Running Notes

Category Running
So how do you avoid running when you just don't feel up to it? Blog about running, of course. In reality, I'm not avoiding running because of this stupid streak I've got going. When I run in a few minutes (yes, I am procrastinating), it will be day 456. Nothing momentous in that, but it is an awful lot. Especially when I am training for a marathon.

My marathon training has hit some speedbumps. Moving my home and moving my work all in the span of a few weeks has been a bit tough. And summer. I hate running in the heat. Last weekend I was supposed to be running 16 miles for my long run. I was already behind and had planned the 15 miler from the previous week. (The previous week, I only ran 12 instead of the 15). Well, instead of 15, this time I ran 13.5. This was partly due to a routing error. I had mapped out a route, with a small optional loop. However, the optional loop was apparently longer than expected. Anyway, due to the blazing sun baking my poor brain, I skipped the "optional" loop, and ended up with 13.5 miles instead of 15.

While falling short of my planned run, it was still a milestone. It's the farthest I've ever run. Prior to that, I had run a half marathon, or 13.1 miles. Hooray for me.

Anyway, the last few weeks I've been increasingly cranky about running. My knee has been hurting a bit. I tried to tell myself it was just sore, and as I build up miles, I would build up strength. I told myself I needed to stretch more. For a brief moment, I thought I might need new shoes. However, being a geek, I keep a running log, including which shoes I wore. I know that all my previous pairs of shoes got a lot more mileage than my current pair. So there is no way I could need new shoes, right?

Except that every other time I needed new shoes, I realized it when my knee hurt. Duh. So I broke down and bought new shoes. And guess what? My knee feels better. Even though there are 100 fewer miles on my current shoes than on all my past shoes.

Moral of the story, and this very boring blog post, listen to your body. Pay attention to it. Try to understand what it is telling you. And when you have an idea what's going on, don't dismiss it.

Posted by Kathy Brown At 9:26 PM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category Domino Development Webcast
We interrupt the Nerd Girl Run retelling for this exciting announcement!

I am pleased to announce I am presenting another webcast for Consultant in Your Pocket. This Wednesday at 10 AM CENTRAL. Also, there will be a giveaway! Check out Chris Miller's blog for details.

Register here.

Thanks to Lotus and Domino’s rapid application development platform, many developers find themselves in a deploy-and-pray application release cycle. That can be fine for simple applications in uncomplicated environments, but what happens when the feature requests get more and more complex? Come hear about different techniques for managing Lotus and Domino application deployment and how to get beyond deploy-and-pray!

Posted by Kathy Brown At 11:21 AM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category IamLUG NerdGirlRun
We last left Thelma and Louise, er, Me and Jess in West Virginia.

West Virginia did not last long. We found ourselved in Ohio. Or rather, the GPS, nicknamed, "Bitch", directed us to Ohio. In any case, we were in Ohio. We knew we were somewhere behind a @the_turtle. We decided it was time to stop for food. This time at the lovely Ruby Tuesday in Somewhere, Ohio. Oddly enough, sitting in the parking lot...the Turtle. We went in for some dinner. And were met with ... ZOMBIES!

Okay, not exactly. We were seated at a lovely table overlooking the gas station, sandwiched between two families with small children. Now, Jess and I both have small children. So we aren't opposed to the little buggers. These were some fine examples. On my left, may I present Zombie child. Approximately two years old, the girl had a pacifier in her mouth the entire meal. She was well behaved and sat coloring for the duration of their visit. Oh yeah, and going "ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" the ENTIRE MEAL.

On my right, I present The Extended Family. Seemed like many families had gathered together. Split over a couple of tables. Lots of adults, presumably happy to see eachother and catch up. And Mac n Cheese Boy. He had his dinner all over his hands. How do I know this? Because he repeatedly got up from the table and came over to me and grabbed my shirt. Extended Family didn't seem to notice or care about Mac n Cheese Boy, he was free to roam as he pleased. Extended Family then harrassed the poor waitress wanting their bill split into 65.3 different receipts.

But I digress.

"Living on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi hit the playlist. In which I attempt to "Baby Take My Hand" and Jess dissed me. She says she was tired. Whatever. Oh speaking of tired. I fell asleep soon thereafter (at least judging by the lack of tweets). Jess was getting tired, so pulled off to the only hotel she could see...

The Econolodge.

Okay, fine by me. I'm laid back. I was asleep. If the driver says she is tired and we need to stop, then we need to stop. It's Econolodge. By the highway. How bad could it be?

Cut to "check in". Here's a travel tip: When registration has bullet proof glass, you MAY not want to stay there. We joked about paying by the hour. Ha ha. Ha. *ahem*.

After paying and receiving our room key, we walked out to the car, to see two "gentlemen" talking to the police. Always a welcome sight. Jess made a remark about finding a dead hooker in our room. At which point, I said, "I'd rather find a dead hooker than get broken into." Thinking a dead hooker is probably a one-off event, as opposed to a break in. The police had left and Jess and I carried every single item out of the car and into our rooms. I think we both secretly feared we would wake up in the morning to find Jenna gone. Touching as little as possible in the room, we went to sleep.

7 states in 15 hours.

Will Jenna be there in the morning? Will we find a dead hooker? Stay tuned for the next installment...

Posted by Kathy Brown At 1:48 PM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (4)

Category IamLUG NerdGirlRun
Ahh...Pennsylvania.

The state in which:

Jess yells at the GPS.
We see a billboard for surfing. (WTF?)
I play a song for Jess that has a siren in it, but she thinks it's real. (Oops)
We see these at a rest stop...

And Amish Pr0n. That's right. Amish porn. We even made it a hashtag. #AmishPorn. Now sadly, at that point, we didn't BUY amish porn. But we saw it. At least, we think we did. We were getting a little crazy at that point. I'm surprised we didn't have someone stop us from getting in the car at the rest stop. We must have seemed drunk.

We also seemed to be chasing a Turtle. Yep. @the_turtle was driving to St. Louis, also, and was somewhere ahead of us.

Also at this point, "techs" came into existence. Jess was my window tech when I drove. I couldn't figure out how to roll the damn window down while driving. We thought that was hilarious. Toll Collector Boy didn't seem to see the humor.

Also in Pennsylvania (I warned you), we passed Shartsville. Much humor was to be had.

Then, finally, we were done. Pennsylvania was finished. We entered...West Virginia. ... [insert record scratching noise] West Virginia?! Did that sign say WEST VIRGINIA?! Are we supposed to be in West Virginia?! Thankfully, yes. We were supposed to be in West Virginia. The best we could say about West Virginia was that it wasn't Pennsylvania.

And then, Ohio. Where we caught a turtle. And saw zombie children. And possibly dead hookers. But first, more playlist:

"Hungry Like the Wolf" - Duran Duran
"Sabotage" - Beastie Boys

Posted by Kathy Brown At 4:20 PM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category IamLUG NerdGirlRun
So we left off with impending disaster...

We had just stopped at Starbucks for some coffee. The guy behind the counter perplexed me. I was wearing a shirt that said, "Geek is the new black". He asked me what kind of geek I was. Uh...the geeky kind? Is geek so cool now that we must define our brand of geek only to be shunned by "cool" geeks?

Anyway.

Jess was driving. I was passengering. We were slowly coming awake. I must take a moment and describe our ride. Many of you may know of Jenna. Jenna is Jess' car. A totally cool MINI that Jess has seriously pimped out for autocross. Now one of the pimp-ations was tires. Jenna has got some bounce. And wouldn't you know it, just before I took a sip of my MEDIUM (suck it Starbucks!) HOT coffee, we hit a bump. A bump that somehow popped the lid off of my scalding hot coffee and caused it to erupt all over me, my seat, the floor and my purse. DISASTER! Hence forth known as the "Coffee Incident of 2010". Sadly, this happened not once, but twice.

We quickly drove through Connecticut, New York ("trailer!") and New Jersey. Just before the Pennsylvania, we switched drivers! A practice drive for me from a McDonalds to a Starbucks and we were on our way. Just in time for Pennsylvania traffic. And Pennsylvania road signs, "Be Alert Heavy Truck Traffic". How about some punctuation, PA? I think the road was getting to us. A few hours sleep, four plus hours of driving and we found road signs to be hysterical.

We stopped for lunch at the oh-so-lovely-but-ubiquitous Cracker Barrel. Where I was "sooooo hungry. Had to restrain myself from knocking an old woman out of my way". And Jess was so hungry she forgot to use the NerdGirlRun hashtag!

The Nerd Girl Run playlist was born:

"Shut Up and Drive" - Rihanna
"The Road" - Tenacious D
"Every Woman in the World" - Air Supply (cuz that's how I roll)
"Truly" - Lionel Ritchie (which Jess didn't know. sigh.)
"What's Your Fantasy?" - Ludacris
"Love Song" - Sara Bareilles
"Something About You" - Level 42

Coming up in part 3 - Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, more Pennsylvania and AMISH PR0N!

Posted by Kathy Brown At 9:32 AM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (6)

Category IamLUG NerdGirlRun
It's been a week and I'm a little late blogging an IamLUG write-up, but what the heck. Conferences in general seem to mean more to many of us than just conferences, and IamLUG was no exception. So please forgive me if this post is more than just reporting on a conference. (And really, if you read this blog, you aren't here looking for journalism or news anyway).

So, somehow, Jess Stratton, aka @mattandjess, now aka @NerdGirlJess on Twitter, asked me if I wanted to drive down to St. Louis for IamLUG. For now unknown reasons, I agreed. Oddly enough, I didn't once look at what route we would take, or how long it would take, I just said yes. As time got nearer, Jess and I did briefly chat.

Me: "How long will it take?"
Jess: "Let me check. Google says about 20 hours. So we'll do it in 2 days"
Me: "Okay."

Later logistics included deciding who would bring snacks versus beverages. We decided the week before that I would drive to Jess' house in Rhode Island on Friday. We would drive from Rhode Island as far as we could on Saturday, crash in a hotel somewhere and then drive the rest on Sunday. That's as detailed as the plan got.

And so, following the plan, I arrived at Jess' house Friday night. Late. Did I mention it was late? I think was 3AM or something crazy when we finally went to bed. And we got up at 5:00 AM. Yes, you read that right, 5:00 AM. So I could run. I ran. A single mile, in the dark. According to the tweets. Oh. Did I mention we tweeted this? We used the hashtag #NerdGirlRun (Nerd Girls do Cannonball Run or something like that). At 6:32 AM, we tweeted the beginning of #NerdGirlRun.

We exuberantly hopped in the car. And promptly drove straight to Starbucks. But hey, it was in Connecticut, so we felt accomplished. We snapped this pic, and took off...only to have disaster strike...

Posted by Kathy Brown At 12:19 PM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category Application Development
As a follow up to my post, "What is your application development cycle?", I'd like to ask what tools you use for version and release management.

There are a million questions, and a million ways to handle release management. I'm mostly curious about development for Lotus and Domino, and if you roll your own or use third party tools.

MTA: Full disclosure, this topic has interested me enough to present a webcast on some options...check out Consultant In Your Pocket for the information.

Posted by Kathy Brown At 10:14 AM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (4)

Category Lotus Notes IamLUG
It's official, the Nerd Girls have a session at IamLUG.

Come meet other Nerd Girls for some lively conversation! Not a Nerd Girl already? We'll share Twitter IDs, Skype names, and introduce you to our Linked In group and Twitter list.

It is during the second half of lunch on Monday. We've done panel discussions and BOFs in the past at other conferences, we'd like this to be more interactive. Let's meet, mingle and connect.

AND, we will have a big Nerd Girl announcement to make, so make sure to be there!

As with all of the Nerd Girl events, men are welcome!

Posted by Kathy Brown At 9:19 AM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Development
I don't mean for those one-off applications. I mean for the big ones. Applications that have ongoing requirements. Apps that always have new feature requests, bug fixes, etc. And I'm strictly asking about Lotus and Domino development. What is the cycle like?

Do you develop one thing at a time, then test, then release? Do you develop a lot of features at once during a set time frame, then test, then release?

Certainly there are best practices out there, but what is the reality? I'd like to hear how it works for you...

Posted by Kathy Brown At 10:23 AM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (15)

Category Lotus Notes Google Ads
Saw this on a Lotus Notes and Domino blog.

Posted by Kathy Brown At 7:51 PM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (8)