its opening up a pack of sandwiches and realising that they have been made for you fresh that morning, cut into triangles and even placed cross wise to look nice, its realising that you are sitting there in clean clothes that were wash and ironed (even the socks were paired) by someone else for no other reason than they wanted to.

by the way “guilt is” realising that you have done nothing to deserve this (fk fk f**k!!)

P.S. there are other things that i class as love as well, but other people seem to class them as variously “get a room”, “arrrgh my eyes” and “WTF, im calling the police”

1) You’ve just upgraded your windows domino server to the latest and greatest version, but for what ever reason, you have bounced it before running domino, when it comes back up it just sits and hangs at “applying windows setting”, after staring at the screen stupidly for about 15 Min’s, you realise domino is stuck at the “do you wish to update you system databases designs” prompt, but you cant get at the screen, you cant click yes as windows is waiting for the service to completely start, solution, map a drive to you D$ (or what ever) from another machine, yes you can do that!!, rename the notes.ini file, and reboot, windows will throw up a service error, sulk for 2 Min’s then let you in, rename your ini file back and load your domino server, sweet!,

2) So you have an ill web app server, that needs a bounce or 2 during the business day, you or the Dev’s are working on the fix but it will take a day or two (or more if its hardware related), how do lessen the impact on the users, simple!, use sso (single sign on), its dead easy to set up (look it up in the admin nsf) and if the server crashes, when you bring it back up the user does not have to re-login to get back to where they were (often they just blame the pause on the Internet/proxy and you get to escape blame all together. Ray!!!!)

3) Linux full screen apps suck balls on your ubuntu machine (VMware, MAME etc), you always seem to get menus and stuff appearing at the top an bottom, and they flicker and come and go as they please, well weep no more, turn off the “visual Effects” (System –> Preferences –> Appearance, last tab), and get back to enjoying samurai showdown VI (and of course VMWARE) in glorious 256 colour full screen.

4) It doesn’t matter how bad your diarrhea is, always check that there is toilet paper before you sit down on the bowl.

I have a hell of a lot of stuff to write about and tons of work to do, but for some reason am not doing them (lazy toad that i am), but i want to put at least one thing up per week that might be of some use to people and the big stuff is taking to long to write up, so here’s something for the admins, its called unlocker assistant and can be found http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/
(well i can be found all over the place but this is the best place)

Simply put, this means you can pull a sickly or corrupt database out of a domino server when the server wont let go of it, yes i know that theoretically risks crashing or damage the database, but quite frankly, if your going to have to bounce the box and the database looks stuffed, then your risking that anyway and it keeps the rest of the server up for the rest of the business day, i’ve used it a lot and have not had any problems at all, the server does a little W.T.F. “wheres me database” but copes with it in a few seconds, try it when your devs screw up their server and see what i mean.

On other news, it looks like i have been accepted as a speaker for uklug, this is fab and i am looking forward to it, there is only one problem, and that is i looked at the other Speakers and quite frankly I’m the only there that i have not heard of (lots of important people and one random peasant), eeek!

Am currently in the British Library, which i have to say is a perfect example of when tax is put to good use, i only wish companies were run this well, from layout to ease of use to technical setup and security, a pleasure to use and to work there, As part of the design work i am doing there, i got out graphic Japan: from woodblock and zen to manga and kawaii” by Natalie Avella , graphic Japan: from woodblock and zen to manga and kawaii” by Natalie Avella, and among its interesting and insightful view points is the use of the IBM ‘nipple’ logo, is most likely based on the red circle in the Japanese flag (which is a very common design motif in a lot of Japanese products, also they had this amazing image

which apparently is what none IBM customers look like when they have not bought the right products (mumble mubble….sharepoint….mumble mumble)
(for those that think i have pinched it out of the book, i haven’t, i just googled it and there are a bunch of places that have it)

Just a little thought, as contractors we all know we have the right of substitution in all of our dealings with our clients, and we all know its is one of those things that the merry people at Her Mage’s Inspectors of Taxes look at when deciding if we are disguised employees, now there is a problem with that as for the most part it is a little tricky to implement, as often we are the most skilled member of our little companies and it can be difficult to find a suitable substitute that the client will accept, and even if you have skilled people, if they are any good they will already be at a clients site in there own major client contract,

But I would urge people to have a check with people they know in the lotus community who are managing the work from home thing, people like Matt White, Jake Howlett and Mark Haller, now these people are both obviously good (or they would not be able to survive out in the hard world), and possibly available to short work periods, (it should be noted at this point that i have not even mentioned this to Mr Haller or Mr Howlett so I am not suggesting that they would want to even consider such a idea, I only give them as examples to show that these people are out there, so no going to them if you don’t know them really well and saying “X says you can sub for me when I’m on holiday”), its just an idea, but it does help all parties (extra work is always welcome when you are constantly looking for clients).