Gayle and I are sad to report that our twelve-year-old beloved dog Domino Designer crossed the rainbow bridge. Domino was a very sweet male English Springer Spaniel who was an amazing loyal companion. He passed peacefully at home with family and his dog sister Bella.
Rest in peace my friend.
It was this day in 2003 when Danielle passed away at the age of seven. She was born with a low grade astrocytoma brain tumor. Dani was an amazing little girl. Dani never talked or walked but, was the most loving little girl you would have ever known. She was full of kisses, knew where all of the sweets were in the cupboards, was adored by her classmates in elementary school, was Alyssa’s buddy and so much more. Oh, and she absolutely loved those frozen mini-pancakes.
Dani would have turned seventeen this month. The last ten years have flown by and, not a day goes by when Gayle or I don’t think about Dani. Many of my memories were shared on my old blog. I want to thank all of you for your support over the years and especially those of you who were there ten years ago when Dani was ailing.
Today we remember Dani.
Today I received the following email from Jens-B. Augustiny’s son Herbert:
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
Last Saturday my father, Jens Augustiny died. You are entered in his
address database and because of this you are receiving this sad news. For
details please refer to the attachment.Since we are not sure whether we can address all friends, business partners
and customers, we ask you to forward this message to other people which had
contact with Jens.Best regards
Herbert Augustiny
I was deeply saddened by the news of Jen’s passing. My heart felt condolences to the Augustiny family.
The last year has been a total absolute blur. Between teaching at Clark Collge, working on projects at Elguji, volunteer work and more has consumed every available minute of my time. I have also been quiet on a few fronts on purpose. Let me first start with Elguji.
Elguji has been very fortunate to have a loyal (and still growing) Notes and Domino customer base. While sales of our flagship IdeaJam for Domino have slowed down a bit, we are still serving dozens of customers around the globe. In fact, we are hard at work (and have been for some time) on IdeaJam 2.0. IdeaJam 2.0 is not simply an upgrade to IdeaJam 1.9.2 but, a complete re-write of the core application made to be “mobile first”. Yes, it will still be a great web application that will blow your mind and we are very excited at the progress we have made. For now just know that we have done our best to include the feedback we have received from our customers. Stay tuned for more on IdeaJam 2.0.
Where Elguji has really transformed and rolled with the times is with our “event-based” IdeaJam cloud platform. We are now providing customers around the globe with what we call “event-based” jams. These jams can be provisioned in 60 seconds or less. Jams run anywhere from 1 day to 3 months. It’s whatever the customer needs. Some of you may have seen that we are running jams for IBM Rational, IBM Websphere and IBM developerWorks. In fact, we just completed a project directed by IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. Our customer work also includes colleges and universities, branches of the US Government and many other global institutions. We couldn’t have done with without the professionals at The London Developer Co-Op.
You might ask “who is driving all of this business to Elguji?”. Let me tell you that there are two primary product evangelists for Elguji 1) IBM and 2) Existing customers. IBM is constantly referring customers to us, primarily for our event-based jams. One of the worlds largest financial institutions who will go unnamed has also sent us plenty of new customers. We are very fortunate to have such great relationships with IBM and our customers.
Elguji is also cooking up a brand new product that frankly, I’m super psyched about. It’s 1,000 times bigger than IdeaJam and I am lucky to be working with some of the brightest people in the world on it.
In October I departed the world of OpenNTF and not longer after that the community which I was part of for over a dozen years gave me the most wonderful send-off I have ever seen. Dozens of blog posts, tweets and more – all with the #thanksbruce hash tag. I wanted to thank everybody sooner but as usual, life got in the way. Thank you to all my friends and colleagues for their heartfelt love on Wednesday, November 2, 2013. I owe much of my success in this world to many of you.
I am now wrapping up the development of a new website for OpenNTF with Niklas Heidloff, Per Henrik Lausten and Martin Rolph (Oval Systems). A new website was long overdue for OpenNTF and I felt compelled to see the project through it’s fruition. It will be a few more weeks before you see the new site. We are now in the user acceptance testing phase.
Once the website launches, I will remain an Honorary Board Member and continue to help support the efforts of the open source community. I do however wish that the IBM Connections team would embrace OpenNTF more than they have. It’s important for the overall IBM Collaboration Solutions app dev community more than ever. </getting off my soap box>
Part 2 coming on Monday.
Gayle and I parasailing 350 feet above the Gulf of Mexico:
Parasailing over the Gulf of Mexico
Parasailing over the Gulf of Mexico
Warren Elsmore wrote a book! It’s called Brick City and Warren describes it as “a celebration of the worlds’ architecture, recreated solely using the celebrated toy of the century, LEGO bricks.”
In our podcast with him, we discussed:
Brick City will be in bookstores in several different countries on May 6th, and it is already available for pre-order on Amazon – check Warren’s Brick City page for links. Warren’s website also has more information on his large scale models and his commission-based work.
Podcast trivia: Warren was briefly a Guinness World Record holder for “Largest LEGO Mosaic” from the 2012 LEGO Show, with a mosaic measuring at 143.9 square meters (1607 square feet).
From my friend and ICS community member Chris Byrne:
My 17 year old daughter Grace, a senior honors student in high school who is dual enrolled at the University of Georgia, was running with friends after school last Friday. When crossing the street, she was struck by an SUV. She is now in the intensive care unit of a local hospital being treated for severe brain trauma. Grace is a multi-sport athlete at her school with varsity letters in Tennis and Cross Country, and was the MVP of the Junior Varsity Soccer Team. She turned to tennis as a sport after breaking her foot too many times playing soccer. She has also completed two half-marathons, the most recent in October (the picture of her is after that race). The outpouring of love and concern for her from our community in Athens has been unbelievable because she has touched so many lives and made such a difference in her young life.
