Backing up your computer verses archiving

I often find people get confused with the idea of backups vs archives. Both are very important ways to keep information, yet each has it's own unique characteristics and purpose. I found this article on multiply.com that helps clear up the mystery. To summarize, if a record is copied for protection, we can probably call it a backup. If the same record is stored on some media with particular concern with immediate access, it is probably safe to call it an archive. Read More... http://www.bwebcentral.com/blog/2/703

Choosing the proper Gift Card

Everywhere I look I see Gift Cards. From fastfood like MacDonalds and Tims to grocery stores, shopping malls, and of course online stores like GoDaddy and Amazon. I just finished reading Chris Nadeau's Credit card fiasco so I thought I'd add my 2cents.

It is a strange cultural phenomenon that our society respects the giving of gift cards while the giving of cash can be considred impolite. At first glance, the whole gift card idea does seem like a scam. Let's consider what happens

1) Some buys the gift card for $x.xx

2) The company selling the gift card immediatly gets CASH

3) The company can't actually count the money as revenue until the gift card is spent. So they put into money into a special holding ('savings') account where it earns interest (ie: they make money off the your money while waiting for someone to spend the gift card.

4) The company has some "scheme" to take money away from the gift recipient. ie: The card expires in X days, or so much is taken off for each day it is not used. (FYI: Many places are trying to inact laws to make the expiry of gift card illegal for this reason)

5) Gift card amounts are nomrally even $ numbers (eg: $20.00), but nothing ever comes out to an even amounts so either a) The gift recipient has to chip in some extra $ or b) Their is a small balance left on the card that the company "writes" off after 30 days and keeps for themselves.

...okay okay...so it all looks like a SCAM right? Let's consider the alternatives:

1) You use a DEBIT card

The feeds for DEBIT seem to continue to rise with no signs of slowing down. To take out $20.00 I really have to take out $22.50 after fees. They call it a "convience fee". The convience of spening my own money !

2) You use a CREDIT card

Credit cards don't have any fees (except perhaps yearly ones), but you can get caught with a lot of interest charges, or sign-up for stupid insurance that you'll never use anyway. Most interest rates will kill you.

3) You use CASH

So cash is safest right? My $20 bill says $20 right? Well maybe, but $20 today doesn't buy you near what it did 20 years ago. Everything, even the dollar fluctuates in value, but is probably a better solution then those above right?

4) You just BUY the GIFT !

The best gifts are those where you sit down and think to yourself, "What sort of things does he like? What soft of gift will bring a smile to her face? And if the recipient is one of those people that likes gift cards (Hint: I like Amazon
and GoDaddy ). Be sure to only buy one's that don't expire.

Not sure what your friends wants? Use the UltimateWishList to drop hints to your facebook friends.

Trying to understand SPAM

Back in the "old days". It was easy to recognize SPAM. Now it seems to be getting harder to identify. Here's a post from Digital point forums trying to figure out what SPAM is today and how to identify it and deal with it properly. Where I used to work, they often sent out "Marketing DM Campaigns". Product advertising send out to a massive directory of contacts with a grey area of whether or not they requested to recieve such information. SPAM doesn't seem easy to identify these days or seems subjective, I think we need to form some consensus we can all agree on. All opinions welcome.

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The future of Keyboards

Sci-Fi? Nope it's real. A virtual keyboard you can take wherever you go. Just take it out and turn it on. Like typing in thin air. It must feel odd not getting any feedback from typing the letters, but it would be a cool gadget to have either way.

Read More... http://www.bwebcentral.com/blog/2/695

The power of Hyperlinks

I remember my first experience with hyperlinks. It was before the web and was with an old DOS version of Norton Utilities. Back then, windows 3.1 was still new and internet explorer hadn't even been invented yet. Much of the jargon used today like HTML, Web, and IM were not even known.

I used to carry my copy of the Norton Utilities, along with a few other apps on a set of 1.44MB floppy disks. Friends of Friends were always asking for help with this/that about their computer, so I could easily whip out my floppies and diagnose there problem quickly. One of my favorite apps was called 'NDOS'. It was a DOS shell extension, that provided many new extensions to batch programming not included with the version of DOS on many computers of the time. NDOS also included a context sensitive help. Whenever, I pressed F1 it would pop up a help window. You could almost imagine this window as a tiny version of Internet Explorer, because inside it certain words were underlined and you could click on them to find out more information.

None of us knew at the time, that this little idea of highlighting words, that could be clicked on for more information, would be a major part of forming the web as we know it today. Now, of course, not only are words just hyperlinked, but we have smart links, you can click or hover over them to find out even more information, and control where you want to go next. I'm always wondering...what will be the next thing we take for granted that will become the next BIG thing in our little world?

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Security vs Convenience..What will you choose?

It has only been recently since I jumped on the bandwagon and have started doing online transactions such as internet banking and credit card transactions. Has the internet become more safe in recent years...not really !

Often the reported "safety" of credit card processing and internet bankings is overly touted as "safe". The truth is it is encrypted but the decision of whether this encryption is safe is a personal decision each of us must make ourselves.

As technology, hardware and software continues to become more advanced, encryption standards quickly become out dated. A 512 byte encryption key is much easier to brute force attack then it was several years ago. So the fact that your are visiting a "secure page' (https) Does not gaurtenee that no one can see the information being transmitted.

As a result, for the longest time, I never used my own credit card (or banking card) online due to a fear of theft of information. Many people freely submit this information and believe it to be safe. The convience of being able to pay bills, check our account, and purchase products online outweights the possible consequence of information being stolen and used against you.

Three factors ultimatly made me take the switch:

1) Internet banking/credit cards is more secure then the phone banking. -> Even if it can potentially be cracked, phone banking has no encryption, anyone could tap your phone line and steal information. So if you were already doing phone banking, it would be safer to switch to internet banking

2) Ever give you credit card to the waitress at a restaurant? She walks away with it to ring in and then brings it back for you to sign the receipt. It is more likely that she will copy your credit card information and use it fraudlently, then it is that someone will crack the internet encryption and steal the information

3) There are much easier ways for criminals to steal your identity then to try and break the encryption. Many stolen credit card numbers come from unencrypted information sent via email, or regular web pages, or phising attempts.

Everything you do will have some degree of risk, we may often find there is a trade off between convienence and risk. If you are already doing riskier activites with your credit and debit cards, then it might actually be safer to do your transactions online.

So what do you think? Do you do all of your transactions online? Do you do phone banking? Do you feel safe? Are we ever really safe?

Thanks to our friends at MS Merchand account, for helping to bring you this information

Take the Illusions of Entreprenurship Quiz

Scott Shane of Case Western recently published The Illusions of Entrepreneurship. This is a link to an online test of your entreprenership skills. Well, actually it's a bunch of questions on new startup facts mostly related to the USA. I only scored 35% so maybe I should buy the book.

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PageRank is bogus

It seems whenver Google releases a PR update there is a buzz all over the blogosphere about it .With many popular blogs now ranking several PR points lower then before. I have noticed many of my favorite blogs that once enjoyed PR of 6,7,8 now have PR's as low as 4 or 5.

And I say ..big deal. It is a sad world we live in where the little green bar on the top of our browser tells us what sites are "good" and what sites are "bad". There are literally hundreds of search engine marketing and promotion services out there. Most of the sites that have experienced this PR drop, have not seen it as "a good thing". Now, I'm no SEO consultant but I have heard that these sites have noted no significant change in their traffic or SERP (search engine results pages), so it might just be the reporting of that little green bar that has changed.

Most internet advertising is done via javascript, and links in javascript are typically not followed by search engines. The supposed "danger" occurs when someone links to a specific site. For example suppose, I choose to post a link to... let's say like our friends at discountclick.com. To google, this means a "vote" for the page, the more votes for a page the more of an authority it is believed to have in a given area. So if companies were to pay for these links Google believes it could cause havoc with the users search experience. This theory holds that if I link to a site and I'm not getting paid for it, it will somehow be a better quality site then if I was paid for it. It has been my experiance this is not really true.

The question this leaves me wondering.. Can google really put pay per post systems out of business? Do we really want to give once company that much power? I'm sure if we think about it someone can come up with a more synergistic solution..one where everyone wins.

What do you think ?

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Here's a great video from CommonCraft to understand the basics of social bookmarking. If you like it you might also want to check out this video tutorial on using ArticleSwap.biz as well.

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One is born every minute and that sucker was me

When I was around 15 I recieved an letter in the mail. The letter started as follows:

CONGRATULATIONS
YOU HAVE WON
A CASH PRIZE up to
$60,000

It even included what looked like a cheque with my name on it and $60,000. It did clearly state that it was not a real cheque but was just an example.

Around the same time, I had entered in several sweepstakes, and I was very excited presuming that I had won. I ran up to my parents and showed them the paperwork, they both told me it was a scam, but I wasn't really listening, I knew I was right, and I knew I had one lots of money (again I remind you I was 15)

All I had to do was call a phone number (1-900) to confirm my prize and they promised they would send my cheque out RIGHT AWAY. I then entered into a bit of a conversation with my mother over calling the number. She tried her best to convince me, but finally she gave in, so long as I agreed to pay whatever charges incurred for calling the 1-900 number. I quickly agreed.."no biggie", I thought easy to pay it with $60,000 as I quickly dialed the number.

I was greated by a friendly sounding recording of a woman's voice. It was a warning that this call would cost a minimum of $3.99/minute for a minimum 15 minutes. I could press 1 to continue or hang-up and I would not be charged anyting. I did the math quickly in my head. I knew I would be out about $60.00. But I also knew I could pay it back quickly when I got my $60,000 cheque.

The phone prompted through several options, entering my birthday, completing a skill testing question, then it said "one moment please...", and the line was slient for about 2 minutes. After waiting for what seemed like an enternity, I heard a loud bells and whilstles sound and then a computerized voice stated:

"Congratulations, you have won a price..you prize is [imagine compute voice here] "one dollar, and fifty-nine cents. You prize will be issued to you by cheque and should arrive within 4-6 weeks. Thank-you for calling..."

I was then presented with a dial tone. I didn't really hear it though.

Thinking back on it now, I'm sorry my mom didn't take a picture of my jaw dropped open with the phone in my hand trying to figure out what just happened.

True to thier word, about 6 weeks later I recieved a cheque for $1.59. It was two weeks prior to that my mom showed me the phone bill and asked me to cough up the ~ $60 charge that appeared on it. I never did cash cheque for $1.59.

Some lessons, you can't learn until you fall for them yourself. I'm reminded of this moment, everytime I see a Pyramid scheme or email, fax that promises me lots of money with little or no effort. Hope this story helps drive home the adage, If it looks to good to be true...it IS !..trust me it IS !

Universal USB Harddrive Adaptor

Do you have several old hard drives lying around? Want to make them more usefull? The Apricon DriveWire Universal Harddrive Adapter allows you to easliy connect IDE, SATA, and notebook hard drives.

What makes this drive different from all others? You can pay as little as $20.00 for an adapter that does one type of drive (eg: IDE, or notebook). Or you can pay ~ $100 for a hard drive enclosure. If you have several types of drives and need to quicky swap and interchange them, this adaptor is probably the right one for you.

In my old days as a sys admin, I was often challenged with the need to quickly get data from a busted laptop, or transfer employee files from an old laptop/desktop to a new one. The small dimensions (0.75" X 3.3" X 4.7" ) make it easy to fit in your 'repair toolbox' to pull out on an as needed basis.

Can also be useful to quickly backup files to an external hard drive, or to share files across a network.