Should I Call The UI Police?

So, while filling out an online application for a race (look, running and developing in one post!), I came across this field…



Seriously? The form had radio buttons for other fields, so clearly they are aware of the technique. They just chose not to use it, but THEN they have to include instructions (that no one will read), for the user to select only “a Maximum of 1”. Ugh. That isn’t even well written. Ignore the fact that it says “Mens” shirts, but that the shirts are Unisex. Oh, and there is an asterisk, as though there is a footnote, but there is no footnote. One presumes it references the poorly worded instructions in red.

The worst part is that this is a huge website, used by TONS of races for the purpose of registering racers. This isn’t some podunk little site that no one ever sees. And this wasn’t exactly their first race registration form.

I was very tempted to check them all off, just because I could.

[ETA: BTW, when I got to the race, they just asked me what size I wanted!]

Great Bay Half Marathon – April 5, 2009

The forecast kept changing from 56 and sunny to 47 and rainy and back again. I woke up Sunday morning to what looked like a sunny day. I decided to wear my running capris and a long sleeve shirt, but bring a running skirt and short sleeve shirt just in case.

Jess and I got to the Newmarket high school (which was the finish of the race) at 9:30. The race website warned that it would be hard to find a parking spot after 10AM and they were right, I think we got the last one. Well, actually it wasn’t a parking spot, but Jess parked there anyway!

It was really windy. I mean really windy. The flags on the flagpole were fully outstretched due to the wind. So, I think it was 50 degrees, but it felt cooler with the wind.

We jogged over to the elementary school around 10:30 AM. Race start was supposed to be at 11 AM. I think the race started a little late, but we were off! Our plan was to take it easy and run about the same pace as our training runs, which was around 10-minute mile pace. We took a left and hit our first hill. First of how many you ask? I have no idea because there were soooo many of them. Thousands. I think. That’s how it felt anyway.

Hill after hill after hill. Did I mention there were hills? Don’t think I’m just a wimp. My neighborhood is essentially at the top of a large, but gradual hill, so every run I go on involves quite a few hills. This *is* New England, not Nebraska. Even so, this course was pretty hilly. According to mapmyrun.com (since for some reason my elevation data is missing from my Seacoast Half Marathon entry), the Seacoast Half Marathon that I ran last fall had a total 197 foot ascent and 194 descent. The Great Bay Half Marathon had a 253 foot ascent and 249 descent. YIKES! It really WAS hilly.

It was a pretty course, too. We had some nice views of the bay through the trees at one point. However, it was during the second half of the race, so I can’t really say that I enjoyed the views. I was too tired and focused entirely on the pavement in front of me just to get up the GIANT hill at mile 8.

There was some interesting course entertainment. At mile 2 and again just before the end there was a guy playing bagpipes. There were some guys in their driveway around mile 9 just jamming, a couple of guitars and drums. They were a great pick me up. Two folk singers at one point with a guitar and an accoustic bass (I think). A female barbershop quartet. And strangest of all, belly dancers at mile 10. I promise I was NOT hallucinating, there were belly dancers. Had to be the strangest course entertainment I’ve ever seen.

Jess and I took turns feeling good. Not on purpose, it just seemed whenever she got her second wind, I was lagging and whenever I perked up a bit, she lagged. It worked out. We had some fun smiling and waving together whenever we saw a photographer. So no matter how we felt, I think we looked good in the pictures!

So the mile by mile pace breakdown:

1 10:10
2 10:01
3 10:35
4 10:20
5 10:19
6 9:53
7 10:11
8 11:27 – I SAID there was a BIG hill.
9 10:27
10 10:42
11 11:07
12 11:16
13 11:12
0.1 9:41 (pace)

Finish time-2:20:18

And a bad cell phone picture taken right after the race (in other words, I look like crap)…

THAT Makes Sense – Lotusscript to Excel (a vent and some tips)

I was asked to take some data from a Notes application and make it into a pretty report in Excel. Okay, no problem. A little lotusscript here, a little lotusscript there, a dash of VB. And VOILA, lovely report in Excel with shaded cells, borders, date formatting. Except for one little problem. I couldn’t get the Page Setup.FitToPagesWide to work.

I checked and re-checked my code. Went home and came back this morning and checked it again. It was correct and yet it didn’t work. Huh? A quick Google search gave me this…

“In Microsoft Excel, you cannot use the FitToPagesWide or FitToPagesTall property in Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications code to change the Adjust To option in page setup.

To change the scaling from Adjust To to Fit To in page setup, set the Zoom property to false as in the following example:

With ActiveSheet.PageSetup
.Zoom = False
.FitToPagesTall = 1
.FitToPagesWide = 1
End With
”

SERIOUSLY?! THAT makes sense. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? [end sarcasm] I have to explicitly turn off the zoom in order to set the Adjust To option, even though every other parameter that Excel spits out for PageSetup can be ignored.

Sigh. Deep breath.

Anyway, I know other blogs have covered this, but I thought I would share a bit of the code for creating a “pretty” Excel sheet from Lotus.

Use Lotusscript in the normal manner to get some data. When you’re ready…

‘We need to launch Excel from Lotus
Dim excelApp As Variant
Set excelApp = CreateObject ("Excel.Application")
‘We need to create a new Workbook
Dim excelWB As Variant
Set excelWB = excelApp.Workbooks.Add()
‘And of course, get a handle on a Worksheet
Dim excelS As Variant
Set excelS = excelWB.ActiveSheet

Now given the handle to the Excel Worksheet we can use a little VB to simply populate fields…

‘Either with direct text
excelS.Range("A1").Value = "Hello World"
‘Or with Lotusscript
excelS.Range("A1").Value = udoc.FieldGetText("greetingField")


We can have some fun with the VB, by inserting Lotusscript. I used the following to increment the row in the sheet each time I looped through a NotesViewEntryCollection.

excelS.Range("A"+Cstr(y)).Value = viewentry.ColumnValues(2)

Now let’s get our Format groove on. One thing I found is that code like this won’t work…

.Orientation = xlLandscape

You need the code for “xlLandscape”. Lucky for me, I found Joe Litton’s old post on a quick and easy way to get the code. I was already recording macros in Excel and poaching the VB to use in my Lotusscript, but he showed this gem…

MsgBox "The value of xlPaperLetter is <" & xlPaperLetter & ">"

Ahhh. A thing of beauty. By putting that in an Excel macro, I could get the code for anything I needed for my formatting. So this:

With excelS.Rows(“2:2”)
.Font.Bold = True
.WrapText = True
.HorizontalAlignment = xlRight
.Borders(xlEdgeLeft).LineStyle = xlContinuous
.Borders(xlEdgeLeft).Weight = xlThin
.Borders(xlEdgeLeft).ColorIndex = 17
End With

Is now this…

With excelS.Rows("2:2")
.Font.Bold = True
.WrapText = True
.HorizontalAlignment = -4152
.Borders(7).LineStyle = 1
.Borders(7).Weight = 2
.Borders(7).ColorIndex = 17
End with

And it works! So pretty.

One last tip, it’s a good idea to make Excel visible at the beginning of your code while developing, so you can see what’s happening and what’s not happening and when. But when you are done, you should probably move “excelApp.Visible = True” down to the end of your code so users aren’t watching the screen make every little format change. While magical to the user, it is slower.

Facebook – Not Interesting or Multiple Personalities?

I’m not feeling the love for Facebook lately. Or maybe I’m just not using it right. Maybe I’m like one of those people who signs up for Twitter, doesn’t follow anyone and then “doesn’t get it”.

I signed up for Facebook sometime last year, probably May, judging by the date on my first profile photo. I friended a bunch of actual friends. It was fun. A great way to share photos, catch up, etc. I put in my high school and college information and a bunch of people from that part of my life started finding me and friending me. Initally, that was fun, too. We caught up on our lives, shared more photos, talked about careers, families, and more. However, after each initial connection, there would be a flurry of discussion and then it would die down. They would become just another photo in my friend list.

Then, Facebook started gaining in popularity (I know it was already popular, but then it started gaining in popularity with the 30+ crowd). Suddenly, EVERYONE I knew was on Facebook, and started friending me. Seriously, I am “friends” with my friend’s mother. Groups that I have vague associations with now have given me oodles of “friends”.

I have co-workers as “friends”. I see these people all day at work, do I really need to get home and see that they’re making dinner or feeding the dog now? Accompanied by pictures of said dog? (Sorry, if you’re a co-worker and you’re reading this, I really did love that picture of Fido!).

I haven’t really started connecting with people from the Lotus community on Facebook. I did connect with a few, but we’re in the Domino Divas group, how could I pass that up? :) The reason I haven’t connected with Lotus people on Facebook is because I’m not entirely sure I want to mix up my Lotus world with my personal world. (I know, I know, I’ve mixed running and Lotus on blog, I’m a hypocrite, what can I say?).

I honestly find Facebook confusing enough as it is. I already get 500 requests to “pass a drink”, do I really need to add a whole new community to that? I can’t handle the news feeds either. Is there a way to filter it to only show things that might actually interest me? I WANT to see when my friend posts pictures of her new baby. I don’t really need to see that 45 people took some silly quiz.

I know there are lots of Lotus peeps on Facebook. How do you handle this? Do you have multiple personas on Facebook? Do you just tune it all out? Do you freely mix your personal life and your Lotus life? I realize many Lotus peeps can actually be your friend and that’s a bit different, but how do you handle all the people who aren’t really and truly your friend? Connect with them anyway? Let them see that awful picture of you in high school that someone else posted? Or that stupid note that your friend’s sister’s brother-in-law wrote about you and some embarrassing story from the third grade?

Speaking of Bob Balaban... (2nd Time Post)

I mentioned talking to Bob Balaban a few posts ago. I am thrilled to say my employer was lucky enough and smart enough to hire him for a bit. I have gone from self-taught-struggling-newbie to self-taught-struggling-newbie who is working with Bob Balaban!!

Can you tell I’m excited? It’s like a dose of Lotusphere every week for me!

The best part is that he hasn’t looked at my applications and said “Oh my god, you’re a complete moron, this is crap”. Not that I was afraid that was what he would say or anything…

[ETA: Sorry, again, this was another post that didn't make it to Planet Lotus, reposting - I think blogger.com must take weekends off]

Half Marathon Coming Up (2nd try)

So I suddenly realized today that the Great Bay Half Marathon is 9 days away (now 6 due to repost). That’s coming up quick! It’s close enough that there are weather forecasts! Not that they’ll be accurate, but still, there are forecasts! (High of 50F and “Few Showers”, if you were wondering).

[ETA: Apologies to those that have already seen this post, but Planet Lotus didn't pick it up for some reason and I am such an ASW that I am re-posting it).

This will be my second half marathon. My first was the Seacoast Half Marathon, last November. My time was 2 hours, 11 minutes, 45 seconds. I way overtrained for that race. It was much warmer than expected that day. I only drank the water I brought, and none from the water stations. I made the BIGGEST newbie mistake, I drank a cup of Gatorade even though I had never had it during a training run. RULE #1: Don’t try anything new on race day. I knew that, and in my dazed state at mile 11, did it anyway. I felt horribly sick the entire last mile of the race. Anyway, excuses aside, even though my time was right in line with what I wanted to run that day, I felt like CRAP. It wasn’t enjoyable. Mile 8 I think I started hallucinating. Mile 10 to the end was terrible.

My goal this race is simple: enjoy it. I am going to run slow. I am going to drink lots of water. I am NOT going to try anything new on race day. I am going to run with my sometime running partner, which should really help in the enjoying myself category. I will probably have a slower time than last race, and I am completely fine with that.

That all being said, it doesn’t mean I won’t panic between now and 9 days from now! :)

6 Days to Half Marathon

Eek. 6 days left. Weather forecast for 56 and Sunny. Just a few "short" runs between now and then. Deep breaths. I need to figure out what I'm going to wear. Not so much from a fashion standpoint as from a comfort and the weather standpoint. I *am* going to be wearing these clothes while running for two+ hours!

And there WILL be professional photographers there. Let's just say last half marathon, I looked like I felt. :P