My 2006 In Review

2006 was mostly a great year for me. One of the major highlights was in January when I was able to speak at Lotusphere 2006 on "Domino for iSeries Administration Best Practices" My other speaking engagement came in September at the COMMON User Group Conference on Domino Domain Monitoring. Both of these times I co-presented with Kim Greene - a true Domino Diva! I went to one other conference in March, but it wasn't tech-related. It was "Thirsty" - an awesome Christian worship conference. We are planning on going again in May and I just found out last night that a guy who lived in my house in college will be going too. We, unexpectedly, got to hang out some last night - so that was great since it's been a while since I saw him.

Anyway, I will try to put together some coherent thoughts together below related to what I've blogged about this year. There has been a lot of things happen that I haven't blogged. For instance we have some great friends from church (I actually went to college with them before they were "them") who are now a military family. He signed up at the end of 2005 and is now a Lieutenant. They'll be moving later this year and will be sorely missed, but they have a higher calling both nationally and spiritually!

I could probably ramble some more about some of the great friendships I cultivated at Lotusphere. All of you bloggers are great and I'll miss you later this month - have fun at Kimono's!! But, here we go...

Things I Received
- On May 2, I got to enjoy a great family trip to Disney and received the joy of taking a 2 1/2 year old to Disney! It was awesome!!!
- On May 29 I finally got a Gibson Les Paul! I'm still loving it! I just need a tube amp now...
- The next day I became an uncle! He's such a cute kid and is (sort-of) crawling around now.
- Then on June 21 we found out that we are having another child! And it's a boy - Oliver Thomas

Things I Lost
- Starting in February I set out to lose some weight. By June I had lost 14 pounds. But I've fell off the wagon since then and gained about 6 of it back. So I'm lighter than I was last year, but plan on going back to the cross-trainer. I did go Saturday.
- On November 5 I lost my Aunt Cassie and then on December 19 I lost my "Nanny". It has definitely been a long couple of months for my Dad's side of the family since he and his 6 remaining siblings have lost a sister and their mother. I just want to thank all of you again who have offered your encouragement and support through these times.

Sports
- I'm not a huge sports fan, but I love Gamecocks football!! This year we beat our arch-rival Clemson and also won our first December game since 1960! We've won some January bowls since then, though, so that helped out with that number in our minds.

General Lotus Stuff
- At Lotusphere I passed my first Lotus Development exam (623). At COMMON I passed the Domino for iSeries Technical Solutions exam. Then in October I updated my 6/6.5 Domino Administration certification to 7.0. I still have one more exam to take for the "Advanced" certification (PCLP).
- In August, I posted about how to drive site traffic in the Lotus community. I plan on trying to keep that up this year with end-user/administrator perspectives on new technologies from Lotus that affect me. The graph in that post shows up through July - I posted in June about the Sametime 7.5 client being (prematurely) available in Beta 2 and the next month I was the first to post some screen shots and thoughts about the newly available Notes Client for Linux. What the graph doesn't show is the affect of my lengthy post the last day of September on Lotus Notes NOMAD. That one actually increased my October site traffic about 33% over the previous high in June.
- As an aside, my most popular Google search is for my Domino Web Access Warning post. I would like to see that number decline due to Lotus working harder to prevent that error. Looking at my post, though, you can see that a ton of things can potentially cause this.
- Also, I have been working on reviving the Charlotte Lotus Notes User group with Susan Bulloch, Brian Good, and Mike Robinson. We didn't have a meeting in 2006, but I'm hoping that we get one in 1Q 2007!
- For Show-n-Tell Thursdays I posted 17 times! It was a mixed bag of development and administration.
- I have upgraded to some of the latest releases as well. We moved our Domino servers to 7.0.1 and then to 7.0.2. We had some major issues with 7.0.2 - see here. But it's all good now. I still have 3 servers to move to 7.0.2 and will probably do that really soon. I also upgraded to Sametime 7.5 - that was a breeze!! All of our Notes Clients are at 7.0.1 or higher. I will probably get Chris Moody to push out 7.0.2 quickly this month.