u/TeeMcBee

Below is my "artist's impression" (space means I can't take a good photo) of what's going on with two young Lady Finger grape vines I planted earlier this year. They're on stakes #2 and #4 of a 5-stake setup, the stakes being about 5'8" tall, and separated by about 3'. Two support wires run horizontally at about 2.5' and 5' off the ground. It was all done according to a YouTube channel's guidance and IIRC it's intended to be a spur pruning situation.

https://preview.redd.it/iuq3601wxljh1.jpg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=feba8450d72bad17809521c4a782e6dd1143c024

It all seems to be doing well -- or, at very least, stuff is growing; the reality is a lot more unruly than my drawing! When I planted them about March time, each of the two vines barely reach the first support wire on their "home" stake. Fast forward to about six weeks ago and they had both reached the top of their home stake and I'd just begun to train them along both wires. And now, having just returned from a trip, I find that they, like an unruly frontier AI model, appear to be making a break for freedom.

So, what do I do with them? Specifically:

1. Am I right that I should prevent any UPWARDS growth past the tops of the stakes?
2. Likewise SIDEWAYS growth to the left of stake #1, or to the right of stake #5?
3. What do I do about the upward growths (are those the "spurs") coming off the horizontal part of the vine on the TOPMOST wire?

That last one is what's concerning me the most. I did wonder, when I first created the stake setup, why the video implied that I should allow horizontal growth on the top wire. Wouldn't spurs from that grow upwards, and if so what would then support them? And now I see the spurs do indeed grow up, I'm just as confused. Was I meant to only train horizontal growth (cordon? espalier? what?) on the lower wire, and let the upper wire be used only to support vertically growing spurs from below?

thanks!

Can anyone point me to where I can find a map of Thousand Oaks showing it divided into the evacuation zones used by Ventura County?

I saw such zones being referenced by the Watch Duty app in one of the updates on the recent Kanan fire. It listed several Thousand Oaks zones for which evac warnings had been issued: Thousand Oaks 16, Thousand Oaks 17, Thousand Oaks 32, Thousand Oaks 36, and Thousand Oaks 37. Unfortunately, I’m relatively new to the area and I don’t know what zone I’m in. Without such a map l’m not able to interpret evac warnings like the one given.

The update did reference an arcgis.com link: Ventura County Emergency Incident Dashboard, but it goes to a map with no zone info. I’m guessing it’s showing only live evac warnings and so because the Kanan warnings have now been lifted, there is nothing for it to show.

I did hunt around for a while trying to find something, but couldn’t find what I wanted. That was despite finding several likely-looking links only to find them dead, empty, or unresponsive.

Where/how do you store your org files?

I am getting a new laptop up and running and using that as an opportunity/excuse to review where I keep my org stuff. I'd appreciate hearing from anyone else who has given that much thought (which, let's face it, is probably most of us!)

Here are some of the areas I find myself considering. Very big in my mind right now is #9.

1. iCloud: To what extent should I use it? My primary machine is a Mac laptop, but I also have an iPhone and iPad. Also, I have sometimes made use of things like beorg, Journelly, and the like, and some of those seem to prefer using iCloud (although many do support other methods). So iCloud is an option as a storage area.
2. DropBox: Same question. My company uses it and I do make use of the personal user space each of us is given, almost as a quasi home directory. Org could live here.
3. Symlinks: Should I use these, and if so how? My background is linux, and I'm at home with symbolic links, and all else being equal I'd be fine with using these to allow a combination of other things -- e.g. Have my main org directory be on DropBox, and then symlink into that things over in iCloud. But I have bumped into problems with that in the past, like where I follow a symlink and find myself having more than one buffer for the single target file
4. Git: If I keep my org stuff under git, what good/bad things should I be aware of
5. Dotfiles: How should I handle these, for emacs but also in general? Specifically, is there a place for the likes of chezmoi, stow, etc?
6. Use of Babel: As a special case within dotfiles, where should the .org source of my config stuff live?
7. org-directory: Should I even rely on this at all? In general, I store stuff according to what it is about, not which application it works with. But Org is different. Should it be? Must it be?
8. Tribal wisdom: What choices (for the above, but just in general) leave me in the best position to make use of good advice I get on places like this sub, or anywhere else talking sense? For example (one among many): one reason for not messing with org-dir, and simply letting it be ~/org is that most advice given as lisp snippets will assume that. Obviously that is easy to change, but why bother if it's good enough as-is.
9. AI impact: what implications are there If I'm going to increasingly be using stuff like Claude Cowork, or ChatGPT Work, not to mention Claude Code and similar. For example, should I place my org directory in a Claude Cowork project?
10. Other considerations I'm sure I'll remember five seconds after posting this

Until now I have kept stuff in <DROPBOX>/<My Name>/org, with a symlink to that from ~/org. I also symlink in Journelly's files from iCloud. I do have that org dir under git, but I've making very little use of that aspect.

So, again: where/how do you store your org files?

I’m in the process of upgrading to Enterprise edition and I have two options. One is the simple upgrade at a particular price per user; the other is a lower price per user but with Premier Success Plan added, so that the total cost is higher than with Enterprise alone. So it’s really all down to how valuable Premier Success Plan is.

Anyone care to offer an opinion?

On the one hand, it doesn’t look completely useless (although the main aspects that catch my eye seem to come only with Signature Success Plan, and I am only being offered Premiere).

But on the other hand it does seem to smack of one of those globs of “features” you often get in a SaaS tool — like “guaranteed 24/7 support when it’s not raining” or ”only high quality electrons used” — that look nice to have but in practice add very little real value to the main offering.

<rant>

I've just discovered that in Salesforce Professional Edition, what I thought was a limit of 5 Flows of a given type, is actually 5 Flows period. That is pretty much useless. I am pissed.

To be clear, there are SFDC web pages that stipulate 5 Flows total, so I'm not saying there's any kind of bait'n'switch going on. That said, there are other SFDC web pages that say 5 Flows per type. And there seems to be a general consensus across people blogging, writing articles, etc that the limit is 5 per type, and since there are 5 flow types, Pro Edition actually allows for a total of 25 Flows. But that is incorrect. I have 5 Record-Triggered flows and I am being stopped from creating an additional Autolaunched or Scheduled flow.

Rassen, sassen, frassen.

So, to anyone considering Salesforce Professional Edition, here's my caution: if you foresee yourself using Flows at all†, then with this tiny Flow limit, its lack of Apex, and the fact that there is only so much you can achieve with custom formula fields (not to mention the limit on the number of custom fields which I have almost hit in at least two recrod types), Professional Edition will sooner or later bite you in the proverbial and make you rue the day you chose it.

For my part, I am probably going to have to upgrade to Enterprise (if I can actually get someone in SFDC to take my money without first insisting on some boring conversation about re-assessing my needs).

But my advice to anyone starting out would be to see Salesforce Professional Edition as merely a toy, if you plan automation of any degree of sophistication. It Just Isnt Salesforce. (Would you buy a Salesforce No Vowels Edition? No. Exactly!)

In the end, given this and all other Salesforce pain into the bargain, my advice would be simply this: find something other than Salesforce. If I were starting from scratch and didn't have users who would lynch me if I changed things now, I think I'd seriously be looking at getting Claude Cowork to be my CRM. If I had time, I'd right now be doing that very thing myself.

----

† I, myself, did not foresee it, but that's mainly because Flows didn't exist when I first got Salesforce, around 20 years ago. I doubt Professional Edition existed back then either.

</rant>

I have a simple record triggered flow intended to use the values from a couple of fields in an Email Message record to modify some fields I have created in the corresponding Task record associated with that Email Message.

It works fine, but not always.

Sometimes, the Task record fields just aren't modifed correctly. However, even on those occasions, if I then manually force an update on the Email Message record, *then* the Task fields do get modified properly. It feels like a race condition; as if maybe when the Flow runs at first, the associated Task record hasn't yet been created.

So, to try to solve that, I modified the Flow to use a Scheduled Path, putting the Update Record component that modies the Task record on the delay path. I tried a 1 minute delay, and then a 5 minute delay.

Neither helped.

Can anyone help me get this working?

Suppose you have an Opportunity progressing through your pipeline stages, but then it suffers some setback that means it should really go back a stage or two. Or if not back, maybe it needs to be pushed sideways and parked. What are good ways to reflect that in the pipeline?

An example might be where your qualification criteria are such that to get to a certain stage, we must be reasonably confident that the sale is going to happen with X months. Everything is going fine, but then the customer says that management are placing a temporary restriction on certain purchases and they think that they will now be buying a little later than they'd first thought, taking the expected close date out to something more than X months.

So you want to see that slippage reflected in the pipeline. You might lower the probability, for example, and you could simply leave it at that. But you might also want to change the stage. And the thing is, it may be better to show it not simply slipping back a stage or two, but being pushed out sideways onto a parallel pipeline, in case it slips back even further. Or something.

How do y'all handle this kind of thing?

When it comes to Setup > Global Actions, it seems like the "Log a Call" type of actions are just a special case of "Create Record" type actions with a Target Object of "Task". If so, why is "Log a Call" singled out for special treatment, especially when that special treatment seems a bit pointless?

As far as I can see, the only differences between "Log a Call" entries and the generic "Create a Record" type are purely cosmetic (and not very useful cosmetics at that). Specifically, in the Activities Timeline:

1. For "Log a Call" items, the label says "...logged a call..." whereas the other type says "...had a task..."
2. The little icons are different
3. In the buttons above the timelines itself, all "Log a Call" actions are gathered under a single button, and all "Create a (Task) Record" are gathered under a different single button

But as I say, why single out "Calls" for special treatment when there are also: video calls, in person meetings, text messages, LinkedIn DMs, LinkedIn Inmails, Slack messages, emails†, etc?

Or is there a way to create your own "Log a <thing>" versions, with their own special icon, label, and button positioning?

--

† Yeah, I know that Emails have their own icon and mechanism too, but that took a while to arrive, it also seems like another case of special treatement, and it only applies if you have Enhanced Email enabled.