Yellow is the New Blog

Saw a few postings about how various bloggers got into Notes, so I figured I'd wax nostalgic as well.

During the holidays in late '97, shortly after my 20th birthday, I came to the vivid realization that I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. Which was a bit awkward, since I was already three semesters into my pursuit of a degree in music. Having worked at Chick-Fil-A on and off for the previous five years, I decided I'd just go back and man a grill until I'd gotten over my career angst. But my father ( a.k.a. "Pops" ) had another suggestion; at the time, he was a server admin working at a large telecom... large enough that they had a whole team of people whose job was creating and deleting email accounts... all day long. In fact, they were a bit short-staffed, and he suggested I apply. He warned me it might be boring but would pay slightly better than what I'd been planning to do, and I wouldn't smell like chicken when I got home. He booted up his Thinkpad, and I got my first look at Lotus Notes ( 4.5, in case you were curious ). That's right: I'm a second-generation Yellowbleeder.

A few weeks later, I'd received a crash course in basic Notes administration from the contract agency and was happily creating and deleting Notes accounts all day. Part of our process was to leave the Notes ID in the address book so that we could call the user, walk them through installation of the client and initial workstation setup, at which point the ID file would be automatically downloaded to their machine and removed from the account record. But to ensure that we had a safe copy of the ID, we'd also save the file locally and then attach it to a document in a custom database that tracked when the account was created, the initial password (to allow for password resets... this was 4.5, after all), and various other bits of info about the user. So, as you might expect, I spent a lot of time in this particular database. I thought the icon was rather boring, and decided to replace it with something a bit more interesting, and easier to spot at a glance on the Workspace... Unfortunately, during my crash course, nobody mentioned any development-related concepts... say, for instance, that the database icon was a design note stored within the database itself and, therefore, determined how the chiclet would display for everyone, not just me. Imagine the lead administrator's surprise when he glanced at the icon for the ID vault database one morning and noticed it had been changed to the Grateful Dead "dancing bear":



Though embarrassed to admit that I'd made the change without realizing the impact, in retrospect I'm quite glad that happened, because I was finally told about the nature of design notes and their role in the NSF structure. I'd soon automated the bulk of my job duties, and over the next few months became "the administrator's developer", creating various in-house tools for user and server administration. Ten years have passed. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up (bah, like that'll happen), but I do know that at some point when I wasn't looking, something originally meant to pass the time and pay the bills evolved into a career, and then into a passion. We few, we happy few...

And yes, as far as I know, the icon for that database is still the dancing bear. And now you know... the rest of the story.