Watch D.O.G.S.

Yesterday for the third year in a row I was a Watch Dog at my sons elementary school.

If you never heard of this program I encourage you to check out their web site. Watch D.O.G.S. (Dads Of Great Students) is an organization that was started by Jim Moore in response to the 1998 middle school shooting in Jonesboro, AR. It’s an initiative of the National Center for Fathering and the program goal is:

To help every school in America be positively influenced by the committed involvement of fathers and father figures in lives of their children and students.

As always the administration at my sons school was great. They had my schedule for the day waiting at the front desk when I arrived in the morning. The day was full of attending classes and helping students with various tasks. Everything from reading, spelling test and helping special needs students with getting paper that needed recycling. I also helped in the cafeteria during lunch hour.

I make sure that my Watch Dogs day is on the same day as my sons birthday. That way I know what day I’m suppose to be there and my son loves having his “pappa” there that day. They make sure you have at least part of your day in your child’s class room.

It is very fulfilling to take a day and do this every year. Everybody at the school are so appreciative to you all day. The students, teachers and other personnel at the school love you being there, and they tell you all day.

I encourage you to try this out. Talk to your kids school administration to influence them to add this program if they don’t already have it. I promise, it’s worth it.

 

So I have had my two newest gadgets for a couple of months now and I wanted to write my review of them both.

BlackBerry Bold

I got my BlackBerry Bold in early December and I could not be happier. I LOVE the screen resolution on it and I can easy watch movies while I’m on a plane or going on a longer car ride (when I’m not driving of course). It has the same resolution as the iPhone but I think it is much sharper on the Bold.

The browser on the Bold is much improved over the 8700c I used to have. I can browse everywhere and actually see the page, zoom in and click links.

There are a lot of great software out there for the BlackBerry, and I have tried many of them. Some of my favorites include:

  • AT&T Navigator
    Wouldn’t leave home without it.
  • Audible
    I love listen to audio books.
  • Google Maps
    The GPS feature built in makes it really cool to watch the icon move while I’m walking around my house.
  • Facebook
    Great to catch up on peoples status.
  • BlackBerry Messenger
    We use this at SNAPPS all the time, especially at conferences abroad.
  • SlingPlayer Mobile
    It’s great to be able to watch my TV stations at home, included recorded shows.
  • TwitterBerry
    To set my Twitter status.
  • vlingo
    This is probably the coolest one of them all. I can call contacts, dial numbers, set my status on Twitter and Facebook, create tasks and email my contacts by just speaking to my BlackBerry. Try it out, it’s free.

I can’t say enough positive things about my Bold and the only negative would be it’s battery life. I never get more than 1.5-2 days out of it. It does not bother me much since I can charge it in my car, through AC/DC or through my computers USB port.

Macbook Pro

Where to start? I guess from the beginning. I started my professional career in computer graphics back in Sweden many years ago. That was obviously on a Mac. They still are the leader in the graphics, desktop publishing and movie department. After a few years I slowly moved towards Windows based PCs, mainly because of of HTML work but also because of Lotus Notes/Domino. It was just easier to code on a “PC” because everybody else was on one. I have owned many PCs over the years and loved most of them. Then a little over a year ago Rob Novak, got himself a Macbook Pro and I’ve been jealous ever since.

Right before Christmas, in the middle of coding for our Lotusphere sessions, Rob surprised me by taking me to the Apple store and getting me a Macbook Pro. My co-workers definitely know, by me constantly talking about it, I LOVE THIS MAC. It’s small and light, have a great battery time and is just beautiful. I can’t get this thing to slow down either. I usually have quite a few programs running; Lotus Notes with Sametime, Ecplipse with Aptana, Firefox, iTunes, Skype and VMware Fusion running a Windows XP guest that has both Domino Designer and a Domino Server running. They all just run without any delay or waiting. The few times I have turned the Mac completely off I can start all those programs at the same time without much more delay than waiting for them to start one at a time. Do I like it? Yes I do.

 

This years version of our Lotusphere session: “The Great Code Giveaway”: The Art of the Possible, is now available for download at download.snapps.com.

Prerequisite:

This application needs to run on a Domino server version 7.0.2 or above. Some Widgets may need version 8.5 or above to run.

This application uses The Dojo Toolkit JavaScript library.
The following is only needed, but required, if you are installing this application on a version of Domino below 8.5.

  1. Download version 1.1.1 or above of Dojo
  2. Unzip the download
  3. Rename and place this directory on your Domino server in the following path:
    path_to_root_data_directory/domino/html/domjs/dojo-1.1.1

This path is hard coded into the MyDomino form. If you want to change the path you can by modifying the HTML shown below in the MyDomino form:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/domjs/dojo-1.1.1/dojo/dojo.js"></script>

This application was tested on version installed with Domino 8.5 (1.1.1) and downloaded version 1.2.3

The application was tested on:

  • Internet Explorer 7.0.5 on Windows
  • Firefox 3.0.5 for Windows
  • Firefox 3.0.5 for Macintosh

Installation:

  1. Change the ACL to match your current environment
  2. Make a non replica copy of the application on your Domino server
  3. Sign it with an appropriate administrators ID

Usage:

Browse to the application and log in as a valid directory user. It should create a myDomino document automatically for the user.
HAVE FUN!

The code is released under the Apache license. You may obtain a copy of the License at:
www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Have fun with it.

 

Heading for Lotusphere in the morning and I’m actually getting to bed at an okey time for the first time in weeks.

Unlike some, I wont be needing any vaccinations though. If you are/will be at Lotusphere this year and you see me, stop me and say hi.

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