I rented a tractor yesterday. They dropped it off here in The Middle of Nowhere(TM) at about 9 a.m. yesterday, and picked it up this morning. It cost me $200. Sure, that's a lot of money, but I've decided it's more than worth it. Here's why:

1. I can stand up straight and I slept last night - I have a bad back. The doc says I'm not a surgical candidate yet. Operative word there. No pun intended. Anyhow, I'm not ready to go under the knife, and I prefer to be able to stand, walk, lie down, etc. without the extreme pain I've endured from time to time because I pushed myself too hard. I'd rather give my money to the rental place, and avoid the wasted time, pain and insurance deductibles.
2. Got more than a few day's worth of manual yard and garden/other work done in one day - And I even made a trip to the store in the middle of the day, so in reality, it's was just a partial day of tractoring. Among the things it helped get done include moving 11 cubic yards of soil to several above-ground planting beds, excavating a flat space in a hillside for a new raised bed (otherwise a couple days worth of work by hand), repairing the quarter-mile gravel driveway (which runs up and down a couple of steep hills and tends to get ruts and bumps galore).
3. Helped the neighbors - Last year I rented a heavy-duty rear-tine tiller to break up the ground for a back-yard lawn. It didn't work - the ground here gets so hard (clay soil) that even an 11-horse tiller can't break the surface. Horsepower means nothing if you can't get through that top layer. I saw yesterday that my neighbor had rented the same tiller as I had last year (coulda sworn I had warned him when it didn't work for me), and was attempting the same task. Feeling his pain, I pulled the tractor up and offered to rip the ground to make it easier to till, and he gladly accepted. Box scraper implements with big nasty digging teeth are amazing, and the neighbor was able to move on to tilling other areas of his yard. 'Nuf said.
4. Tractors are Fun - Ask any guy who's used a full-size commercial tractor and they'll tell you, these are real men's toys. God Bless John Deere.

Back when I was a teenager I spent a couple summers helping out/working now and then on a horse farm that some friends owned. One of my favorite things about it was the tractor. It was cool then, and it's still cool today.

Yee Haw.

I must say, I was just a little surprised at how many people actually thought I was being serious earlier today... I mean - DOG SEAT BELTS??? Come on!

My story was borrowed from a pre-planned radio show on 1190-KEX here in Portland. The radio personalities notified some listeners a day ahead of time, to have them help to make it that much more believable. It worked.

The first person I heard from among many today was my friend, co-worker and neighbor, Mike. He seemed shocked that my dog, Buddy, was in jail.

My reply: “Can you *believe* that crap????”

He wasn't the only one.

Once the radio show started this afternoon, not only did the phone calls start rolling in to the KEX studio, but the local and state police offices started getting a lot of phone calls, too. The Portland Police Bureau was warned ahead of time, and it sounds like they were ready, but the Oregon State Patrol wasn't aware or prepared for a bunch of phone calls from angry and confused people wanting to know what the heck was going on with this “new law.”

Classic.

Anyhow, Happy April Something-or-Another.

Microsoft has released their Solution Accelerator for Sarbanes-Oxley. While I know that's probably not the most important or exciting thing you've heard all month, it mets a need I have, and I was pleasantly surprised at what it has to offer for those who have a similar need.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has to do with reporting of finance process and controls information by publicly-traded companies. They call it “corporate governance” and in a nutshell, we have Enron and Tyco to blame for this, although I must say it seems to me to be no-brainer stuff for any corporation that takes ethics seriously. So, you won't hear me complaining.

The solution accelerator that Microsoft released late Friday allows people with a Windows SharePoint Services (aka WSS, aka SharePoint 2003) server to quickly and very easily add on new functionality, and to almost instantly get up and running with a nifty new system that significantly helps organize a compliance project or effort.

I won't go into the specific (because for most people it just gets more and more boring the more you learn), but anyone who is responsible for a compliance project or for preparing an infrastructure or framework on which to run such an effort owes it to themselves to download and try the accelerator. SQL 2000 with SP3 and WSS on Windows 2003 Server are required.

The installation is so simple it's almost scary (compared to other solution accelerators it was a complete breeze). Configuration is simple and the flexibility built into your design phase is great - if you want to design your compliance project based on balance sheet structure, you can do that. By account? Fine. By process type? Your choice.

Microsoft has promised a number of solution accelerators over the course of the year. The ones they have provided so far are pretty good - it will be interesting to see what else they come up with.

I have a real dilemma - the need for something now that doesn't quite exist. Nothing is more frustrating than being almost able to do what you need.

My company did an early adoption of OneNote and that vast majority of the Office System 2003 to include SharePoint, about which I have written here before. OneNote is a terrific, free-form note-taking program. Groundbreaking in terms of its combined application simplicity and ability to map to the complexity of an individual mind and organizational style. On top of that, it's designed in a way that lets people share their own individual notes and thoughts with others, and while everyone takes notes differently, it allows you to use the information others provide to you pretty easily and quickly.

Sidebar: I now take most all my notes electronically. I used to take 90% of my notes on paper, now its the other way around.

The headline mentions OneNote, SharePoint and Wikis. People who know all three pieces of software might be confused as to why I am thinking about them together. There's a reason for that. I have a request on my list (and have been looking into it for a few weeks now) to try to find a way to support what Wikis do so well on the SharePoint platform. I think we can get 90% of the way there, but that last 10% of missing functionality is a killer.

We run a software development company, and wikis are a great way to do free-form note-taking and documentation of necessary information: Where is the server farm on the network? Where is the build server? Who do I contact about the virtual machines? What are the latest notes from each of the ten developers on any given aspect of the current version? Wiki software solves this need, simply and gracefully. It allows you to collect information in a free-form mode like you might in OneNote, and to do so in a truly collaborative and shared way like you might do certain things on SharePoint. The only real “issue” (I hate that word) that I have with the Wiki is that its a separate tool, a completely separate system, and not integrated into the other technologies we're using at work today. That's not a completely bad thing, by the way, and use of our Wiki system is not something that we can or would even think about stopping, but when we have competing or overlapping technologies, I need to figure a way to try to make things work together, or to change what we have in order to provide  and maintain all the necessary functionality.

I can't quite do what we need today, but here are the basic options:

1. Use OneNote as the information collection and storage mechanism and require everyone to run OneNote in order to have access to the information. Share OneNote notebook (.one) files on a SharePoint server and turn the file-locking time down to one minute and hope that works for people who need to enter information at the same time. Not a viable option right now. I need something browser-based that can be accessed from any computer on the network, and which is truly multi-concurrent-user.
2. Use SharePoint lists to try to replicate what the Wiki software does. I could probably make this happen, but the usability aspect of things would become a problem. I can't ask people to take a leap back in terms of the ease of sharing information in free-form, cross-linked, and all the other stuff the Wiki provides. Tried it, and in some cases it's acceptable, but in most cases it's (again) about 90% there.
3. Change nothing, and have disparate information system with redundant information, which makes it hard for people to use them effectively. Most people will choose to use one or the other, but not both, for any given purpose. All users will not choose the same way, and sharing of information breaks down again becasue Group-A users Tool-Number-One and Group-B uses Tool-Number-Two to perform the same tasks and record the same types of information. Information becomes less cohesive, more fragmented, less usable.

Not really the options I am looking for there, but that's about what the situation looks like today. Now, nothing is really broken right now - we have systems and software that does what we want it to do. But integrating some of the functionality and making things a little more tightly built would not hurt anyone's feelings.

So, what do I want? Well, in a dream world:

1. Change OneNote to output/read/use/consume/generate a standards-based file format so that it that can be used as a front end to any one of a number of systems. Let me do my thinking, writing and organizing in OneNote (which it's great at), and then let me publish it to anywhere I like, as a standards-based file set (it's not so good at this yet). In other words, don't break what you have now, but give me the additional abilities to “talk” in a standard XML format to web services, in clean HTML markup to some other system. Expose the API, and let me publish from OneNote directly to my Blog, to a SharePoint site/list/library, to the Wiki, etc.
2. Build true Wiki functionality on top of/into SharePoint 2003 (Note: this version, not the next one). Yes, I know we could probably do this on our own if we put enough time and effort into it, and if it comes down to it, I may take a look at that possibility, but given my staffing situation I'd rather see someone else do it and then have them provide me the ability to adapt it the way I see fit. I certainly didn't write OneNote, SharePoint or our Wiki software (although our developer would have loved to change things at times), and I am not looking to build something from the ground up - I just want to be able to customize whatever solution comes up in order to meet our needs.

Anyhow, that's my wish list for at least a couple pieces of software that we already use today - Software that already meets needs, but which could be even better if the integration points were tighter. Office System 2003 did a great job of pulling a whole slew of different applications and servers together into one cohesive working unit, and I think my ideas are just an extension of that same model of design. I also believe they are in no way original ideas - Only our application of them would/might be original.