Make My Technology Simple

2009 will be a ‘GREEN’ year!

Take my word for it, as a product of the ‘boom’ leading up to the .dot com bubble, we are going to see the same kind of build up in green technologies with the Obama administration as we did with computer technologies with the Clinton administration. The smart business will start to take advantage of such upcoming technologies and position themselves so as to take advantage of it.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are welcomed!

A budding career comes to an end

Heath Ledger had a great career ahead of him. Yes his portrayal of the Joker set the bar up a couple of notches. Which of course is a good thing. Jack Nicholson’s portrayal at the time did the same thing. We thought he had as he always seems to do, aced the role. His acting abilities have never been questioned. As Rick Flair, retired WWE Hall of Famer will tell you, ‘To be the Man, You have to Beat the Man!’. Well I think Heath Ledger ‘beat the man’. I think that Heath Ledger put on the Joker’s face in a whole new way. Torn down all our preconceptions of what the Joker ‘was’ and showed us something excitingly new and scary. He created the modern day Joker. Someone who didn’t care. Whose only driving force was to shake ‘everyone’ up. Show them that there was a new sheriff in town. And no matter who you were, gangster, politician, police officer, or John Q. Public, he was going to show you that nothing mattered. Nothing!

There was so much buzz about this movie and this actor months before it came out. Yes some of it was about how awesome the movie was! 150 minutes of stay in your seat rollercoaster action! No one went to the bathroom or got up to get popcorn during this movie! No one talked! No babies cried! NO ONE MOVED! You have heard of movies that were riviting?! Well this one strapped, tied, gagged, rivited, welded and put a spell over you from the very start to the ‘end’!

You can expect this movie to get nominated for a lot of awards. And whether Ledger gets the nod for ‘Best Actor’ or ‘Best Supporting Actor’, it doesn’t matter. Anyone seeing this film will say that the Joker changed them. The portrayal was so on the money ‘evil’ that they went home and needed another ‘fix’. They did Google searches on his name and found that he was in several great movies, but then said, ‘that was him?’ He played in ‘The Patriot’, ‘ Brokeback Mountain’, ‘The Brothers Grimm’, and ‘A Knight’s Tale’ to name but a few. They will download images of him as the Joker, put him up on their desktops, print them out and hang them in their rooms and private offices. They will pull out their makeup kits from Halloween and unskillfully try to recreate that vision that haunts them.

It makes us re-think what we had previously thought as the gold standard. And BRAVO for anyone who can do that!

It is a sad thing that this very creative young actor passed away. But he went out in style! We should all be so lucky to have leave behind a legacy such as his portrayal of the Joker.

I dare everyone to take a step back from their lives as they know it and instead of the ‘I don’t care’ message that everyone seems to send out these days, I dare them to move the bar up a few notches and make a statement that will leave all who see it say, ‘That is how to do it’. Although we cannot think of the Joker as a hero, we can think of Ledger’s performance as stellar and that is what we should strive for when doing anything in life!

Summertime Blues

For most of us this phrase would mean that they are down in the dumps. To others it might mean that a concert. The key here is that we should not assume anything when it comes to our computers and their protection.

Case in point… a client calls me up saying that one of his office PCs is acting ‘weird’. So anyone that has sat in front of a computer can tell you that ‘weird’ is not good. So I get on over to the client’s office and discover that this computer has has been infected with a few viruses. I discover immediately that the PC does not have their anti virus software up to date. When I ask him about this he says that a message came up a month or so ago and said that it wanted him to buy something to continue his protection. I told him that that was normal. That the program itself would continue to do scans, but that you had to pay for the up to date ‘signatures’ that tell the program how to detect all the new viruses.

Well to make a long story short, we activated his anti virus account, downloaded the ‘signatures’ and then did a full scan. The scan found 17 new viruses. One of which was noted to send information to someone else’s email account!

 We will never know if that virus did in fact send any information out to another email account [this is one of the ways identity theft occurs]. But we have agreed that I would return the next business day to ensure that all his computers had up to date accounts and that they were doing full scans every night.

So the moral of the story… never assume your computers are safe! You just might end up with the Summertime Blues…

Make Email Blasting Easy!

 ’Is there some way for me to keep my friends and associates up-to-date on what is going on in my life, business, and/or organizations?’

As hard as it may be to believe, as a solutions provider, I hear this line more times then you would think. Because after all, I am in the business to provide ‘simple’ solutions to my clients. Sometimes it is not easy, but other times it is a ‘piece of cake’!

 A company called Constant Contact is that ‘piece of cake’ I am referring too! A low cost subscription of $30 per month for less than 500 email addresses gets you an account with them. Now what you say? Take the great online tutorials! Learn! Play! Create emails and send them to your family and friends to announce your birthday! Your new baby! Create groups that consist of contacts related to different things. You don’t want to announce to the whole email list that you are having a baby shower! Or maybe you do!

There are tons of templates that only add to the excitement of creating your own emails and then blasting them out to friends, relatives, members of your associations, whether that be the girl scout troop that you are the Den Mother for, or president of your Civic Association.

Need help?! As a Constant Contact Authorized Business Partner I can do that! From a little hand holding to creating professional looking emails, from setting up your account to setting up your groups and uploading your contact lists. Need a little help or a lot, I am your partner.

For more information, click on the ‘Build a Mail List with Constant Contact’ under the Use Links section on the bottom right hand corner of my website. It will bring you to my Co-branded website with Constant Contact and you can read up on how you to can ‘Make Email Blasting Easy!’

Have thoughts or questions about this or any other of my blogs? Please post a response! Let me know what you are thinking. 

“Never Eat Alone” a book by Keith Ferrazzi

Like most people, anytime I find a worthwhile resource I like to share it with my friends and associates. One such resource is a book that I am reading called, “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi with Tahl Raz, published by Currency / Doubleday. I found this to be an excellent book for people that are interested in advancing themselves. Whether you are looking to access people at other companies to do business with; starting to look for a new career; or learning how to “share your passion” by mentoring others! This book has it all.

The book is a good read. If you do pick it up, I would suggest having your highlighter and notepad & pen ready to start jotting down you’re the action list that you will create from its chapters.

Some of the chapters speak for themselves:

1.       Becoming a Member of the Club

2.       Don’t Keep Score

3.       What’s Your Mission

4.       Build it Before you Need it

5.       The Genius of Audacity

6.       The Networking Jerk

There are a total of 31 Chapters in this book. Each with something great to say for people looking for ways to make in-roads with other people, businesses or themselves.

With each chapter he starts it off with a telling quote from a notable person, book or movie. One such is:

“Spectacular achievement is always preceded by spectacular preparation.” By Robert H. Schuller.

If you have read this book, please let me know your thoughts on it. Love it? Hate It?