Lotus Notes on USB

Notes on a USB drive.

I have mentioned this before, but must mention it again. As I am no longer allowed to use my USB drive at work anymore, although that is all I used it for, I have a work supplied USB drive. I had to go back and refer to the release notes (p.25-28) to remember how to kickoff the install.

In a nutshell go to a command prompt and change to the drive and directory that your Notes Client setup file is in and type the following command:

setup /a /v"NOMAD=1 TARGETDIR=G:\ /qb+"


Replace G with whatever drive letter your USB device is recognized as. You may want to refer to the documentation to learn more about setting up the autorun.

Of course, to get the most out of it you'll want to check out Dec's post that will get you all setup to run Designer and Administrator from the USB drive as well, simply by copying over admin.exe, designer.exe, events4.ntf, and domadmin.ntf.

Now one thing that I learned Friday, that is mentioned in the documentation is that not all USB drives are created equal. It appears my personal SanDisk Cruzer Titanium kicks butt compared to the cheap one that work purchased. Oh well. The first attempt at installing Notes on the new drive was taking so long I had to cancel it as I was leaving for the day. It came up estimating 2 hours for the install. Maybe I'll have time to get it done sometime tomorrow. My biggest worry is if it takes that long to install on the new drive, will it run worth anything on it. Installing on my Sandisk Cruzer Titanium did not appear to take much more time than a regular install and running from it did not appear much different than running from the hard drive. Once I get Notes installed on the new one and get to try it out I'll post how well it actually runs from it.

Ford Five Hundred

I hear there is talk about rebadging the Ford Five Hundred and Freestyle with the Taurus name. The Taurus name may have been good to Ford in the past, but my opinion is they should stick with Five Hundred and Freestyle. I think the old Taurus name and model range would align better with the Fusion anyway, although I would not recommend rebadging the Fusion either.

Ford, if you want to re-use the name, put it on something brand new and don't rebadge something you already have on the market.

Marketing via the web.

Cool the way people/companies use technology. I have had more than one instance where I have mentioned or said something about a product or company and the next thing you know I hear about it or receive a response about it. I think I have mentioned it before, but there are some companies and people out there that get the marketing side of it all and utilize the tools to help them. In this instance I don't know 100% sure that it was Jonathon Crow, Vice President of Marketing for ThinkFree that left the comment on my blog, but that would be my guess. I believe he is also the one responsible for the posts by Jonathon on ThinkFree's blog.

Without a tool like the Internet I know I would never come in contact with the Jonathon's, Ed's, Blake's and others of such companies.

There are multiple things out there to help companies keep tabs on what people are saying about them. Google, Icerocket, Bloglines, and Topix are just a few that quickly come to mind. Simply put your company name in under such blog or news searches and then subscribe to the results via your favorite RSS reader.

I recieved a comment about Pixilive right after commenting about the Picasa Web Album limits growing and following that post on how great it was that the limits had grown, how I wasn't as pleased that it now limits pics from the blog perspective. It couldn't totally be coincidence that I received such a comment.

Thinkfree Maintenance

It would be nice if they would have this display when going to any linked documents on the site as well. I had to go to the main page to get the message that helped me figured out why the linked document didn't seem to be working.

Blogger - Limit on Pics

What happened to ability to endlessly post images to your blog? Now my blog pics are competing for space with my Picasa photos as the photos uploaded via Blogger end up you my Picasa Web Album and count against it's limit.

Per Blogger Help:

Images and photos that are uploaded through Blogger get stored in your Picasa Web Albums, which are part of your Google Account. The number of images you can upload is therefore dependent on the amount of space you are using on Picasa Web Albums. To find out how much space you have available, please see these instructions.

If you would like to purchase more storage space, the Picasa Web Albums help center can tell you how.

Blogger & Podcaster (B&P)

Once you setup an account you can add your blogs & podcasts to their free directory (B & P Guide). Not real sure why only three of the four I added are listed. As there aren't tons in the list, I am guessing I must be one of the early ones to get to their site and grab an online copy of Blogger & Podcaster.

Blogger & Podcaster

Have you picked up your copy of the inaugural issue of Blogger and Podcaster?



The online version utilizes Olive Software's ActiveMagazine.

Triglycerides

It has been close to three weeks since my last trip to the doctor. It was a follow up from a couple of weeks before that. My stomach was cramping a bit and I wanted to make sure it wasn't going to be a flair up of the Acute Diverticulitis or anything of that nature. They had me drink the nasty stuff, do the MRI thing and everything came back looking good. They said I probably just had some kind of bug. They also did some blood work and said a couple of the liver related counts were real close to borderline, so when I was to come back and see the doctor a couple of weeks later they wanted to do some more blood work to see if the bug might have thrown things off a bit or if something else was going on. So seven vials of blood and three weeks later I got the first results today. Everything looks good, but my triglyceride count was on the high side, so they told me to follow up with my family physician on it. They stated that the other blood test can take up to six weeks for the results, so I will be getting more results at some point.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007

Looking for info on SharePoint Designer. You might want to check out the six-part series on getting the most out of SharePoint Designer 2007. I would say it goes beyond my needs or possibly better stated, beyond my knowledge, incorporating in CSS, ASP.NET, etc.

Outlook 2007 Notifications

Here is one of my favorite features in Outlook 2007. Setting up notifications via my MSN account to send reminders to my cell phone. You can also set rules for forwarding e-mails, shown here it will forward e-mails marked with high importance (of course I changed the phone number for display purposes).

Busy Busy

My posts seem to be getting further and further between. It seems like there are several more things to do at work each day and the boys track has been keeping us running (pun intended). The track will be over early next month, but not sure work will slow down.

JC Sports
LC Sports

I also had a few of my photos in our local newspaper this weekend. They were photos used by a local business of their facility. They used the photos in their ad promoting their Open House next weekend.

The Run for the Presidency

A listing and links to some candidates/potential candidates for President in 2008. I'll add more as I get time.

Democratic Candidates


Joe Biden - Democrat


Hillary Clinton - Democrat


Chris Dodd - Democrat


John Edwards - Democrat


Al Gore - Democrat (a couple of draft sites 1 2 and possibly another site to watch 3)


Mike Gravel - Democrat


Dennis Kucinich - Democrat


Barack Obama - Democrat


Bill Richardson - Democrat


Tom Vilsack - Democrat

Republican Candidates


Sam Brownback - Republican


John Cox - Republican


Jim Gilmore - Republican


Rudy Giuliani - Republican


Duncan Hunter - Republican


John McCain - Republican


Mitt Romney - Republican


Fred Dalton Thompson - Republican (a couple of draft sites 1 2)


Tommy Thompson - Republican

Green Party Candidates


Elaine Brown

Libertarian Party Candidates


Bob Jackson


Steve Kubby


George Phillies


Christine Smith


Doug Stanhope


Kent McManigal

Picasa Web Albums

I like the fact that Picasa Web Albums upped their free storage and you still have the option to upgrade if you like.

More free storage

We've upped the free storage quota to 1GB (and counting!). That's enough room to post and share around 4,000 standard resolution photos. Need more storage space? Upgrade

It gives me more room to post pics for my JC Sports site.

04-03-2007 Jays vs Kewpies

Ringtone

I noticed that Mazda had a link on their site that said download Zoom Zoom Ringtone.



I thought, I'll see what it sounds like, that is until I clicked the link and it took me to MIDIringtones where they want you to pay $1.99 for the ringtone. Come on Mazda, you must not get it. You want to give something like that away free, to get Mazda fans playing it everywhere. Talk about the ability for some cheap advertising. Oh well, their loss.

X-Stop - Lumbar Spinal Stenosis

For those with certain back ailments, the X-Stop sounds promising.



Find more info here.

Outlook 2007

Trying to get up to speed with Outlook 2007? This demo might help a bit.

Getting Real

Have you looked at "Getting Real"?

Excerpt:

Getting Real is a smaller, faster, better way to build software.

Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.

Getting real is less. Less mass, less software, less features, less paperwork, less of everything that's not essential (and most of what you think is essential actually isn't).

Getting Real is staying small and being agile.

Getting Real starts with the interface, the real screens that people are going to use. It begins with what the customer actually experiences and builds backwards from there. This lets you get the interface right before you get the software wrong.

Getting Real is about iterations and lowering the cost of change. Getting Real is all about launching, tweaking, and constantly improving which makes it a perfect approach for web-based software.

Getting Real delivers just what customers need and eliminates anything they don't.

We do some of this with some of our web apps today. I agree mocking the interface up is a nice place to start. The only place that I begin to feel a little uneasy is when you get down to iterations, which sounds a bit like the project that will never end. I need to find time to read through the whole thing and see how that is handled in Getting Real.

Of course, this all sounds a bit more unstructured than the SDLC (Software Development LifeCycle) guidelines they are trying to instill at work. I am just not 100% sure how well that structure fits with today's world of I want instant gratification. I guess we'll find out.

Paint.NET

Version 3.05 is out now. As a lot of people talk about the Web 2.0 look. I would have to say that Paint.NET is kind of following that trend, what one might call App 2.0 or App 3.0 on the interface. See the example below.



Maybe I should check the forum to see if anyone agrees, but I don't like the way that the newer versions have dropped having the first item in the list highlighted as use to be the case. For resizing it was handy to simply hit Image and Enter to Crop to Selection since it was already highlighted. I know I should just get use to hitting Ctrl+Shift+X, but I kind of got use to the other way. Office 2007 is making me learn some new ways of doing things I use to do too, so Paint.NET is not the only one.