On hiatus

Taking some time off to enjoy time with the new family. See you all again in mid January 2010.

eric

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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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Black Tuesday

This morning I got some Facebook notifications from some friends back in Ohio. As it turns out, my previous employer, whom I spent 6 years working for and really enjoyed, fell on some hard times after a prosperous looking first half of the year. As a result, they had to let a lot of people go. Some were people I worked with on a daily basis while there and others were people I supervised before we moved down south.

It’s unfortunate they had to be let go and my thoughts go out to them all. Heartland was my first professional place of employment and provided me a lot of opportunities. It paved the way for my entry into Sharepoint and where I am today. I will always look back upon today as Black Tuesday and remember those who were let go.

I know there will be bigger and better opportunities out there for them, it may not be in Toledo. Follow your gut and believe in yourself and you’ll come out even better.

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Why I love Sharepoint

I came to an epiphany last night while randomly walking up the stairs. I was going to blog about this aforementioned realization today but was easily distracted with other things.

All through high school and summers during college, I always worked for a subsidary of the Sauder corporation. They have an old time craft village, make tables and chairs, and are a market leader in ready to assemble furniture. One of my great joys in life is when we bring home a piece of prefab furniture that I get to put together. It means it’s time to bust out the screwdriver and get to work.

Because of this, I realized Sharepoint is pretty similar. You get a clean slate every provisioned site or site collection to solve business problems. Sometimes you don’t need a lot of tools, sometimes you need more tools like data view web parts and jQuery. The materials, work and tools make the process of problem solving fun, although we all know it can be frustrating at times.

I like trying to solve people’s problems using the Sharepiont platform. It’s so flexible to use and leverage. I love getting my hands dirty and figuring out how to solve the problems that people bring to me. I find myself wanting to do it for them most often instead of being in my consulting role. I want to get in there and do the work.

I thought I’d share what gets me excited about Sharepoint. What do you like about it?

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Salute to our troops

I wanted to take a minute and give a salute to all our nations military personnel, past, present and future. It takes a special person to dedicate their life to service of their country, and without these people, we might not enjoy the liberties that we do.

On behalf of all Americans home and abroad, we say thank you, stay safe, and come home soon.

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Interesting survey results

We recently participated in a survey about employee opinions on options to help ease the budget issues we are all facing in the UNC system. The survey results were posted today and I am pretty shocked at the results.

My take on the data is people would rather see friends and co-workers get potentially laid off than take voluntary leave based on the data presented. What I don’t understand is if given the option people would take a voluntary leave of up to 5 days but would be against the same measure if it was mandated.

Some of the demographics on the survey were surprising as well, the majority of respondents were in the 46-55 age bracket but yet over 40% had less than 5 years of service.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the figures. This is totally contradictory to something I read on Twitter last week, linked by LLiu.

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