Captain Oblivious

Loads of people have mentioned that ILUG2008 is accepting session submissions, so I won't repeat all that fantabulous information. But I did want to show people how entertaining it can be to do even a session abstract at an event like ILUG. First, we have the session abstract Julian and I submitted for our Lotusphere session:

Reports, Charts, and Graphs in Lotus Notes

Do you need to generate some graphs from your help desk system? Need some custom reports out of your expense tracking database? Want to create charts on the fly in a Lotus Notes database and email them to your boss?

You can do all that and more! We will show you several ways to create reports, charts and graphs from - and in - your Lotus Notes databases, with no expensive third-party tools to buy at all!

Nothing wrong with it, and it clearly did the trick because we not only got to present but also had 5-600 people watching us. But it is a little bit dry. heh. Here's our abstract for a similar (not identical) session for ILUG (no, I have no idea if it has been accepted or not):

Charts! Reports! Graphs! Beer (no, not for you)...
by Rob McDonagh and Julian Robichaux

Need some charts, graphs, and reports from your Notes databases? We'll show you some techniques you can use right away. Turn a view into a bar chart, export data to Excel (bleh) or Symphony (yay), and even create comely (that's right, we said comely) graphs on the fly. You can display it all in dialog boxes, on Notes documents, or on the web. Heck, you could even do all three at once -- we don't care!

All of these techniques work with Notes 7 and 8, and they use free tools and free libraries that are free so you can do this stuff for free. That's free, free, free, and yet more free. That's a whole lot of free right there, so save your company some money with this spectacular - yet free - presentation. In return, we will graciously allow you to buy us beer.

See the difference? When you're submitting an abstract for ILUG, you can relax and be your snarky self. And we didn't even get to the cursing. Yes, Virginia, there will be cursing at ILUG. In fact, I believe failure to curse during your presentation will be grounds for summary ejection from the country...