Blogs

Spring is here! And the first warm days of the year lead some people to thoughts of spring cleaning – the yearly act of cleaning the house after the cold winter months. Time for a little spring cleaning and maintenance for your computers too!

Help Desk Support

When working with any IT organization, you need to make sure that any issues and concerns you may have with your technology solutions are being met.  You also need to make sure that you can contact your IT staff whenever you need them. 

No point having a soap box if you don't use if occasionally.  And no fun always talking about the same thing, so let's take a diversion:  winter biking.

Some of you may know that I cycle to work.  Some of you know that I do that all year round – regardless of the weather.  I love hearing you say “that's quite impressive of you” while your face is saying “really?  no.  really?  You can't be serious.  Are you off your rocker?”.  Some of you hide it better than others.

Your knee-jerk reaction to the idea is both correct and wrong.

We help a lot of charities set up online donation systems.  A common question is “should we use CanadaHelps.org or set up our own donation system?”.  It's a good question.  Let's take a basic look at some of the options.

Our website clients often come to us looking for a solution to a problem. However, a lot of the time this isn't what they say when they walk in the door. A lot of the time, we're told, "we'd like to have a forum on the website", or "we'd like social media links on all of our pages", or "we've decided that we want [website feature]". Although it's easy to go ahead and provide these solutions, our job as consultants is not just to do technical work but also to try and understand our clients' real needs.

A couple of weeks ago, we got a call at 4pm.  Our potential client had heard via e-mail at 3:15pm that their site was getting shut down by Monday and they should make alternative arrangements.  It's a proprietary CMS (Content Management System) - no alternatives.  Luckily, they had control of their own domain so we could get DNS moved to us.  This was Friday.  

Saturday morning we went to see what we could move.  We hoped to grab a fixed copy of their site at the very least.  Their site was already gone.  It appears their Provider had gone under.

You are working on a report or spreadsheet and put it on a USB stick to take home. Later on, you open up the file only to realize that there was one other file you needed as well, but forgot to put it on the stick before you left the office.

Carrying files around on portable storage devices is simple to do, but opens up some thorny issues.

What if the stick is left somewhere, or what if the right files aren’t on it? If important work gets done on a stick, how does it get backed up, or shared with other people who want access to the latest version of a document?

You're a systems administrator and things are good. You've got backups in place to protect your precious data. Congratulations, this is great! But is it enough?

The Bad and The Ugly

Okay folks – I admit it – I too have had one of those days.  You know the kind – you either have lived it or you dread it.

I'm at work for the morning madly getting ready for a one week vacation visiting family last Christmas.  My son calls me at work and says he has a paper due before we leave, but the printer is making a funny noise.  After a quick troubleshoot, I tell him to reboot the computer which he is unable to do because he gets some sort of blue screen of death.  I tell him to leave it until I get home.  

For most people, this topic is a lot like cleaning leaves out of the gutter, wiping down the inside of kitchen cupboards, and checking your windshield wiper fluid and tire pressures.

Though the car references are pretty good analogies for today's topic (and reminds me to check my car).

My temptation today is to get on my soapbox, pull out a bible, and have a good ol'fashioned maintenance revival meeting.  Although I don't think there has ever been one.  There should be.