Widget or plug-in? Whatever… it’s difficult to beat Ed Brill in the race to blog something related to Notes, all you can really do is wait until he goes on holiday (sorry, vacation) and hope that he doesn’t have his Macbook with him and access to a WiFi connection. Today’s announcements were centred around two newly-available widgets (plug-ins?) for Notes 8, supporting LinkedIn and TripIt. I’ve never used TripIt so I’m not going to comment on that one (not until I start using it, which I will do shortly) but I’m well-connected on LinkedIn so that was the widget for me.

To be honest I’ve had it installed for a while, and find it very useful to connect with my 275 contacts, keep up-to-date with LinkedIn-based events (such as UKLUG) and speed up access to other aspects of the site.

Naturally, Ed’s blog post fuelled a number of suggestions for other features – I know that this first widget is stage one of the Notes / LinkedIn integration and there’s more to come from this partnership in the future.

But for now this is an excellent widget and another great example of the extensibility of Notes and the ability to provide capabilities to business users who need to collaborate beyond the walls of their enterprise. Oooops, nearly forgot… you can download it from here.

My daughter Lauren (Lolli as she is known to her friends and on Twitter) is a girl of many talents – she gets amazing school reports, she plays the flute better than anyone should be able to after just 10 months, and no-one is better at driving the wrong way round a Project Gotham Racing 4 circuit to smash head-first into the other drivers. But her real passion is gymnastics.

She came to the sport fairly late and joined a gymnastics club with the aim of getting into the school team – this was quite a challenge as the Marist Preparatory School has a long tradition of doing very well in the national championships. But I’m very proud of my girl because she stuck to it and eventually was accepted into the school team for the final junior year. The team did very well and took bronze in the Southern finals (and two weeks later they pushed the silver medal team into third place and took silver themselves at another competition).

Since then Lolli has been attending a better gymnastics club than the first two she joined, and today was their own club competition. There were three disciplines – floor, vault and trampette – and a record number of children taking part (I think they said two hundred). Lolli was in a group of girls aged 10 on 1st January 2009 – she did a faultless floor routine, a great vault (always her weakest discipline) and an amazing pike somersault off the trampette. The competition was stiff, I noticed a number of other girls of very good ability, but when the award ceremony took place there was a clear winner in her age group. Lolli took the gold for the floor routine. No sooner had she sat down she was called up again to accept the bronze medal for the vault. And then she was back on the #1 podium again for the trampette. After two golds and a bronze there was only going to be one overall winner, and thus she got a third gold and a trophy.

Well done kid, I’m proud of you. All those medals around your neck and you didn’t even walk with a stoop. Thank you to the current Mrs Adams for proof-reading this entry.

Collaboration University – the education event for customers and Business Partners on the subjects of IBM Lotus Connections, Quickr and Sametime – takes place on the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of September 2009 at IBM South Bank (London). This year there’s an added incentive to attend. As well as hearing from collaboration experts such as Rob Novak and his team from Snapps, Carl Tyler, Chris Miller, Gabriella Davis and Warren Elsmore (to name but a few), this year’s keynote speaker will be worth the registration fee alone… it’s me. Rob Novak blogs this historic announcement.

But seriously, I’m very honoured to be asked to speak at Collaboration University because the two events (the other is in Chicago) are among the most prestigious and valuable on the Lotus calendar. If you’re going to be implementing Lotus collaborative solutions, or simply want to discover the value they can bring to your organisation, I can highly recommend attending Collaboration University. Just don’t heckle the keynote speaker.

By the way, I know that’s not a good photo on Rob’s blog. I had to get a photo sent in a hurry for a press article, something in a suit rather than bearded and wearing a t-shirt, so the current Mrs Adams took that photo outside one evening. I since have a better photo, which I hope Rob will use rather than this one.

If you’re one of my Twitter disciples, you may know that my car was repaired today… under a tent on my drive-way.

A month and a day ago, the 5 series had an altercation with a brick gate pillar and came off worst. I blame the lady who had placed her unnecessarily large ‘Urban Sherman’ too far forward in the queue for drop-off at school, which meant that I had to squeeze through the entrance gates… and sensing I was too close to her, I compensated by moving a tad too far left. Crunch. Okay, my fault.

Fortunately, I’ve continued to opt for a company car for all these years (not that I don’t care, I felt bad about making a stupid driving error). I rang the lease company, who sounded remarkedly relieved that no other cars were damaged – as the call-centre operative said “that complicates things immensely”. I suggested that I take it to the local BMW service centre but the reply was “no, don’t worry, it’ll probably be repaired at your house”. I checked the date… nope, it wasn’t April the 1st. Repair it on my drive? I don’t think so. An assessor was booked for a week later, and three days later I received another call saying that an assessor was arriving a week later than originally booked. I started to get dubious about this, and phoned the lease company again, asking if they were really serious about this repair on the drive business. The answer was ‘yes’, but see what the assessor says.

The assessor took one look at it and said “yeah, no problem, we repair far worse than that”. He explained that the specialist erects a tent (sorry, mobile workshop) around the vehicle and then uses a very expensive piece of machinery to shape the panel. It involves inserting tiny looped ‘keys’ into the body-work and then pulling the panel into shape with a bar that fits through the loops. They also have the ability to respray the body-work under the tent.

The specialist arrived this morning and quickly erected the tent from a compartment on the top of his van… and then drove the van out leaving the tent in place. Very clever. It was an all-day job, and wasn’t helped by torrential rain. You can see the before and after photos here – and thus my cynical view of whether they really would be able to repair it on my drive was squashed. I guess they deserve a plug… the company is AutoRestore.