Hey -- welcome to the first of my LotusSphere 2004 blog entries. I've been away from blogging for a few weeks. Here's what I've been up to:

Adopted Eclipse as my java ide of choice.

Re-wrote nctSerach as a multi-threaded java object set -- more details on that are forthcoming, but if you're at LotusSphere, you may get to see early beta running live at Brightline's booth.

Working with Rocky, created and had printed 1350 "CULT" LotusSphere t-shirts (You'll see them if you're down here).

So....sorry I've been away, but I've been too busy to write.

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Now, on to tonight.

Tonight was the annual Penumbra dinner at Fulton's Crab House. This is a private even where we invite members of the IBM & Lotus crowd and a few others for a semi-formal dinner and cocktail party. Ambuj Goyal was kind enough to attend this year, staying as long as he could.

Friends, this is an impressive man. We haven't had a real developer running Lotus in a very long time, and his leadership is working -- at least so far. Though I'd gone over simply to compliment him on a job well done thus far, I ended up (to my great surprise) in a serious discussion of Eclipse. I knew he was a developer and well respected technical person but I had no idea just how up to date those skills and interests were. Let me tell you though, with the conversation we had it would not surprise me in the least to hear that he had a copy of Eclipse (or something built on it) on his desk and that it had seen at least enough use to understand its strengths and weaknesses. I seriously doubt this could be said of other recent leadership at Lotus.

So --- things look good for all us treehuggers and futurists alike.