mattandjess.net - as you wish: February 2006 Archives

February 25, 2006

Reboot the "Rhode" scholar
Posted by Jess in Geek Humor

Reboot is finally earning those biscuits.

Her first foray into Canine Good Citizenship is to participate volunteering in the "Reading With Rover" after school programs in a nearby school. Every week, her and I go to the school, and little girls and boys take turns petting her while the others read to her.

We've been having fun so far, the worst that's happened so far is that Reboot was put in a classroom that was learning about balls; footballs, soccer balls, and tennis balls all over the place, and a very short leash! She's also wet-willied a few kids, she's good at sneak-attack kisses, and, well, she loves people. What can you do?

Most of our friends can attest to the way we treat Reboot. She's her own little person, basically. And she understands. One look in her eyes can display a level of understanding that can't be described.

There's only one problem that arises when you talk to your dog on a regular basis like a regular person - the dog gains the same vocabulary as a regular person, which, in Reboot terms, can really come back to bite you in the ass sometimes.

The only way that Matt and I have found to overcome and circumvent this particular quandary is to partake in attempts to confound her.

That is, speak in really big words so she doesn't understand what we're really saying.

To the untrained eye, Matt and I could appear to have a large vocabulary while we patter around the house on a daily basis. We're not trying to be pretentious. We're not trying to better ourselves for the good of humanity. Our cause isn't even as noble as trying to finish the New York Times Sunday crossword. They'd have to realize it's simply a matter of trying to outwit the dog.

"That was really good. Should I give her a special treat for that?" becomes "The trick was performed exemplarily! Would the pronounless canine be obliged to receive a confectionary-enjoyment mechanism?"

Of course, this verbal trickery can only last so long until she's so smart that she's quietly curing cancer in the basement or we've simply run out of words in our pocket thesauri. Ad interim, we can perdure for the interregnum.

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February 23, 2006

Show n Tell Thursday
Posted by Don McNally in Guest Bloggers

Here's my first contribution to this new web-wide feature. It took me a while to come up with something small that I thought may be useful. This is a kinda sorta pseudo-relational behavior you can incorporate into a view.

Say you have a set of response documents that contain the fields you want to display in a view. But, instead of opening those documents when they are clicked, you would rather open their parent document. And you display the response documents in other views, but in those views you want to open the response document (so you don't want to put code in the QueryOpen of the response form). What do you do?

Put this code in the QueryOpenDocument event of the view and the parent document will open instead of the document that you double-clicked to open.

UPDATE: I added some error handling for orphans, unreadable parents and replication conflicts. Don't know why I didn't think of it, other than that we hadn't run into those problems in the view where I used the code.


Sub Queryopendocument(Source As Notesuiview, Continue As Variant)
	Dim doc As NotesDocument
	Dim docParent As NotesDocument
	Dim ws As New NotesUIWorkspace
	Dim openIt As Integer
	
	openIt = False
	Set doc = Source.Documents.GetFirstDocument
	If doc.IsResponse Then
		Continue = False
		If doc.HasItem("$Conflict") Then
			Messagebox "Opening replication conflicts is not allowed in this view",48,"Open Document"
			Exit Sub
		End If
		Set docParent = doc.ParentDatabase.GetDocumentByUNID(doc.ParentDocumentUNID)
		If docParent Is Nothing Then
			openIt = False
		Elseif docParent.IsDeleted Or Not docParent.IsValid Then
			openIt = False
		Else
			openIt = True
		End If
		If openIt Then
			Call ws.EditDocument(False,docParent)
		Else
			Messagebox "Cannot open requested document. This may be because " &_
			"the selected document is an orphan or because " &_
			"you do not have access to the requested document.",48,"Open Document"
			Exit Sub
		End If
	End If
End Sub

This LotusScript was converted to HTML using the ls2html routine,
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.

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February 15, 2006

Air Travel Can Be Bad for Your Mental Health
Posted by Don McNally in Guest Bloggers

OK, so anyone who has flown more than a few times has probably had a frustrating experience. My most recent ones were more memorable to me because they happened in such a short period of time. And to think we get to *pay* for all this “fun”.

I made it to Orlando when I was supposed to, had no tight connections or changes, but my luggage decided to stay in Detroit for a while longer. I had someone meet me at the airport and they ended up hanging out until 11:30 before driving 90 minutes back home. The voicemail finally came at 4:30 that the luggage was at the hotel. We should have just gone back to the airport!

I flew from Orlando to St. Louis for the weekend and that went OK. Until the trip home. A mechanical problem delayed us out of St. Louis, which meant I missed my flight out of Detroit. I got on standby for the next flight out and was sweating to see if I’d make it (otherwise it would be a long walk and two more hours in the Detroit airport). Fortunately, I made it and so did my luggage.

Then Friday we flew down to Tampa. We got on the plane in Detroit and sat for 20 minutes before they said they needed to service the lavs. Then 20 minutes later we heard that they needed to service the water in the plane. Then 10 more minutes and they said there would be a 60 minute ground stop because of weather in Tampa (which was, admittedly, bad - 8 inches of rain in 12 hours). I suppose it was better to be on the ground than to be circling northern Florida waiting for the weather to clear, but it wasn't like the plane came in 30 minutes before we left - why couldn't they have taken care of the other stuff before?

We took off 90 minutes late, flew around thunderstorms and came through another one just before landing. Of the four of us, only the one sitting next to me (our 3yo) threw up. No more details than that are needed.

But, it's vacation and the worst February day in Florida is better than the best February day in Michigan. How bad can it be?

BTW, our trip back from Tampa was completely uneventful. Just a l-o-n-g layover in Detroit.

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Is This Thing On?
Posted by Don McNally in Guest Bloggers

Well, since Jess offered, I’m going to give blogging a try. Time will tell if I have anything interesting or worthwhile to say. This was really supposed to be posted a week ago, but vacation (of all things!) interrupted.

Went to my first Lotusphere this year. What an incredible time! Since reviews of the sessions have been blogged all over the place already, I won’t rehash them. I did attend a lot of the sessions on using DB2 with Notes/Domino and I can’t wait to get 7.01 installed (although, that might not be the best idea in some cases). We have a few applications in place already that might benefit from NSFDB2. The Office integration stuff that John Head showed will come in handy as well. And the stuff that Rocky showed was - as he says - just plain kewl.

So here are some personal experiences from the week:
Best experience: standing around the fountain in the Dolphin meeting a lot of people who I have read online
Worst experience: peeling (literally) my lips from the frozen fruit treat we had on Wednesday
Surreal experience #1: sitting at lunch when a group of IBMers filled the rest of the table and talking with Chris Reckling and someone who was involved with the initial involvement of NSFDB2 development (sorry I can’t remember his name).
Surreal experience #2: Being part of the group that walked into Boardwalk Brewery, rearranged half the tables and chairs, stood there a minute, then put them all back and walked out.

Thanks to jonvon for encouraging me to blog and to Jess for encouraging and offering a way to do it.

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February 12, 2006

"Buzzer beating" the snow last night...
Posted by Jess in Day to Day

Well, we did it. We beat the snow and managed to have an amazing time in our favorite playground, Mohegan Sun.Thanks Matt, you did a great job organizing!

I had a great whole evening/night at Mohegan Sun... Seven us of us started with dinner first. After that, we needed some digesting, so what better way than with some table games?

Some folks had a good night at the craps table (I did not). However, at video poker, my original $10 that I started with yielded $400 with 4 aces on one hand.

After that it was some Chocolate Dream martinis at the martini bar/planetarium (Godiva Chocolate liquor, vodka, Baileys = yummy).

Finally, at around 10:30PM, it was off to the dance club they have there, where we felt cool with our own coffee table and bottle of Captain. (for a set cost per table, they hook you up with your own waitress and a bottle of your choice - they supply the mixer. It was REALLY fun to feel so cool. :-)

And, we realized how nice it was to actually have somewhere to SIT once you are done dancing. That's something us peasants had never before gotten to experience at a dance club!

The snow started around 11:30, we left at around 12:45AM. Our hero Tom , the designated driver, did an awesome job driving us home. Thanks Tom!

We all agreed I must be sure to "thurn tirty" more often.

Can we say slow morning today? The blizzard hit around 4AM, so we have a nice fire going and absolutely nowhere to be.

It was so nice to have a such fun night out with all my friends. To steal a phrase from Professor McGonagall in the latest Harry Potter, it was a night of "well-mannered frivolity".

Being a movie and board game fan (oh, and not rich either), we all usually opt to stay in together and hang out on weekends. Which is always a great time (and Matt makes a *killer* chocolate dream martini).

But, sometimes, you just have to cut loose and thurn tirty.

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February 11, 2006

30 years old today....
Posted by Jess in Announcements

Finally! :-)

Now, in traditional fashion from my early years living in the snow belt in northern Massachusetts, if the snow can just hold out until as LATE as possible...

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February 06, 2006

Jess's List of the best First Five Movie Minutes
Posted by Jess in Day to Day

As many of you know, I absolutely love the movies. I love knowing what goes on behind the scenes making them. I love hearing trivia. I love movie props. I love finding the right movie quote to fit *any* moment, and then trying to be stumped to figure out where the quote came from.

I was thinking the other day about how some movies just suck you right in from the start. The introduction may be riveting, disgusting, funny as hell, or just plain weird - but it sets the tone just right for the rest of the movie.

I was trying to think of some of my favorite "Movie Introductions" - the first five minutes that set the tone.

In such a short amount of time, it's impossible to think of all the ones I love. Here's what I could come up with in a few minute's thought, in no particular order:

Ghost Ship
Without giving away any plot secrets, let it be known that as a horror movie fan, the first five minutes of the movie Ghost Ship are the most delightfully grisly minutes I've ever spent watching a horror movie.

Gone in 60 Seconds
The left-hand dial ticks across a clock. The clocks spreads out across the whole screen, and the dial turns into a speeding road, while still ticking. The ticking sound blends perfectly into a great Moby song (Flower), and we are given a tour of a bedroom that contains family photos and other strange artifacts, while still tapping our feet to the captivating song.

The Matrix
That ever-familiar disjointed chord that is now synonymous with The Matrix is how the movie starts. The chord never crescendos, which is perhaps what makes it so memorable. A screen so dark - and a tall, gorgeous, exotic woman in full black shiny leather proceeds to make movie history in one of the most beautiful - and most parodied - movie moments ever.

Jaws
It made number one in Bravo's 100 Most Scary Movie Moments countdown, AND it happened in the first five minutes. The audience never saw it coming.

The Fellowship of the Ring
We were not only treated to epic battles and introduced to a great story... who can withstand the power of Cate Blanchett's sultry vocal chords narrating the story itself?

Amelie
The movie is endearing, and warms the heart, and it starts with the very first introduction of Amelie and her family. The counter on the DVD didn't even read 00:30 and I was enamoured.

Jerry Maguire
Okay, I'll 'fess up. I was never, ever interested in The Who's Magic Bus until I heard it in context. The repetitive, pulsating block-tapping sound sets such a great tone for a movie about instant action and quick talking. AND - sounds killer with a good set of speakers.