Category: AI

As a consultant, I have to enter my time in more than one place. My own hours go into my invoicing system, and a lot of the time they also have to go into a customer’s system, especially if you’re a subcontractor working under a prime contractor. Those prime contractors almost always require you to…

I’ve been trying to get AI to help me run jacrod.com for a couple of years now. It took three tries to land on something that actually works, and the thing that finally worked is not the thing I expected. Here’s the whole progression, including the parts that failed. Attempt one: have it write me…

Claude Desktop is really good at file-based operations. Reading documents, writing documents, filling out spreadsheets, getting context from files – sort of whatever you ask it to do. Every once in a while, though, I need it to actually DO something in an external system and there isn’t a standard connector. Here’s what I did…

As I mentioned on a recent LinkedIn post, I was disappointed to find that HEIC images from an Apple iPhone couldn’t be included in a PowerPoint presentation. I looked everywhere for a codec and tried to get PowerPoint to just understand the files. No dice. I spent $0.99 on some app in the Microsoft store,…

Why manufacturing data needs a matching BOM and PO As a past Dynamics 365 functional consultant, a lot of my work was related to data. Creating setup data, data migration, and helping troubleshoot bad data was a lot of my job. To make sure that I have some sample data to use for Northwind Kitchens,…

When I write documentation, I try my best to make sure the voice, format, and look are consistent across things I write. One of the things that I find hardest about delegating is being able to share my focus on consistency. In reality, the subject matter and content are the important things for someone doing…

As I mentioned in previous post, Claude Cowork is more of an assistant than just a chat interface. Behind the scenes, Claude Cowork actually spins up a little sandbox container within which it can read and write to files, execute code, and access skills and connectors. What is Claude Cowork? Claude Cowork is Anthropic’s agentic…

I use something from Anthropic’s Claude suite almost every day. I think that almost everyone in my sphere of influence should be using them, too. In this series of blog posts, I’ll go through what I use these different tools for and how they help me. The goal is to lower the bar and show…