GEEKNOTE: It is already Labor Day Weekend 2013... Where did the first part of the year go? The last week especially has been a bit of whirlwind.
Like every business owner I know, I'm tasked with both working ON my business and working IN my business. The latter taking most of my time last week.
I worked on a whole bunch of different projects and got most of them either completed or all but wrapped up. This, in spite of getting a slew of FBI-Moneypak infected machines in at the end of the week, including two on Saturday.
I set a single day PR (personal record) on Saturday for the most FBI-Moneypak disinfections in progress on my work bench at the same time. The sad thing was that most of these infections would never have happened if the computer owners had followed basic safe computing practices (eg. don't visit suspect websites or open unknown attachments) and had real antivirus software on their systems. Without exception, these machines were using Microsoft Security Essentials or one of the other free antivirus programs. As the saying goes: "You get what you pay for." All of these machines will be going home on Tuesday.
More and more, I find myself distinguishing between spending my time on customers who buy products and clients who look to us for advice and solutions to their IT needs. There really is a distinct difference between the two. The customers are the ones who keep coming back with the same problems over and over and who seem to value low cost above everything else. The clients are the ones who take our advice and let us help them solve the underlying issues that are causing problems.
The trick to maintaining my sanity appears to be to concentrate on clients who value and actually LISTEN to my advice and get over customers who seem intent on screwing up. I've got one large medical customer who dropped the top rated F-Secure antivirus software that has successfully protected her network for a decade and installed the bottom rated Microsoft Security Essentials on the advice of another geek, who apparently values "free" over "effective". There is a part of me that hopes that her entire network becomes as much of a mess as it was before we decontaminated it a decade ago. Given the amount of HIPAA covered data on her network, I'm glad I'm not a patient of that practice.
One of the issues I wrote about earlier this year was Intel's decision to get out of the desktop motherboard business except for their line of NUC systems. Contrary to their initial promises, Intel motherboards have become all but impossible to source and we delivered our first system with an Asus motherboard last week. My initial impression is that the new board is a "keeper" that will make a good replacement for the Intel boards I can't get my hands on anymore. Both the latest NUC system client and the client who received the Asus based system appear VERY happy with solutions we came up with for them. They made up for the medical customer intent on courting disaster.
I all but completed three network assessments last week and will be dropping them off to the three respective clients this coming week, along with recommendations on how they should prioritize addressing various IT needs (eg. Windows XP machines that need to be retired) in their businesses. If they take those recommendations to heart, they shouldn't have any major IT disasters in the next year.
I've also previously written about domain registrations and what NOT to do when securing a domain name. We started the process of regaining control of a local company's domain name in late July. As of Saturday, I'm STILL waiting on Network Solutions to provide us with the last piece of information we need in order to transfer the name back into the local company's name. Just maybe, we will be able to get this sorted out this coming week.
In spite of a busy week at work, I found time to get my two LP gas bottles refilled, so there is a Labor Day cookout in my immediate future. Regardless of how you plan to spend your Labor Day, I hope it is an enjoyable one.
As always, feel free to drop me a note or give me a call (847-2424) if you have any questions about your computer or the Internet.
Rob Marlowe
Senior Geek
Gulfcoast Networking, Inc.
http://www.gulfcoastnetworking.com
