jonvon.net

jonvon.net Mostly a personal blog, with some content regarding Lotus Domino http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/ en-us Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:47:53 -0400 dialectic vs debate Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:47:53 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dialectic-vs-debate.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dialectic-vs-debate.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dialectic-vs-debate.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/dialectic-vs-debate.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dialectic-vs-debate.htm?opendocument&comments improvisation: stretta, monome, grainstorm Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:43:02 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/improvisation-stretta-monome-grainstorm.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/improvisation-stretta-monome-grainstorm.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/improvisation-stretta-monome-grainstorm.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/improvisation-stretta-monome-grainstorm.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/improvisation-stretta-monome-grainstorm.htm?opendocument&comments a third way Sun, 20 Feb 2011 11:56:25 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-third-way.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-third-way.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-third-way.htm
i don't think anyone particularly likes being digested. ya know. but ultimately we have no choice but to surrender.

the difference between grief and mere sadness, or momentary depression, is that with the latter you have a choice. you can decide, "i'm going to be happy right now and stop all of this moping around." with grief, you have to let your body go limp in the jaws of the lion.

i think i'll leave the metaphor there, since the next step is me, transformed into a pile of scat on the african plain. ;)

actually just now i'm feeling really happy. it feels a bit more than just a momentary blip on the modulating sine wave that is my mood; it feels like i'm starting to emerge on the other side. i'm lion scat, about now. but little flowers are growing out of my stinky head.

hehe. i just couldn't leave that alone..

so, what now? well this week i'm happy to report, i'm going to sit in some asp.net training classes. monday and tuesday of lotusphere we had sharepoint training. oh the irony! and in my spare time i'm still working on the story/novel/book thing.

but something else is happening. ben poole has managed to get me interested in Ruby with his excellent introductory blog post, starting with ruby. actually ruby is something i've been interested in for a while, but i just never got around to it. upon reading ben's post, i quickly realized i needed to get familiar with the unix command line in mac os x, and let's face it, unix itself, at least a little bit. this is yet another thing i've been wanting to do, being the owner of several macs at home for several years now. so i went and put The Mac OS X Command Line: UNIX Under the Hood on my wish list (my way of bookmarking things on amazon) and i'm planning to order it next week. i'm sure there's plenty of free information online, but in this case i think i want to just go step by step with a book. and since my daughter is rather the mac power user, i'll be showing her what i learn as i go along.

all of which leads me to something i'm thinking about, in a kind of on the back burner kind of way. i have this half baked idea about... well... life and career and career trajectories, which is colliding with various political thoughts concerning corporations and the decisions we are making at the macro level as a society, and the growing disparity between rich and poor and the rapidly disappearing middle class in america and the many illusions we've all bought into and participated in.

one of these illusions (a smaller one in the big picture perhaps) for me personally is the idea that working with a software platform owned by a major corporation is a really good idea. let's face it, the platform you are working on today might be old news tomorrow, and the big corporation you are working on behalf of within the walls of your actual company might decide to stop selling it. so the idea that, as an applications developer, i should bank on lotus notes, or sharepoint, or anything owned by ibm or microsoft or for that matter, oracle or any other big player, is becoming less and less tenable to me.

that's not to say there isn't money to be made in any of those spaces. sharepoint is just amping up, really, and i predict it's going to have a long run ahead of it. and notes is far from dead, even if ibm isn't willing to compete with it vis a vis exchange or sharepoint, on the level they are capable of. why that is, is a complicated thing to tease out. i think what it boils down to is there isn't a lot of revenue from services around notes, like there was when notes was the new thing on the block. at this point it's frankly too good at what it does, is too cheap, too powerful, too easy to maintain, too easy to code for, and is therefore is ultimately a really really good deal for the customer. but not enough people understand that. the people that do will continue to buy notes, and notes will continue to be a robust business, despite what the higher ups at ibm think about the revenue streams.

or something like that.

but anyway the point is, i got around to thinking about what it is that has been so good about my time developing in notes. honestly for a long time i wasn't particularly tied to it as a development platform. i mean over the years i've done other things. i've written asp pages and jsp pages and servlets. back in the very beginning i wrote html-only sites. but i've worked for a group for ten years now that does notes development, and that was all they wanted to do until just very recently. i came on board originally to help with the web side of things, and we've all learned a lot from each other.

it wasn't until i started a blog and got involved in the community at large that things started to change in my head heart. after some time blogging, and meeting new people, i had a lot more emotional commitment to the platform. when the technical direction at our company changed, it forced me to step back and look at everything with fresh eyes.

so then i started to wonder, what was it about what i was doing all those years that made me so passionate about lotus notes? what was it that was fundamentally good about what was going on?

ok, besides the obvious technical underpinnings of notes, the flexible nsf data structure and all that. the built in security, email, designer client, all that stuff. the better you get at that the more you can get done in a short amount of time, the more you like what you are doing. but you guys know all about that.

there was something else going on. there was, and still is, a community like no other i've ever seen. people in this community are just... awesome. why is that? i don't know.

i suspect it has something to do with the flexibility of the software itself. it lends itself to a certain way of thinking. and therefore, i believe, it attracts a certain kind of person, who thinks in a flexible way. and maybe this flexibility lends itself to kindness? to creativity? to wholeness?

i don't see a lot of that in other communities.

and then i started to think, well, if it is the community that is so great, if it is the friendships i've made that will outlast lotus notes (or at least my career programming in it), what about that? and what about the fact that i really don't like being at the whim of this and that corporation?

when i say that, what i mean is, if i'm working in notes, or sharepoint, or whatever, and the company making it decides something else is brighter and shinier, and the competitive positioning starts to flag, then me and all my friends are shit out of luck.

fuck that. i don't want to be around for something like that anymore.

and what about the company i'm working for? look, at the end of the day, i'm about solving problems for people. if they want me to code in sharepoint, i don't really care. i've returned to my agnostic take on things. php, ruby, java, whatever. it's all good.

but what if there was another way? what if there was a way to be involved in business, but doing things in a technology that made the kind of sense that notes makes, but was more based on the needs and desires of a community. what if there was a way to be involved in a passionate community (that part is really important to me) but be working in software that isn't going to be sidelined because some group or another inside a giant corporation wasn't making as much money as it had been before?

the problem with the big corporate scenario is, it affects all of us. so why not head down to Tahrir Square and do something else?

not that i'm expecting anyone else to do anything particularly, just because i'm sort of thinking about doing something else that i haven't even decided on yet. like i said i'm happy to be getting trained on asp.net next week. happy to have a job and so forth.

what i'm getting at here is open source. i don't see how it can be anything else.

what are the opportunities? i don't know yet. i think what i'm also saying is, i want to fly under my own flag. because our institutions have let us down, big time. this is true of the corporate world to some degree, but it is also true politically. it's hard to start your own country though. man. how do you do that?

some time back gabriella davis said "I have the luxury of choosing to work with technologies I love." that's what i'm orienting myself around toward. but i'm looking for something different than the stuff lumped out on my cafeteria tray. i think right now, i want to find out what i love. and i don't exactly know anymore what that is.

i don't know if it will turn out to be this Ruby lark. i don't know if it will be Couchbase. or some combination of the two, or something totally else. but what i'm thinking is, i need a Third Way, one that fires on all cylinders for me personally that involves community and open source and fresh ideas. i don't want to be worried anymore about what steve mills thinks about the notes business, or what the microsoft sales guys are going to climb all over our company like orcs over fucking helm's deep to pitch at us about, or whatever. i want to figure out what i love, and devote my time to that.

of course i'm already doing that, with the writing. but for the first time in years, i'm feeling like i want to pick up a new technology.

see, i told you it was half baked. anyway that's what i'm thinking about. ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/a-third-way.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-third-way.htm?opendocument&comments a little mixed up Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:07:27 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-little-mixed-up.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-little-mixed-up.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-little-mixed-up.htm
man i'm going to miss you guys something awful.

today i experienced some grief about this. it just keeps coming, here and there, in unexpected waves. it kinda pisses me off.

this is the end of an era for me. sharepoint training has finally been approved, and we have real sharepoint projects in the pipeline, and finally, some end user licenses to go with them. we've still got years worth of domino stuff to do. but the writing is on the wall, in big fat purple comic sans.

this past year we had our practice pulled out from under us. a lot of stuff changed. i posted some things to the blog that i never thought i'd post. i lost my Lotus religion, for a bunch of reasons i don't feel like rehashing. ironic, since i'd lost my actual religion a few years before that. guess i should have seen that coming. my face is pretty good at catching pies. but at least i'm not alone in that around here. ;)

honestly though, this whole thing turned out to be a good opportunity to re-evaluate practically everything career-wise, along with my long term goals and desires. what do i really want out of life?

i figured out some years ago, well into my career as a geek, that what i really wanted to do was write novels for a living. i've been working on that for a good long time now, and though i still don't have anything to publicly show for it, i know i'm getting good enough at it that, well, i can sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel. it's going to happen. but that's another adventure, one i can't talk about since i'm not quite on it yet.

so, when i say i've been re-evaluating, that's only sort of true. i've known for a while that a career change was coming. not the kind where i stop doing notes and start doing sharepoint. i mean the kind where i never, ever write another line of code for another corporate entity, ever. unless that entity belongs wholly to me.

but in the near term, well, missing lotusphere is another stone on the path away from the life i knew. right at the present moment, that hurts some. yes, i'll still be around online. but how long before the technical content on planetlotus is no longer useful to me? how long before lotusphere itself is, from a technology standpoint, irrelevant to what i'm doing every day? the more those things are true, the less incentive i'll have to stay tuned. that's the facts, even though i have, in no uncertain terms, made lifelong friends in this community.

anyway i'm feeling a little mixed up right now. i hope LOTS of people are around on saturday, cuz that's the only day i'll get to see you. you know, in person, so i can hug you and tell jokes and drink too much beer with you and all that good stuff.

see you soon. :-)

p.s. volker i'm going to miss you too. :-)

p.p.s. the Long Goodbye post has been reinstated, mostly because it's a moment in my personal history that is important to me. i'm pretty sure ibm is big enough to deal with it. if they aren't, then things are worse than even i imagined. ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/a-little-mixed-up.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-little-mixed-up.htm?opendocument&comments Brené Brown Mon, 17 Jan 2011 20:04:59 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/brené-brown.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/brené-brown.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/brené-brown.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/brené-brown.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/brené-brown.htm?opendocument&comments clearing the air Sat, 9 Oct 2010 13:35:04 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/clearing-the-air.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/clearing-the-air.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/clearing-the-air.htm
I didn't do the research. To make assertions without vetted, on-record statements from in-the-know experts is just stupid.

I'm not a journalist though and I'm not going to try to become one.

All that to say, I'm not going to do that again.

That's not to say the post was completely without merit, but a good portion of it had no center of gravity, no dantien. A little ironic, no? The center could not hold, under scrutiny. Therefore, it was effectively ruined. And that's why I took it down, despite receiving multiple emails and a few tweets letting me know what I'd written was helpful or in some way good.

So... by way of lame explanation, what I'm doing lately is giving myself more room to make mistakes.

There was a politician, apparently well known and well regarded (I'd never heard of him, but that doesn't mean much), who went down in flames last year because of some personal problems. There was a discussion about it on a message board I'm a part of, and one guy said, "I hope he has the courage to make the right mistake."

Man, that really stuck with me.

That's what I am doing lately: allowing myself the courage to make the right mistakes. I need to do more of that, not less, but in a lot more senses that just blogging about what bothers me about Lotus Notes.

The right mistake is tricky. It's right because it's the thing you need to do to keep growing. It's a mistake because people get hurt. Theoretically, in the long run, if it really is the correct thing to do, everyone learns something and comes away stronger. That's the theory.

Finding the balance, figuring out if it is in fact right, and finding the courage to go ahead with it, is an exercise filled with anguish. Truth cuts both ways. There is no sense in which white always wins over black. That is an illusion endemic to, and epidemic in, our culture.

The whole thing is totally fucked though when the surgeon goes around waving his scalpel in the street. I just can't ever do that again. It's like that time I decided to show off in front of my little brother, driving that old ex-cop car I got in an auction, and hit the gas in the middle of a busy six lane street. Everything went blurry in my head, and when the cop pulled me over, he said, "Son, I'm not going to give you a ticket. I'm just going to tell you that if I ever see you doing that again, I'm taking you straight to jail."

I never did that again.

I don't know what to do next. But I know I'm growing. Forty five years old, and still learning how to be a human being.

UPDATE

All of the posts in the referenced meme have been retired. If you don't know what that means, no worries. :-)

Anyway. It's time to do something else. ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/clearing-the-air.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/clearing-the-air.htm?opendocument&comments bill clinton goes vegan Wed, 22 Sep 2010 21:08:02 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/bill-clinton-goes-vegan.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/bill-clinton-goes-vegan.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/bill-clinton-goes-vegan.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/bill-clinton-goes-vegan.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/bill-clinton-goes-vegan.htm?opendocument&comments lance spellman is the man Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:38:08 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/lance-spellman-is-the-man.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/lance-spellman-is-the-man.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/lance-spellman-is-the-man.htm dojox grid conundrum, I pinged a couple of the guys in the community I knew had been deep into dojo, and specifically, dojox grids. I had a feeling my questions were pretty simple for someone who had spent a lot of time with the grid object. There are exactly two guys that I know for sure have done a lot with dojox grids, and Lance Spellman is one of them. I knew this because of his early work (now a couple of years old already!) on his dojomino project.

Although the answers did turn out to be pretty simple, Lance wasn't able to just pull them out of a hat. He sat down, a couple of days in a row, in between running his business and raising his family, to come up with the answers. He put a grid together and carefully went through a simple example to show me how to do it. For this I owe him many, many beers. Unless he doesn't like beer, in which case I'll have to come up with something else.

The following is a quick breakdown of the answers to "the conundrum". :-) Again this is just a very simple grid - one column, with buttons below it that add and remove names.

To get a grid to sort when it starts up:

mygrid.sortInfo = 1;

...where 1 is the index of the column you want to sort on. The grid column index is not zero-based, so 1 is the first column.

That's it! That's all you have to do. Just make sure you set that property before you call mygrid.startup();

Getting the selection stuff working correctly was a little more complicated, but still pretty straightforward once you see the code (assuming you understand grid programming at least enough to get a grid up and running).

Here is an example function. Depending on your object hierarchy, you might have to adjust the objects a little. But this is the basic logic:

addNameToNamesGridItemStore : function(username){

// adds a name to my namesgridStore object,
// the dojo.data.ItemFileWriteStore that powers
// the dojox.grid.DataGrid namesgrid object
var nameobj = {"name":username};
namesgridStore.newItem(nameobj);

// clear current selection
namesgrid.selection.clear();

// sort the grid
namesgrid.sort();

// define a callback function that selects the item just created:
var foundItem = function(items, request){
var item = items[0]; // gets a handle on item just selected
var itemIndex = namesgrid.getItemIndex(item);
namesgrid.selection.setSelected(itemIndex,true);
namesgrid.scrollToRow(itemIndex); // this is nice when the grid is long enough to scroll - works great!
}

// ItemFileWriteStore has a fetch() method
// so, fetch the item we just created and then let dojo fire the foundItem()
// function defined above, and set as a callback below, "on complete"
namesgridStore.fetch({
query : nameobj,
onComplete : foundItem
});
}

Lance taught me a few things about grids that I didn't know. But I also learned something else that is important: Lance Spellman listens carefully to the requirements, is careful and methodical with his code, pays attention to the details, and is whip smart, as I found out when talking to him over Skype. He understood everything I was doing, had been down all the roads I was traversing, and was exceedingly kind in his assessment of what I was doing.

If I were hiring a contractor to do development for my company, Lance is exactly the kind of guy I'd want to hire.

Thanks again Lance. You rock, sir. ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/lance-spellman-is-the-man.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/lance-spellman-is-the-man.htm?opendocument&comments my little slice of the dark side of the dojo equation Wed, 15 Sep 2010 10:16:11 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/my-little-slice-of-the-dark-side-of-the-dojo-equation.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/my-little-slice-of-the-dark-side-of-the-dojo-equation.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/my-little-slice-of-the-dark-side-of-the-dojo-equation.htm
It's a weird, upside down world. Honestly I need to give up trying to understand what is going on.

But I have to say, learning the new Domino stuff has put some umph in my day. I'm having more fun writing code than I have in a long time. Some of the things dojo brings to the party are just really incredible.

With dojo there is a significant learning curve, but once I get past it for "this dijit" or "that dojo feature", my development time speeds up, with the result being a more professional looking and more feature rich application that requires less testing across browsers, and all the while I'm still able to get all the benefits I always have from Domino apps - the flexible data store, the security, easily implemented hide-when logic, computed text, and on and on.

This makes me happy. :-)

There is however a dark side of the equation. With dojo, we are dealing with an open source project. There is quite a bit of documentation, but it's pretty thin. I find a lot of documentation on what they call the "api", but often the methods or properties are only listed, with no explanation, anywhere. dojox is even worse. There is an O'Reilly book covering dojo, but it doesn't cover dojox, because the dojox libs are "more experimental" and "too much material to cover" etc.

The examples I've found covering dojox grids only go so far in explaining what is there. There are so many layers of code to understand - like the dojo.data layer for example. dojo is incredibly powerful, and the dijit and dojx code use all the other stuff that is there in dojo core and base, so to get your head around dojox grids for instance, there are a lot of other things to understand, and you almost have to grok it completely to get the most out of it.

I'm working on that. ;-)

To make matters more complicated, when I dig into the dojo source code I find a lot of methods that aren't documented at all. I find methods that look incredibly useful. But if they are not documented as official api calls, I worry that if I use them, they could disappear in a future version of dojo, and then in a future server upgrade I could lose functionality. Applications could break. And yet it seems there isn't a way to get things done sometimes without using an undocumented call.

And so all of this brings me at last to my dojox conundrum. If you aren't a developer, and you've already managed to read this far, you can stop reading now, the rest is going to be even more boring!

I've got a few grids working in an application. But I've got some thorny problems I haven't researched my way out of yet, and I'm running out of time, so I'm hoping there might be some simple answers to what seem like simple questions.

OK, here goes!

I have a grid, established inside a dijit tab container. Actually a couple of them, and they are pretty neat!

The requirements for the grid are pretty simple:

1. Just one column.
2. The column has names in it.
3. I add names to the column, and remove them, with buttons (Add/Remove) that are below the grid. Names are added programmatically via a custom name picker - added to the ItemFileWriteStore.
4. When I add a name to the column, that name should be highlighted.

Everything good so far, all of that works OK, except adding back names that have been previously removed (working on that - something to do with the ItemFileWriteStore, I think).

But the things I can't seem to figure out are:

1. I can't get it to sort, from a programmatic call. In other words, if I call mygrid.sort() nothing happens. I can't seem to turn on the sorting programmatically. It only happens when the user clicks the header. I've been digging around in the source code to find out what is being called, but I haven't found it yet. Where do I find that listener? What is it calling?

2. If I click the header, then sorting turns on. After that, things get weird. Here's why:

If I add a new name to the column, it sorts automatically. Cool. This is actually what I want to happen. But, the code that I run to select (aka highlight in the grid) the correct name (the one that was just added) runs, and then some more code runs that is dojox code (this is dojox code that runs after, or is a part of, the sort routine that is now called by a listener when the FileItemWriteStore gets updated). So what happens is, the dojox code selects a row. It seems to select the row number that it was on before. Not the name, but the index. The result is, now two rows are selected. And the row I selected has moved around, and so now neither of the rows are the one I want.

My code, the code that selects/highlights the row that contains the name that was just added to the column, works fine, as long as sorting is not running yet.

So what I'm looking for is:

1. How do you get the grid to sort automatically (programmatically) without someone clicking on the header? I've tried setting all sorts of things in various combinations besides just mygrid.sort(), like setting sortInfo, etc. Nothing works. I'm using (and not using in another example) a ComparatorMap that works great once sorting is in effect, on the ItemFileWriteStore object. I say that to say, I've gotten somewhat deep with the intricacies of sorting, and yet I can't do something as simple as start up sorting programmatically.

2. Is there a way to turn off the grid column header's listener? So that when someone clicks it, it doesn't do anything? I don't want it to sort in descending order, ever, for instance. Setting mygrid.clientSort = false makes no difference at all.

3. Where do I put code that can run AFTER the sort routine does its thing? I want to programmatically select the correct name, and then scroll to it, if need be, once the sorting is done. I don't want to resort to setTimeout, I know there must be a clean way to do it - some piece of code I need to add a dojo.connect call to or something like that?

Well there you have it. Hopefully someone out there has been down this path. This seems like pretty simple stuff. I've been scouring the documentation for weeks, I've been googling and reading fora, etc, and now I'm digging into the dojox source code. I'll figure it out eventually, I mean what choice do I have? But in the meantime with any luck someone knows the answers to these questions already... I'm facing the possibility of having to roll my own grid due to time considerations (and, let's call it management fatigue), it's just one column with a limited set of requirements after all, but I really don't want to! ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/my-little-slice-of-the-dark-side-of-the-dojo-equation.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/my-little-slice-of-the-dark-side-of-the-dojo-equation.htm?opendocument&comments suspicious Fri, 3 Sep 2010 20:47:26 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/suspicious.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/suspicious.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/suspicious.htm
Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and fall in.

I should be suspicious
of what I want.

-Rumi / Barks

if that isn't an accurate description of my life, i don't know what is. well, i haven't ended up in prison yet, but i'll keep trying. i just never know what i might end up accidentally accomplishing. ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/suspicious.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/suspicious.htm?opendocument&comments darn good salad Sun, 25 Jul 2010 17:05:57 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/darn-good-salad.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/darn-good-salad.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/darn-good-salad.htm
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! :-) ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/darn-good-salad.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/darn-good-salad.htm?opendocument&comments Lotus Notes: The Long Goodbye Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:33:00 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/lotus-notes-the-long-goodbye.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/lotus-notes-the-long-goodbye.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/lotus-notes-the-long-goodbye.htm
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." ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/lotus-notes-the-long-goodbye.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/lotus-notes-the-long-goodbye.htm?opendocument&comments jonvon´s magic cereal Sat, 6 Mar 2010 14:56:01 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/jonvons-magic-cereal.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/jonvons-magic-cereal.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/jonvons-magic-cereal.htm 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. :-) ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/jonvons-magic-cereal.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/jonvons-magic-cereal.htm?opendocument&comments dinner with trond Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:00:00 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dinner-with-trond.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dinner-with-trond.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dinner-with-trond.htm 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. ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/dinner-with-trond.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/dinner-with-trond.htm?opendocument&comments symfoni´s global calendar Sun, 28 Feb 2010 14:09:04 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/symfonis-global-calendar.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/symfonis-global-calendar.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/symfonis-global-calendar.htm 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.

]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/symfonis-global-calendar.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/symfonis-global-calendar.htm?opendocument&comments the future of the email market for Lotus Mon, 7 Dec 2009 10:03:22 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/the-future-of-the-email-market-for-lotus.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/the-future-of-the-email-market-for-lotus.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/the-future-of-the-email-market-for-lotus.htm
1. 70% of the email market in the corporate world (i actually don't know what market segment they were talking about) has gone to exchange.

2. many customers who have been with Notes for a long time, let's say really any release before 8, but mostly like 4, 5 or 6, have switched or are switching to exchange for email.

3. Lotus is winning many new customers (customers who never saw the pre-8 clients).

so the result is, Lotus is winning new business, while the old business where impressions of the clunky client, the "two lane highway" / workplace years, and the years of non existent marketing (thank god that is behind us) have stuck, like flies in poisoned molasses.

i get this picture in my head of two rivers side by side, running in opposite directions, and masses of salmon swimming like hell in each respective direction.

so my question is, does this bear out to what other people are seeing in the marketplace?

and yeah, this hits home for me for reasons i'm not going to talk about outside of what i just did, because i don't usually blog about work, and this is as close as i ever want to get. mainly i'm just trying to gage what is going on out there.

also up for discussion:

i've also seen: independent developers who have had a lot of trouble finding work, and business partners who do things other than development like making products, who are doing very well with Notes.]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/the-future-of-the-email-market-for-lotus.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/the-future-of-the-email-market-for-lotus.htm?opendocument&comments a tale of two macs Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:41:01 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-tale-of-two-macs.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-tale-of-two-macs.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-tale-of-two-macs.htm
the fellow who called did so from the center of Happy Apple Nirvana. i could feel him smiling from deep within the center of Brahman's navel (or is that Atman, i can never keep them straight) as he told me with complete and joyous calm that the computer was ready to be picked up.

i went into the store to pick it up and while i was there i grabbed a fire wire cord and a game for my daughter. everyone i spoke to was sooo happy and listened so well and was genuinely interested in everything i had to say. all my questions were answered quickly and efficiently and with great energy and near manic attention to detail. i'd stepped back into Happy Apple Land, after my sojourn in the bowels of, oh, i don't know, Apple Purgatory?

i remember going to see my sister when she was in college. she was majoring in theatre in a small college near (or in?) st. augustine. st. augustine is a touristy place. there is an old spanish fort there, and lots of historic places to see. if you are into the hyperreal, ripley's has a museum there. there are horse drawn carriages that trot down cobbled streets. there are great beaches, and an old cathedral, and so on. we went there a lot when i was a kid. we always had a blast there.

the st. augustine i knew from childhood is the one i have just described. but my sister lived in an apartment that was just behind that st augustine. it was a poor neighborhood. there were gangs there. the place where she and three other students and various others lived was pretty much a hell hole. the kitchen was unusable. literally. i had one of two lifetime run-ins with the paranormal on the metal fire escape stairs that led up to her front door. little claws running along my back. spooky as hell. the week after i visited, the whole neighborhood was effectively shut down due to a gang war, and armed gang members had to escort my sister and her friends from block to block whenever they wanted to walk anywhere. like say to the store or whatever.

so there is st. augustine. and then there is the st. augustine behind st. augustine.

now i've learned, there is Happy Apple Land, where everyone is a "genius" and they wear cool blue and orange t shirts, and they are all very happy to answer all of your questions, as long as everyone is staying inside the preconfigured Apple Swim Lanes.

but. go outside the swim lanes and suddenly you are being escorted through dangerous territory by rival gang members. this metaphor is actually quite a bit more apt than you might think.

this is a tale of two macs. or, two macbooks, to be a little more precise.

first off, for those interested, when i got my machine back, i had to move the data over from my old machine. except i couldn't do it the cool way. cuz i had vilefault enabled on the old machine. and i couldn't turn it off as there was not enough room on the hard drive for a complete copy of the Home folder. so it goes.

i didn't want to repeat the merry go round from before. so i just went with a brand new account and transferred the data over, directory by directory, file by file, the old fashioned way. and that was fine cuz it forced me to actually look at the data and think about what was there. i trimmed some of the fat. no biggie. and the firewire cable worked great.

i bought a macbook last january for my wife who was starting a master's program in humanities. her program is online and she needed a reliable machine. she needed a new machine, anyway, actually, as her old macbook just doesn't work anymore. at all. we can't even turn it on. it was the last of the motorolla macbooks and it's toast. so as it was in its final throes we went down and got her a new machine, an aluminum model, which apparently they don't make at the moment, in the macbook line.

so. around the time my machine came back, her machine started throwing kernel panics. oh and the iSight camera had stopped working a while back. but the kernel panics, well, when that happens the machine freezes, and whatever she was working on just goes away. poof.

so she put her data on a thumb drive. transferred it to my machine. and i took hers in for service.

so i walk into the Apple Store and say, hey, i need to drop this machine off for service. i know what's wrong with it, basically, and can someone take a look. and the person i am talking to starts telling me i need to make a genius appointment. i say, no look i just want to drop the machine off. and he gets offended, cuz i cut him off mid sentence.

he doesn't know about my very recent history with his store. he doesn't know that for me, just walking in there is now stressful. especially if there's a repair involved. all he knows is some asshole who needs to grow up and learn how to be polite just cut him off mid sentence and now his day has become stressful.

see at some point there is this big feedback loop that keeps getting worse. but i realize, right there, he didn't deserve that. so i try to smile and be a sane human being for the rest of the conversation. and i do that. so i pull out my Pro Care card. and he makes an appointment. and says that you know, someone will get back to me in a week or so. and then i say, well is that true? i mean, i'm a member of Pro Care (which always sounds like a dental plan to me), thought you guys were supposed to do this a little quicker in that case (or something along those lines). and now he has to remake the appointment. and he gets snarky with me several times. in fact at one point he stops himself and says, was that snarky? i'm sorry.

we were both kinda riding the edge, trying to be basically human to each other. but i did maintain my cool through the rest of the conversation. but see, what happened was, i walked into the store without an appointment. and this effectively puts me outside the swim lanes. and so, apparently, this causes dissonance in the mind of any Apple Store employee i talk to. they just can't handle it.

oh and btw what i learned was that, when doing a "quick drop", tell them you are a procare member, NOT a guest. cuz that way they will click the Member button on the web application screen instead of the Guest button. and then things will, theoretically, go faster.

so after putting in my data multiple times (like, i don't know, four or five times including associating my apple id with my procare id, which somehow was never done before) we finally get the order put into the system, and away goes my wife's macbook into the bowels of the store.

it has been, i think, eighteen days from that day. and to my knowledge nothing meaninful has happened yet.

which is why i have not written anything about this from before, because i figured it would save me some time to just write it all up at once.

but i've apparently gone inside the badlands. i'm in the Apple Store behind the Apple store. i'm at the part where various Apple employees try to walk me from street corner to street corner. but no one is really handing off anything. nothing is really happening. like i'm unstuck in time, or, i dont' know. pick your own vonnegut/kafka metaphor.

of course this is all ridiculous. it's not like anyone is losing any limbs, or anyone is dying. it's not like my parents innocently named me Harry Potter. the Apple Store didn't give me cancer. i must say though i'm glad my cholesterol is coming down because they might have given me a mild infarction or two somewhere along the way.

so the long boring stupid story is that, some days later they call and say that the machine needs hardware replacement parts. (see i totally knew that. i'd done my homework.) and they would have to ship it off somewhere, send it to a "depot" of some kind, as they didn't have the parts in stock. and did they want me to make a back up of the data?

so i go by the store, since this is all on my voice mail, and also whenever i call them back the phone rings and rings and no one picks it up. and i tell them, no, i don't need a backup. just please send it off so i can get it back and return it to my wife and get my macbook back from her and then i can install Notes 8.5 and i can go on with my life, get back to work on my novel, and basically return to normal. or what passes for normal for me, anyway.

ok so i didn't really tell them all of that. but that's what i'm thinking.

so they are all like, ok cool, we'll do that then.

and then a week later someone leaves me another voice mail. with the same message. they are going to ship it off, but, do i want them to back up the data first? just in case something goes wrong or they have to replace the hard drive.

i thought it was the same voice mail from before. i seriously didn't think it was a new one. and btw the last conversation we had with them, which was last night, they admitted it was the logic board. which has nothing to do with the hard drive. but let's forget about that for now. and get back to the 99 dollars they apparently really, really, reeeeally want to charge me to back up the data that they know i do not need backed up.

so i go by the store. in person. i talk to a guy in a cool orange t-shirt. i get his card. and i say, you know, it's funny. i had the same exact conversation with a guy, right here in this spot, a week ago. the same one! we are talking about exactly the same thing. we are talking about the fact that i don't want my data backed up. i just want you to send the machine off for repairs. that's all. no data backup needed, just send the machine off. now. thanks.

i was very nice. very polite. i smiled as often as i could. i just want to point that out. because after a while i get to thinking, this is just bad karma. i've done something wrong and i deserve what i'm getting. i was mean to an Apple employee who wasn't listening to me and wanted to unjustly charge me money for something that was not my fault. who just wanted me to line up and get into the Apple Certified Swim Lanes, where as much as possible Apple gets to push the hard work of fixing their broken shite onto their customers, and where possible, they get to charge us for things we don't need and should not have to pay for.

but i digress.

so this time i get a business card. the card is somewhere else and i don't remember his name and that is probably good because otherwise i'd likely blog it right now. but i have a business card and until last night it was squirreled away in my wallet.

so then today or yesterday or maybe wednesday (today at the very latest) i should, from the time of my last redundant conversation, be picking up the machine, with its new logic board. except i'm not.

do you know why not?

because yesterday morning, i got a voice mail asking if they wanted me to have them back up the data. because they needed to ship the computer off to a depot, where they can replace the hardware that needs replaced, because they are not able to fix the problem themselves. and this time he kindly leaves the price tag for me on the voice mail, in a cheerful, blustery voice. the cost is 99 dollars, and can i get back to them and let them know.

see how they did that?

lol!!

i mean that is just awesome. its like they've been up night after night reading Kafka, and figuring out how they can make the Apple Store more Kafkaesque. i mean it's only an Apple Store. how much harm can they really do to the world? they could get as Kafkaesque as they want and really, probably, no one would be harmed, per se. they aren't going to give me H1N1 just because they ship my laptop off to, er, Antarctica? by mistake or something. it's all ok cuz they all wear these really great t-shirts and stuff.

ok. so. this is the part where i make a declaration!

i'm never buying anything from Apple ever again. the Apple stock price can climb all the way to the moon, large swaths of which Apple will undoubtedly one day own, but i don't care. i might just give up computers altogether. eventually. at some point in the distant future. or, whatever.

i'm likely not going to blog about this again. so this is the end. ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/a-tale-of-two-macs.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/a-tale-of-two-macs.htm?opendocument&comments good news bad news Fri, 2 Oct 2009 09:23:53 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/good-news-bad-news.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/good-news-bad-news.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/good-news-bad-news.htm
it turns out the bad news is that what he was calling to tell me was that i forgot to initial a checkbox allowing them to charge me one hundred dollars for diagnosing whatever was wrong with my machine.

omfg...

they are trying, really hard, to lose a customer.

let me put this another way.

they called me. during dinner time. to scold me. as though i were an idiot child.

i had to tell the poor guy who i unloaded on not to take it personally. cuz as i told him, "you are the fourth or fifth person i've spoken to about this issue and i'm really pissed off". just so he would understand that the undercurrent of anger on my side of the equation wasn't anything against him in particular. and then i directed him to the place on the form in question where a manager had initialed saying there would be no charge.

hello? anyone? fucking? in there?

his response? he said he was directed by a manager to call me up and inform me that unless i came in and initialed that check box, that they would not be working on my machine.

this is the part where i get surly.

un. fucking. believable. the sheer arrogance is completely astounding.

dear apple store managers, everywhere in the world, and especially in Tampa, Florida.

you do not get to call me up and harass me. ever. you don't get to have your "administrators" (or whatever you call them - geniuses? hahahahaha) call me up and tell me that from now on i will be required to initial that check box. let me fill you in, all you Apple store managers who are undoubtedly completely and blissfully unaware of this blog entry, that relationships with customers are just like all relationships. there is give and take. it is ALWAYS A NEGOTIATION. you don't get to set arbitrary rules, no matter how great your hardware is.

have you got that part? get smarter already. christ on fucking crackers.

i'm pretty sure that by the end of the conversation he'd said he was going to work on the machine. although i'm not 100% certain. i suppose i'll find out eventually.

how much worse can this get? i've been patronized by the good people at the Apple store for the last time. i can tell you that for sure. i'm really not sure at this moment what i'm going to do when i walk into their store to pick up the machine. i may walk out with my money back instead. not sure how i can even use the machine with any semblance of joy after this.

maybe i'm getting old. but it seems as though we keep lowering the bar, and lowering it further and further, and when we've got it lowered that far, we lower it some more. i want to teach people how to start thinking. i want to show them there is a better way to live. maybe that's arrogance on my part? i don't know. but i don't think it is.

last night my daughter read me "a couple of stories". she's doing so great with that. i am continually astounded at how many words she knows, and even words she isn't sure of, she often figures out very quickly. she is truly mastering reading. i'm incredibly proud. can you tell? so in between stories i said to her, hey if you get to read me stories, i get to read you a poem. so i did, and wouldn't you know it, i turned to a Rilke poem that kind of put things in perspective. here is an excerpt from The Man Watching:

What we choose to fight with is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!

... When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.

my "triumph" over the situation with the computer definitely makes me small. i'm not sure there is even a triumph there. it's such a stupid thing. i ought to be out wrestling with angels instead:

If we would only let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

...whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

anyway. maybe that's the universe or god or whatever you want to call it (myself? or just plain old Rilke) telling me, i've got better things to worry about than this. ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/good-news-bad-news.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/good-news-bad-news.htm?opendocument&comments new macbook, bad experience Thu, 1 Oct 2009 17:38:32 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/macbook.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/macbook.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/macbook.htm
really nice machine. i was sooooo excited when i saw the keyboard back lighting. omg i love that sh1t. it's the little things. i love the aluminum body, just everything. it's wonderful and i can't wait to try Notes 8.5.1 on it.

got it home, ported my data from my old macbook over. on my old macbook (which still works as long as it is plugged in - needs a new battery i guess - for the second time) the data is encrypted with FileVault.

all the data got ported over. i didn't have a fire wire cable around so i used the network cable and it worked fine. or so i thought.

once the data was on the new machine, i tried logging into my account. of course this would be the same account i had on the old machine. i've typed the password about a zillion times, no way i've forgotten it.

so i type it in and it comes back with an error. something about FileVault (don't remember now the wording).

so i google the error and after searching some i finally find what looks like the right set of instructions.

the first thing i have to do is figure out how to enable root level access on the machine. then there were five or six more tasks after that, all looking at least that herculean.

ack.

so, hey i just bought the machine two days ago right? i also bought AppleCare to go with it (don't leave the store without it man, trust me on that one), and i am a ProCare member (don't get me started on ProCare - those f$kers won't even look at your machine without paying for it - a hundred bucks a year!!), and i've bought, let's see now, including this new machine, four Apple laptops, one iMac, and two iPods over the years.

they ought to roll out the red carpet for a customer like me, right?

not so much.

first off, the first tech who looks at the machine says, oh, we'll just change your password and you'll be all set. he wasn't looking at the error. he wasn't actually reading it.

see how i did that? cuz ya know, when there are errors on the screen, i like to, you know, actually read them. i'm curious like that.

then i explain to the tech guy (i'm using the term lightly at this point) how i already looked up the error and told him how the first instruction was to enable root level access on the machine. he looks at me with slight terror, his eyes getting sort of big and wide, pupils dilating (no i'm not making this up or embellishing) and says, ooohhh, it's a File Vault error. we'll have to check it in and have them look at it.

so we do that. and he says someone will call me.

now having tried to call the Apple store one time and having been completely befuddled and denied by their automated telephone system, i realized that this was a "don't call us we'll call you" kind of scenario. but i'm a patient guy. even when it comes to the long awaited MacBook Pro (insert gilded choirs of angels singing hallelujah here - i've really wanted one of these machines for a LONG time), i can be patient with them while someone monkeys around with the significant task of getting FileVault to give up its encrypted ghost. i mean, i figure that is going to take someone with both brains and time some significant effort to come to grips with. right?

so it's been two days and i haven't heard anything. no calls from either confident or frantic tech people. nothing. i'm starting to get nervous. so i go into the store on my lunch break and give them the repair number and they disappear. for a while. i start to realize right then - ah, no one has even looked at it yet.

another tech fellow comes out. he is introduced to me as their "administrator". um, yeah, not sure what that means in the context of an Apple store. but i'm not impressed. by the title anyway. i'm more than willing to be impressed by his technical skills. but he simply says, we are going to have to wipe the drive and charge you 85 dollars.

now wiping the drive doesn't bother me. i can just disable FileVault on the old machine and push the data back over again. no biggie, right? but the 85 dollar charge? THAT i have a problem with.

it isn't MY fault that "Snow Leopard" can't handle the encrypted data. it isn't my fault that their software can't, in this instance, talk to their own software. but the fellow is insistent.

so i start to get surly. he brings out another geek. oh my she looks very smart and very geeky. just the sort of person who can listen to the problem's description and make an intelligent assessment of the situation. right? right?

not so much. she listens to me talk to the fellow. i explain again what happened. by now it is painfully clear than no one on their "technical staff" has even thought to GOOGLE the error message that they clearly do not understand. they don't get it. talking to them is like, well, talking to a deer that has it's eyes caught in the headlights. no one is home. all the fellow can do is to repeat his assertion that because it is a "software problem" (apparently these are magical words that mean "we automatically get to charge money") and they are going to levy their 85 dollar fine. no. matter. what. cuz ya know, i'm so stupid, pushing their bright shiny buttons on their perfect, beautiful screens, and so this means i obviously deserve to pay them for the privilege when the machine locks up tighter than a.. well something that is locked up really tight. uh, davie jones locker? or something?

anyhoo.

now. now............ he's got me steaming mad. this is the kind of mad i just don't really GET any more. i've grown up a lot. honest. but i'm losing it at this point. i say to him, WE ARE DONE HERE. YOU ARE GOING TO TAKE THIS COMPUTER BACK AND YOU ARE GOING TO GIVE ME A FULL REFUND.

and i put the computer down on one of the many large wooden desks that now populate the new fangled store. and we stand there and he and the geeky girl who is supposed to be All That sort of stare at the computer, and stare at me, and finally he picks it up and says, "OK" with a hint of triumph in his voice, as though he's won some sort of argument he was really hoping he WOULD in fact win. or... something. by this time i'm not at all convinced i can accurately predict what he might be thinking, since i'm not entirely sure he IS thinking. i mean i thought i could at least assume if not predict rational customer service. am i crazy?

and so he goes over to the register where they are now going to give me my money back. theoretically.

now at this point i am ready to disavow All Things Apple. For Fucking Forever. all over an 85 dollar charge. but the charge is so unwarranted and unbelievably stupid, and the service has been so painfully slow and so painfully unintelligent. and i expect more from Apple. i'm sorry, shame on me apparently, but i just do expect more from them. because their machines rock. and because they look so nice. and because they cost a lot of money. (that last one is kinda important methinks.)

now i know better.

so i suppose in order to do a refund, he's got to go and get the manager. and she comes out. and she's very nice and she wants very much to help me and figure out my problem. so NOW after all of THAT, i finally have someone who, holy crap, is actually listening to me. i guess threatening to return the merchandise will do that?

she doesn't understand the problem i don't think, she even looks at me with some suspicion, and says that they haven't seen that problem before, and that they have transferred data from some machines that had FileVault installed, but... well, i guess she decides to take my word for it. maybe it's my earnest insistence that i've been wronged. maybe it's that, over and over again, i am able to explain the problem logically. maybe it's that i'm pissed off. really bad, by now. maybe it's that i suggest to her that she can GOOGLE THE ERROR AND SEE THE RESOLUTION ON THEIR OWN F@#$@#$@ING WEB SITE???

who knows what part of my tale (the one i've burned up my entire lunch hour telling to various suspicious, uncaring, and unthinking people, people who think that whenever they smile at me, i'm supposed to just jangle up 85 bucks out of my pocket like a broken one armed bandit), finally gets through to her.

her solution? they'll wipe the data for me without charge. i tell her i've got a ProCare card. cuz i know this is the part where no one looks at my new MBP for days or weeks. she says, oh that's good it would have been 3 to 5 business days before they could have turned it around without ProCare. but since i do in fact have it, they can get it done in 1 to 2 business days instead.

i think to myself, yeah, it's been sitting in the back room without anyone even looking at it for two days. already. right? right? but i'm emotionally spent, i've already totally lost it once, let it go, let it go.

i told this story to a friend of mine at work. he said, thanks for telling me that. i'm never buying Apple.

i love Apple computers. i've watched my daughter do amazing things with her iMac that i know she would not have been able to do with a PC. but god almighty frankenchrist people. Apple really needs to train their people on THINKING PROACTIVELY and on giving good customer service and on LISTENING CAREFULLY and on RESEARCHING THINGS THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

the manager, who was a sweet girl in her way, expected me to thank her. she gave me this look, saying something along the lines of how she had helped me, and it was obvious, albeit unspoken, that she expected me to thank her. i was so worn out at that moment that i did just that. i said "thank you" and walked out.

but what she didn't realize is that she did the absolute MINIMUM to keep me coming back. and i do mean the minimum. she basically came out and did some triage, mostly treating me with respect but here and there lapsing into suspicion or some kind of wariness. and then had the, god what do you call it, temerity? to expect to be thanked for what she did. as though LISTENING INTELLIGENTLY is a SERVICE that goes beyond the call of duty.

but that isn't enough. not by a long shot, when you have already been treated the way i was, after spending close to 1,600 dollars on the machine in question.

i'm disappointed and a bit shocked.

and i'm waiting, i guess for two days, to hear back from them. i fully expect to have to go visit them before they call me, but maybe they'll surprise me. we'll see. ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/macbook.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/macbook.htm?opendocument&comments today´s breakfast Thu, 3 Sep 2009 10:25:20 -0400 http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/todays-breakfast.htm jonvon http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/todays-breakfast.htm?opendocument&comments http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/todays-breakfast.htm
here is the recipe for the smoothie:

one cup strawberries
half cup blueberries
two bananas
seven leaves of romaine lettuce.
1 cup of water.

blend...

and that's it! simple to make, tastes great, and very cleansing. i added the blueberries for the antioxidant boost, you can also make it without them and it tastes great that way too. romaine lettuce has a high chlorophyll content which is very cleansing/detoxifying.

i'm sort of slowly heading toward going "raw" as a vegan. this is the next step on the journey for me - one i've known i was going to take but haven't had the time yet or the inclination to follow. but i'm getting there, it feels like it is time to start moving that direction. so i started reading this book:

12 Steps to Raw Foods: How to End Your Dependency on Cooked Food

i don't know why but i had a good feeling about this book. it hasn't disappointed. i love the way it is written, and i love the stories mrs. boutenko tells about her own family's history. basically the short story is, they all had really awful health problems. they did the raw vegan thing and everyone started feeling better, rather dramatically. she had a diabetic son for instance who was cured, her asthmatic daughter? also cured. she and her husband had all sorts of problems - all cured by eating raw, vegan foods.

but then they ran into problems after being raw vegans for nine years. it seemed their diet wasn't quite cutting it. so they added in greens, lots of greens, and things got better again.

so i'm experimenting with the green smoothies. i figure its a great way to start inching my way toward going raw. moving away from cooked foods is i think a bigger deal than i imagined it would be. it turns out there are opiates created by cooking food. grilled meat for instance has highly addictive toxic substances that are also found in cigarettes. 100 grams worth of grilled meat equals 800 cigarettes worth of these toxic addictive chemicals.

but this addictive property of cooked food isn't just limited to meat. it doesn't matter what kind of food it is, when you cook it, addictive chemicals that often have opiate effects, are created. here are a few other things i've learned about cooking food:

- many fats cooked at temperatures over 300 degrees turn into trans fats. different fats have different temperatures at which they go toxic.

- vegetables and fruits naturally contain enzymes that help digestion. at temperatures over 118 degrees, the enzymes disappear. (there is a restaurant in orlando called Cafe 118 for this very reason). when the enzymes disappear, the body has to make up for it by manufacturing enzymes to digest the food. this is hard on the pancreas and is stressful. i read recently that the enzymes created by the pancreas go around killing cancer cells. by diverting them to digestive activities, our ability to fight cancer is limited.

- many other vitamins and nutrients disappear in even light cooking. for instance falcarinol, a cancer fighting nutrient found in carrots, is halved when carrots are blanched.

- the pH of foods changes when foods are cooked. they become more acidic. the more acidic a food is, the harder it is on the body. one way the body adjusts by pulling calcium out of the bones to change the pH back to where it needs to be. ever notice Tums and Rolaids are made mostly of calcium? there's a good reason for that. raw foods are much more alkaline. the blood stream has a certain pH it has to maintain - it's basic survival. so the body will do everything it can to adjust to whatever dietary choices we make.

so... for all of these reasons - the pH of foods, toxic chemicals created by cooking, nutrient density, and the resulting health and wellness of eating raw - i want to move in this direction.

honestly it feels like moving toward a completely raw diet is going to be harder than going vegan was. but i am already experiencing benefits from eating the green smoothies. so... i'm going to continue experimenting in that direction.

if you want to read more, some of it is in the book i linked to above, and some of it is in the Thrive book i blogged about before. ]]> http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dxcomments/todays-breakfast.htm http://jonvon.net/jonvon/blog/blog.nsf/dx/todays-breakfast.htm?opendocument&comments