The preceeding weekend entailed a full day commitment entertaining a friend that was in from out of town and then continued work on taxes as they were due on Tuesday of course (and I had delayed knowing I had to pay). First thing Monday morning, not long after the Viriginia Tech tragedy had begun, I found out my paternal grandfather had died. Needless to say that caused a fair amount of chaos in what was already looking like a busy week. After returning from the funeral Wednesday night, I woke up Thursday not feeling well and got progressively sicker through the day.

This past weekend already had a minimum full-day commitment (roadtrip) for the christening of my godson which I had to attend while still sick. Because the sinus problems have continued and I've felt very drained for most of this week, I'm still catching up with blog reading at this point, much less writing, given there was some major action in the Domino Blogosphere last week while I was pretty much completely out of touch.

The good news is the primary project I've been working on is drawing to a close, and I'm going to be able to catch up on some of the other projects I've been neglecting, so there should be much more activity here from this point on. I hope everyone has a great weekend.

Ok, if you read my blog, you probably read Rocky's so you probably already heard that Bob Balaban is blogging now. No, not that Bob Balaban, but rather the guy who brought Lotusscript to Notes. Since his new job at IBM is to make Domino a "kick-ass development platform again." Because I am developer, his blog may very well be my new favorite in no time at all.

Also new to the blogosphere over at RezAir is an old colleague and friend who has been working with Notes/Domino since way back in the version 3 days just like myself. As you'll see, in addition to being a regular geek, Marc's a bit of a flight geek too. Perhaps he'll fit some Notes entries in between his air travel posts.

Via Nick Carr, Mike Gotta and others comes news of a new Forrester report on Web 2.0 that reveals 61% of 119 CIOs surveyed would prefer a suite of social software solutions from an established enterprise software vendor rather than a piecemeal approach using single function Web 2.0 technology from startups.

This is a strong validation of IBM's strategy with the upcoming Lotus Connections social software suite. Lotus Connections provides blogs, profiles, social bookmarks, communities and activities in an integrated platform, any single piece of which could be used separately but are even more valuable when used in concert. Couple those tools with Sametime awareness and instant messaging and you have a superior toolset for leveraging newly discovered resources and knowledge immediately.

One small issue for IBM is that one of the surveyed technologies — wikis &mdash: is not part of Connections, although they are part of Lotus Quickr.
Technorati: Lotus+Connections, Social+Software, Enterprise+2.0

I recently received a jury summons. It was marked as Standby, as were the two other summons I have received since living in this location in Atlanta. As the previous times my standby group had been not required, I figured the third time would be the charm. Indeed, that was the case and I wasted spent all morning waiting to see if I would be needed/assigned to a jury pool. I hit the jackpot (the odds were very much against me) after lunch and went to a courtroom for voir dire which is lawyer talk for "which of you suckers will vote my way?" Sadly, they did not complete the process today which means I have to go back tomorrow for more of the same. If I'm really lucky, I could be stuck in a trial for a week!

Of course if mentioned any details about the case here, I could be disqualified.... hmmmm.. sooo tempting.

I am just kidding. Jury duty is an essential part of our civic duty and a key part of our US Constitutional guarantees for individual rights. It did come at a very inopportune time however, as I had plenty of regular work to do, plus Notes 8 beta testing, a server to configure for Domino 8 testing, trying to get better up to speed on plug-in development as well as needing to explore other development platforms too. *sigh* Anyway, I promise some real live Notes, Domino, and generally technical posts on here soon.

Via Google Blog, last week the US Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading on 35 stocks frequently pumped by spam email. Looking over the list of companies, I recognized a few names that I'd seen slip into my inbox. Personally, I don't understand people who fall for these pump and dump emails; just who buys stocks based on a random email from a person that they don't know?

I like the idea, but it would be even more interesting to see the SEC go further and set up a reporting mechanism or even a honeypot or spamtrap that filters for stock symbols and triggers a suspension automatically based on a certain number of appearances, much like the circuit breakers on automated trades.
Technorati: Antispam