UKLUG supremo Warren Elsmore has announced that the UK Lotus User Group will be holding a two-day event in Edinburgh on the 8th and 9th of October 2009 at the Radisson SAS hotel. That’s handy, it’s my preferred hotel in Edinburgh. The choice of location for this year’s event has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Warren lives in Edinburgh. Nor does it have anything to do with Wild Bill‘s encyclopedic knowledge of every watering hole in a ten mile radius (he’ll probably vehemently deny that, and tell me it’s fifteen miles).

Joking aside, I’m pleased it’s happening in Edinburgh – all of our customers large and small are important to us, but sometime I don’t think those in Scotland get enough opportunities to interact with the community or get to events. So this is great news.

Stay tuned here, Warren’s site and the UKLUG site for further details. It’s in my diary already.

For the full background on this subject please see here.

A couple of months ago I acquired a CD with the Parish records for St Nicholas (Chiswick) from 1855 to 1901. It revealed the details of my main suspect for my Alice West, living a stone’s throw from my great-grandfather Henry Clinch… this was not the right Alice West. My great-grandmother was Alice Maud West, and this one turned out to be Alice Jane West. Disappointing maybe, but by this point I had two options, and this removed one of them.

The other major development during the past couple of months was the early availability of the 1911 census (following a successful challenge under the Freedom of Information Act to bring it forward from 2012). Of course, I headed straight for the record of Henry Clinch and ‘wife’ Alice – information recorded six months before the birth of my grandmother – and it revealed one important detail… that she was born in Acton. This was rather interesting – it recorded Henry as being born in Chiswick, but the 1901 census shows the two birth places reversed. This could have been an error on the part of the census recorder. Ten years later the head of the household was responsible for entering the details, so you’d have to assume Henry wouldn’t have got it wrong.

So, knowing that Alice West was born in Acton, I turned back to a birth certificate that my mum’s cousin Susan had sent me (she acquired it based on a strong hunch) and two previous census records (1881 and 1891). Although the family had moved from Acton to Hammersmith everything matched up… Alice Maud West born in Acton at the right time, and her parents’ names matched the census information to the birth certificate.

Knowing this was the right Alice West, it confirmed the names of her parents – Frederick West and Harriet Underwood (and we’ll call him Frederick West, not Fred West). Tracing back further, Harriet was born in the tiny Hampshire village of Froxfield Green and was the daughter of Stephen Underwood and Harriet Restall. Stephen, born around 1819, was listed as an agricultural labourer, but also as the Parish Clerk – which says that he was literate. Frederick West was born in the Kingston area, the son of John West (unfortunately not an heir to the tinned fish empire) and Sarah (surname as yet unknown). Frederick lived in The Bittoms, an area of Kingston now dominated by a large car park and County Hall.

And there you have it… a mystery solved but opening up new avenues of investigation. What prompted young Harriet Restall to leave a tiny Hampshire village and pair up with Frederick from Kingston and then live in Acton? Today it’s commonplace to move around – I think about my own life moving between Twickenham, Isleworth, Shiplake, Hounslow, Shepperton, Knaphill and now Camberley. In the 19th century it was fairly unusual to go far from your place of birth – maybe for employment or education reasons, but that’s quite difficult to pin down. The search goes on.

Let’s just ignore the man from Plymouth who two years ago said it was a four hour journey so Lotusphere didn’t exactly come to him (which I actually thought was quite amusing but not useful feedback for planning future events). LCTY ’09 (the UK version) is now open for registration. As in previous years you have a choice – Manchester (the Radisson SAS hotel at Manchester Airport, 28th April) and London (Hilton on Park Lane, 30th April). Well, actually you have three choices (see below) and hopefully soon to be four.

We have the agenda finalised, but it’s not on the web site yet – the session abstracts are currently being collected and reviewed, and will be published soon. There will of course be a keynote speech covering the major Lotusphere announcements, there will be some customers speaking about how Lotus solutions have enhanced their businesses, and then there’ll be the usual two tracks in the afternoon. The days will be capped off with a guest speaker – I’ve put in the same suggestion as the last four years, this year someone is investigating said person but we believe he’ll be too expensive. It won’t be Jeremy Clarkson because as Paul Mooney knows the budget doesn’t stretch anywhere near as far.

As you would expect, we’re using Lotus technology to manage the events (you’d hope so wouldn’t you). Lotus Activities, part of IBM Lotus Connections (available from your Lotus reseller or sales rep right now), is the perfect solution – we’ve already captured ideas of content, links, presentations, to-dos, comments, instant messages, agendas (from a Notes application) and registration data. The wonderful thing is that no-one has to ask where things are posted, and it cuts down on the e-mails. Apart from one (sent before the activity was created) there have been no e-mails containing file attachments. That alone makes people very happy.

The image on the right shows the activity itself, accessed via the Notes 8.5 client and displayed by section. Note the ‘Online’ indicator at the bottom… in Notes 8.5 you can takes activities off-line just as you’ve always been able to do with Notes applications.

Do I hear the Welsh and Scottish among you complaining that both events are situated in England? Fair enough, let’s start with news of Lotusphere Comes To Wales (19th March) which is being run by Codel Software in conjunction with our good friends at Cardiff University. Scotland? We’re working on it.

I have just one thing to say before the ceremony starts. Any scenario in which a band as awful as Scouting For Girls are nominated for an award is a bad sign for the British music industry. Unless the nomination was for worst band of the year. I can’t remember the last time I heard a band that made me so badly want to tear my own ears off.

I’m a late-comer to Twitter. It sounded like a distraction and quite frankly sounded a bit silly (seeing people in Facebook who were “twittering”). While at Lotusphere I sat and had lunch with some guys from a very important Lotus customer, and Mark the CIO asked why I wasn’t on Twitter. One of my reasons, jokingly, was that I couldn’t bear the thought of signing up and having the embarrassment of no-one following me… so round the table I received a number of pledges to follow me if I joined. And join-up I did…

Two weeks later I have 54 followers and I’m following 58 people. Some of the people I’m following are celebs (Stephen Fry, Alan Carr, Chris Moyles) so I’m not expecting them to follow me.

So, is Twitter useful? I’ve got to be honest… not really. Well, maybe it has been a couple of times. Paul Mooney made the point that it was incredibly useful at Lotusphere for letting the gang know where you were, where you were going and so on. But here’s the issue… Paul is following 250 people. How does he cope with potentially so many updates and filter out the useful from the noise and the blabbering?

It is wholly possible that I’m not using Twitter to the best of it’s ability. It was only over the weekend I discovered that I was missing personal replies to my ‘tweets’. My biggest wish-list item for Twitter would be filtering into groups… for example during the week it would be useful to just track a group of work colleagues, or at Lotusphere just those people attending. It’s possible that one of the various Twitter companion tools can do this but as yet I haven’t had the time to look… perhaps someone can put me straight. For now, I refuse to have it on my BlackBerry – I had Facebook on there for a while and the constant alerts drove me mad.