Computer Chit Chat

Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

Have you heard about I Want Sandy? I only did recently. I Want Sandy is a personal productivity tool. On her website they call the service a personal assistant. To use the service all you need to do is sign up for a free account and then enter anything you want to be reminded of. That includes reminders, appointments, things to do, contacts, bookmarks, lists and notes. You’re then notified of all of the items in a daily email digest. Reminders can also be sent by text message and Twitter. You can also add items by emailing Sandy, so you don’t even have to be at the computer to update your schedule. I Want Sandy was voted as one of the finalists for the Webware 100 Awards. If you need to organize your life a little more, just say I Want Sandy.

• Wildfire email phishing scam
• How to switch from Outlook to Thunderbird
• Giveaway of the Day

Fuelmyblog and Tsheets.com want to know what people do in the first five minutes of their working day. One lucky person who answers this question on their blog will win an 80Gb iPod Classic or an 8Gb Nano.

You probably know Fuelmyblog as one of the most popular online blogger communities. TSheets is an affordable monthly service that offers a web-based timesheet system created to track hourly time from any computer or mobile device. The Tsheets website is well laid out and easy to understand. To use their language, it’s Triffic.

So, they want to know what I do in the first five minutes of my working day. I get up on a work day at 4am. I usually begin work at my day job at 6am. When I get to work the first thing I do is clock in. Then I go into the office and turn on my computer. Then I put the radio up on top of bookshelf on top of my desk (the only place I get reception) and turn it on. I open Outlook first and then the different apps and folders that I use all day. Then I go into the kitchen and make a pot of coffee. Then I go back to my desk and check my voicemail and email. By then almost ten minutes has gone by and I need that coffee. So, there you have it. That’s what I do in the first five minutes of my working day.

What do you do in the beginning of your work day?

• How Dragon Naturally Speaking increases earnings and pays for itself
• Journyx, free time and expense management software
• And the winner of the Computer Chit Chat Christmas Contest is…

When I worked in mail order computer sales I started out selling products related to Macintosh computers to consumers. At that time I didn’t sell Macs, just everything related to them. As the company changed my position changed with it. With little notice I was thrown into the shark pool that is IT today, and was asked to sell to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies. I received some training in everything from cabling, backups and computers as well as some of the more specialized areas such as configuration of networks including servers. Yes, I’m one of those girls, the ones that know what many of the acronyms you hear mean. LAN, WAN, CRM, SSH, FTP, TCP/IP. The company I worked for often asked us, the sales reps, to position ourselves as a one stop shop for all computing products.

When calling to pitch networking and when responding to bids an answer I frequently heard was “we need a Secure Server and we’re looking at Fortress SSH with the client server”. Our bids frequently lost because clients felt that there were better products then what we had out there, and that those products were made by Pragma. Now that the company I worked for is no more and I am no longer in sales, it makes sense. Why wouldn’t a corporate client buy highly specialized security related solutions for their network from a catalog that carries everything from mousepads to servers? Because they needed their solution right the first time. And when you need something right, don’t you typically go to an expert? Someone who specializes in doing what you need? Of course you do. You would no sooner buy specialized software such as this from a one stop computer shop as you would buy a car from a bicycle dealer.

Pragma is an expert in servers, telnet and ssh software. That is all they do. Pragma is a Microsoft Gold certified partner, which means that they have proven they have extremely specialized knowledge to use in creating customer solutions, demonstrated excellence in customer satisfaction and received in depth training directly from Microsoft. They’ve been in business for more than sixteen years. And, I’m thinking that from a customer point of view, when your department is responsible for building your infrastructure you only want a solutions provider who’s been in the game for a while and knows the answer to your question because that’s the only product they carry, rather than someone who tells you they don’t know and to let you check with their tech (who is frequently another rep nearby). That’s the kind of provider that you not only want, it’s the kind you trust.

• Memory America
• 25 free magnets
• Let’s chat about mailing lists