MWLUG Belated post

I am ashamed to admit it but I took some time off to just ...not...do...a...thing while in Chicago for work, which also meant blogging.

Weird to "not do anything" but still a great time had by all.

I got to Chicago early on wen. so I could do a webex for a client on migrating from Lotus Teamroom to Lotus Quickr and will repeat it next for the CEO, so it went well. In spite of my having to bypass the IBM firewall and hack a router and some other information. Luckily IBM Chicago is filled with friendly people and very helpful staff so to everyone on the 6th Floor, thanks again for helping me and Donna I didn't tell anyone the code, I promise.

When I arrived I found Alex Kassabov and John Head busy with their pre-MWLUG upgrade sessions which were well attended and equally well appreciated by the attendees.

Shortly helped Gregg Eldred (more posted by greg on his blog) bypass IBM security to be allowed into the building, evidently asking for Ed Brill is not enough. And we proceeded to help Richard Moy (more is posted by Richard on his blog) and team get set up for the next day.

An impressive list of speakers and attendees, about 100-125 people came in the end.

Thursday morning was at IBM after my mile walk to the office and setting up for everyone, I was video taping the keynote from Ed Brill. Due to mechanical difficulty missed the introductions but did get Ed videotaped, look for it to be posted soon.

Ed accepted questions from the crowd and for a person who just arrived from Australia via Hawaii he was in great form and not falling asleep on us at all and even stayed to meet with people afterward.

Then it was off to one of the sessions, I was interested in Kim Greene's session and glad I could make part of it, although my netbook gave me it's 1st BSOD since I owned it. 2 hours to session, not a good thing. As it turns out, it did cause my demo problems.

Over lunch Kim, Bill Machilsky and I discussed some items of technical nature, but also what makes us like what we do and how we do it and how to teach the next generation. More on that in another post.

Then for my session I was prepared to video tape it as outside of my Lotusphere sessions I rarely get myself on video. All set up and ready to go....and the netbook fails me.

I should say the projector in the room and my netbook had words and well, the netbook lost. I had to go to plan B, instead of doing demo's while discussing topics I had to hold everything until the end. It seems there was no good resolution to work with that I could see the URL line so held it off. Plus my Netbook's server seemed to be in a "frozen" mode while swapping between internet documents enabled.

Remember this for Lotusphere, get to A/V check early! I have faith in my abstracts being accepted this year, the power of positive thinking and vision, start with the end in mind.

So we discussed URL's, how exciting I know, but in an SMB URL's and Sametime, Traveler, Quickr, iNotes, Mail Redirection and more gets tricky sometimes. Found a number of people in need of Mail Redirection help, but mostly about clustering maybe an Ideajam is out there on this already. One side of the room was really into the discussion, the other was less zealous in their discussion.

One lucky winner received a R8 nerd hat I had from the LotusUserGroup for pointing out the graphic on the default Domino 8.5 homepage shows 4 people without heads.


After my session we took an open air bus to the boat ride of the architecture of Chicago. Having not been to Chicago before it is very impressive and something New York is not...clean.

Later that night we enjoyed some food and drinks and some of us stayed up to watch the Dolphins beat the Bucs, well I did, the others with me discussed more business and life as we know it. But all good fun and a nice reminder of why we all do what we do and like Lotus so much.

I left early Friday, Thursday was my wife's birthday and had to run.

My thanks to Richard for putting it all together and I understand next year's is in Cleveland and I look forward to it.