July 9, 2009 --- It happens to all of us.  Your computer is really slow. If you have your own business you may just put up with it until the IT guy shows up again for something else or, if it's really bad, you may call him or her.  At gwntec, we get this a lot from staff at one of our clients in particular.  If you don't want to wait for your consultant or support firm, here are some of things you can do.

July 3, 2009 -- Carol, my wife and a web designer, is working with an organization that has become very interested in social networking as a means of increasing their reach and strengthening their relationships with those they want ot reach. In fact, one of the ideas they have on the table is scrapping their website and replacing it with a social-networking site.  And, they are not thinking of Facebook or My Space; they are planning to put up their own site.  Somehow, they seem to think this will attract like-minded people to their organization.  Now, social networking can be useful: As I write this, CNN's Rick Sanchez tweeted that he had just hit 100,000 followers on Twitter and Facebook had over 23 million US members as of last March.  However, just latching onto social networking is a mistake.  Social networking can be a usefu part of a marketing strategy and anl outreach tool but it also raises many questions and presents significant challenges for both nonprofits and businesses.

You know how annoying it is when you call a vendor's help line and you get dumb questions like, "Is the monitor turned on?"  Even I get this treatment.  (I used to get annoyed, too.)  Well, when I got off the subway last night, there was a panicked call from a client.  "There are no icons on my desktop and it looks like the accounting system is corrupt."  After a brief conversation this morning with the client on his cell phone while on his way in to work, I headed out to his office.  As I was waiting on the (elevated) subway platform, I got another call from the client.  He had arrived at his office, turned on his computer, and everything seemed okay.  Now, Gary's law is that 95 percent of computer problems are resolved by rebooting the computer and I had failed to ask if he had done that.  Most of us have troubleshooting scripts, whether written or internalized, and I had failed to follow mine, so I'm writing this post at a Starbucks, rather than at my desk.

June 20, 2009 -- For those who thought Twitter was just a fad, I guess there's a lesson in what is happening in Iran.  Going to the Twitter site and entering the search terms #iranelection and #gr88 yields an avalance of short messages, mostly from iran, about what is going on in <140 character bursts.  For example, one mesage I see says "confirmed: Multiple srcs confirm Basij [Iranian security forces] are at hospitals. Go to embassies."  Another message provides a link to a list of embassies accepting the wounded.  On Tuesday, Twitter, recognizing the importance of 9ts site, postponed maintenance scheduled for early in the morning here, but during the day there, so coverage woud not be interrupted.  While I believe it is incorrect to call it a "Twitter revolution" (see this interview with Gaurav Mishra), twitter's iis playing an important, if not critical, role.  Does this tell us anything about how small businesses and nonprofits can use Twitter to enhance our missions? 

June 11, 2009 – I like it when my clients want to do things for themselves. For example, a staff member at one of my client’s, whom I trained, has been handling adding new users, deleting users when they leave, and changing passwords as needed. An intern, whom I also trained, does the physical setup of computers for new users.  It saves me time for more productive work and saves them money.   Another client decided to replace his old Anti-virus (A/V) software with new software, did a little research, and chose a good product.  I like collaborating with clients like these. On the other hand, sometimes clients makes choices using criteria that, I think, could have been better.  One client’s staff member was concerned about the (slight) slowdown their business A/V product was causing and chose to replace it with a free product.  I would have made another choice and that got me thinking about how I evaluate A/V products.

June 4 2009 — Servers crash.  After all, they are just a lot of circuits that can fry, a power supply that can burn out, a fan that can stop working, and a disk drive that can fail.  They crash a lot less frequently than they used to. And, while twenty years ago crashing hard drives were not-uncommon events, they are rare today.  Still, it does happen.  One solution is spare equipment.  I worked on a project for Citicorp where every server had two external disk arrays that mirrored each other and there was a standby server that could replace the one that crashed.  They could have a failed server back in production in 15 minutes.  But a small business or non-profit doesn't have the bucks to spend on standby servers and redundant disk arrays.  So what can you do? 

May 28,2009 -- In Starbuck's, I was sitting next to a company executive and the company's architect. They were discussing energy options for a new plant to which the company is moving and it was hard not to overhear the conversation:  The new plant had two out-of-service generators that could be refurbished and put back into use.  The architect suggested that the company might find it economical to use the generators for both electricity and heat for water and for the building during the winter.  This would depend on the comparative costs of self-generated energy and energy purchased from an outside provider, which they were working on.  The executive mentioned that they were looking into a solar solution, for which New York State would provide a subsidy.  The architect was doubtful that solar would be more economical, even with the subsidy, but said the company should look at the numbers.  When the executive took a break, I took the opportunity to engage the architect.

May 21, 2009 -- Is your phone company also your ISP?  That can get you into trouble, as one of my clients found out.  They have a DSL line with their telco provider.  Their static IP allowed the owner to get into his system remotely for work and it allowed me to get on the server for remote management. This all worked well until they decided to increase the speed of their Internet connection.  For some inexplicable reason, when their telco changed the circuit speed, it also changed their static IP circuit to a PPOE circuit, which meant that the phone company would hand out a new IP address every time they connected. Suddenly they lost Internet connectivity. For three days and counting.  There are some lessons here.