i love this discussion between daniel vitalis and ka sundance. yes that's a funny name but i'd like very much to know him in real life. dialectic vs debate - very interesting. i love the respect these guys show each other.

i kept thinking ka would bust out the china study's epidemiology but he never did, and then vitalis says it's been debunked. hm, interesting. i don't know anything about that but i'm willing to learn.

i'll tell you a little secret. i have always eaten fried rice with eggs since i became a vegan. i've never been totally "pure" and i've tried to not be religious about it. lately i've been eating fried eggs, a little here or there, maybe once or twice a month. lately i've been craving steak. i'm not at all sure i can digest it at this point though. mostly what i am learning is that there are an amazing number of incredible plants that we can eat and there are strong ecological arguments for eating plants, or at least for dumping our industrial food system and going organic. what i am more leaning towards is local farming and to that end we finally joined a CSA and i'm going to start learning about organic farming by actually doing it - volunteering, taking classes and so on.

the main reason i am still advocating a heavily plant based diet is the effect eating a lot of fruits and vegetables has on my moods and on my mental energy and creative output. however i'll be honest and say that my energy level physically has not been what it was, so i have a few real questions to ask and answer. being vegan has been an incredible journey, i am still learning new recipes, learning about new things to eat and new ways to combine food.

the good thing about grief is that it is essentially about acceptance. there's anger, there's sadness, all of that. but by its very nature it presents an end to itself. it's a kind of organ, not unlike an intestine, that sort of digests us, and spits us out the other side.

i don't think anyone particularly likes being digested. ya know. but ultimately we have no choice but to surrender.

the difference between grief and mere sadness, or momentary depression, is that with the latter you have a choice. you can decide, "i'm going to be happy right now and stop all of this moping around." with grief, you have to let your body go limp in the jaws of the lion.

i think i'll leave the metaphor there, since the next step is me, transformed into a pile of scat on the african plain. ;)

actually just now i'm feeling really happy. it feels a bit more than just a momentary blip on the modulating sine wave that is my mood; it feels like i'm starting to emerge on the other side. i'm lion scat, about now. but little flowers are growing out of my stinky head.

hehe. i just couldn't leave that alone..

so, what now? well this week i'm happy to report, i'm going to sit in some asp.net training classes. monday and tuesday of lotusphere we had sharepoint training. oh the irony! and in my spare time i'm still working on the story/novel/book thing.

but something else is happening. ben poole has managed to get me interested in Ruby with his excellent introductory blog post, starting with ruby. actually ruby is something i've been interested in for a while, but i just never got around to it. upon reading ben's post, i quickly realized i needed to get familiar with the unix command line in mac os x, and let's face it, unix itself, at least a little bit. this is yet another thing i've been wanting to do, being the owner of several macs at home for several years now. so i went and put The Mac OS X Command Line: UNIX Under the Hood on my wish list (my way of bookmarking things on amazon) and i'm planning to order it next week. i'm sure there's plenty of free information online, but in this case i think i want to just go step by step with a book. and since my daughter is rather the mac power user, i'll be showing her what i learn as i go along.

all of which leads me to something i'm thinking about, in a kind of on the back burner kind of way. i have this half baked idea about... well... life and career and career trajectories, which is colliding with various political thoughts concerning corporations and the decisions we are making at the macro level as a society, and the growing disparity between rich and poor and the rapidly disappearing middle class in america and the many illusions we've all bought into and participated in.

one of these illusions (a smaller one in the big picture perhaps) for me personally is the idea that working with a software platform owned by a major corporation is a really good idea. let's face it, the platform you are working on today might be old news tomorrow, and the big corporation you are working on behalf of within the walls of your actual company might decide to stop selling it. so the idea that, as an applications developer, i should bank on lotus notes, or sharepoint, or anything owned by ibm or microsoft or for that matter, oracle or any other big player, is becoming less and less tenable to me.

that's not to say there isn't money to be made in any of those spaces. sharepoint is just amping up, really, and i predict it's going to have a long run ahead of it. and notes is far from dead, even if ibm isn't willing to compete with it vis a vis exchange or sharepoint, on the level they are capable of. why that is, is a complicated thing to tease out. i think what it boils down to is there isn't a lot of revenue from services around notes, like there was when notes was the new thing on the block. at this point it's frankly too good at what it does, is too cheap, too powerful, too easy to maintain, too easy to code for, and is therefore is ultimately a really really good deal for the customer. but not enough people understand that. the people that do will continue to buy notes, and notes will continue to be a robust business, despite what the higher ups at ibm think about the revenue streams.

or something like that.

but anyway the point is, i got around to thinking about what it is that has been so good about my time developing in notes. honestly for a long time i wasn't particularly tied to it as a development platform. i mean over the years i've done other things. i've written asp pages and jsp pages and servlets. back in the very beginning i wrote html-only sites. but i've worked for a group for ten years now that does notes development, and that was all they wanted to do until just very recently. i came on board originally to help with the web side of things, and we've all learned a lot from each other.

it wasn't until i started a blog and got involved in the community at large that things started to change in my head heart. after some time blogging, and meeting new people, i had a lot more emotional commitment to the platform. when the technical direction at our company changed, it forced me to step back and look at everything with fresh eyes.

so then i started to wonder, what was it about what i was doing all those years that made me so passionate about lotus notes? what was it that was fundamentally good about what was going on?

ok, besides the obvious technical underpinnings of notes, the flexible nsf data structure and all that. the built in security, email, designer client, all that stuff. the better you get at that the more you can get done in a short amount of time, the more you like what you are doing. but you guys know all about that.

there was something else going on. there was, and still is, a community like no other i've ever seen. people in this community are just... awesome. why is that? i don't know.

i suspect it has something to do with the flexibility of the software itself. it lends itself to a certain way of thinking. and therefore, i believe, it attracts a certain kind of person, who thinks in a flexible way. and maybe this flexibility lends itself to kindness? to creativity? to wholeness?

i don't see a lot of that in other communities.

and then i started to think, well, if it is the community that is so great, if it is the friendships i've made that will outlast lotus notes (or at least my career programming in it), what about that? and what about the fact that i really don't like being at the whim of this and that corporation?

when i say that, what i mean is, if i'm working in notes, or sharepoint, or whatever, and the company making it decides something else is brighter and shinier, and the competitive positioning starts to flag, then me and all my friends are shit out of luck.

fuck that. i don't want to be around for something like that anymore.

and what about the company i'm working for? look, at the end of the day, i'm about solving problems for people. if they want me to code in sharepoint, i don't really care. i've returned to my agnostic take on things. php, ruby, java, whatever. it's all good.

but what if there was another way? what if there was a way to be involved in business, but doing things in a technology that made the kind of sense that notes makes, but was more based on the needs and desires of a community. what if there was a way to be involved in a passionate community (that part is really important to me) but be working in software that isn't going to be sidelined because some group or another inside a giant corporation wasn't making as much money as it had been before?

the problem with the big corporate scenario is, it affects all of us. so why not head down to Tahrir Square and do something else?

not that i'm expecting anyone else to do anything particularly, just because i'm sort of thinking about doing something else that i haven't even decided on yet. like i said i'm happy to be getting trained on asp.net next week. happy to have a job and so forth.

what i'm getting at here is open source. i don't see how it can be anything else.

what are the opportunities? i don't know yet. i think what i'm also saying is, i want to fly under my own flag. because our institutions have let us down, big time. this is true of the corporate world to some degree, but it is also true politically. it's hard to start your own country though. man. how do you do that?

some time back gabriella davis said "I have the luxury of choosing to work with technologies I love." that's what i'm orienting myself around toward. but i'm looking for something different than the stuff lumped out on my cafeteria tray. i think right now, i want to find out what i love. and i don't exactly know anymore what that is.

i don't know if it will turn out to be this Ruby lark. i don't know if it will be Couchbase. or some combination of the two, or something totally else. but what i'm thinking is, i need a Third Way, one that fires on all cylinders for me personally that involves community and open source and fresh ideas. i don't want to be worried anymore about what steve mills thinks about the notes business, or what the microsoft sales guys are going to climb all over our company like orcs over fucking helm's deep to pitch at us about, or whatever. i want to figure out what i love, and devote my time to that.

of course i'm already doing that, with the writing. but for the first time in years, i'm feeling like i want to pick up a new technology.

see, i told you it was half baked. anyway that's what i'm thinking about.

this is the first lotusphere in nine? ten? years i've missed. well i haven't missed it yet, but i'm about to. except for saturday. i'll be there, at the boardwalk, espn, etc, until as late as everyone wants to be out. i'm crashing on site saturday night, to make sure i miss as little as possible. but i can't be around the rest of the week.

man i'm going to miss you guys something awful.

today i experienced some grief about this. it just keeps coming, here and there, in unexpected waves. it kinda pisses me off.

this is the end of an era for me. sharepoint training has finally been approved, and we have real sharepoint projects in the pipeline, and finally, some end user licenses to go with them. we've still got years worth of domino stuff to do. but the writing is on the wall, in big fat purple comic sans.

this past year we had our practice pulled out from under us. a lot of stuff changed. i posted some things to the blog that i never thought i'd post. i lost my Lotus religion, for a bunch of reasons i don't feel like rehashing. ironic, since i'd lost my actual religion a few years before that. guess i should have seen that coming. my face is pretty good at catching pies. but at least i'm not alone in that around here. ;)

honestly though, this whole thing turned out to be a good opportunity to re-evaluate practically everything career-wise, along with my long term goals and desires. what do i really want out of life?

i figured out some years ago, well into my career as a geek, that what i really wanted to do was write novels for a living. i've been working on that for a good long time now, and though i still don't have anything to publicly show for it, i know i'm getting good enough at it that, well, i can sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel. it's going to happen. but that's another adventure, one i can't talk about since i'm not quite on it yet.

so, when i say i've been re-evaluating, that's only sort of true. i've known for a while that a career change was coming. not the kind where i stop doing notes and start doing sharepoint. i mean the kind where i never, ever write another line of code for another corporate entity, ever. unless that entity belongs wholly to me.

but in the near term, well, missing lotusphere is another stone on the path away from the life i knew. right at the present moment, that hurts some. yes, i'll still be around online. but how long before the technical content on planetlotus is no longer useful to me? how long before lotusphere itself is, from a technology standpoint, irrelevant to what i'm doing every day? the more those things are true, the less incentive i'll have to stay tuned. that's the facts, even though i have, in no uncertain terms, made lifelong friends in this community.

anyway i'm feeling a little mixed up right now. i hope LOTS of people are around on saturday, cuz that's the only day i'll get to see you. you know, in person, so i can hug you and tell jokes and drink too much beer with you and all that good stuff.

see you soon. :-)

p.s. volker i'm going to miss you too. :-)

p.p.s. the Long Goodbye post has been reinstated, mostly because it's a moment in my personal history that is important to me. i'm pretty sure ibm is big enough to deal with it. if they aren't, then things are worse than even i imagined.

A few years ago I went on a week long retreat. I was in the woods with a bunch of guys who beat on drums, recited ecstatic poetry, and participated in and created rituals of various sorts.

One night I was climbing out of a sweat lodge and I heard a man say to the fellow behind me, "The essence of wildness is to be gentle with yourself."

It was a totally offhand comment but it's haunted me, in a good way, ever since. Wildness was seen as a good thing in this group of men. In fact the question that drove the first talk given on the first night was, "What do you do to keep the Wild Man alive?"

Brené Brown's TEDxHouston talk touches on this same theme in a very deep way, though she never mentions the word wildness even once. This is a profound talk that I'm definitely going to listen to many times. There is a lot to learn here.