Old Blog Post

The other day I tried a new dish, and it turned out blog worthy. So here it is.Take five to six chicken breasts and trim off any fat. Cut an incision about 2 inches long (or just above) along one of the sides, to shape a pocket. I extend the cut section inside the chicken as close as the edges I can without cutting though, to make the pocket as big as possible.Microwave a tray of deep frozen spinach for 3 minutes. It should be soft but not cooked. Add some ground nutmeg and stir. Mix in a generous amount of shredded cheese. Fill the check pockets with the mix and put chickens on an oven safe dish covered in aluminum foil.Salt and pepper the chicken breasts. Then dust them with paprika powder, smoked chipotle powder, ancho chili powder and similar spices. Put in preheated oven and cook for 20 minutes in 400-425 degrees F.When finished, serve with your choice of vegetables and potatoes/rice. For a luxury version, or if you are doing low carb, add a spoon of fresh cheese like Bressot, Cantadou or similar (garlic and herb flavored soft cheese) and let it melt on top. Enjoy!  

This week the children in the Stockholm region where I am from have sportlov (transl. "sports break"). This break from school goes back to World War II. Despite Sweden being neutral and not participating in the war directly, the rationing and lack of coal used to heat the schools became a problem. The solution was to close the schools for a week during the winter to conserve cost. Different activities were arranged for the out-of-school children, and quickly the activities were focused on outdoor activities and sports. That is where the "sports break" got it's name from. Today the dates are different in different parts of the country, but it takes place in the end of February or in March. When I grew up, I was not very interested in winter sports. My parents had me learn ice skating and I also did cross country skiing, but I was more interested in less strenuous activities... My sister on the other hand did enjoy Alpine (or downhill) skiing, both locally on the island where I grew up where they had ski lifts and prepared tracks on a small mountain, in northern Sweden (Scandinavian Mountains) and in Italy in the Alps. So what did I do? Well, eventually I managed to convince my parents, using my excellent verbal skills (in combination with several warm winters with no snow, when skiing and skating was not really possible), that being outside freezing and potentially getting sick was not the best use of the break. I was about 10 or 11, and I started to try different activities arranged both on Liding??>, the island where I grew up, and in Stockholm itself. The Swedish Army Museum in Stockholm had, like most museums, activities, and one year I went there and built a plastic model of a SEPECAT Jaguar. I then started going to a local indoor shooting range, where a local shooting organisation arranged for children to test air guns, shooting .117 caliber pellets. We had to sign up for a timeslot, and after 30 minutes of shooting time, we were allowed to sign up again for a later slot again. I frequently walked to the nearby library to read or get some new books while I waited. This way I often got three or even four sessions of shooting in. Other years my parents took the opportunity to go down to visit my dad's family in Blekinge in southern Sweden. I usually spent a large part of that time reading, both during the 8 hour drive (today it is less than 7 hours, due to new roads and increased speed limits) and during the stay. After I got hooked at computers in 7th grade, a couple of times I managed to borrow a computer from the school during the break, or some years actually got to spend time in the computer room despite the school being closed. The maintenance staff often used this week to repair things or paint stairs or walls, and as…

I am following the Apple event online right now, and the new iPad2 sounds impressive this far. Dual core processor, up to 9 times faster graphics, dual cameras (front and rear facing), gyroscope like in iPhone4 and iPod Touch, 1080p HDMI output, as well as 33% thinner (8.6mm vs 13.2mm) is all very impressive. It even comes in two colors, white has been added. Steve Jobs claim the battery life is still 10 hours, like in the original iPad. The price will be identical as for the first generation iPad, starting at $499 for the base wifi only model with 16 GB memory. It will be available in the US on March 11, with 26 more countries on March 25. The same day Apple will also release iOS 4.3, not only for iPad2 but for the original iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. The video conferencing program Facetime will be available for iPad2, so the users can communicate with iPhone4 users using video. For iPhone4 the new iOS 4.3 will also add wifi hotspot functionality. I played around with the first generation iPad last summer. I liked it, it was a cool gadget, but I have my reservations. I am totally tied into iTunes, and if I want to copy any of my movies over from my collection (which is mainly in the formats AVI (Divx/Xvid) and MPEG, I have to re-encode them or convert them into Apple's format. Personally I prefer a tablet where all standards work, like mp3, wmv, avi, divx, Flash and more. Steve Jobs also showed a new cover for the iPad2, which attaches to the front using magnets as well as some other accessories. So it is a cool toy, but not something I can motivate spending that money on right now.  

Stuart McIntyre just posted a blog entry that I think everyone should read. He is actually in turn re-posting a blog entry by Single Dad Laughing, who has given permission to repost it. So I will simply copy the full blog post below. It is fairly long, but I hope everyone that read this blog will read the full text. It really made me think, and I also recognize me in several sections. I am sure the same will happen to you.Thank you. As a warning, the following post was written in complete desperation. I have recently learned some very sobering truths from people that I love dearly.These truths have set in motion a quest within me to do whatever I can to make a change. Today is not geared at funny. Today is geared at something greater. Read it to the very end. I promise you will be affected in a way you have always needed to be. I spent more than twelve hours writing this post because its message is that important to me.I wonder. Am I the only one aware that there is an infectious mental disease laying siege on us right now? There is a serious pandemic of "Perfection" spreading, and it needs to stop. Hear me out because this is something for which I am passionately and constantly hurting. It's a sickness that I've been trying to put into words for years without much success. It's a sickness that I have personally struggled with. It's a sickness that at times has left me hiding in dark corners and hating myself.And chances are it's hit you too. What is the disease called "Perfection"? Perhaps a list of its real-life symptoms will help you better understand it. We live in communities where people feel unconquerable amounts of pressure to always appear perfectly happy, perfectly functional, and perfectly figured. "Perfection" is much different than perfectionism. The following examples of "Perfection" are all real examples that I have collected from experiences in my own life, from confidential sources, or from my circle of loved ones and friends. If you actually stop to think about some of these, you will cry as I did while writing it. If you don't, maybe you're infected with way too much of this "Perfection" infection."Perfection" is a wife who feels trapped in a marriage to a lazy, angry, small man, but at soccer practice tells the other wives how wonderful her husband always is. "Perfection" keeps people from telling the truth, even to themselves. My husband is adorable. He called me a whore this week because I smiled at a stranger. When I started crying, he said he had a game to go watch. I love him so much."Perfection" is a husband who is belittled, unappreciated, and abused by his wife, yet works endlessly to make his marriage appear incredible to those around him. "Perfection" really does keep people from being real about the truth. You would have laughed, guys. She said that I suck…

This image was inspired by a twitter conversation last night...  

Here are a couple of pictures to illustrate Saturday (BALD) and Sunday (Kimonos after the Welcome Reception/Party) at Lotusphere 2011.       

It is now two weeks since Lotusphere ended. After I got back I was thrown into a project initiated by the CEO, to be presented this morning during a manager meeting. Now when the presentation is over, I will try to put my thoughts about Lotusphere down.As always, the conference is busy, fun and overwhelming, and it have been taking me a while to wrap my head around everything.Sessions Let's start with the sessions. I was not able to attend nearly as many sessions as I wanted, but I managed to catch some great ones. Thanks to Ben Langhinrichs' excellent Lotusphere session database the planning was easy. I attended a number of sessions on Xpages, a jumpstart session, a show-and-tell as well as several Xpages-related sessions. I also purchased a copy of Mastering XPages during the signing on Monday. I been stuck on an older version of Notes for a long time, but it seems like we will get to a current version shortly, so I decided to spend the time and effort on learning Xpages. There was very little classic Notes development at Lotusphere. Kathy Brown had a great session (as always), this time on @Formula language. Scott Good and Henry Newberry had several sessions about web development, covering subjects like CSS and JSON. SNAPPS had Rob Novak and my fellow countryman Viktor Krantz had their 10th Great Code Giveaway, with loads of useful code. Julian Robicheaux (also from SNAPPS) had a session about feeds that I attended as well. But if I have to single out one session, it would be Mat Newman and BP206 "Where is the Love?". I love the energy, the humor and enthusiasm of Mat. IBM should hire him right away. He gave me a few things to think about, and many things to bring back home to the people responsible for end-user training...Social Business As I was participating as member of the media, I had meetings with several IBM executives. One of the most interesting was with Uffe Sorensen. He is responsible for the messaging and collaboration business in eastern Europe, Middle-East and Africa, and he focus on social media, mainly Connections, but also mobile applications. Uffe made a very interesting observation. Most companies are already using social networks, they just don't know it yet. As we all know, the tagline of Lotusphere this year was "Get Social. Do Business.", and while some executives see it s just the buzzword of this year, I think IBM actually get it. Jeff Schick, who I also got to meet, is the Vice President of Social Software at IBM. He told me that IBM have been a social business for many year and that the employees "eat their own dog food". The tools have been modernized, and Jeff talked about how the employee catalog evolved into the social portal it is today, with expertise search and much more. I think this is crucial, that IBMers actually use social tools. Some critics recently pointed out that some IBM executives…

IBM released more info about their cloud offerings during Lotusphere 2011 (#ls11 on Twitter). Already during the opening session it was revealed that Project Concord, the online collaboration document editing that was shown at last years conference, was now a full product called LotusLive Symphony. Another product unveiled this week is LotusLive BES, a hosted Blackberry Enterprise Server offering that works together with the email in LotusLive.- This will allow a small company to get email, mobile support and much more without the need to purchase hardware, install the software, provision users and hire someone to maintain and administer the server, Brendan Crotty at IBM explained to me.- LotusLive is not intended to rip-and-replace, we think that most customers will use a hybrid model, he continued. There is a LotusLive Connections offering, currently supporting Profiles, Activities and (most recently added) Communities. The products are designed for a hybrid model.Uffe Sorensen, responsible for social business in EMEA, echo this. He point out that Xpages was developed to bring most of the functionality of the rich client to the web.- Now you can do almost everything you do in the Notes client on the web as well, he said.- Domino powers an incredible amount of applications, and we can't demand them to be thrown out, so a hybrid model is important.LotusLive Notes lets customers host their Notes applications in the cloud, but they still use the Notes client. By rewriting the applications, or parts of them, they can be deployed as web applications as well.So IBM is getting a more and more complete cloud offering, with options to run hybrid models if the customer wants to. Personally I think IBM is on the right way, and they have a solid offering. Imagine a new company going to ibm.com, selecting the services they need and then paying online with a credit card, and moments later they have the tools they need, without having to purchase hardware, software or services for an on-premises solution. 

Alistair Rennie opened Lotusphere (#ls11) - after saying "I love the smell of Lotusphere in the morning" - by introducing the 500 college students invited by GBS. He talked about the Notes customer General Motors and the Chevy Volt electrical car they brought to Lotusphere, and how it contains more code than an F-35 fighter. Then he introduced this years guest speaker, Kevin Spacey. Kevin Spacey is not just a film actor, but also the producer behind last year's movie "The Social Network". He was speaking about how he, after he decided to change career, started a social network for independent film makers called Triggerstreet back in 2001. Then he talked about Facebook and how the movie came to be. Now Alistair is back in stage and talk about how the important thing to IBM and Lotus is the success of the customers. "Everything is just hot air" he said. IBM just completed their yearly Chief Human Resource Officer study, which shows that social networking and business is very important to grow and evaluate businesses. Alistair Rennie think that social networking is the fifth step in evolution of computing, after mainframes, departmental computing, PCs and the Internet. It makes the business nimble and fast. The companies embracing social networking are also more successful, according to Alistair Rennie. Those companies are also more connected through mobile devices and the cloud. "It's about the people, stupid" Social business have to be built on open standards (OpenSocial, HTML5, etc) as well as work like the internet, use resources and services not only inside the company but also public resources. Alistair Rennie promise that we later this morning will see the next versions of Lotus Notes, Sametime, Connections, LotusLive and Portal. "Rethinking the outcome in the face of social business. Get Social. Do Business"   Now Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of RIM on the stage, showing the RIM PlayBook. As @vowe said on twitter, "first OGS with a commercial break". Going mobile is just one of the ways social businesses will succeeded Rennie says. Now Jeff Schick from IBM is on stage, introducing representatives/executives from BASF, KBC Bank, CSC and AT&T for a on-stage panel. Message: "going social is a way to get good employees and keep them, as well as building value." Now Sandy Carter, VP of Sales (Worldwide) is on stage. Talking about how she is an "evangelist" at IBM, and how important she (and IBM) sees social business and how they "walk the walk". The internal network, w3.ibm, is very important to IBM employees. For every 1% increase in retention, the IBM software division saves 50 million dollar. Sandy talks about how companies that outperform their competitors are 57% more likely to use social networking. Finally the demos started. Ron Sebastian, who traditionally was doing the demos, had passed the torch to Brian Cheng, a young IBMer who won the hearts of the audience with his enthusiastic presentation. Brian showed the next versions of Notes, Sametime and Quickr, all featuring the activity…

Follow it here. Excerpt from Saturday's entry:So here it is day one of Lotusphere ?at least as far as I´m concerned. I realize the festivities don´t actually start today, but today is when my Beloved takes off for Florida into this unknown behemoth cult party that involves a lot of alcohol and nerding out on badass topics. It like Woodstock, except ?nowledge´ is the drug that is washed down with alcohol. How I wish Adobe held conferences like this ?from what I understand nobody parties like IBM does. At least, that´s what I remember when I worked for IBM years ago ?right, Jeff? [A particular IBMer took me out for dinner and drinks when he came to Dallas in the mid 90s. He's a high profile computer consultant from NJ's location that worked with some very prominent clients in NYC and elsewhere. Jeff knows how to party IBM-style, and that's all I'm going to say.]So here it is day 1 of Lotusphere (for us), and as I´m scheming and starving, I´m reading his Twitter updates of Kobe burgers and beer ?as well as imagining all the other goodies and alcohol he´s ingesting. Sigh. Don't miss Friday's entry.So after work we head over to dinner. I didn´t realize that all of Lotusphere would be joining us via B.B.T.FB.C. [BlackBerry Twitter Facebook Conference]. Our chat at dinner included his packing list (for the n^x time), and every update for every person that checked-in through Twitter/Facebook/blogs/whispered into the ether"...". My Beloved went name by name, explained who they were, and what they were doing. It was like some convoluted, extended family tree gossip session. I had dinner with some very important people last night ("..."and apparently most of them were very thirsty.. hm..).Dinner is finished and we make it back home. We´re doing the packing thing ?making sure he has everything, folding the last minute items ?you know the drill. So I´m working on a shirt of his when I say to him, "Hey Hon, when you get to Orlando, please let me know you landed safely."Without missing a beat, he actually said, "Just follow me on Twitter.""..."[insert one Girlfriend Look of Death] ""..."er, OF COURSE I´ll text you!""..."Right. 

...exactly one year after the Challenger disaster, I had a more personal loss. My mother, Marie-Luise Martinsson (born Groeling) suddenly and unexpectedly died, just a few weeks short of her 61st birthday. She was born in 1926 in Lauenburg in what was then Pommern. Since the end of WWII the town is called Lbork and belonging to Poland. My mom was just 19 years old when the war ended. The picture to the right was taken aroudn that time, probably in 1944. She lost her only brother (who I am named after)in the war (he was a glider pilot)as well asthe oldest of her two younger sisters due to diphtheria the year after. Her father had become a POW and was imprisoned by the Russians, but was eventually released a few years after the end of the war. My grandparents settled in Stralsund in the then DDR. Not until they retired were they allowed to move to the west, where my aunt lived.My mom was on the run for a couple of months, escaping the Russian troops pushing west through Germany, and she eventually ended up in Bremen. She later moved to the Hamburg area, where she worked for a few years. In the 1950's (I think 1952) she moved to Sweden to work as a nanny for a Swedish Air Force Colonel, and she ended up staying. In 1967 she met my father and they got married.My mom was a great cook. She had been schooled in cooking during her late teens, and she could cook all kind of dishes. She was also great at baking. We often had fresh home-baked bread growing up, and both me and my sister to this day enjoy cooking and baking. I have to admit that my sister is better than I am, but I consider myself a decent cook.She was strict but loving to me and my sister. Perhaps it was her German upbringing, or just due to the fact she belonged to an older generation (she turned 43 the week after I was born), but I am very grateful that she instilled some discipline in me. She was also very adamant about acting like a gentleman, opening doors for people, treating women well, etc. All those things have been beneficial to me later in life.She was not too happy about me spending so much time in the computer room in school, instead of coming home to do homework. But I am sure she knew I would eventually work with computers or something similar. I just wish she would have been able to see me succeed in life, and to see my son Erik being born.My mom stayed home until both me and my sister were in school. Then she worked nights at a local hospital for a while. The last few years of her life she worked for the German Parish in Stockholm. Her funeral was held in the German Church in Stockholm's Old Town. Thank you for everything, mom. You made…

The lotus is so thick you can smell it in the air"..."He decides to volunteer me(?), uh, tell me(?), ?- I was ?olun-told´ that I should run to the store after work for one of his Lotusphere projects."Honey, why do *I* need to go there," I asked.Logical Beloved programmer says, "Because you´re in that area and daycare is across the street."Now, while I am a logical sort, geek and programmer too, I´m still a girl"..." And I think I´ve been *super* cool about this Lotusphere cult/revival thing, the Dolphin Hotel elevator noises in bed, and even about the talking alcoholic IBM turtle. . "Ummm"..." No, try again." I´m a good girlfriend so ill give him another chance.And you can almost see his brain processing it:mouth.addEventHandler(MouthEvent.SPEAK, makeGirlfriendHappy);Function makeGirlfriendHappy(e:hopefullyNone):void;{ NavigateToHappyGirlfriend (newHappyGirlfriendRequest ("[insert quick thinking touchy-feely stuff here]")); }"You´re sweet and kind and nice to me?" He blubs.Do I let him off easy? Do I? DO I?Read full story here #ls11  

My beloved is a "..." Lotusphere Geek. I can admit that. its not like he has some infectious"..." diseas"..."Get this -the man spent all night adjusting a QR code to ensure it was *perfect*. While I have no issue with that, I was somehow dragged into this pentacostal glossolalia ?through his chirping utterances about a Harry Potter theme park, the sound of the elevator at some place called "The Dolphin," and something about a very brilliant turtle. Confusion abounds, but this must be a very advanced cult to have a talking turtle.So we´re lying in bed"...""..."Yea, I thought about what you´re thinking about too. We started kissing and cuddling. He´s smiling and he´s happy. I think the hyper-frenzy is over and I might get my Lotus Geek back to his normal geekiness. So he´s holding me, stroking my hair and suddenly, he breaks the silence by saying, "I´m walking through the lobby"..." Ding.. Going up"..." Ding.. Going Down.."He´s visualizing walking through the hotel and riding the elevator up and down."..."Good night, Lotus Geek. You´re one of a kind. [consequently, IBM, you owe me a ticket next year. Last night was rough, but more importantly I really have to check out this talking turtle].Full story here #ls11   

Greyhawk68 just blogged about how Lotus is not dead at his employer. I just have to echo that. As late as yesterday the CIO and I were attending a meeting where the marketing department was discussing a way to track customer visits. The CEO was also there, and after a short discussion within the marketing group, he took command of the discussion. He explained that he in a previous position been creating some simple Notes databases, and that Notes would be the perfect vehicle for the kind of database he envisioned the marketing department needing. There were not much discussions after that, i think everyone realized that the CEO was right and knew what he talked about.There had earlier been discussions about using a off-the-shelf program like Goldmine or ACT!, but the question is if the cost (in time) to customize one of those products is much less than the time spent to develop a tool in Notes perfectly suited for our users. Just like Greyhawk68, we use the best tool for each project, but in surprisingly many cases Notes and Domino is actually the best one. #lotusknows   

I will be using several social networks while at Lotusphere. I just signed up for Gowalla, but I use Foursquare more. I am of course on twitter and Facebook, and you can message me there. But the easiest way is to mail me at texasswede@gmail.com, directly to my Blackberry.I am arriving Saturday a little after noon, and will be joining BALD at Big River Grille around 15:00. That's 3.00pm for you Americans, or when Mickey's big hand point at 12 and his little hand point at 3. :-) I will also be at ESPN late that evening, at a number of JMP sessions on Sunday and of course at the welcome reception Sunday evening.When I know my schedule better, I will post it. As I go as media/blogger, I get my meeting schedule when I arrive, or sometimes not until Sunday. #ls11   

Tim and Gabriella of Turtle Partnership have once again built iPhone and Blackberry apps, which in turn are using Ben's excellent Lotusphere Session Database.The Blackberry app (version 1.6) can be downloaded right now from Tim's blog post, or later from the Blackberry App World. The iPhone and iPad versions have been submitted to the Apple App Store for approval.New for this version is that you now can check in using FourSquare and tweet your location using twitter directly from the app. Update: I am having problems with the app on my Blackberry (Bold 9700 with OS6). It locks while loading the data (never finishes) and clicking on the day/time selectors just bring up the menu. I am sure it is related to the data not being fully loaded, and hopefully Tim will get it fixed soon. #ls11   

...what Lotus knows. In 164 hours a number of us will be sitting in the OGS at Lotupshere (follow it on twitter as #ls11) and hopefully learn what IBM is planning for the next few years. I hope we will see more of Project Vulcan and Notes/Domino 9, and of course learn about what the plans are for all the other products, like Connections, Quickr and Sametime....who the speaker at the OGS is. With the Wednesday party at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, would it not be cool to have a tie-in at the OGS? Perhaps someone involved in the movie, like Robbie Coltrane? And will we see Alistair Rennie wearing a Gryffindor robe on stage, or at least a Gryffindor tie? :-)...what the hundreds of students brought to Lotusphere by Group and IBM think about the product we all use and (mostly) love. When I showed the power of Notes to a web designer with PHP and SQL knowledge, she was very impressed....if the wifi connectivity is enough for all the devices brought to the OGS. 

It is 10 days until wheels up for Lotusphere (#ls11), and I am finishing preparations of the laptop I will bring. After some headaches with dual boot (actually triple boot) between Windows XP and Ubuntu (this is material for a whole other blog entry!), I now have the operating systems running and most of the software installed.I realized that I need a copy of all my Notes templates on the laptop as well, in case I have to make any changes/updates while at Lotusphere. So how do I synchronize the files between desktop and laptop? This is my solution:I have a Dropbox account and have the software installed in both places. I created a folder in Dropbox called "Notes Templates". Then I installed Microsoft SyncToy 2.1 and installed it in both places. I set up a folder pair on each system, to copy the files between the Dropbox folder and the Notes Data folder. The settings in SyncToy let filter on extension and file attribute. So I selected to only copy .ntf files. But that would still include all the standard templates, and I don't need them to take up space in my Dropbox account. So I told SyncToy to exclude read-only files, and I then marked all default templates as read-only on both sides. Now only the 25 templates I need access to are being synchronized. Mission accomplished. I am sure there is a smarter way to do this, but this works for me. 

In my previous post, I promised to write more about my adventures trying to get my Lotusphere laptop to dual boot, or in this case actually triple boot.First a short background:The laptop is an older one, with a 1.83 GHz Core Duo processor, 512 MB memory and 120 GB harddrive. It is not powerful enough to run VMware. I need Notes 7.0.3 installed (client, admin and designer), as that is the version used at work. I found that if I open Notes templates in Domino Designer 8.5, the program make some changes, like adding element (mostly related to Xpages). I don't want to risk that my templates get messed up.I also want Notes 8.5.2 installed, as that is what my home setup runs. If I need to access my home server, or if I want to test something I learn at Lotusphere, I want that version.Since IBM in their infinite wisdom makes it very hard to run Notes 8 and any previous versions in the same installation, I decided to install XP Professional twice on the laptop, and boot between them. Since I don't store a large amount of data on the harddisk (and I am bringing a 500 GB external drive anyway for photos), I can as well install Ubuntu 10.10, just for fun. That way I also get GRUB installed (version 2 comes with Maverick Meerkat) automatically.I wiped the content (and partitions) on the drive, and then happily installed Windows XP SP3 on a 40 GB partition. I installed all the drivers, as well as security updates and patches (101 patches weighing in at 250 MB in the first round, a handful more after reboot, for a total of about 300 MB of updates). Next I installed and configured all the software I wanted in both XP installations, including OpenOffice, Cam2PC (an excellent program I use to transfer and organize my digital pictures), IrfanView, Flickr uploader, Dropbox, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Writer, as well as a handful of other programs.Next I used Clonezilla Live to clone the XP partition. I did not test anything yet, as I still did not have a way to easily switch between the operating systems. But the next step would take care of that. I popped in the CD containing Ubuntu 10.10 and installed it using the choice "parallel with existing operating system". Worked like a charm, I rebooted and had a nice menu Where I could choose between Ubuntu, Windows XP and Windows XP. Of course, it would be nice to clean up the menu somewhat, and actually display some meaningful text for the two Windows installations, making it easier to select the right one, even after a beer or two at #ls11. :-) So I installed a piece of software in Ubuntu that let me edit the boot menu. I changed the labels and voila, it all looks great! I selected the first Windows XP partition and installed Notes 8.5.2. I then rebooted and selected the other partition. But when…

Darren Adams blogged about his experience running the new OS6 on his Blackberry Bold 9700 earlier this week. I have also been running that version (a leaked version I found, 6.0.0.424 to be precise) for a while now. I will not reiterate everything Darren already told, please go and read his review as well. There are things I like, and things I don´t like as much. There were also things that were annoying at first, but that I quickly got used to. I like the now home screen, with the expandable trays. Scrolling sideways is sometimes not as snappy as I would like, but I attribute that to the fact that the Bold 9700 only got 256MB of memory, not 512MB as the new model that is delivered with OS6 installed from factory.   I like the new notification bar at the top, and that I can click on it to see all new notifications and go to them directly. Clever. I miss the functionality I had in the theme I had installed earlier. When I selected the mail icon, the latest five unread messages were displayed on the screen. When I moved over the SMS/MMS icon, the last five text messages were displayed, etc. But I am starting to like this new functionality. Talking about themes. OS6 only comes with one theme, using slightly spiffed versions of the icons in OS5. I was used to a nice custom theme, and I miss that. Hopefully there will be some themes created for OS6 and the Bold 9700. Blackberry Theme Studio does not support this phone yet, not even in the latest beta version. To be honest, I don´t like the default icons, they should been modernized. Or there should be a way to select another set of icons. And for custom folders, could we not get a few more choices?   Another thing I really like is the new camera application. Not only does it take the pictures slightly faster, it feels like, most of the settings are accessible directly from the camera screen, instead of having to open the menu, go into options, etc. One really nice feature is the geocoding of images. It is much easier to turn on and off, and after your location have been identified, the location is included in the file name. Very clever! The icon with the A is where you can select different presets, with A of course being "auto". There are settings for portrait, landscape, night, beach, snow, party and even text, when you want to take picture of text on a white background. On the media tray, there is now an icon for podcasts, which have made me start subscribing to This Week In Lotus and Idonotes podcasts. The sounds have changed. The old notifications are gone, and replaced with new ones. It is possible to get the old ones back, however. The first I would do is to change the alarm sound, or you may not wake up from…