It isn't IBM. It's people in the community like Nathan Freeman and Tim Tripcony and many others. And who are Nathan and Tim telling talking to about this stuff? People like me, of course. They aren't sitting down with the corporate strategy people high up in my company. And why would they?

IBM isn't selling it. IBM isn't marketing it. No one, at the customer-corporate level, knows what the engineers working on Domino are doing. They don't know, and they don't care. Why? Because, apparently, Domino does not show up on "the quadrant". When corporate level strategy folks are trying to make decisions, they don't have any guidance from IBM, or the analysts, or the trade magazines, or anyone, concerning the actual core capabilities of Lotus Notes, because Notes isn't allowed to compete with Websphere. "IBM Lotus" shows up on the quadrant for "Social Software". What does that mean? It means Connections and Quickr and Sametime. Somewhere in the middle of that stuff, if you ask enough questions, is this little old "messaging" engine thrown in that IBM can't seem to get rid of, called Lotus Notes.

We've been carrying the banner by ourselves for far too long. Now we see the results.

It took me, from 2002, until now, to say goodbye to Notes. Which means, it took me almost as long to say goodbye to Notes as it did for me to say goodbye to my own mother.

Coda:

To think about quitting my job to go into consulting is ridiculous, based on what is going on in the market, and what others are saying, and the recent dismal experience of folks with more experience and more connections in the industry than I have. To move to another company to do Domino again is equally ridiculous for the same reason. Where I work, we will likely continue our Domino practice for a few years while we begin to learn the Microsoft way. But we are quick learners, and we will likely supplant our Domino applications as rapidly as we can. What choice do we have? We've seen the story we are in. We'll each play the part that makes the most sense for us.

Additional reading:

Microsoft, IBM, and Jive Get Together Atop the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software
"IBM is a leader by virtue of being ahead of the market with a strong market presence," the analysts write. IBM is not only an established technology vendor, but the report points out that IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 offers a comprehensive social software suite and that the company offers many flexible deployment options."

Looking beyond the magic quadrant to find the nitty gritty
Gartner's "strengths" and "cautions" have to do with a vendor's "marketing effectiveness," "messaging," and "awareness."

Jake Howlett: Why My Sudden Interest in SharePoint
"…what am I supposed to do when a good customer decides to leave Domino? Wish them luck and let them go; after years of building a relationship with them? Not likely."

Notes and Domino development. Any future in it?
"…this is not about the product but about how it's perceived and understood - Notes and Domino are seen as yesterday's news."

What's happening to app development?
"I checked out the IBM marketing blitz on LotusKnows (www.lotusknows.com.au) and it's all generic commoditized services, (Calendaring, Quickr, Telephony, Connections, portals). It has NOTHING to do with custom application development or the great ROI you can achieve leveraging app development."

Things I learned at the DNUG conference in Berlin
"Attendance at DNUG conferences is down. …It's the customers that are staying away. If you look at the conference guide listing all attendees, you can't help but notice that the largest contingent are IBM and Business Partners. …Many business partners are developing an exit strategy."

ingredients

go raw simple granola cereal



i get this in the local health food store for ten bucks. you could also try sprouting your own seeds, which i haven't done yet but i really want to try and hopefully will this spring. i'm not sure what homemade sprouted flax/buckwheat groats will look like. the ones i buy look and taste like granola cereal. i think sprouting my own will be healthier and cheaper. we'll see...

manitoba harvest shelled hemp seeds



manitoba harvest chocolate "hemp bliss" hemp milk



fwiw, the manitoba harvest hemp products are better tasting than anything else out there, in my experience.

vegan gorp made of roughly equal parts of:
organic walnuts
organic sliced almonds
organic pumpkin seeds
organic hulled sunflower seeds
organic dried fruit (cranberries, blueberries, whatever you can find)
organic dark chocolate covered raisins

fresh fruit such as:
organic blueberries and/or
organic strawberries

directions

mix together:
one tablespoon of the cereal (sprouted flax / sprouted buckwheat groats)
one tablespoon hemp seeds
two or three (to your own taste) tablespoons gorp (hint: that gorp recipe is awesome)

add a tablespoon or three (whatever you like) of blueberries or strawberries or both. basically whatever fresh fruit is in season. sometimes i use organic frozen blueberries. if i take the cereal to work in a jar (which i do every morning during work days) the frozen blueberries keep everything cool, which is really neat.

add some chocolate hemp milk over the top and you have jonvon's magic cereal. during the week i put the hemp milk in a separate jar and add it on top when i get around to eating.

i usually eat another piece of fruit as well, like an orange or a small organic apple. i like really small apples. just the right amount for me and very tasty.

advanced vegan fu

i add two pills of chlorella that i take with water. i highly recommend doing this. chlorella (an algae grown in japan) has lots of protein, minerals and antioxidants, is extremely cleansing, and will help your body rejuvenate itself and make you look and feel younger. i say this out of my own personal experience - your mileage may vary, especially depending on what the rest of your diet looks like. (in case you are wondering, i am not affiliated with any of the companies that make the products.)

along with the chlorella, i drink organic matcha tea. the chlorella will clean you out due to the high amount of chlorophyll. the antioxidants in the matcha will come along with a "push broom" and sweep up the junk.

i used to have some problems here and there with my mood when drinking matcha but when i drink it in context with the "magic cereal" and the chlorella, i don't have any problems at all. everything is nicely balanced for me. my energy levels, mental clarity and immune response are all incredibly strong these days. sometimes people cough in my face and i just think, no problem. i very rarely get sick now and when i do, it never lasts long. the cereal/fruit/chlorella/matcha routine works very well for me and sets up my whole day.

warnings

fiber intensity:

whether or not you are a vegan, this is a LOT of fiber. you will likely get thirsty. so plan to stay hydrated. have a bottle of water near you the rest of the morning and afternoon and drink, lots, if you get thirsty.

if you are NOT a vegan or vegetarian, you might also experience some bloating or gas. you might even consider doing half a tablespoon each of the base ingredients and work your way up.

if you overdo it, if you add more than a tablespoon of the primary/base ingredients (hemp seed and flax/buckwheat groats), my experience is increased thirstiness due to the extra fiber. you may need to sit and be quiet while you digest too, if you feel nauseous at all. that feeling may be (if your experience is like mine) your body telling you it needs to concentrate its energy on digesting all that fiber.

basically what i'm saying here is, don't overdo it with the base ingredients, and don't underestimate the amount of fiber. the fiber is really good for you and will help you avoid colon cancer. but take it easy and work your way up.

note: the gorp is not nearly as fiber intensive as the hemp/flax. the flax is really the most intense ingredient in terms of fiber, from what i can tell.

i started out doing four pills of chlorella, but toned it down to two. starting out you might consider one and work up to two.

expense:

when you add all of this stuff up, including the chlorella and matcha, you are spending around 100 bucks. here is a rough estimate of what i am spending:

cereal ingredients: ~ 50 to 60 dollars
matcha: ~ 10 dollars
chlorella: ~ 24 dollars

i was spending about five dollars every morning buying fruit and kashi bars and peanuts. the cereal ingredients last about three weeks or so, the matcha about a month, and the chlorella maybe month and a half or so. i don't quite have it down to a science with that. but... when i add up what i was spending ad hoc, 25 dollars a week for junk, that's about a hundred dollars or so a month. so in the long run i'm doing way better with the cereal routine since it is my health we are talking about and over the long haul the costs are almost equivalent.

one morning i forgot my cereal, or didn't have time or something, and i fell back to my old kashit/fruit/nuts junk food routine (as i think of it now) and after eating, i felt as though i'd poisoned myself. the benefits to the "magic cereal" routine were so obvious to me at that point that now i work extra hard to make this happen for myself every day, especially during the work week. sometimes i vary a bit on the weekends with other things.

sprouted ingredients:

sprouted ingredients are alive. in other words, they are literally "sprouting" - they've started growing and have sort of been "arrested" in this early growth stage. this means that all sorts of biochemical things are going on with the plants. there are amino acids and things available during sprouting that aren't available at any other time. sprouted foods are very healthy to eat (really darn fascinating). but... because they are in that state they are also more prone to having bacteria attach to them. humans aren't the only ones that want to eat them! and they are more susceptible to infection than they would otherwise be.

i keep the sprouted stuff, and the hemp seeds, in the refrigerator. but even that doesn't keep them good forever. i never have a problem with the hemp seeds, but the flax/buckwheat DOES start to go bad. i rarely get to the bottom of a package before they start to go bad. i can't smell them going bad, but i can tell after i eat them that they've started to turn. if that happens i take a couple of echinacea and that solves it for me. but then i have to get new cereal. this is partly why i am interested in doing my own sprouting. the ingredients will be fresher that way. the cereal is sprouted at a facility somewhere, then shipped, then it sits on the shelf, and then finally i buy it. i put it right in the fridge, but it would be better if i did it myself.

so, for this reason, i always keep the two main base ingredients separate from the gorp and put them together on the fly "at run time". that way if it turns out the flax is starting to go south, i don't lose the other ingredients.

i don't ever have any problems with the gorp and i don't keep it refrigerated. it sits in a big glass jar on the counter.

good luck and let me know how it goes. :-)

tuesday night at lotusphere is chock full of parties and receptions. it is always a busy night. from what i can tell it is the busiest night at the 'sphere for that kind of thing. between invitations from ibm for various things, and invitations from business partners i always have more events to go to than i can possibly attend.

there is an annual dinner (for several years running now) that i am guessing not a lot of people know about that is put on by a company called symfoni. the fellow who puts the dinner on is trond-are utle. he had a blog a while back, blogging under the monicker "Air Play". trond is the COO of symfoni and a super cool guy. trond invites several bloggers every year to come along. his idea is that we are famous (or infamous perhaps?) people in the community and the employees and customers who are invited to the symfoni dinner "get to" hang out with us.

well let me tell you, from my perspective it is exactly the opposite. the truth is, i've had the immense pleasure of hanging out with some of the coolest people i've ever met, any time i've gotten to go to trond's dinner. people like arne for instance - one of the smartest guys around and a much more prolific blogger than me.

with trond having fed me at least three times over the past five? six? years... i started to feel a little guilty. i wanted to give something back. trond never asked me for anything at all, i just wanted to do something cool for him in return.

one thing i've been getting deeper and deeper into lately is poetry. i've been writing poetry on and off since high school, but the last maybe six years or so i've been exposed to a lot more poetry and a lot more poets. i've performed my own poems here and there, and whenever i do a reading it seems to impact people pretty strongly.

so i decided to ask trond if he'd like me to read some poetry at his dinner. i had a pretty good idea that it would work because they always rent out a private room, and the last few years there was a microphone.

the one thing i didn't think about was the fact that trond had never read even one of my poems. he'd never seen me read a poem. for all he knew i was some sort of hapless american idol wannabe poetry nerd. if you think about it that could actually be a pretty bad combination.

so. i didn't think about that. mainly what i was thinking was that i'd never done anything like this before. normally if i read some poems, it is in a room with a bunch of other poets. like at a coffee house or something. i was also surprised at myself for having had the sheer balls to write and tell him that i wanted to read poetry at his very expensive dinner.

neither one of us knew what we were doing. i just had this feeling like it would work, and that i'd be able to "give back" a little, and sort of "sing for my dinner", even though trond never said one word about anything like that. he always just sends me an invitation and is always happy when i show up. which honestly still blows me away.

well. it turned out that trond was more nervous than me about my performance. when i told him i might have about ten minutes of material he got kinda jittery! and who can blame him? for all he knew, i was going to go up there and recite some really boring lines. or maybe i'd trip over my own tongue. or do something really silly, try to sing or something. i mean there are a lot of crazy people in the world, and who knows, i just might be one of them.

so i tried to explain my plan. see, i had picked out three poems and put them together sort of like how a dj puts songs together in a specific order to get a particular effect musically in order to pull the crowd into whatever place they want take them. the poems i'd picked weren't meant to get people to dance of course. but they were chosen with intention.

the first poem was by a poet called rolf jacobsen. rolf jacobsen is a norwegian poet. i figured i'd read english translations of scandinavian poets out of respect for the people in the room, and as a way to connect them to the poetry. although later i learned i butchered the pronunciation of his name. :-)

the jacobsen poem i read is called the silence afterwards, and it brings the reader into contact with the kind of knowledge that is behind words. it brings the reader into silence, into a place in which a person comes into contact with the voices of trees and rocks - our ancient ancestors. the poem invites us to forget sales statistics and brunches and gas ovens, fashion shows and horoscopes, military parades, architectural contests, the possibilities of winning on the numbers...

people were discussing these sorts of things at the symfoni dinner. well not exactly, but you know, we are worried about a lot of things, and our minds are on technology, and how it impacts us. we're all making a living that way, after all, me included.

the second poem is one that i wrote myself. it is a poem about a poet called federico garcia lorca.

lorca was shot at the beginning of the spanish civil war by franco's men for the crime of being seen as a leftist, or for the crime of being gay. one of those, probably both. in the poem we go underground, to a secret place where lorca disappears and the soldiers cannot find him. it is an intense poem, full of both grief and triumph.

the third poem i read is by a swedish poet named harry martinson. it happened that karl martinson (the texas swede) was there at the dinner, and later he told me that his family had done a geneological search to see, among other things i'm sure, whether anyone in his family was related to this poet, since they had the same name. it turns out they weren't related. but i thought it was neat that he knew of the poet, and that the poet was important enough for his family to spend that kind of energy finding out whether or not they might be related. think about that! poets in the U.S. are certainly not held in that kind of regard.

martinson's poem, the cable ship, is a funny story with a fascinated meditative center about some guys on a fishing boat. martinson spent a lot of time at sea and wrote quite a few poems about that. in the poem, they've accidentally pulled up a transatlantic cable - a huge phone line running between continents. they try to listen to it:

"It's some millionaires in Montreal and St. John talking over the price of Cuban sugar, and ways to reduce our wages," one of us said.

they try to patch it with some rubber and let it go back to the bottom of the sea.

so the idea was, first we come into silence. we forget technology. we forget project schedules. we forget the banalities of the day. we move into silence. the knowledge that goes beyond words. foundational and intrinsic universally interpenetrating meaning from which we all spring and to which we all return. we connect to our ancestors, the trees and the rocks. then we go underground with lorca. we think a little about the struggle between ugliness and beauty. we remember that some people have died for poetry. we go down and down and walk in the land of the dead.

and then, at the end, we remember that we do live in a real world, with things like sailors and boats and transatlantic phone lines. we dredge up the line, with martinson, and remember that we do in fact work with technology, and we remember that it is good to laugh.

there was an energetic design too, here, something like a roller coaster. we get in, we go down, and then we come back up. simple, really. much simpler than the dueling dragons. :-)

but it worked. oh man, the whole room seemed to be entranced. even the people serving the food, i could feel them standing very still. everyone listened intently. later the ibm guy had to get up and give a little speech, and he said he wished he'd gone before me, because who could follow that act? he actually used the word "experience", that the performance had been an experience.

man that might have been the best thing anyone ever said about me, reading poetry. i hope i see that guy again. somehow i left there without talking to him.

after the dinner was over i was milling around with joe litton and i ran into this fellow who, it turned out, worked for one of symfoni's customers. he was a german fellow, living in sweden, super nice guy, very friendly. he had this idea that companies like symfoni must be going around hiring really expensive entertainers like me to come and liven up dinner parties like the one trond had just thrown. omg. that might have been even better than the ibm guy's comments. sooo funny. i had to explain several times that i was trying to pay trond back, just a little, for all the free food and good times he's given me over the years.

i'd like to point out though, that if anyone wants to hire me and pay me "a lot of money" to come read poetry at your dinner party, dude, i am so there.

every year for the past probably five or so years i've gotten an invite to attend a dinner put on by symfoni tuesday night of lotusphere. the last few years i've tried to make it a point to go, even if i have other invitations to other things that conflict. there's just something really cool about hanging out with the scandinavians and learning new (for me anyway) words like tak and how to say cheers and so on.

this past dinner something really cool happened there that i have another blog post (still in draft) queued up to talk about. but for this post i wanted to write about symfoni's new global calendar product that they are about to launch (or maybe they have by now?) that has an Adobe Air front end. Trond showed it to me briefly one day at the Dolphin rotunda and i asked him to send me some data on it, and he did (pasted below).

i thought it was interesting that they were using Air to leverage their code to PC, Mac and Linux. and the Air UI looked pretty cool.

anyway here is the text from Trond's email (slightly edited). seems to me like these guys have been working really hard the last few years and have expanded their product line quite a lot. some of their old software was the standard clunky old Notes stuff some years ago, but these days everything looks really slick. i wouldn't be surprised if they've started penetrating the U.S. market with some of these products.

Hi John,

Here's a few screenshots, don't know if you wanna use any:

- http://twitpic.com/z6col (notes version)
- http://twitpic.com/yt8wr (notes version)
- http://twitpic.com/z6d4z (air version)
- http://twitpic.com/z6cxx (air version)

About Symfoni Global Calendar (GC):

GC collects calendar appointments from any user or groups of users in your organization (Domino or Exchange!), and gives you lots of ways to browse, consume and otherwise interact with this information. It answers questions like "where's my team now, or next week", "what is John doing tomorrow" etc. It even enables push-back of appointments from the client into someone's calendar (this is a role based right), so Sue at the front office can help me add "sick day" to my calendar because I CALLED IN sick... ALSO, the new version will support shorthand entry like "meeting with Tron tues 2pm-4:30 @corneroffice", OS notifications/popups like "your meeting is in 10 minutes" or "You're tracking John, he just finished his meeting".

GC has a classic Notes client and also a web interface, but this spring we're releasing the brand new standalone client based on the Adobe Air platform. This client runs on Mac/Linux/Windows, is light and fast yet integrates very well with the OS for start menu icons, popups, alerts etc.