Tech Republic posts for May 08

Blogging at Tech Republic was a little light this past month. I have gotten myself deeply involved in a disaster recovery planning project that is taking a lot of my time and energy. The project will in all likelihood exceed $100,000. The hardware is looking to be about $60K or $70K. I'm looking at several outside companies to provide the DR planning expertise.

We are looking at implementing Virtual Server technology at either the remote site or back in the main office and then grandfathering the old servers to the remote location. We are experiencing scope creep and considering upgrading our Exchange Server to 2007 in the process. This is quickly becoming a very complex project but I'm enjoying managing it.

Num	Date Posted	Title
1	2008-05-09	Fire suppression for the server room
2	2008-05-10	Setting up a remote hot site
3	2008-05-30	I only read the stories for the comments
4	2008-05-30	New user guide to TechRepublic

I'll confess here that perhaps the real reason blogging on tech Republic has been light is because of the "attack and castigate" mentality of some people who read and comment on blogs. I wrote about it on post number three on the list above. It seems to be so prevalent on many forums and blogs today. It's as if a reader feels that they must challenge whatever the writer presented.

It takes all the fun out of blogging. It has made me seriously think about bringing my blogs back from Tech Republic to my own blog. Here I can write in a bit more relaxed manner, simply sharing some of the things I learn and discover about disaster recovery or any other project I am working on. If it's not interesting, you don't have to read it, but it helps me to write about it.

Blogging on Tech Republic

I have been invited to contribute material to the Tech Republic group of blogs. TR has been around since 1999 and is owned by CNet, the premier tech news company. I have been reading their stuff for years and never imagined that I would be adding my own viewpoints in a regular blog there someday. I am honored to be joining the Tech Republic / CNet team.

The blog is called Tech of all Trades and is new this year to TR. I will be joined by several other computer geeks like me who specialize in supporting small to medium businesses with mainly Microsoft technology. The majority of Tech Republic readers work in small businesses. That makes sense - there are just more of us because there are so many small businesses.

I've thought often about the pros and cons of being the top geek in a small business. It can be a bit of an ego booster to have everyone look to you for advice and help on all their tech issues. It can also be a pain because there's no way that one geek can know everything. There's also a kind of one-upmanship that goes on with some of the more tech savvy co-workers.

I'm not a gamer. The other day someone asked me what I think of overclocking the latest AMD processor and would I recommend using water cooling. My response: Why don't you try it and let me know how it works for you? There's no way I'm going to be overclocking any of the units we use to crunch numbers in accounting or file flight plans in Ops.

I'm more concerned about keeping viruses, spyware, malware and spam out of my network. My job is to keep the computers running and the electrons flowing. Anything that detracts from that mission is just not worth my time. So I guess I'm not as much of a geek as some. I carry a Treo, not an iPhone. I spend time on Digg but not on the Something Awful forums.

One of the main reasons I accepted the invitation to join the Tech Republic team of bloggers is the opportunity to be read by a larger audience and to get more feedback. There are millions of blogs out there and it takes someone with TR marketing muscle to get the word out. If you haven't visited the Tech Republic site, I encourage you to do so and become a subscriber.