Crowdsourcing My Wife's Birthday for Charity

December 21st, 2011 was my wife Mary’s 40th birthday. Being the great person that she is, she chose to donate her birthday tocharity:water, our favorite charity.

Normally, when you donate your birthday to charity:water you have a party and people make donations instead of bringing gifts. Without the party, the whole donations in lieu of gifts wasn’t going to work. So, what I did was surprise Mary with a special “virtual online party” by using social media and crowdsourcing.

An iPad and Mickey Mouse

This month, my wife Mary and I took our two kids, Ethan (eight) and Lauren (six), to experience all that Disney and Universal Studios have to offer in Orlando, Florida. This was our fourth family vacation to the Sunshine State, so at this point, between our other trips and my wife’s research, we are pros at running the Disney gauntlet.

The Toaster Effect

Saturday, my wife Mary returned from a shopping trip with a new toaster. When I saw it in her pile of newly purchased merchandise, I innocently asked, “Did our toaster break?”

“No,” she replied, “I just thought it was time for a change.”

I quickly did the math in my head, and replied, “Okay, sounds good.”

I came to the conclusion that there were two good reasons why her purchase garnered an almost “Yes, dear” reply:

An Emotional Business Conference

To stay current with the IT and business world, I attend quite a few business conferences. I’ve heard some great speakers tell some great stories at those conferences. Some stories have been funny, some sad, some inspirational, but none has moved me to tears, until now.

What the Cloud Actually Means to Business

INTRUST GROUP and our clients have been using cloud-based applications for several years now. But recently, we’ve seen that trend rapidly accelerate. It’s become such a hot topic that I’ve started a blog dedicated to it, called Cloud Actually.

You’ve probably heard the term “eating our own dog food,” or “dogfooding” before. In the IT industry, the term was first used in 1988 by Microsoft to kick off an initiative to make sure that they used as many of their products internally as possible. We at INTRUST also make sure we practice “dogfooding” as much as possible, and the cloud is no exception. We are in the process of moving many of our systems to the cloud, and we will be sharing our successes and failures at Cloud Actually. So you will be able to find out if we are “eating our own dog food,” or “drinking our own champagne,” as I recently heard it described.

Our Future Will Have More Screens, Not Less

In my day-to-day work, I currently use three different computing devices: a smartphone, iPad and laptop. I choose the appropriate form factor, or “screen,” based on where I am and what I am doing.

My phone is always in my pocket, so I can check email or get to the web, no matter where I am. I use my iPad during meetings to take notes, check email and do light web browsing. I do the majority of my email, research and content generation on my laptop. For instance, I am typing this article on my laptop.

There is a lot of speculation right now that a single device will become the only device we need for computing. I recently heard a very good analogy that convinced me that it won’t happen anytime soon. The analogy was about cameras.

Is Your Business Continuity Desirable?

Recently, while lying in bed with my wife late at night I discovered something of hers that I desired for the first time in our nearly 16 years of marriage. It was her Business Continuity Team, or BCT.

You see, she was on a conference call with her team because the power had been out at her office for the past 3 hours, and it was looking like it wasn’t going to be restored until later the next day. The team was reviewing contingency plans and assigning responsibilities and determining at what time they would need to start notifying the 2,000 employees to either work at home or report to an alternate location.

Our First Retiree

This month, Tom Arnold retired from our company. To be exact, he retired on Friday April 13th. This was the first retirement in the 19-year history of the company. It wasn’t something I was prepared for, but for Tom it was old hat. Prior to retiring from INTRUST, Tom had already retired from the telephone company after working there for 30 years. After that first retirement, he quickly found himself drawn back into the 9 to 5 grind. His hobby of building and repairing PCs prepared him well for a position in the IT industry. After a few jobs through a temporary agency in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, he landed at CONTECH Construction Products, helping out with everything from telephone moves to PC assembly and repair.

I first met Tom in 2001 while he was working at CONTECH, building and repairing PCs. At the time, my company was contracted by CONTECH for some different IT projects. While working on some of those projects, I had the pleasure of working alongside of Tom. I was always impressed by his calm demeanor and broad knowledge of every piece of hardware Dell ever produced. He could look at any laptop or PC and know the technical specifications, and if it wasn’t working, he usually knew what the problem was before he even started troubleshooting.

Will Blog for Food

This month we updated the design of our website and added some new features. A major addition to the website is a blog with content contributed by everyone in the company. I say major because it is no small task to get everyone in the company to contribute content on a regular basis. First, it was an experiment to see if we could get everyone to contribute, and now that everyone has at least one article in, we will see how long we can sustain it. To see how we did it, read on. . .

When we began the task of redesigning our website I had the vision of a blog with content from everyone in the company. I didn’t want to just use a news service that would provide us content, and I didn’t want to have just a couple of people write articles. I wanted to get a broader point of view of all the different ways we use technology. We have a very broad and diverse set of clients and I thought they would appreciate the many different topics we could come up with.

To the Cloud!

Have you seen those “To the Cloud!” commercials on TV and thought “To the what?” Well, you aren’t alone. A lot of people have been wondering what exactly Microsoft is selling in those commercials. “The Cloud” has been around since 2006, when Amazon first started selling excess computing and storage capacity, but only recently have companies started marketing it to consumers. The problem is that most people don’t know what “The Cloud” is.

Everyone understands the concept of renting a hotel room. You go to a building that some company owns and maintains and you use your credit card to purchase a certain sized room or rooms for a certain length of time. The room has electricity, television, water, maid service, etc. While you are in the room you expect a certain level of privacy to do whatever you came to do. When you are done you take what you brought with you and check out.

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Motivation to Change Your Password

In my December newsletter article, I explained what a botnet is and how criminals use them to attack certain targets on the Internet. In that article, I equated those botnets to the battle droids used in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In this article, I have an even more outlandish story to tell. The main character of this story is Aaron Barr, CEO of Security firm HBGary . He reminds me of the main character Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies. Sometimes you love him, sometimes you hate him, and sometimes you just feel sorry for him. While Tony Stark’s weakness was the shrapnel coursing through his veins, Aaron Barr’s weakness was his simple use of a single password between multiple online systems.

Aaron Barr thought he could track down the identity of hackers using social media. He thought if he did this, it would generate a lot of publicity for his company. In order to generate as much publicity as possible, he went after a hacker group called “Anonymous”. It is believed that this group orchestrated an attack on credit card companies in retaliation for blocking Wikileaks funding channels. The entire story can be read here, but suffice it to say, Aaron befriended some of the members of the group. He followed through with his plan by giving them reason to trust him, but then turned on them and threatened to expose what he believed to be their true identities.