Even though this is their second meeting, the Irish Lotus User Group (ILUG) is looking to be the place to be. The agenda, sponsors and speakers makes this look like a ‘Mini-Lotusphere’. I hoping someone is going to record this, not only because of all of the useful information, but because of the quality of people that will be there. Every one of them are Lotus ‘Hall of Fame’ caliber people. Bill Buchan, Daniel Nashed, Ed Brill, Kathleen McGivney, Libby Ingrassia, Mark Wallace (Mark, where’s your site?), Paul Mooney, Rob Novak, Thomas ‘Duffbert’ Duff, and Warren Elsmore… Wow! I mean, I’m proud of the work done by the Detroit Notes Professionals, but could any other Lotus user group out there pull this off? GREAT JOB, PAUL!!!

If anyone out there has an opportunity to go, you just have to attend this!!! (Contact Paul Mooney NOW!) There are two things preventing me from jumping on a plane and going there. One, I’m broke! Two, this weekend is the Michigan Columbian Squires State Convention (more on that tomorrow).

I hope everyone has a great time! Hoist a few for me… Cheers!

I love that I’m not getting any comment and trackback spam now, but I’m not seeing anything in the ‘Search Referrers’ view… Nothing. It is now empty. I don’t have time to check it out now. I’ll look later. If anyone knows what’s going on, please let me know. Thanks!

Then stop down at the Fr Daniel A Lord Circle 801 Columbian Squires Car Wash Fundraiser! It will be held this Saturday (June 10, 2006) from 10AM until 4PM. These are a bunch of inner city boys that are trying to earn their own money to go on some trips, like a camping weekend. The cost of the car wash? Whatever donation you would like to make! Please help support this worthy cause.

Courtesy of Lifehacker, I found out that Google Labs is at it again. It seems that they have a ‘sneak peek’ of a spreadsheet tool to try out… for a limited number of users (first come, first served). It looks cool, and it seems based in AJAX. This ‘one ups’ the ajaxXLS tool currently out there because this lets you actively create, edit and save the spreadsheet, while ajaxXLS just lets you view it.

Forget the Clone Wars, what we have here is the ‘AJAX Wars’.

Spider Attacks Detroit
Originally uploaded by Ray "The Lion King" Bilyk.

I saw this when I was checking out ClickOnDetroit.com, the website for WDIV-TV in Detroit. The camera is located in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, across the Detroit River. It makes a wicked picture, doesn’t it?

Sometime after 7PM EST last night, we had a power outage. Since I run my own server at home, this site was also down until about 7:30AM this morning. Sorry about that.

As I watched the Detroit/Miami game last night, I thought of a way to beat the Miami Heat. I can’t believe how simple it would be. Can anyone remember the ‘Bad Boys’ era of the Detroit Pistons organization? Part of what gave us our reputation was the defense played by Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn. When you drove the lane against them, you were going down… and going down HARD! Then, they would stand over you while you were down and remind you that if you drove the lane again, you were going down hard again. It was simple… and it was a foul. Now, I don’t normally advocate intentional fouls, but since the refs are calling the Pistons for breathing on Dwyane Wade and not calling Wade and Shaq for charging, you might as well make the fouls count.

I call for Laimbeer and Mahorn to pull the Pistons aside and show them how to do it ‘old school’. Let’s hear it… BAD BOYS! BAD BOYS! BAD BOYS!

My nephew and best friend, Jim Vote, just called me to give me an update on what happened at the Knights of Columbus State Convention, which is held on Mackinac Island every year. (This was the first year since I was 18 years old that I did not attend the convention.) I would like to congratulate Kevin MacFarland, Sr. on a successful 2 years as State Deputy of the great state of Michigan. I was honored to be a part of it. Let me be the first person not on Mackinac Island to congratulate the following Brother Knights on their elections to state office:

State Deputy – Thomas M Wegener
State Secretary – John R “Bob” Moody
State Treasurer – Thomas A Marcetti Sr
State Advocate – Michael J Malinowski
State Warden – Robert “Bob” Fox

According to my nephew, it was a smooth election for the most part. Also, there was a suggested by-law change to raise the state per-capita tax, but it was defeated. There also seems to be some changes coming around with some of the programs… new directors, program changes, etc.. I hope that everyone had fun, and have a safe trip home.

It’s been a long time since I have done one of these, but this is one of those items that will bite you in the butt if you’re not careful. It’s really one of those ‘app dev 101’ things. I’m blogging about it because it happened to one of my customers.

A customer had a database that was very slow when users were entering data in a form. I found out that this customer had moved the database to a new server, and that was when the problems began, so immediately I thought that we had some ‘locked in’ names somewhere. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the form was refreshing on field changes. I then found a few of the problems… I had a doclink that went to a nonexistant database on the old server, and I also found a couple of actions that had the old server name ‘hard coded’. A couple of quick changes, and we were good to go.

The moral to the story? When using @DbLookup, make sure you don’t hardcode in your server name and/or database name. Replace “ServerName/Org:db.nsf” with “” (2 double quotes). That way, when you move the database to another server, you won’t have problems.

I know… I’ll buy a condo for my car! This report comes from WDIV-TV (ClickOnDetroit.com).

If anyone out there has any of this ‘disposable income’, please contact me, I would like some of it. I’ll let you keep your pet rock at my house, and I’ll take care of it for you… Really!