Goodbye Zoe, you will be missed

I don’t normally post personal things on my professional blog, but many readers and Twitter followers have had a sincere interest in the happenings of our black lab Zoe. Last night my wife and I faced the inevitable. We had to put our black lab Zoe down. The below is a brief summary of our life with Zoe.

Elissa and I decided to get a puppy right after we had purchased our first home in Toledo prior to getting married. We both agreed we should do the responsible thing and adopt a puppy. We turned to a local organization called Planned Pethood who rescue and foster pets and adopt them out. They take in the animals, take care of medical needs, spay and neuter the animals and place them with foster parents until adopted. We found a lovely litter of black labs and picked Eriko who we renamed Zoe.

She was a fun puppy but really tested our resolve. She kept trying to show dominance over Elissa and kept nipping at her pretty much until she grew out of the puppy phase. It was getting so bad we considered returning her, but we kept on and she stopped. She still didn’t listen to us very much but she was no longer biting. She loved playing in the backyard where she would play ball, chasing it until she wouldn’t have the energy to run after it anymore. Sometimes that was nearly an hour.

As a puppy/juvenile she was really a chewer. She at 3 small shrubs in our backyard down to the main trunk as well as eating a huge hole in the arm of our leather chair. For 4 years, we had to cover that arm with a blanket to hide the missing leather. She loved to play with 2 liter bottles. On the hardwood floors she would chase it everywhere until she finally chewed the cap off and had it deflated.

She loves those bottles

In February 2008 as we were packing up the house to move to North Carolina, we felt something strange in her neck. We took her to the vet before we left and they said to follow up with a vet after relocating. They thought it was cancer and did some biopsies and aspirations to confirm. Tests concluded she had lymphoma. We started her on a chemotherapy treatment at Riverside and she tolerated the whole process pretty well. The day after treatment she as back to her normal self, you wouldn’t know she had cancer by her attitude. This went on for several weeks and we stopped after the lumps had disappeared and everything was seemingly normal.

She was cancer free, or so we thought. The lumps reappeared an about 4 months. We knew this probably wasn’t a good sign but we decided to go through another regimen of chemo and pray that this time it would be eradicated. It wasn’t the same treatment plan as the last time, but one that proved to be effective. Or so we thought. The lymphoma came back a third time after a few months of remission. This brings up up to this summer. We had decided that we weren’t going to do another round of chemo and keep her comfortable as we could for as long as we could. We’ve been giving her the steroid Prednisone to help suppress the cancer.

It worked for a while, at which point we had to up the dosage and the lumps shrunk again. Last week her lumps were very large and she had developed what looked to be a water sack or cyst of somesort in her throat as well. We lovingly called her “Turkeyneck” until we got her dosage increased. The increase in dosage shrunk those back to nothing. The whole time though out this year long struggle she has been very tolerant of the process and medications up until this week. Her attitude and demeanor has changed and we realize her time is almost up. She is not comfortable and is not really interested in eating. Last night we gave her a special dinner in anticipation of putting her down this afternoon. Things seemed to be ok until between 9 and 10 she threw up her dinner 3 times and her breathing became different. We went to bed with the assumption that we were going to have to go to the vet in the morning, not the afternoon.

Elissa slept with Zoe downstairs, I use slept lightly because we didn’t sleep all night. At 1:30 am she came upstairs asking me to look at her. She was really declining and the cancer or Prednisone was ravaging her liver, she had taken on a jaundice color. We took her to the emergency vet and at 2am she passed as comfortably and peacefully as we could make her

Zoe we love you and will miss you. Hopefully now you are comfortable and running through the Lord’s backyard, mangling all his shrubs. You’ve made our lives an adventure and we will remember you fondly. We hope to find your spirit in the next dog we bring into the family, your sister Libbey will miss you.

Zoe relaxing on the couch

Smile

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Sharepoint Saturday Raleigh registration open

For all maybe 10 of my readers in the North Carolinas, registration for Sharepoint Saturday Raleigh is now open! If you’d like to attend, please go register, these events fill up quickly so be sure to sign up early.

Some great speakers are lined up and am looking forward to meeting them. Some I have already met from SPS DC and Charlotte. Really looking forward to the Sharepoint 2010 session as the cover will have been blown off the NDA because of the Sharepoint Conference.

I’ll be a volunteer helping out and sitting in on some sessions. Hope to see you there!

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Removing HTML Person Group Fields in Sharepoint

Over on Stump the Panel, Sasha wanted to change the message being displayed on a Tasks list when no one had a task assigned. The hyperlinks for the Assigned To user on the DispForm and EditForm.aspx pages should also be removed.

First, the Disp/Edit forms. In order to make changes to these pages, we need to employ the tool pane URL hacking method. You’ll need to have a tasks list populated with some data or you won’t be able to see this in action. Click on one of the items to go to the DispForm page. Employ the tool pane hack by appending &PageView=Shared&ToolPaneView=2 to the end of the URL in the address bar and hit Enter. Success, we’re in Edit mode.

Add a content editor web part. Click the source editor button and paste in the following:

Substitute a local path to jQuery if it exists in your environment. You may be thinking to yourself that this script looks familiar, well it should. It is the same script from the employee training admin page modifications only repurposed slightly. I have changed the selector to ms-formbody to isolate the HTML Assigned To field. This makes the hyperlink disappear.

Next step, change DispForm to EditForm in the URL. Add a content editor web part to the page like before. Click the source editor and add the following into it:

Now the underline will be gone from the people picker control.

The original problem was solved by converting the view to an XSLT data view and entering in the default message to be displayed when no items were found. Then Sasha noted that the Assigned To name hyperlink should be removed. This again involved more recycled jQuery code. The XSLT Code for the Assigned To filed looks like this, note we added person as the selector:

<td class="{$IDADW2OC} person">
	<xsl:choose>
		<xsl:when test="@AssignedTo=''"></xsl:when>
	<xsl:otherwise><xsl:value-of select="@AssignedTo" disable-output-escaping="yes" /></xsl:otherwise>
	</xsl:choose>
</td>

And the jQuery to remove the HTML:

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