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Ending on a high note
by
Richard
Schwartz |
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It's over. Wow! Let's get right to the most important news: There will be a Lotusphere 2004! At each Lotusphere prior to last year, the dates of the next Lotusphere had been announced in the closing session. Last year, however, they did it in the opening session instead. When that didn't happen in this year's opening ceremony, I became a bit concerned...but any uncertainty was removed in the closing session. Lotusphere XI is scheduled for January 25 through January 29, 2004. I'm already looking forward to extending my attendance streak to eleven in a row. I found a few more "ten for tenners", by the way. Mary Warner and Wayne Scarano are added to the list, so now we have lucky thirteen. I still suspect, however, there are quite a few more out there. Since this is the last day that I'll be filing these reports for LDD Today, any further additions to the list will have to be made in my personal blog.
With my anti-spam presentation behind me, I didn't have any slide editing, practice run-throughs, or last minute research into spam vendor offerings to take care of, and apart from these blog entries I had no Press obligations this year. So I finally got to spend the day doing all the things I really wanted to do! I got to three breakout sessions, one lab, the Q&A with the development team, and the closing session today.
Thursday's best session was Charlie Kaufman's talk about new security features in Notes and Domino 6. I've probably been to Charlie's presentations at least a half-dozen times in the past ten years, and he is always interesting. I bought a copy of his book yesterday—autographed. Right at the front is a little cryptogram, which of course I had to work out. Fortunately it was a very easy cipher to crack, and I had the answer in just a few minutes. After I had it, I started looking at the actual content of the book. It is very dense, but it looks pretty readable. I'll just save any questions I have about it for next year, when Charlie will surely be at Lotusphere again.
The IBM Research lab was also very interesting. I found myself talking to a researcher who was demonstrating a system that draws very cool maps showing the relationships between people you exchange email with. This took me back about 20 years to some research projects I was involved in. They had nothing to do with email, but used a computer to produce the same kind of maps of relationships, although much more slowly.
The closing session featured Irish Tenor Ronan Tynan, whose voice was wonderful. His musical choices weren't really the sort of music I usually listen to, but there was one song about Ellis Island that definitely moved me. I was a bit disappointed by his accompanists, a small ensemble of musicians including a pianist, strings, and wind instruments. I don't know for sure if it was the fault of the room acoustics or if one of the instruments was slightly out of tune, but something just didn't quite sound right. The singing, however, was actually not the main reason Mr. Tynan seemed to be there. He spoke at length about his own experience at overcoming physical limitations to succeed in athletics, as a physician, and as an artist. I think the message IBM was sending to us was that despite the challenges we face in what for many of us has been a tough year, it is possible to persevere and achieve great things.
Lotus continues to persevere. Lotusphere this year was more upbeat than last year. There seemed to be a lot of willingness among participants to trust Lotus to fill in whatever holes we might still be seeing in the next generation strategy. The Q&A with the developers really confirmed that. And there was a lot of light-hearted banter between questioners, engineers, and the overall audience that definitely wasn't there last year. I think this is a very good sign—looks like Sunday's "lucky shooting star" was right after all! |
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