cloud agnost

I’ve been following a trend know as microfinance or microloans for a few years now, and I’m really excited to see that some online marketplaces for it are getting established.

The concept is simple- instead of investing huge amounts in huge multinationals, invest smaller amounts in microloans the 3rd world, where traditional means of finance are typically unavailable.  You’ll be getting fairly low returns, from 1-3%, but data to date suggests that microloans have extraordinarily low default rates.  Certainly no once can argue against a little portfolio diversification these days, and I’m hoping no one will argue against the mission.  Take a look at:

http://www.kiva.org

https://www.microplace.com/

  I use nearly all the tools on this list pretty regularly, and being able to take them with you on a flash drive and use them anywhere is pretty awesome.  If you’re like me and use a flash drive instead of a laptop, you’ll want to read this.

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http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/09/02/24-killer-portable-apps-for-your-usb-flash-drive/

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Neowin.net – Hacker says Windows is more secure than Mac; calls Apple fans "ignorant"
Hacker says Windows is more secure than Mac; calls Apple fans "ignorant"

A glimpse into the future?

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‘Skinput’ turns body into touchscreen interface – Innovation- msnbc.com
‘Skinput’ turns body into touchscreen interface

  I’ve been running the office 2010 64 bit flavored beta for a little while now and it’s pretty rockin.  definite improvements to managing huge email inboxes, and finally some social network integration showing up for outlook.  can you tell i like the new outlook?  word and excel get the file button back, and the ribbon is making sense of the madness everywhere now 🙂

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Microsoft Office 2010 Beta Professional Plus – Free Download
Download Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta

i’ve been in seattle 5 years, and amusingly lived right down the street from microsoft when i first moved here.  i was so jealous of all the “rich people” in their fancy cars, and angry with all the traffic they made on hwy 520 when i wanted to get into seattle to see a punk rock show on a friday night after work.  well, joke’s on me cause now i’m one of them but i’m still driving the now 5 year older car.  i can say i am doing my best now to accomplish what i can without having to waste gas and time in traffic, by going online to get more things done faster.

i’ve been trying to focus lately on the core aspect of what i do, in terms of trying to help as many people get the most out of their computers as possible.  after the past few weeks on trying to focus on the basics of how computers can adapt to help each of us as individuals with, as i have experienced personally, every aspect of life.  i have personally found all of the following on the internet- 2 houses, a dog, true love, and i think it count’s twice- once for the woman i hope to make my wife and again for the dog- a guitar, a free car well i took a friend to pick it up anyway, i already had one lucky for him., many close friends, and a way to keep in touch with some of the people i’ve met in the 12 states i’ve lived in.  there’s nothing that connects us like the internet. it’s an old analogy now, but the idea of the information superhighway is right in terms of needing to learn what you’re doing online.  no matter what pc you’re using, a phishing attempt by a clever mock-up of a website you trust could trick you into giving up personal information.  if you learn to use the tools available to you, like a billion other windows users have, you’ll be able to stay safe online as well as keep in touch with people in richer and better ways than have ever been possible before.  if you don’t have time, the information superhighway can make the commute shorter, and i bet i can show you a shortcut or five 🙂

i’m asked more times than i can count every day “how do you learn this stuff,” and i’ve tried answering this a million different ways, but, in order, when i’m faced with virtually any problem in life, i wind up using the collective wisdom most people call the internet to find the best answer, by searching.  often the f1 key will get you a quicker answer if it’s a simple question. you can look for basic instruction on how to get online and do a search on www.bing.com, or the provider, like google, or yahoo, or search provider of your choice at your local library, and use public pc’s to gain some familiarity with the basic controls if you want or need to, and the library can often help you find free classes and training in your area. the following points should help anyone already familiar with using a pc make sure they don’t find themselves lost due to any sort of loss, whether due to hardware failure, being stolen, or even a virus.  since i studied political rather than computer science, and enjoy building custom pc’s in my spare time, i can say with 100% confidence, from experience, that you can learn to do this all yourself!

1. illness/virus:  a foreign intrusion that is somehow harming the system.  from a clogged dryer hose to a virus in your pc, proper care and maintenance is sorta the price of admission if you want your “stuff” to keep working the way it did when you bought it.  if you have one, and aren’t comfortable or able to wipe out your PC by reinstalling windows, learn to, or pay a professional to and then follow the other steps below.

2. hardware issues/capability problems:  windows gets the bad wrap for a lot of common hardware and driver problems.  if your computer is on and reading a message on anything other than a black and white screen, windows and microsoft are doing their best to do what you ask, or at least to tell you what’s broken with your computer.  occasionally that will be some issue with windows itself, but the vast majority of problems, in my experience, are due to either out of date drivers and software, incorrect initial configurations, and just too much stuff going at once.  the best and worst thing about windows is that it’s the system over a billion people around the world use to interact.  the possibilities with a pc are endless, so of course there are some complexities in how they work.  just like upgrading a car’s audio system or suspension takes knowledge, and requires you to work with it’s limits of sound-making or corner-taking, a pc has limits in performance based on the parts it’s made of.  just like in the real world, there is a chance of being taken advantage of in a sort of digital mugging known commonly as spyware, or being infected by virus.  basic precautions will protect you from virtually any virus or spyware, if you learn to use the security measures available- i have personally not encountered a virus in the 7 years i have followed the following 3 basic steps. 

the 3 basic steps to healthy computer living are as follows-

1. protect, 2. maintain, 3.backup.

a. protect. for free with the microsoft security essentials, avira free, avg free, avast free, and that’s just the av’s that are free.  there are around 100 legitimate, free antivirus programs out there.  the hope is that you’ll buy a full version to get additional support and services.  i’ve done all of my financial business online my whole life, and feel absolutely 100% confident in the fact that the technologies i use to conduct these transactions keep me as secure, if not more secure, than doing business with the bank if you must, but credit union in my case.  random side not here, get a credit union, take your money to a not-for-profit, local or regional institution and you’ll be much happier with the service you receive- just make sure they have an online banking site, and ask for a flyer with photos or to have them show you what it looks like in-store so you know where you’re going.  this also means making sure your pc gets reliable power.  you’re living dangerously if you don’t use a surge protector, at all times. i have several at home, and a portable one for my laptop.  the quality of electrical lines varies dramatically, and spikes can easily damage a computer.

b. maintain. this was more labor intensive back in the day, making sure to defrag the hard drive from time to time, and dealing with popups and cookies and such.  now days this work should all be done by your security system and windows on a schedule, so long as you leave your computer on.  at this point it’s really completely unnecessary to turn off the pc 100%, unless it’s a reboot to install updates.  modern hardware has the capability to turn on and off parts of the system as needed to improve power consumption, battery life, and to make sure these critical maintenance tasks can happen when they need to.

c. backup.  i’m horrified every day when i meet people who need to buy a new pc because theirs was stolen,  i’m even more horrified when they find that their backup hard drive has also been stolen.  this underscores the need for redundancy in your backup system.  i have a 2-step approach to backup that keeps my critical files both secure and available online.  1st, i have an external storage system on my network. whether it’s a router with an external hard drive attached and hidden away from your other computer stuff.  i also keep the most critical 25 gb of my files backed up, and secured, for free, on windows live sky drive.  you can even get a fee plugin to easily access your skydrive as a regular folder at http://skydriveexplorer.com/

My uber crucial 5by of documents and photos are all meshed up.  www.mesh.com provides 5gb worth of file synchronization beauty between all the devices in my world, be they windows of the mobile or pc variety, a web browser on any computer, or a mac.  it’s a service very comparable, and IMHO much better to apples $99/year mobile me service.

all those file aren’t meant to be only on one pc, all of the online options are secured by passwords you choose, with only the people you choose.

also, try using the windows live essentials, also free, from www.download.live.com to help you do email, edit photos, vidoes, blog, and keep your family safe online.  the windows live services are all about helping you share all your digital stuff, and manage your online activities, and share all your photos and fun stuff online.

3. resources all used up: computers, like all modern technology, require some maintenance, as mentioned above.  In addition to having batteries that wear out, laptops are prone to exposure to vibration, moisture, and all kinds of other stuff.  Desktop PC’s should be cleaned with “canned air” every 6 months at LEAST! in addition to slowing down to wear and tear on the hard drive, having too much running in memory can hold back a healthy pc’s performance. if you notice the pc slowing down after you have lots of stuff happening, you need a memory upgrade. you can use ready boost on a windows vista or 7 pc to stretch the system’s memory, just plug in almost any flash drive or memory card and you’ll be able to choose “speed up my system using ready boost” to dedicate part of the device to holding programs you’re using so that slower spinning disk can spin less, last longer, and use less electricity/battery life.  adding a 4gb SD card to your pc’s media slot is probably the best $10-15 performance upgrade you can do in 1 minute or less on a windows vista or 7 pc.

4. not enough power  computers are generally designed to do what people are doing when they were purchased.  if your 5 year old pc isn’t streaming hd videos from youtube and netflix well, it may just not be good enough to go that fast on the information superhighway.  try the windows 7 upgrade advisor to see if you can get windows 7 running on an older xp system, and then put a 4gb sd card or flas drive on it for ready boost and that might just be enough turbo to get your videos streaming, or consider upgrading to a new PC.  moore’s law has held true for 30 years of processing advancements- every 6 months, if you pay the same amount of money for a processor, you’ve been able to get about twice the performance- hence the talk of ever-increasing gigahertz and terabytes and belly-flops.  

interestingly, i’ve found this strategy, especially the ever-increasing belly-flops, to be a great way to deal with problems in the real world.

  This is the sort of thing and thinking that makes me proud to work for Microsoft.  Imagine if a school system could simply share 1 pc between a few students instead of having to buy a pc for each student.  Not only would students naturally learn to work together and share resources, but the cost to the schools would be fractionally lower.  Can’t wait to see what comes of Multipoint Server…

Thanks, Aaron, for bringing this to my attention 🙂

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Microsoft to schools: Share a PC | Beyond Binary – CNET News
November 12, 2009 12:30 PM PST Microsoft to schools: Share a PC

Lately I’ve been talking to a lot of people who want to know where they can learn about Windows 7 on their own time.  The videos on this site explain several of the awesome new features of Windows 7 in a very easy to understand format.  And remember, f1 is your friend!

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Getting started with Windows 7 – Help & How-to – Microsoft Windows
Getting started with Windows 7

since this is a forum that im still setting up, i thought it would be fun to share a few details about who i am, and some of the reasons i think Microsoft has chosen me to be a “guru.”

taking it from the top, i first used a computer sometime around 1990. i was recovering from a very serious case of acute appendicitis, and while i wasn’t able to get out of the house to cause mischief, so i started playing with my dad’s work laptop.  i don’t recall the brand, but being the hardware junkie i am i can tell you that it was a x286 model, and Oregon trail was pretty much the coolest thing i had going on during recovery.  i remember poking around some of the lotus work apps that my dad used and being blown away by how many numbers he was keeping track of. he was using the system to help manage some offshore drilling operations for trintomar, in Trinidad and Tobago, off the northeast coast of Venezuela.  i actually got the chance to visit for Christmas in 1991.   the experience of being so ill, and then seeing how much luckier i was as a child than the children i was seeing in a country that, by international standards, is doing just fine, was truly a life-changing experience.

that year, after making me memorize the multiplication tables up to 10, my dad showed me a little about how to run lotus 1-2-3.  after that, math, graphs, spreadsheets, etc, have never really never been a challenge again.  i can’t say much happened for me with computers over the next few years.  he kept the laptop, i used it to learn to write and type, and played Oregon trail every now and then, but once i got a super Nintendo, metroid and troy aikman footbal pretty much ruled my electronic life.

the next computer i got to use was when i moved to Idaho my sophomore year of high school, in 1997.  my grandparents gave me what i believe was the greatest gift i have ever received: a brand new, top-of-the-line, desktop computer.  it was a “family” system, and it wasn’t in my bedroom, but rather the office, but i don’t think anyone in the house (ok it was just my mom and stepdad and they used them at work so didn’t want to use it at home) would argue that it was MY computer.  i think i must have killed about 3,123,654,313,943 demons and zombies and whatnot in diablo 1&2.  greatest game of all time, srsly.

having the chance to use a system when i was about 10, and REALLY play with one when i was about 15 laid the foundation for what i hope is shaping up to be a very successful career.  the first system we brought home actually had a faulty motherboard, so the clock was running fast.  micron sent out a tech to replace it after i spent about 2 hours “under the hood” tinkering around with the system figuring out what was the matter.  i watched the tech like a hawk so i wouldn’t break the thing if i decided/needed to work on it myself, and a system builder was born.  after i realized that he was actually replacing the main board that everything in the computer was connecting to, right there in the home office, i realized i could probably build computers, which seemed like about the coolest thing i could do since i had given up on being any good at sports by this point.

over the next few years i helped my mom make flyers for work in publisher, used the computer for endless amounts of internet research for competitive debate in high school and college, and made a decent chunk of change doing various training, repairs, and upgrades for people who needed help with their pc’s.  i also got into web design for a while, wound up doing a bunch of excel form creation for sears even though i was supposedly just a sales guy, blah blah blah.  i’ve been in the workforce for a decade, and have had success at two of the largest companies in the world, as well as one of the fastest growing family businesses in the US.  the skills i tried to learn early on about how numbers are organized, how to run a search when you get stuck looking for something, and about what makes a computer’s clock tick so that i can get it to work again when it stops, were absolutely the critical skills that i needed to teach myself how to get the job done, almost regardless of whether i was running a landscaping business, or working for Microsoft.  certainly different skills are relevant to different users, but i’ve had 2 years now to talk to regular, everyday pc buyers, and have noticed an awful lot of “best practices” that anyone who really loves their computer, whose life is enriched and improved rather than made frustrating and frantic by it, all follow.  in subsequent posts i intend to go into a lot more detail but those basic principles are

1. make sure you’re using the right tool for the right job- that’s what software evaluations, or trials, are for.

2. make sure you keep your system protected by UPDATED antivirus software, and that your systems automatic updates are also running.

3. make sure you have a backup strategy in place.

4. f1 is your friend.  it’s up by the top left of the keyboard.  it’s what we call “context-relevant help.” actually it’s just the help button, i made that last bit up.  seriously though, it’s a pretty smart little button. it knows whether you’re using the internet, or paint, or calculator, or word, or whatever, and will direct you to the on-screen instructions relevant to the program you’re working with.

i am humbled by working for Microsoft.  they have machines that require only 3 buttons be pressed, and hot chocolate fills your cup.  they also have one where you essentially stand inside a “worldwide telescope” and can use gestures to fly around through a 3d map of the known universe.  imagine being able to see your house from street level, zooming out so you can see the milky way and other galaxies, flying over to the closest one, and then zooming back out, in again to the milky way, and taking a perspective from the moon of what earth looks like.  this was a real, 3d, interactive experience i was able to be part of at a demonstration about a year ago, and it’s exactly what you can see at www.worldwidetelescope.org

if you’d like to be able to fly all around the universe but can’t, i’m excited to help show you how 🙂