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Rick

Shopping story

By popular demand (thanks Jack), here’s the shopping store. A customer of
mine took advantage of the amazing computer deals at a local big box store
with matching initials. It was one of those computer, monitor, printer
packages. Turns out they sold her an ‘open box’ printer and though
apprehensive the manager assured her everything would be fine.

I show up to set everything up and take one look at the box and asked to
see her receipt. They charged her full price for the printer (three-in-one
HP) and gave her a gift certificate for $8.50. There was no packing
material around the printer, the cartridges were already installed and dry,

How much computer can $40,000 get you?

Over the past few weeks, I have been working with a local business (that I will not name) to help them change their computer setup. The business is of the type that they need to worry about security, privacy and large-scale record keeping.

When I help out with this sort of job, I have no problem admitting where my limits of expertise are and I help the client find another business that has the book learning to do the job they need. I am grateful for the real geeks who can do this type of job because I prefer to work with the people rather than the machines.

The business client has kept me on board for the job though because I will be there to setup the individual computers and help the employees through the process.

Know how much you are paying for high tech

I was going to write about a tremendously awful transaction with a local big box and one of my customers, but I decided I will save it for another day…unless you the web visitors demand the story. It's a doozey, but unfortunately not unique.

Instead, I want to write about the financial consulting side of my business. I know very little about stock trading, CD's, bonds, gold, and mutual funds, but I do know what technology and telecommunication services cost and how to save money on monthly bills. I still get surprised to find out how many people don't really know how much money they spend a month on phone and Internet service. Often times, I can save people almost $30 per month (that's nearly a new computer a year) and get them better services. At the very least, I can usually keep expenses about the same, but still increase services. Let me illustrate how to approach your tech bills and see if you can benefit from a change.

Why I prefer Canon digital cameras

When I bought my first serious camera (back then cameras used stuff called film), I had to make the big decision that all photographers must make with their first SLR (Single Lens Reflex – the king of camera that lets you change lenses) – Canon or Nikon.

You may say, "But what about Minolta, Pentax, Sigma, Hasselblad, etc." For the most part other brands are either too proprietary, over priced, behind in innovation or difficult to find accessories for. Canon and Nikon are the standards.

At the time I was shopping for my first SLR most pros shot with the Nikon F5, a camera that was built for surviving battle photography. Canon was always pushing the technology and feature envelope while Nikon was working on rugged design and dependability.

Captcha?

Captcha1Technology has spawned many strange new words from blog to podcast to spyware. Captcha is a new term that you will be seeing more of in the coming months. In fact, chances are good that you have already dealt with captchas. A captcha is a scrambled mess of characters (like the ones pictured in this article) that we have to reproduce in a box before submitting a web form.

The purpose of captchas is to thwart bad guys from releasing programs (web bots) that can automatically fill out forms all over the web. They do this to leave spam on sites that allow comments or to send bogus orders to e-commerce sites. Captchas work well at stopping these hacker bots because they can't 'read' and verify these characters.

Reader/Listener Challenge

We work extremely hard at creating tips, reviews, and other content for our web site. However, we often feel like we are the only ones who use the information. I often think, "If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? And if we post an important article or tip, will anyone read it?"

My challenge is to the regular readers of our site and listeners to our program who do peruse the site, follow our tips, and take our advice. We need you to start a grass roots movement to get eyeballs over to this site and utilize the information that is here and leave comments to help us improve upon what is here as well. We have designed the site's content to be helpful to anyone who uses a computer, but mostly computer users who tell us they are beginners or just learning. However, we also believe that more experienced computer users can use our site to help out their family and friends who get constant questions about their computers. 

Proper care and feeding of batteries

I bought a new digital camera the day after Thanksgiving. Following Adam's First Law: Gadgets Yield More Gadgets, I have ordered a new vertical shooting grip and several batteries.

When the batteries arrived, I followed Adams 379th Law: Always Read the Instructions. I am thinking seriously about moving the 379th law up to at least 134 because I discovered some interesting information about rechargeable Lithium-Ion batteries.

1. Li-Ion batteries run down faster when they are cold. If you are shooting in the cold, you should keep spare batteries in your pocket, close to your warm body.

A Fourth Utility?

Water, gas and/or electricity, and telephone service have been widely available for years and present in almost every household in America. In the past few years, I have noticed that households with Internet connections now panic almost as much with an Internet outage as they would with a power outage or water leak. The Internet has truly become the a 'fourth utility'.

We all use the Internet now as a communication medium and the ultimate reference device. When it slows down, act erratic, or fails, we tend to worry about it almost as much our other three utilities. You can keep your fourth utility humming along problem free by following the advice we have laid out for you on this site regarding Internet security and troubleshooting. 

GoDaddy.com email snafu

Ran across a strange situation today that I hadn't seen before. The customer has domain (your own personal name) email hosted through the popular godaddy.com service. Often times they can't receive emails from each other or from customers because the emails were getting returned to the sender saying "this user does not accept non-Western character sets or encoding". 

A character set in computing contains letters, numerals, and symbols that make up a font. Every character has a corresponding number that the computer tracks it with. This is a simplistic explanation of how character sets work in the computer world, but the best I can do for this article. 

Being stranded isn’t as bad as it used to be

Driving back from my first client this morning, the guy in the car next to me honked and pointed at the side of my car. Since I couldn't tell what he was talking about, I pulled over hoping that someone had taped a $100 bill to the side of my car. As it turned out, I had a flat tire.

I put the space-saver tire on my Civic and headed to the tire repair place. The wait was over an hour and a half, but I was able to get quite a bit of work done – including this post.

The tire place offers free WiFi so I was able to sit and work on Internet things. I also answered my calls and scheduled appointments for next week. I did have to postpone some appointments for today, but I was still able to get to everyone I had scheduled (at least that's the plan, I haven't left the tire place yet).