GEEKNOTE: This and that

GEEKNOTE:  This week's GEEKNOTE is a bit of a mixed bag as I've got a bunch of irons in the proverbial fire at the moment.  Multitasking at its finest.

I've talked in the past about sporting special events and how they can be an asset to the community.  One of my favorite special events is coming up this weekend... The sixth annual Coteeman Triathlon will be Saturday the 10th.  I participated as an athlete the first two years and this will be my fourth year as race director.

This USAT sanctioned sprint triathlon features a pool swim, a 9 mile bike ride, and a 5k (3.1 mile) run, all within the city limits.  It is perfect for beginners, even non-swimmers as you can wade the "swim".  The bike ride is two mostly flat 4.5 mile loops, and the run is also pretty flat.  Close to half of the participants are coming from out of town this year and staying in area hotels.

Over the years, we've had athletes as young as four and a number of athletes in their 70's and beyond.  If you race on Saturday, you can tell all your friends at church on Sunday and at work on Monday that you raced in a triathlon over the weekend.  Quite a few of them will think "Ironman" and you are under no obligation to use the word "sprint"... just show off you finisher's medal and smile.

More information can be found at http://www.coteeman.com and you can register online through Thursday.  I hope to see you there.

We've been doing some pretty cool stuff at work the last few weeks at work:

It took some searching to find the right driver, but we got the wireless card working in one of the Intel NUCs.  Combined with a wireless keyboard / mouse, the only wires going into it are the ones for the power and the monitor.  Definitely slick.

The guts in our mini-ITX desktops are changing, with a new motherboard, faster processors, and more drive options.  I'm partial to high performance SSD (solid state) drives, but then, I AM a bit of a performance freak.

I've written here a couple of times this year about our evolving marketing efforts.  Tim and I have been working on our marketing program for ages and we had an "ah ha" moment a month ago:  Everything we've been working on suddenly "clicked" into into one coherent piece.  In hindsight, the missing piece was so simple we both wanted to wack ourselves up the side of the head and say:  "Duh, why didn't we think of that?"

In the process of polishing our marketing program, we developed a network report for new customers that I suspect will be something that all of our existing business customers are going to want to have for their own networks as well.  The reports I've done so far are typically about 3/8" - 1/2" thick, so they do take a bit of time to prepare, not counting the couple of weeks it takes to collect the data.  Between doing these reports for our existing customers and the new ones signing up, I expect to be generating quite a few of these reports over the next month or so.

Finally, my wife Carolyn shared a CBS News link to a study that found 25% of 2 year olds now have their own smart phones.  It is bad enough that adults laugh when I whip out my flip phone.  I guess I really am going to need to upgrade just to stay up with the toddlers of the world.  I'll think about it later.  I'm too busy listening to records on my phonograph today.

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