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.

Essays posted on Tech Republic April 2008

Num	Date Posted	Title
1	2008-04-02	When the e-mail system fails
2	2008-04-03	What to do when the batteries run out
3	2008-04-05	Tech talk, geek speak and nerd words
4	2008-04-09	Strategic thinking for tactical techs
5	2008-04-10	I turned down a six-figure job today
6	2008-04-15	Pros and cons of remote data backup service
7	2008-04-18	The MBA tech in the small business
8	2008-04-19	Data centers don’t run themselves
9	2008-04-22	The three stages of a tech career
10	2008-04-29	The tech news is good from here
11	2008-04-30	Even Super Techs have limitations
12	2008-04-30	A new kind of job for the tech professional

Articles posted on Tech Republic March 2008

Num	Date Posted	Title
1	2008-03-05	When techs try to communicate with management
2	2008-03-06	Project management responsibility can be elusive
3	2008-03-08	Old tech guys are slowly fading away
4	2008-03-11	When accepting a counteroffer is a good idea
5	2008-03-12	Computer geeks make the best researchers
6	2008-03-13	A simple fix for Microsoft update problems
7	2008-03-17	Why we always leave our computers on
8	2008-03-19	IT involvement in mergers and acquisitions
9	2008-03-20	Here I am Bill Gates – hire me!
10	2008-03-24	The terrible curse of spam
11	2008-03-26	Spammers must correct their wrongdoing
12	2008-03-28	Yes, I am the web surfing police

Memories of an old tech guy

I have been posting all my tech articles on Tech Republic these days. But I put so much work into this one that I wanted to enhance it with photos here on my own blog. This post was entitled, "Old tech guys are slowly fading away" on my Tech of all Trades blog.

I love visiting computer history sites and watching computer history shows. Why? When I visit these sites I gain a perspective on a part of my life that I did not have at the time I was passing through it. For example, when I first started programming in Applesoft on an Apple II computer, I thought it would be a great business language. Ha!

I know I am going to be dating myself when I bring this up, but humor an old tech guy for a few minutes . I remember when we used to sell software on cassette tapes. We put it in baggies and hung it on a peg board on the wall, right next to the the Commodore PET and the Apple II.

People would bring in the TRS-80 computers (we called them trash-80) and ask us to repair them because the local Radio Shack didn't service their own stuff . What year would you say this was? If you guessed 1978 you would be right. I'll bet that's before some of you were born.

When I got out of college I went to work as a programmer for some "old school" programming shops. I wrote in RPG II on an IBM System 3 and in COBOL on a Sperry Univac 90/30. That machine was a dinosaur even then. The hot new technology was writing in BASIC and Datashare on a DataPoint ARC network.

I used to love to visit COMDEX in those early years of the microcomputer. I was amazed to see all the technology that was coming out. With thousands of other geeks we ogled over the new Micromodem II for the Apple, which sold for about $300. Since I worked for an early computer store I got it for a lot less. My whole world changed.

I can't tell you how many hours I wasted "surfing the net" back in the late 70's and early 80's. No, the Web did not yet exist and most people had not heard of the Internet. We dialed up places like CompuServe and "The Source" or would just connect to TymNet or TelEnet to see whose network we could log on to. Was that hacking? Maybe.

Rather than bore you with my old tech guy memories, perhaps a short list of some of my favorite computer history sites might be helpful if you are interested in learning more about the history of the personal computer. But be careful, if you have any work to get done today, this trip down memory lane will seriously sidetrack you.

1. The Computer History Museum- The online home of the museum on Shoreline drive in Mountain View. Go to the Exhibits section. You can spend hours viewing the collection of marketing brochures. I especially love their time lines. They even have a great YouTube channel. Careful - I warned you this could be detracting from real work.

2. Apple Computers -Because a big part of my early career involved Apple II computers, I like to include Steven Weyhrich's site on Apple II History. You can find other sites like Apple-History.com, but it hasn't changed much lately. The Apple Museum is a better site and the Wikipedia article is great. Where is the "official" Apple history site?

3. Old-Computers.com - One of my favorites. There are nearly a thousand computers in their museum. Use the index on the left-hand sidebar. The articles in the history section are great, the forums are active and something unique that I haven't seen anywhere else - a major list of collectors from all over. Great if you have an old computer to buy or sell.

4. Computer Science Lab- John Kopplin put together a four part pictorial of computer history through the early 80's. Some of the photos are rare which I have not seen elsewhere. The accompanying descriptions could be taken from a college lecture on the history of computers. The lecture ends as the PC was getting started but is well worth a visit.

5. Computer Chronicles - Who can forget this great TV series from Stewart Cheifet? It aired from 1981 to 2002. Well, you may have never heard of it. You can watch many of the episodes online at the Internet archive. I highly recommend the episode Apple II forever, one of my favorites. More on the history of the show is on stquantum.

6. Old Computer Museum - Although you can find this site from the Old Computers club (#3 above), it is worth mentioning as one of the best organized and presented. This collection of Boris Serebrennikov is outstanding. If you have an old Lisa or even an Amiga (still a popular retro machine) he is interested in hearing from you.

7. The Computer Collector - This is a fairly complete list, useful to those who have old machines to buy, sell or trade. It is also an enormously wealthy site for computer history buffs. Many of those who buy and sell computers have great historical information about the computers they worked on. Lots of great personal history stories can be found here.

8. IBM PC Official History - It still amazes me how many people believe that the IBM PC was the first microcomputer. We used to laugh at those who thought our industry was "legitimized" when IBM finally made their entry in 1981, easily five years after Altair, IMSAI, Cromemco, Apple, Commodore, Radio Shack, Atari, Altos and Vector Graphic.

9. Personal Computer in TV commercials - The download squad has put together a collection of TV commercials for personal computers, some of them going back to the early 1980's. What a hoot! The early William Shatner piece has been removed but the original 1984 superbowl ad introducing the Macintosh is there as well as many others. Enjoy!

10. Old Computers.net- This list could go on and on - and it does if you Google it - but this one needs to be included in my top ten list of sites to visit. An extremely popular site, it is billed as the "Obsolete Technology Website" it includes great links not found on any of the above sites including the Intel museum. Thank you Steven Stengel.

I know I've missed your favorites. Add them in the comments. Also, be sure to check out the resources for "Dinosaur Sightings" on Tech Republic.

Spam filters that work

I wrote a piece on my blog on Tech Republic today about an RSS feed reader that I like and use. I wrote it in response to a piece from Gene Marks in Business Week claiming that no business owner uses RSS feeds after they've tried them. I tried to politely disagree.

He made some other points in his article with which I disagreed but I didn't want to overload my readers on Tech Republic with too many disagreeable points. So I'll bring it up here. Gene also claimed that no spam filter works. I don't think he has had a lot of experience with spam filters, or at least not good ones. No business in the world should be without one.

There's no way I can endorse his recommendation that employees sort and delete their spam as it comes in. That's ludicrous for any business today that has more than a few employees or that has an email address that has been around for more than a few months. What a tragic waste of time for the employee and a loss of productivity for the employer.

Maybe the business I work for is a little bit larger than his small business experience. We have over 100 mailboxes and receive over a half million pieces of email each month. Guess what? 97% of that email is spam. We could not function without a decent spam filter. Of course no filter is 100% effective but it cuts it down to a manageable one or two pieces.

I've written previously about our success with Commtouch but I have also been somewhat pleased with Cloudmark for the really small business who has litle or no IT budget. But for a professional MS Exchange environment go with Commtouch or Postini or some other outside service to clean your mail before it gets to your employee's mailbox.

What do you think? Is there a limit to the amount of spam that employees will tolerate before productivity starts to really decline and morale suffers?

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.

The truth about Windows Vista adoption

I read a great article this morning in Jason Hiner's Tech Sanity Check on Tech Republic about Windows Vista adoption in business. I have long been wondering how Microsoft could be claiming that Vista sales are brisk. I am not seeing that in my own experience as an IT Manager of an SMB - Small to Medium Business. The article points out three areas in which Windows Vista sales are flourishing but concludes as I do from my own personal experience that Vista is not being deployed in the corporate environment in big numbers yet.

First there are the laptop sales, 95% of which come preloaded with some flavor of Windows Vista. The PC Industry on the whole is experiencing a 10% increase in computer sales over last year and a large part of those are laptops. Laptops, more appropriately called notebook computers account for more than 55% of all new hardware sales these days.

So the largest part of those Vista sales Microsoft is claiming come from all those laptops. I have seen that in my own experience as more users ask me to work on their personal laptops, which are running Vista. Yes, I still work on employee computers - can't seem to get away from it. If they connect to my network via a VPN I have a vested interest to make sure they are secure.

The next big chunk of Vista sales come from upgrades. Every early adopter of Vista I know has upgraded from the Home Basic version to the Home Premium or Ultimate, or better yet to Vista Business, usually at my urging. That's a no-brainer. But Microsoft's claim of high sales of Vista into Corporate America has long been surprising to me until now.

It appears that many large enterprises are renewing their corporate licensing agreements which includes provisions for future upgrades of the desktop OS to Vista. In other words, they are buying Vista on paper but not actually deploying it this year or maybe not even planning to do so next year. Like me, many have concluded to roll out Vista only when they have to due to either an inability to purchase XP or due to the unavailability of XP support from Microsoft.

Maybe I'm being a little harsh, but I just don't see what business benefits Windows Vista brings to our network. In fact, to me, the new security features are a hindrance to implementing the OS. I hate having to answer yes five times when I want to install a piece of software. Like Jason points out in the article, Microsoft has simply tried to transfer culpability to users for letting malware into a system. Why introduce another level of complexity for security?

Conclusion: We will not be rolling out Vista in the workplace until probably 2009 when most of our desktops are due for a normal tech refresh.