The Team
Originally uploaded by Curt Stone.

This past Saturday we played our final game for the season. In my opinion, it was our best played game. All players played their best games. This was a real fun team to coach and I think they had fun too. See you guys for the pizza party on Sunday!

DSC03275.jpg
Originally uploaded by Curt Stone.

I'm having trouble with Blogger so I thought I'd use Flickr to create my post. (and highlight two great guys from Lotusphere)
Got the news today in my email that Sirius and XM are merging. Great! I hope this does expand programming. Getting MLB is a plus in itself. I'm always surfing for new content and this will be great. I won't have to worry about my new car purchase having one or the other.
Here's the email from Mel :
February 19, 2007

To: SIRIUS Subscribers

Today is a very exciting day for SIRIUS customers. As you may have heard, SIRIUS Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio are merging to form the nation's premier audio entertainment provider.

This combination of our two offerings will benefit you - our loyal listeners. As a single company, we'll provide superior programming to you every day with the best of both SIRIUS and XM. Currently, XM and SIRIUS broadcast a wide range of commercial-free music channels, exclusive sports coverage, news, talk, and entertainment programming. Howard Stern. Oprah and Friends. The NFL. MLB. NBA. ESPN. CNBC. Fox News. Additionally, the combined company will be able to improve existing services such as real-time traffic information and rear-seat video as well as introduce new ones.

After shareholder and regulatory approvals, we anticipate that the combination will be finalized by the end of 2007. Until then, both companies will continue to operate independently. We will continue to provide you with the uninterrupted service - as well as the outstanding customer support - that you have come to expect and enjoy from SIRIUS. We do not anticipate any changes in your service during the merger process, however, please call our customer care team on 1- 888-539-7474 should you have any questions.

We look forward to the many benefits this combination will offer and continuing to make your listening experience an enjoyable one - offering more of the Very Best Radio on Radio.

Stay tuned,

Mel Karmazin, CEO

Inspiring pep talk
Originally uploaded by Curt Stone.

Thanks to mom, Karen, for taking some pictures of our Elks basketball team. Check out my sidebar Flickr site for more pictures. We have a fun team to watch and coach. My hope is that the kids learned some about basketball and had a fun time playing. We only have one more game left for next Saturday.
It's been fun!

Our happy place!
Originally uploaded by Curt Stone.

This is one of our favorite places in the world. It's the Mexican pavilion at Epcot. We really like the margarita's there. I enjoy the view of the lake, feeding the 'Mexican' birds, eating nachos and sipping margarita's with my favorite gal. Awesome! It doesn't get better than this.

I see that LotusUserGroup.org is running a photo contest and Ray Bilyk has an entry of bloggers leaving after the closing session. Show your blogger power and place an entry for Ray's picture. It's a cool shot of some of the Lotus bloggers sadly going their seperate ways after a great conference.

Technorati tags:
Lotusphere2007

While at Lotusphere, I was lucky enough to catch The Robert Cray Band at the House of Blues. It was Awesome! When I got home, one of the first things I did was check iTunes for his new live cd release. They were selling the 2 disc set at the show but I didn't have $20 cash on me. On iTunes, there's a bonus song not on the disc, "Smoking Gun". I'm really grooving to this cd. I can't believe I've been missing this artist. He's currently touring with Eric Clapton. How cool is this show?
This disc got me thinking about my Top 5 Deserted Island Live discs.
In order, they are:
1. The Allman Brothers Band - Live At Filmore East
- This is the album that turned me on to the Allman Brothers. It's the one that got me into Jam bands all together. The raspy soul vocals of Gregg Allman and the dueling guitars of Dicky Betts and Duane Allman make this a classic. Don't stop with this one. Pick up all their live material if you can. It's smokin' good blues music.
2. Grateful Dead - Closing of Winterland
- This is a tough one to pick but I have to chose something from my huge collection of Dead recordings. I like this time period of 77-78. Scarlet Begonias/Fire On The Mountain is my favorite jam from the Dead and this set starts out with it. The DVD is a great companion to this and it's fun to watch the hippies.
3. Neil Young - Live Rust
- This was the first Neil Young I started with. It's a great place to start with Neil. It begins with an acoustic set and finishes electric. Most of the great songs are here.
4. Gov't Mule - The Deepest End
- This two disc and one DVD is taken from shows at the New Orleans Jazz festival. Many guest artists make appearences and keep the music lively. Of course, you have Warren Haynes conducting and crunching out great original and remake material. This was the towards the end of the celebration of their late bass player, Allen Woody. There's material from their two studio cd's that had many guest bass players.
5. Eric Clapton - Crossroads 2
- Four discs of Clapton in the 70's and his live jams. My favorite is the guest appearance of Carlos Santana on "Eyesight to the Blind". All the early 70's Clapton is here and jamming.

It was a fun Super Bowl to watch even if one of your teams were not in the game. I was cheering for Peyton Manning. I have a pet peave over critics to claim your career is crap if you don't win the Super Bowl. They just want to create controversy and there's no reality to their opinion. The fact is that it takes a team effort to win a championship. I don't agree that Manning should have won the MVP when the story of the game was the defense and the running game. What if the opening kickoff touchdown for the Bears ended up to be the winning point spread? Would it be Manning's fault? Manning won a Cadillac for winning the MVP. I hope he buys a Cadillac for his offensive line. The running backs were awesome too. It again shows that it takes a team effort to win big. It's been the reason for the Patriots recent success. It seems that they taught the Colts the most important lesson and the Colts figured it out too. Enjoy the success.

Finally, Neil Young is releasing vintage concert recordings. Last year, we got our first taste with "Live at the Fillmore East". The only complaint from this release was the amount of material. The original show had an acoustic set that was not in good enough quality for Neil's taste. The next release, titled Massey Hall 1971, appears to fill this void. I like the comment in this next link that says Neil's producer wanted to release this show instead of the studio recording of "Harvest". As if I'm not excited enough about the news of this release, Neil's record company, has announced the long awaited archive box set due out this fall. They're promising 8 discs and 2 DVD's filled with live and unreleased material and calling it "Archives, Volume 1". Yahoooo! Check out the announcement here.

I was pulling my hair out today with a hide-when problem. Inspired from sessions at Lotusphere 2007, I built a tabbed table with seven tabs and imbedded a table in each one. There are hide-when formula's on 3 of the tables when a field above the table changes. Problem was the hide-when's would not activate until I clicked a tab even though the field that changed had the property to refresh when changed. Many trips to the Notes.net forum gave me some ideas but nothing seemed to work. Some comments stated that the hide-whens should hide the tab if the elements in the tab were hidden. Would you beleive this? If you make a change to the field and scroll the right scroll bar, hide-whens will work. Looks like a bug. I put the table a little lower on the form so the user has to scroll to see the table and then the tabs work fine. Weird?