A little less than a month ago, I was excited about a visit to the Microsoft campus in Redmond for some meetings, and a couple days away in Bellevue with my wife.  It turned bad while we were relaxing in our room in the beautiful new Westin Bellevue when we read about the pet food recall.  While we were away, our friend and neighbor had been checking in on our beloved little cat (Kitty, aka Jersey, that's her below with the pink bandage covering her IV)... we had him confirm the brand of food we'd been giving her and were horrified when we realized it was on the recall list. We asked him to stop feeding it to her immediately and made plans to return home the next day.

This story is not unique--- there are countless other people describing almost the exact same scenario:  We noticed she'd been drinking and peeing a lot more and in light of the news story, we took her to the emergency pet hospital.  There, they ran some tests and found severe kidney failure.  They immediately began IV fluid treatments.  She remained in hospital for two and a half days and showed some improvement.  We took her home where she ate and drank well for a couple of days.  Then, we took her to our Vet for some follow up tests and the vet prescribed some medication for an associated thyroid issue... we began the medication and she became very sick, crying in pain through the night.  The next morning, the vet admitted her for another 4 days of IV treatment.

The pathology includes signs of crystalization in the urine and kidneys, and some intestinal thickening.  We're treating her with antibiotics for the intestinal problem, feeding her prescriptive food for the kidney failure, and trying to get her to drink as much as possible, but we don't know how hydrated she's staying.  The prognosis is still unknown.  She's not the same playful curious little soul that she was.  She walks very gingerly and sleeps a lot.

My wife and I are heart-broken.  It's amazing how a little creature like this can become such an important part of your home.  We're sickened by the thought that every time we put down a bowl of "Nutro's Natural Choice" for her, we were poisoning her.  She was always a little finicky, and we'd tried numerous natural organic foods, and she seemed to like this one for a while. 

Why couldn't Nutro or Menu Foods have run toxicology tests on their food?  Why the hell were they buying wheat gluten from China, let alone using it in the first place (Natural Choice, my ass).  We can't believe that such an innocent little sould has had to endure so much.

I've found stories like this all over the web.  For example, our hearts break for Red and his family.

Over on my OZ blog, I wrote a couple of posts about using folders in SharePoint lists and document libraries.  I bemoaned the use of folders in SharePoint document libraries and lists as a way to organize large quantities of documents. 

Finding something in a digital folder hierarchy can be impossible unless you already know the hierarchy. For example, I've seen top level folders in these hierarchies that align with a company's departments or divisions, beneath these are folders for fiscal years, then maybe some folders that describe activities.  What's the problem with this? If I'm new to the company, I pretty much need to understand the business before I can find the document I need.

It seems pretty natural to want to organize things just like you might in your physical filing cabinet, but a filing cabinet doesn't do things like search or filtering, and a computer doesn't expose things in a tactile way like a filing cabinet.  Back in the DOS days, if you had a folder hierarchy like the one I described above and you wanted to find a file with a certain string of characters in the file name, you could issue a command like this:

DIR budget*.xls /s

This would search through the hierarchy relatively quickly and list the files matching the pattern along with the folder in which the file resides.  In Windows, you could use Search, but it's fairly slow because windows has to parse through the contents of the hierarchy one file at a time.  Then along came desktop search which indexes the file system, making searches much faster. Nice, but we're still using a pretty blunt tool. What if we could label files with certain terms appropriate to our business and then quickly expose them based on those labels? 

We can add custom document properties to a file, but in Windows explorer, there's no way to include the custom property as a column and then filter or group on that column.  For example, what if I put all my files in one folder, and all my documents had custom properties called "Fiscal Year" and "Division"? Then, what if I could have a shortcut on my desktop that opened Windows Explorer and showed a list of files from my folder whose custom properties contained 2007 for Fiscal Year, and Manufacturing for Division?  Or what if another shortcut listed all the files in my folder, but grouped things by Division and then by fiscal year? This would be like a Pivot Table for your files... but to me it's like Microsoft gave us these Custom Properties and then didn't give us anything we could do with them.

The bad news is that the file system can't do this.  The good news is that SharePoint can. 

Custom Document Properties are metadata.  Being able to manipulate file listings based on their metadata is one of the core pieces of functionality in SharePoint.  My opinion?--- don't use folders in the file system OR SharePoint.  In a SharePoint document library, custom document properties can be promoted or demoted to/from the document library's columns (effectively linking the two). I believe we should use SharePoint, properly describe our documents with Columns (and/or custom properties), and then use custom views to filter and/or group based on these.  It gives you the ability to simulate a folder like experience, but it's important to note that in SharePoint, if you nest documents in folders, this doesn't work.

I recently downloaded an application for my Motorola Q called John Cody's Alerts. I'm still giddy about my Q, and since installing John Cody's Alerts, I'm even more delighted.  It's an application that's a must have if you need to be reminded frequently to do things like take medication.  For me, beyond having to take some blood pressure meds twice a day, I'm trying to lose a few pounds and reminders to eat something small at regular intervals makes a HUGE difference--- if I don't, I tend to overeat at dinner.

Anyway, this is a terrific little app produced by a diligent small business person.  John tells the story on his web site of how Handango seemingly cheated him out of some just rewards he earned in the partnership they had established.  As I too am a small business person, I stand in support of John... having read the communications he provided, their position seems arbitrary and unfair.  Until this is resolved, I won't be purchasing from Handango, and will be purchasing my license of Alerts directly from John.

I upgraded to Windows Desktop Search 3.0 Beta a while back and continue to have some problems:

For some reason it's indexing my SD card (I have a Toshiba M200 tablet) and I can't make it stop.

It isn't indexing my Contacts or Calendar in Outlook.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled (with a few problems doing so) and it still isn't working right.  I'm eagerly awaiting an update...