There are certain times when I really have to applaud the customer relations department at certain companies.  After sending back a "defective" product, I received the following letter in the mail:

Dear Everybody's Nuts Fan,

Thank you for returning the closed pistachio that snuck his way into your package of Everybody's Nuts.

We try our very best to keep out the riff-raff and maintain our incredible high standards for Big. Open. Pistachios.  But every once in a while, a particularly clever pistachio finds his way into a box.  Perhaps he enlisted a few friends to create a diversion that distracted our inspectors for just a moment.  Perhaps he his in a corner waiting for the ideal opportunity.  Sadly, we'll probably never know the real story.

Please be assured that we will send this wayward pistachio to therapy to see if we can get him to open up.  Our counselors have had great success with some new bio-feedback techniques.

True to our promise, we have enclosed a coupon good for a new package of Everybody's Nuts.  You may wish to use this as an opportunity to try a different flavor of Everybody's Nuts:

[...]

Thank you again for being a good Samaritan and sending this little fellow back to us.  We hope you continue to enjoy Everybody's Nuts.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, I received a coupon for a free box of nuts simply because one of the pistachios I had purchased wasn't opened.  Now that's what I call standing behind your product.  Regardless of the fact that the pistachios that I did eat were very yummy, I am now an Everybody's Nuts customer for life for the sole reason that they had the gumption to stand behind their product.

      First let me introduce myself, I am Sean's Better Half also known as "the wife". Sean has been trying to get me to write on his blog for a very long time now but I have always said "NO", because I am not an IT or computer geek. Therefore, I felt that anything I wrote about would not be right for his blog but as you can see I have finally given in to his nagging.

     Some background on me: I do not work in the IT field but I am in a science field. I have worked on and off for about 10 years in the bio-tech field. I used to work in industry but am now in Academia. I currently do Cancer research in a lab at the University of Maryland in Baltimore (yeah, the one with the great Shock Trauma Center and yes, I do see the helicopters often). I decided to go into Academia because we have a child starting college soon and the benefit of free tuition at any state funded school was one the we just couldn't pass on especially after going to a college fair and seeing the average cost of tuition at a small private college (who has $40,000.00/year to send their kid to school? Lord knows we don't unless that lottery ticket hits tonight). I am the mom of 4 boys ages 16,10,5, and 21 months but it seems like 5 boys if you include Sean. And I have come to the conclusion that all of you IT guys are little boys with more expensive toys.  As you can imagine it is never quiet at our house.

     I just wanted to list some of the things I have noticed since I started working where I am now. It is more typical in my field for people to want to go from Academia to Industry instead of the other way around like I have. That is unless you want to be a professor/faculty at a University and constantly have to write grants in order to get money to do your research. Every time I would tell people here that I had come from industry they would look at me like I had a second head and then I would get asked why did I leave? I would tell them that I came because of the benefits (where else can you accumulate leave at the rate of  20 vacation days and 15 sick/year while also getting 15 holiday and 4 personal days when you first start)? Another thing I have noticed is that many people in the Science/research field who have a PhD and a lot of the MDs  here at the hospital are very intelligent in their particular field but don't seem to have that broad of a horizon when it comes to knowledge or common sense about a lot of every day topics. I am assuming that this is because they have to put so much time and effort into what they are studying or doing research on. At least I hope that is why. I have also learned quite a lot about Visas. I mean the kind that you need to work or go to school here in the US. I am not the norm in my lab. I never was in industry either because I am a female but here it is because I am a white female who is a US citizen. I work with a lot of people from India and China. I have found that it is very hard to get a post-Doctoral candidate who is from the US to work in Academia. It could be because most of the US candidates go into industry where the pay is significantly better. I put out a job advertisement recently for a post doctoral candidate in our lab and didn't get one applicant who was a US citizen. This isn't saying that scientists from other countries aren't intelligent in fact my boss is from Germany and two of my co-workers are from India and they are all very good at what they do. I just find it interesting the lack of US citizens that are choosing to go into biomedical research. It is also a very complicated procedure when hiring someone from another country. The visa process usually can take up to 3 months or more depending on what kind of Visa the person has. I do have a problem with how some of the people from other countries are treated once they get here to work in these positions but that is another story. Anyway, I have babbled enough and must do some work.

I hope my husband is happy that I finally posted a blog entry about something. Sorry it had nothing to do about IT!

I have been so busy with other things lately, that my blogging has suffered immensely.  Hopefully, I can remedy this before All Hallow's Eve:

• I have made a conscious decision to give up sodas at home.  Since I refuse to suffer through diet sodas, it means that I will be drinking more juice, kool-aid, and water.  The reason for the change is simple:  I was drinking anywhere between 4-8 sodas a day at home.  Each soda contains 150 calories, so by removing sodas from my diet while at home, I expect to cut 600-900 calories from my intake each day.  I want to see what kind of impact that has on my waist line or if I will start eating more to fill the void.  I will not be removing sodas entirely from my diet, but by not having them at home, they won't play as large a role in what I drink.  We'll see what happens, but things are not starting out great.
• I ran into a very annoying problem this weekend.  I was working on some validation for a form and was having some seriously weird problems.  I wanted to create a simple script to validate all the fields on a form to make sure that there was something in each of them.  The problem was that each of the fieldnames contained a hyphen "-".  While the W3C says that this is completely legal, both IE and FF barfed when I tried to access the fields via document.forms[0].field-name.  Something else to keep in mind when building your forms.
• I had mentioned earlier that I had to get a new oven.  Our last one started beeping and displaying and ever so helpful "F7" error message on the digital display.  After searching the internet, this seems to be caused by the main control board failing.  After the issues some people have had on this range, I can understand why it might be fried.  As a replacement, we decided to go with another GE Profile range.  Let's hope this one doesn't have the same problem.  One feature of the range I got to try out for the first time was the built-in temperature probe.  Helped me cook a roast perfectly last night.
• As Phil has already mentioned, the NHL season has started again.  The Caps have brought in some new faces, so it will be interesting to see how the chemistry develops.  I already feel really good about the new uniforms.  I might even be willing to buy one of them.  I love the move back to the old style logo and the red, white, and blue.
• Is it just me, or should eHarmony really be called JustUglyPeople?

Any ways, I hope to keep this more current in the coming weeks.  Not promising anything though.

I don't know how I get myself into these situations, but I seem to have really got to learn to say no occasionally.  Of course, where would the fun be in doing that?

• I am currently working to finish up a couple of minor things from idea exchange before Sunday.  Hopefully, once I get this done, Bruce can go live shortly afterwards.
• I am busy trying to get some people together to plan a 20th reunion for my high school class.  I have a meeting setup for Sept 22 at the Greene Turtle in Columbia to kick off the planning.  I have also setup a site on Blogger (www.parkdaleclassof88.com) to put out news that everyone can read without paying for it.  Hopefully, I can get a couple of people to help me add content to the site.
• I have the RHS Boosters spaghetti dinner on Sept 28 to plan and execute.  I'm going to kill Mary when I see her next!!!
• I have volunteered to help out with my church's website.  The site is built on Joomla and the guy running it doesn't know too much about CSS and JavaScript.  Hopefully, I can do some simple things to make it look nice and work better.  I am thinking of incorporating either the Google web development widgets or JQuery 1.2 into the site.  I will definitely be switching them over to Google Calendar for their event planning.  I can't believe they actually have it in an embedded PDF file.
• Chris Miller and I have been cooking up some bits of trouble that should be fun to see what comes of them.  More on that in the future.  Of course, it will be nearer in the future if I can actually get access to the database to do some work!!!!  I will be using Domino 8 Designer to do the work, so I should get some real experience with the wee beastie.
• I submitted one abstract for LS 2008 and am thinking about trying to put another one together before tomorrow's extended deadline passes.
• Oh, and I have a day job that's been keeping me awfully busy.  Spent most of today wrestling with MS Project 2003 via LS COM objects.  Can you believe that Project doesn't have a straight Save method in the COM objects?  Freaking silly.  Instead, you have to do a msproject.application.FileClose/FileCloseAll/FileExit and pass a 1 to make the file get saved.
• Do you have any co-developers that fit these scary criteria?  If so, try to get management to move them on.
• I love the last line of today's Dilbert.  "That leaves fraud, which I like to call marketing"  Priceless
• Jackson is playing soccer again, although I am just a spectator this time.  It's so much more enjoyable when you don't have to scream the entire game.  Of course, I still do.
• How sad is it that I put the wife and kids to bed tonight and headed out to the bank and to do some "emergency" grocery shopping at 10:30?  I do more shopping at Bloom after 10 than a married guy ever should.  Oh....and can you believe the price of milk?  $4.19 for a gallon of milk, regardless of the %, and we are complaining about gas prices?  Seeing as how we go through a gallon a day, that's almost $30 a week on milk.

• 13 days into August and ND8 hasn't been released yet.  There is still a chance it will show up on my birthday or Jackson's birthday on the 23rd.
• LotusSphere 2008 is starting to weigh heavily on my mind and it's more than 5 months away.  I have started to put together some session ideas in my mind and am just waiting for someplace to submit them.  Update:  Matt White has found the url to submit your abstracts.
• While listening to Nickelback's Rock Star on the radio, I couldn't help but wonder why it was ok for them to sing "bitch", but the word "drug" (drug dealer) got censored out.  Haven't they figured out that censoring words does nothing but make the ideas they convey more attractive to kids.
• We went to the County Fair on Friday night.  I couldn't bring myself to walk past the Rabbit exhibits.  It will be a while before I look at a bunny in the same way after Kipper's last meal.
• I upgraded my Sametime Server and Client to CF1 last week.  The client upgrade is a MUST HAVE, since it fixes a number of bugs with the tabbed chatting and performance issues over all. 
• Parade Magazine had a great article on the fallacy of the current drinking age.  This is one of those laws that have very serious unintended consequences, the worst of which is that all underage drinking, whether condoned by the parents or not, has to occur without any adult supervision lest the adults get cited for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.  I have yet to meet a person in favor of the current drinking "laws" that can have their arguments stand up to scrutiny.  I am intrigued by the idea of a "drinking license".
• Theo shows off a cool excel trick that's been around forever.
• Speaking of excel, I have run into an issue with trying to set the color of an excel cell text and background using the RGB function of VBA.  If anyone has an idea of how to do it correctly, please let me know.  I am currently trying to call it as a method of the Excel.Application OLE class.
• The attack of the killer tomatoes has been going on for about 3 weeks now, but it's almost over.  The Great Whites are very weird in the fact that they don't taste like they look.  I will not be doing Belgium Giants next year cause they don't like something in my soil.  Ditto for First Lady, but that's because they were incredibly small, didn't taste great, and didn't ripen any earlier than the other tomatoes.
• My biggest disappointment this year have been the pepper plants.  The stems on the bell pepper plants are relatively fragile and I have lost a large number of almost ripe peppers when their stems broke off due to the weight of the peppers.  Talk about pissing me off.
• Rob's been on a roll lately with his Eclipse rantings.  I whole heartily agree with him.  It has to be easy or Notes Developers won't give it a chance.

• Growing up, I never really appreciated the weather in the DC area.  It wasn't until I moved to the San Francisco Bay area that I longed for the unpredictable storms that came with the hazy, hot, and humid days of July.  These days, I cringe whenever I hear of a strong storm heading towards my house.  Thoughts automatically turn to the damage those winds and hail can do to my garden.  Who'd of thought that I would ever think like this.  On a positive note, I have had my first sighting of a tomato turning red in the garden, so things should definitely be much better shortly.
• If a page doesn't come up in a search on Google, does it really exists?  I was trying to find the site for our neighborhood pool and drew a blank in Google.  My wife was able to find it using ViewManager.  Not sure what to make of that.
• If you are in IT and you egosurf in Google and come up with nothing, should you be worried?  I have tried to track down some people I used to work with at different companies and have not had much success.  And these are people who are at least as senior as I am and ones I would expect to have a presence on the 'net.  What would you think of a perspective hire for a senior position if you Googled their name and didn't find them any where?  Does it detract from their ability to be taken seriously as a top level professional?
• Ran into a limitation of Excel 2003 this week.  It seems that even though you can store up to 32K characters in a single cell, the program will only display and print the first 1K characters.  And here I thought that Notes' 16K/64k limits were a pain.
• Andy's done another fine job, this time with extending OpenLog. 
• A comment on CodeStore pointed to a new Notes.INI setting for 7.0.2, HTTPMultiErrorPage.  This setting allows you to create custom 404 pages for non-nsf based elements on your Domino server.  Sometimes it's more important to read the comments than it is to read the actual blog entry.
• It looks as though Exchange 2007 wasn't exactly the big step forward that Exchange Admins were hoping for.  In fact, if this entry is correct, admins are going to have to wait for SP1 for a fully baked version of Exchange.
• I love it when I find out nuggets like this about the Notes client.  Should be really helpful when debugging an agent or monitoring a design refresh.
• This essay on how developers should approach writing code is dead on.  Some of the best developers I know write the least amount of code and spend more time talking than coding.
• Finally, this WTF example reminds me of the difference between MS developers and Notes/Domino developers.  Namely, that security is not an after thought.

• How come Exchange NEEDS so many different versions of "replication"?  The latest iteration, due in SP1, is called Standby Continuous Replication.  Maybe they are trying to keep up with the Vista versions.
• Ran into an issue this week using "Cache-Control: no-cache".  I was using it in the header of the output of an agent that generates a report.  When the report is generated for viewing in the browser, everything worked fine.  When the output is directed to Word, an error was generated.  Removing the Cache-Control from the output resolved the issue.
• Andy Broyles has a nice write up about the advantages of late binding in making your LotusScript libraries more dynamic.
• There are some really useful solutions in this article from Smashing Magazine.  I can definitely see a use for some of these methods in my applications.
• Chris Wisnot has a good idea for people who support multiple Domino installations and want to do so via Nomad.
• I found a solution to my iTunes library issue from last week.  Hopefully, this will do everything I need it to.
• Now, if this only came with a joystick, it would be perfect.
• I know I am going to catch some flack for this, but here goes nothing.  We lost a police officer in my area recently.  He was killed while trying to flag down a speeding car on a highway.  While I think it is tragic that he lost his life over something like trying to catch speeders, I am disturbed by amount of coverage his death has garnered.  I have learned that he was a super person, but I am sure that there are many other super people that get killed every day and they don't get their faces on the evening news every night for a week.
• There's nothing better than opening your mailbox and finding a check from the hospital refunding an overpayment for a visit 6 months ago.
• If you really think that Workflow in Sharepoint is so easy, try following along with the Developing Workflows in VS articles on the Sharepoint Blog.

• If iTunes is such a user friendly and modern application for managing your music and video files, how come it can't do something simple like watch multiple directories for new files to be included in your library?  Winamp has done it for years.  And why aren't you allowed to download a file you purchase through the iTunes store more than once?
• I have a Sunfire 280R that is languishing in my basement.  I have NO skills with Sun machines.  Does anyone have any recommendations for a free OS that I can put on it to run Domino?  Instructions will greatly be appreciated.
• When are the people who actually know what it's like to work in a real company going to be the people writing in tech magazines? It's evident that Davey hasn't worked in a real environment in years.  Very few people in organizations really WANT to share their knowledge with their co-workers.  It's easier to be replaced if everyone knows what you know.
• If you are a Notes developer and are not currently reading them, Best Practice Makes Perfect, Chris Blanik's Interface Matters, and Bob Balaban should be on your daily reading lists.
• Ulrich found a bug in the LotusScript Class for Determining Elapsed Time and Business Days I had in the OpenNTF Code Bin.  It has since been fixed.