What Do You Do?

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Some law of human nature demands that any two strangers, gathered for a sufficient period of time, will eventually ask – whether from genuine curiosity or to evaluate relative status –  “What do you do?”

I never know what to say.

“I am a Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Functional Consultant.”

I’m met with a blank stare.  I’ve said words and communicated nothing. 

Only once have these particular words been sufficient. I was on a plane.  The woman next to me lit up. “Oh! I’m a Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Functional Consultant too!”.  She paused, “…How do you explain it to your family?”

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Night Shift

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Submitted for the SLO Nightwriters writing contest. Instructions: Write a maximum of 2 pages of dialogue that follows a story arc — beginning, middle, and end. Minimal non-dialogue content—no more than stage directions.

Harry [whispering]: Hey Barry, you awake?

Barry: Never closed my eyes.

Harry: Ha ha, I sleep with my eyes open too.

Barry: That’s not what I meant.

Harry: …

Barry: What’s on your mind Harry?

Harry: The boy.

Barry: Always the boy.

Harry: I know. I think about him every night. Just look at him. Look at him sleep. He’s so peaceful. Have you ever seen anything so perfect in your life?

Barry: Never.

Harry: I’m worried, Barry.

Barry: Worried?

Harry: I’m worried he’s changing too fast.

Barry: What do you mean?

Harry: I mean he’s perfect right now, right? So really any change is too much. Too fast. Too much, too fast.

Barry: Remember when he slept in the crib? Before the bed?

Harry: Oh yeah. I remember. He was so little then. They’d dress him up in those footie pajamas with the spaceships on them. Or that onesie with the owls. They were always so scared something might happen. Nothing else could be in the crib. They’d even put us up on the shelf at night. Then they’d lay on the floor and push their arms through the bars of his crib and feel his warmth. They’d fall asleep there to the steady rise and fall of his little chest with his little inhales and exhales.  

Barry: He was perfect then. He’s perfect now. He can change and still be perfect. 

Harry: But I don’t want change. Change is like how he used to hug me every night before falling asleep. Then one night: no hug. 

Barry: He hugged you tonight.

Harry: I mean, sure. He hugged me tonight. But it wasn’t a tight, tight hug. It wasn’t a—it wasn’t a—

Barry: A bear hug?

Harry: Yeah. That’s right. It wasn’t a bear hug. He used to wrap his arms around me at night and then squeeze with every muscle in his body. He used to sing while he’d rock me back and forth. He used to tuck me into his shirt before going to bed to “keep me warmed up through the night.”  

Barry: That was nice. He’s a caring boy. I’m glad he’s caring. Maybe we’ve made him more caring. He wasn’t always like that. Remember when he used to carry you around by your ears? 

Harry: Oh, don’t remind me! Back when he started crawling—if my ears weren’t in his mouth, they were clamped into his fist!

Barry: He dragged you across the floor so much your rump was going bald.

Harry: I’m glad that was just a phase! Can you imagine if he never stopped? Today I’d be Harry the Hairless Hare…It would be a whole Fuzzy Wuzzy situation.

Barry: Hey now—there’s nothing wrong with going bare.

Harry: Easy for you to say!

Barry: I’m just saying, change is inevitable. 

Harry: But what will happen in the future?

Barry: The boy will grow. It won’t always be perfect. But we’ll fill the boy up with care, and it will pour out of him as he grows up. Love will fill the cracks.

Harry: You know, last night I heard them talking. They said, “A child grows up in the blink of an eye.”

Barry: Maybe that’s why us stuffed animals never close our eyes.

Harry: Hmm. Maybe so.

Barry: Goodnight Hare.

Harry: Goodnight Bear.

Boy [murmuring in his sleep]: Good night room. Good night moon. 

Using Excel Add-in to Filter for Open Sales Orders in Dynamics Finance and Operations📊

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Introduction

It’s good to make a blogpost every now and again just to remember how to do it…

Here at iamJoshKnox blog, we LOVE reader feedback. Last week, Jared reached out with a question about using the excel add-in to return an excel list filtered for open sales orders.

What a great excuse for a video (and blogpost)! Watch the video above (or send your AI-bot to watch and comment for you, that’s your decision).

🔽[video summary powered by Loom]🔽

Overview

Step-by-step guide on how to filter and retrieve open sales orders from Dynamics 365 using the Excel add-in, in response to Jared’s inquiry. Addresses common issues and offers solutions for effectively managing sales order data.

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Willis: A Chicago Architectural Tour Guide

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I was recently in Chicago for DynamicsCon, a top-tier community event for users and implementers of Microsoft’s Dynamics platform–Like Me!

The conference was an excellent chance to catch-up with old friends, make new ones, and learn about the latest happenings in the world of Dynamics (If you’re curious, there are a lot of happenings).

DynamicsCon was also an opportunity to learn about Chicago.

I took in a Cubs game at Wrigley with some friends.

(Justin Turner hit a walk-off RBI for the win over the Marlins)

I also dropped in to train jiu jitsu at a local place.

(Serafin Jiu Jitsu is the most beautiful gym I’ve ever visited)

My Uber driver suggested the best way to learn about Chicago is to take an architecture boat tour–boats ferry you around the Chicago river and they tell you about the buildings. I didn’t have time for a boat tour, but his recommendation primed me to think about the architecture and design of the Chicago skyline. As I walked around Chicago, I snapped pictures of buildings that interested me.

Problem: I didn’t have an architectural tour guide to tell me about what I was seeing.
Solution: I built one.

–INTRODUCING–
Willis: A Chicago Architectural Tour Guide

Sears Tower will ALWAYS be Sears Tower to me, but I named this bot Willis because it seemed like an appropriate cousin to Watson. Simply upload a photo of your Chicago structure and Willis will tell you a bit about what your looking at and how it came to be.

An advantage over an architectural boat tour: Willis can also go on land.

TRY WILLIS HERE

I’ve written other posts on how to create a custom GPT. If you are interested, these are Willis’ configurations:

Without further ado…

A Chicago Architectural Tour, Guided By Willis

Pictures by me (All Text by Willis):

Alright! You’ve captured some amazing shots of the Merchandise Mart—or as us locals call it, “The Mart.”

🏢 Name: The Merchandise Mart
📍 Location: 222 Merchandise Mart Plaza, Chicago, IL 60654
🗓️ Year Built: 1930, during the era of Art Deco’s peak style (think Al Capone and the start of the Great Depression!)
🎨 Notable Feature: The building’s imposing size—it covers over 4 million square feet—earned it the title of the world’s largest building when it opened. That’s like 22 football fields of floorspace!
🏆 Historical Fact: Originally owned by Marshall Field & Co., it was later bought by the Kennedy family in 1945. The Mart also played host to radio station studios in the 1930s and, more recently, has become a major hub for design showrooms and tech startups.

Fun tidbit—when the Chicago Bears last won the Super Bowl in 1985, The Mart was already well-established as a local icon!

The building overlooks the Chicago River and is known for its striking setbacks and vertical emphasis—a classic example of Art Deco style.

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Too Many Browser Tabs? Go Vertical!

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Stop! Look up. Do you have more browser tabs open than you can count?

You might have a problem.

In fact, you might have several problems…but the one that this blogpost can help you with is managing too many tabs. Introducing: vertical tabs.

Microsoft Edge – Turn On Vertical Tabs

By default, internet browsers usually put tabs horizontally across the top of the application. In Microsoft Edge, you can “Turn on Vertical Tabs” to display tabs vertically, down the left side of the application.

Horizontal Browser Tabs

Tab Actions Menu

Vertical Browser Tabs

When toggling between lots of tabs, I prefer this approach because vertical tabs have a fixed width, making them easier to read (as well as click).

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imAGIne Futures | Introduction & Part 1: Automobiles

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Happy New Year!

It’s a new year, OpenAI released a new model, and we might be at the dawn of Average General Intelligence (AGI) – a world with AI systems capable of understanding, learning, and applying intelligence across a wide range of tasks at human levels or beyond.

What are the implications? What will an AGI future look like?

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently wrote Machines of Loving Grace speculating on 5 domains that will be radically transformed by powerful AI. It’s essential reading on the topic.

I have my own hunch: the future’s already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.

Introduction

I think a lot about an essay by Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google from 2011:

“A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade.” 

This is a clear pattern looking back through history:

Automobiles

  • Karl Benz invents the first automobile in 1885. It’s a luxury good.
  • In 1908, Henry Ford brings his model T to the masses.
  • Today, you can get in Twitter fights for suggesting car ownership is anything other than an essential right.
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Use ChatGPT Desktop App for Windows

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Instead of using ChatGPT through the web browser, you can use Microsoft Edge to access it as a desktop web app. I find this to be useful for frequently used websites because the application is always available when I pin it to my toolbar instead of getting lost among all the other browser tabs I may have open.

OpenAI (the ChatGPT company) is working on a Windows desktop app. It’s currently in trial mode and only available to ChatGPT plus customers.

The ChatGPT apps can be downloaded here.

Install ChatGPT as an App with Microsoft Edge

Get the ChatGPT App for Windows NOW!

4 Running Lies I Was Told in PE

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At the beginning of the year, my sister asked our family if we’d like to make a 5-person marathon team. Each person would run one-leg of a five-leg course that stretched 26 miles in total. My sister is a trail runner. The rest of us…not so much.

My sister has run marathons and ultramarathons. She’s even written essays about running. 

My brother-in-law, her husband, was in a triathlon club when they met. At their wedding, he said: “I realize I don’t have to pace her, I just have to crew for her.” A pacer runs alongside a runner during subsections of an ultramarathon, while a crew person cheers for the runner as they pass aide stations and makes sure they have snacks, making this probably the most romantic sentence about running I’ve ever heard.

My brother and my uncle both served in the Marine Corps, which is basically a professional running club. And though both are out of the service now, they say “Once a Marine, always a Marine“, which is good because at 77 my uncle was one of the oldest runners on any of the marathon teams.

So when I say the rest of us aren’t really runners…I guess I just mean me.  

Anyways, in August we ran the Point Mariah Trail Marathon:

Our running team, plus my dad, Calvin and Lawrence
(at picture time, my uncle had already run off somewhere else)

While I trained to run (editor’s note: one-fifth of) a marathon, I realized almost everything I was taught about running in high school was wrong. This seems odd. We had a class called physical education (PE). PE was a mandatory part of our school curriculum—an education in physical activities like running.

Those PE classes had the educational substance of a biology class run by a teacher starting: “Welcome everyone, now before we begin it’s important everyone understand the earth is only 5,000 years old.” Though one might anticipate this sort of education if someone named “Coach” standing in front of a class.

I digress.

In my (editor’s note: again, very limited) runner training experience, I’ve found running to be more pleasant and fulfilling than I had remembered from PE. Perhaps this is because of the lies. 

This is my attempt to correct the record:

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Podcast Alert! On Data Migration | MVP Insights with John Siefert

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Recently got to talk with John Siefert, CEO of Dynamics Communities about data migration and my career in ERP. John has been hosting a series of MVP interviews in advance of Community Summit 2024 (October 13-17 in San Antonio).

The set of MVP Insights interviews can be found here.

Things we talk about:

Community Summit 2024

That’s right: if you attend Community Summit in San Antonio, and you get up before 8am on Tuesday October 15, you too can listen to me talk about Data Migration.

REGISTER HERE.

Podcast Alert! D365 Consulting with Josh Knox | Ellipse Unsealed Ep. 34

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Had lot of fun chatting with Savanna Manger and the legendary Bobby Small on the Ellipse Unsealed D365 Podcast. The complete Ellipse Unsealed Podcast Playlist is here.

Things we talk about:

  • Bobby and I reminisce about my alma matter, George Mason University, and how the area has changed.
  • The joy and adventure of experimenting with a new consulting business model at Cooptimize.
  • Our favorite books, foods, and words.

We also talk a bit about my book – you can get your copy HERE!
(or just shoot me an email and I’ll gladly send you a copy).

Podcast Alert! Crafting a Consulting Niche | MVP Show with nz365guy

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It was a pleasure to be chat with Mark Smith (nz365guy) on his MVP Show Podcast. You can find more of his podcast interviews here.

Things we talk about:

  • My journey from college, to ERP consulting, to independent consulting, to joining Cooptimize.
  • Experiences living in Brazil, differences in US/Brazil culture, the importance of family, food fun.
  • Reflections on the importance of soft skills in the ERP consulting industry.

Crafting a consulting niche is a chapter in my book – you can get your copy HERE!
(or just shoot me an email and I’ll gladly send you a copy).