Below, please find links to my presentations from Lotusphere 2010. If you have any questions about either of them, feel free to write.

• BP202 There’s No Fixing Ugly: How to Make a Great First Impression with Your Applications
• JMP104 JavaScript, JSON, jQuery and AJAX for IBM Lotus Domino Developers

If you were there, thanks for coming...I hope they were useful. If you are the person I offended in one of my "You can't fix ugly" presentations, my apologies. Completely unintended, I assure you.

But when I found out the narrator was a dog, for reasons I can't exactly explain, I worried the name was a come-on--that it was too much to hope somebody had actually written something compelling, thoughtful, about racing--and somehow that kept me from pulling the trigger.

Then, when it became popular with, well, normal people, that pushed me even further away.

That, I can tell you now, was time sqandered. Wasted. Frittered away.

Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of the melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively. In order to make my point understood without question. I have not words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences. And that's why I'm here now waiting for Denny to come home--he should be here soon--lying on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor in a puddle of my own urine.

I'm sure you've seen some of the hype about President Obama's BlackBerry and have probably heard the various noises being made (mostly by people who have no idea what they're talking about) discussing how unsecure it is and why, therefore, it's a risk to our National Security.

My friend John Wargo, who knows a lot about BlackBerry devices (he worked for RIM for a while, has just written what I think will prove to be the definitive book on BlackBerry application development, and is one of the best BlackBerry developers in the country) took the time a few days ago to explain why all the hype is just so much hooey.

If you have a few minutes, you may want to read John's post, The President's BlackBerry. Interesting stuff.

The camera car is a Porsche 944 S2 starting from the class pole. The orange-and-white 944 ("Brad") and a black BMW coming from the back of the field ("Sean") make for an interesting race.

Lest my head sound even more inflated than it actually is, let me explain that statement...

I made a lot of changes to make my car faster last winter, the most important of which were aerodynamic. In particular, the big wing on the back. The cumulative result made my car nearly unbeatable by guys who hadn't done the same thing, which is to say pretty much all of the front-runners in the group I race with.

However, a couple of those racers have been looking to put an end to this situation, specificially Brad Waite and Sean Tillinghast. Brad and I have raced together for several years and usually share garages and hotel rooms. He recently added a wing and splitter to his car and his lap times show the effect. This weekend he ran within about half a second of my times which kept us in close contact.

In yesterday's second race, Brad got a terrific jump on me on the start and I spent half the race or more thinking I might not be able to get past him. Ultimately, he had a momentary fuel pickup problem which lasted just long enough for me to nip past (through the grass!), but he is now officially fast (video soon...).

Sean has moved down to GTS2 (my class) from GTS3 last year where he was one of two drivers always fighting for the win. He's been working out the kinks in a new car and this weekend he came ready to play. Sean and I had several great battles over the course of the weekend and even though I ended up winning, I think the easy wins are over. He actually set the fastest race time of the weekend, getting the lap record I was hoping for. It's going to be a battle from here on out, which I couldn't be happier about.

For the record, out of 11 starts my 2009 season ends with 9 wins, 1 second, one DNF (did not finish), half a dozen new lap records, and the Regional GTS2 Championship.

It is filled with back-of-the-napkin drawings that pretty much explain life.

Known around here as the Thrilla in Vanilla, it started, as all such things do, with a bet. Specifically, one of our folks came in and said his brother-in-law, given an hour in which to do it, had failed to eat 50 donut holes in an office contest.

"Fifty? In an hour? That's all?," asked three hearty souls in our office, "That ought to be easy."

And so, the game was on.

The early money was on Laurie whom, it was widely believed, could leverage her amazing metabolism and easily out-eat the rest of the office in spite of her size.

The late money was on John, the biggest and, it should be pointed out, youngest of the bunch who came loaded for bear after spending the night prior researching eating contests on that Fount of all Knowledge, Google.

Each contestant got to choose their weapons. Mike and Laurie went with Krispie Kremes; John, Dunkin Donuts. John and Mike washed theirs down with water, Laurie with milk. John was a dipper, soaking the donuts before consuming, Laurie and Mike were washer-downers.

But, when push came to shove, Mike, the dark horse, was a run-away winner, downing 50 Krispy Kreme donut holes in just 9 minutes, 30 seconds. Laurie was second at 16 minutes and John, well, the kid came in last, downing his final Dunkin Donut (hole) at 23:40.

Afterward, all agreed fifty was a lot but when asked about having a whole hour to eat 75, Mike said, "Well, I could probably start eating again...."

To the winner goes the spoils and he walked off with a cool $100 (pooled from the rest of the office) for his trouble.

OK, people, back to work...

Thanks to everyone who attended my session this morning at the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference in Chicago. I appeciate you being there.

Several asked about getting the example database and/or presentation for their own use. You can download a copy of the one from Lotusphere (same bits...different background) here.

Please feel free to contact me if you have questions about what you're seeing or how it works.

I'm wondering how many times we've heard that statement from customers. I can't tell you the exact number but I can tell you it is a lot.

Every time somebody tells us they don't care how their application looks, we laugh. Not a mean laugh--it's a nice laugh--but we laugh nonetheless. That's because (a) we know they're lying and (b) we know we're going to make it look good, anyway.

Mind you, they don't mean to be lying--more often than not they're just trying to save a little money--but the truth is, it's not the truth. Not even close. They do care how it looks, even if they haven't quite admitted it to themselves yet.

Fortunately (for them), building ugly applications is something we're not willing to do. Blame me for that, if you like, but, personally, I can't stand to even work on an ugly application, let alone use it. I certainly don't want to stick any of our customers with one, even if they have, for all intents and purposes, asked for it.

Why not? For a lot of reasons, the most important of which is I know that, at some level, design matters to pretty much everybody.

"Not to me," you say. "Function matters a lot more than design. Design is just a nice-to-have." Uh huh. Yeah. I hear what you're saying but I don't believe you. Design is integral to everything we do and everywhere we go, every day of the year. Like it or not, you see and touch and use great (and terrible) design work all the time, and somewhere inside that function-is-all-that-matters head of yours, you not only know the difference, you care about it, too, a least a little bit.

An example? Sure...

Consider the two beverages shown above. Let's assume they have exactly the same beer on the inside and that the cost per ounce is identical. So, same beer, same price. The only difference is the printing on the cans. Which would you rather buy? Which would you rather drink? Which would you rather serve to friends?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you didn't choose the beer on the left.

But maybe that's not quite fair. Let's leave your friends and all that peer pressure out of it for the moment. Let's even change the price a little. This is just beer for internal consumption among the members of the household. Nothin' fancy. Your friends and outsiders won't have to see it and the good news is the one on the left is now a penny an ounce cheaper. Still the same stuff inside the can but with the plain one you can save more than two bucks a case. I'm sure you'd be OK with the one on the left now, wouldn't you?

After all, it's the same beer, but cheaper. Clearly, the smarter buy. And, it's just for the "employees" of the house, anyway. Surely they won't care.

Or will they?

In for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose.

These are the Myths of Domino and just like the years-gone-by myths of dragons or sea creatures or Minataurs, what irritates me most about them is how often they come from people who (a) should know better, and (b) are in positions of authority to make poor decisions on the basis of them.

We have come to the point that some of our proposals now contain an entire section devoted to addressing some of the most pervasive (and damaging) of these myths. I thought I might share some of the more damning with you and hopefully you'll share the ones you've heard, too.

So, here goes: