Sending holiday e-mails to your customers

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In 2009 I have seen something of years past become popular again: the holiday e-mail. I’m not bashing the idea of sending a nice note out or even the concept of sending real cards through the postal service. What gets me is the e-mail that was clearly crafted in about 2 hours of the work day before a holiday. It should have taken no longer to create than the call for help they sent out right before drafting up this holiday masterpiece. An e-mail sent from your computer telling me that your computer isn’t working doesn’t tell me much, since it clearly is working.

Lots of people and companies actually go out of their way to put together a good e-card and send it out a few days before the holiday. It usually has a sale announcement or is saying that their offices will be closed. Its nice, and its clearly something they sent to an entire mailing list. Great.

These craftily drafted letters though have a subject like “Happy Holidays” and only come from people trying to sell you something, but that are too lazy to actually make a pitch to you. There is always an attachment. You open the message to find a piece of clip art (from the clip art disk that came with their copy of MS Office 1997) followed by a message. Most holidays are actually mentioned, but around Christmas the political correctness of these people has them only referring to “Holidays”.  The rest of the  message is their signature file which has 6 phone numbers, an address, maybe a website URL, their title, a picture of their dog, their kids birthdates, and some crafty quote from their favorite movie of 1988. I’m kidding about some of that.

So what is the proper way of doing this without sending spam? There are 2 answers: a.) don’t do it; and b.) use a real mailing service to get it done. There are a few reasons why these should be sent out. The first is obvious: you’re not going to be working, but by sending the e-mail you might still be making money. The second: you actually care to wish someone a nice holiday. The third: because they call you a lot and you want them to know you won’t be there, and subconsciously tell them that if they need to get ahold of you to try their cell phone or home phone.

So to those of you sending out e-mails hoping someone is going to call you: STOP, RE-EVALUATE what you are doing! To those of you maintaining real, legal mailing lists and using them to actually promote things: good work!

Your Family Photos (the digital ones)

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With digital cameras, people are taking more photos than ever. A single memory card can hold thousands of photos and a common home PC can hold millions of photos. This was never an issue with film as a person was limited in the amount of film they could carry, number of pictures they could take, and by the cost of developing the pictures. Photos that people liked were put in frames or albums and the negatives were crammed into a shoebox somewhere. Fire, flood and time were the only things that would ruin the photos.

With photos being digital people are much more careless with them. Rather than taking one picture of their cat eating ice cream, they take 5 and a video. Albums of kids and grandkids now have thousands of photos for each year of a child’s life. Some people inadvertently backup their photos by posting them online, having them printed, or e-mailing them to friends. Usually the quality is degraded a bit, but the photos remain printable.

The worst thing that can happen is for your storage device holding the photos to break or get lost. The storage cards used in cameras are very reliable, and usually only break with extreme abuse. The hard drive in your computer though is a lot more dangerous. Failure rates are lower than ever, but it still happens. A complete drive failure would mean that the photos on the computer are gone forever. Likewise, a computer virus or malware can damage images or make them susceptible  to being deleted.

I recently came across a customer of mine who experienced a hard drive failure. It was dead and no data was able to be recovered. I somehow managed to find a previous backup of some older files, but their most recent photos taken with their new camera of their grandson and new puppy were gone! Imagine losing hundreds of family photos! Upon delivering a new computer to them, I asked to see their digital camera. I noticed a small pouch that they kept with the camera and found a stack of memory cards. As it turns out, this couple had not lost their photos! They still had the originals since they had not been deleting images from the cards as they were being copied to their PC. In another case, my sister had lost a digital camera with a 2GB card in it. Fortunately, she had copied photos to her computer only a few days before losing it. Lesson learned: don’t erase photos from your memory card unless you really don’t want them and make sure that you copy them to your computer at the very least.

For the really paranoid and others that  realize the need for a good backup strategy, there are a number of free or cheap online backup programs. I personally like Mozy but others like Carbonite and Amazon S3. Google also offers Picasa online for free for a certain amount of storage, with the ability to add on for a very reasonable fee. Google’s service is for photos only, while the others will do documents, video, and much much more.

So this weekend spend a little time looking at the safety of your pictures. The odds are in favor of you needing to use a backup copy at some point in the next year.

Where to start with SEO

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After a long talk today with my superiors at work regarding a new service to help business owners get on the right track with their online presence, I have decided to give a few tips right now that anyone can do for any site.

1. Get a domain name. Your website shouldn’t be something like http://imakewidgetsforthat.wordpress.com or http://myunclemademedothisfor10bucks.blogspot.com. Get a real domain name with either your company name or something having to do with products you manufacture or sell. .com and .net are more ideal than other domain names, but you may actually have a reason for a .tv or .org or even .info.

2. Figure out what should be on your site. Product and service descriptions along with your phone number are the basics. Do you want it to do more? Would videos help your product?

3. Start on the right foot. It isn’t 1995 and your site shouldn’t look like it. Your site should have all of the basic code optimization from the start. This means having unique page titles, using META tags, and having friendly sounding file names. Your links should all work. You should have a defined sitemap. There are software packages out there to make this happen, but you may need to make sure that your “web guy” incorporates these features while using clean code.

4. Get on the major social networks and tell people about your business and about how they can find more information.

5. Make sure that it all makes sense! You won’t sell anything with your site if nobody understands it. Hard to read graphics and an over abundance of text send people running.

These are just some small basic tips. More will come in the future.

Google gives tips to users with hijacked search results

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Recently there has been some malware that changes the way that search results show up. If you’ve seen it, you know what I am talking about.

In their guide, google explains how to use a boot cd to scan your PC for infected files. Its a little on the advanced side, but worth a try if you feel like trying to fix it on your own. You will need a working computer to do this though!

Check out what they have to say here

Windows 7 on a netbook

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I have an acer aspire one. It is the 9″ model in white. The OS it was shipped with, a variant of XP home, is rather slow. It was actually slow enough that I didn’t like using the netbook. I tried the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and while I liked the speed, there are still too many issues with having a Linux computer. I thought about trying Mint or OSX but could never find a good guide for either.

Finally I was sick of a slow machine that didn’t do much. I wiped the 160GB hard drive and partitioned it to be useful: 40GB for XP Pro, 45GB for Windows 7, and the remainder to be used for something to be later determined. Installation was a breeze. The hardest part was reading the license key that I had written down a month ago. It found all of my drivers and even asked me if I wanted to connect to my home wireless network.

Immediately it updated some drivers and I assume installed updates. My first move was to disable the “pretty” graphics. I want performance, not beauty. So then I started installing the programs I use and trying the Google Apps that I use on a daily basis. I hate to admit it, but it seems faster than my XP machines: with an ATOM single core processor and 1GB of RAM.

Will it run Photoshop, MS Office 2007, and all of the stuff I use at work? Sure, but on the small screen its not very useful. I may try it with the intention of plugging into a big monitor. We’ll see.

Battery life seems to be slightly improved as well. I guess they really did intend on ’7′ running on netbooks!

Google and Gandhi on October 2, 2009

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As a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, Google has featured the face of Gandhi in their logo today. Today is the day that Gandhi would be 140 years old. Gandhi’s birthday is celebrated in India as the holiday “Gandhi Jayanti” and the day around the world is known as the International day of Non Violence. Gandhi was known for his passive resistance and has influenced a great number civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King. Google’s own philosophy of only doing things that will have a positive effect on society. You can read more on Google’s philanthropic efforts at google.org.

Forza 3 Demo Review

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Being a huge fan of the original Forza as well as Forza 2, I just had to have the newest edition. In preparation for the official release in a few weeks, I have now replaced my RROD XBOX 360 with a brand new arcade edition and have downloaded the Forza 3 demo.

It is a HUGE download, so plan on it taking a while. I was able to watch an episode of Mad Men while waiting.

Once it booted up I was amazed already wiThu the level of graphics. As soon as I had the chance, I started up a race. For the initial I chose the mini cooper S. It is dog slow. I also chose advanced mode because that is how I race: no traction control, no brake assist, no stability management; just ABS. That car sucked and the best I could do was a 4th in 3 races. Moving along…. Ferrari California. Beautiful car, and a blast to race! I was able to win that race on the first try, but it took some aggressive and creative passing strategy in the alst turn.Next it was on to the 911 GT3 R3 car. WOW. It is fast! I couldn’t keep it on the road and finished dead last.

After losing, I was able to watch a replay and notice the detail of this new game. First off, the demo track is crazy narrow with almost all decreasing radius turns. It has mountain drop offs and cliff sides to deal with. Think back to the Pacific races in the original Need For Speed. What I was most impressed with wasn’t the detail of the actual road surface (complete with cracks in pavement and bumps) but rather the uneven edges of the pavement. It is just like one of those ancient roads! I also raced with the in car view and LOVED the detailed interiors.

I also noted that the car dynamics are much more realistic. Changing to the race car, you can actually tell that it is a race car with the way that it skips over the pavement and is much more unsettled than the street cars.

Why gmail went down for the afternoon of Sept 1

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Gmail is a fantastic service. Even better than gmail though, is gmail on your own domain name. I work with about a dozen domains with mail hosted on gmail. When they all suddenly went down yesterday it was a big deal to me. That is a lot of users wondering why their mail won’t load.
Google answered the question of why soon after the 100 minute outage was repaired. As it turns out, they were in the midst of a hardware upgrade and did not realize that the load on gmail was as high as it is. While the servers were all able to handle the issue, the routers handling the traffic management were overloaded. IMAP and POP service was available, but outlook sync and web access were down. Google talk and and other apps were up as well.
My response to google: durring my workday, you have been down for a little more than 2 hours in the 5 years that I have been using gmail. Good work! Kudos on constantly upgrading services and servers. Not having to host mail on normal servers makes it all worthwhile.

Backdate to XP with your brand new coputer

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This seems to be an increasing problem with many businesses and individuals: new computers are needed, but so is Windows XP. For home, people don’t like change. It is why Linux in the home is still a long way off (with people being aware of it). In business, XP is needed by many software packages. XP has been around for a long time. I think I have personally been running it since 2003.

Along came Vista: I was an early adopter myself to learn the ins and outs, but have switched back to XP due to my own software needs.

Before anyone makes the smart remark that one could build their own XP machine or order from __________ with XP installed: I know. I believe that the problem stems from the price of DDR2 memory. A computer running XP with service pack 3 runs pretty nice with 1GB of memory and runs really nicely with 2GB. XP doesn’t do a whole lot with more than 3GB of memory. On top of this is the fact that people have somehow been sold on the idea that they need more memory. I have no idea why your e-mail reading, solitaire playing grandmother needs 4GB of RAM in her new $599 Gateway laptop with HDMI out. OK, there it is: 99% of people don’t need the power in the new PCs but the other less than 1% do. That 1% is also the group that wants the latest and greatest technology because “one day they might want to edit a home movie on their PC”.

So now that we have established that lots of people need XP for their existing software and that most people have no need for anything more we need to figure out what to do.

First off, you need an XP license. You can buy a new one from someplace like newegg or tigerdirect or you can probably find a way to use the XP license from that 5 year old computer you are replacing.  I always suggest XP Professional. Its better.

Now, if you bought more of a business line machine from a reputable name this shouldn’t be very difficult. Their biggest customers’ IT support teams have voiced to them the need for XP support. The problem seems to be in most off the shelf consumer level PCs. Brands like HP, Compaq, eMachines, Gateway and Sony to name a few. These are the computers with all of the “fancy new parts” that the sales guys tell you about.

If you’re still shopping, check with the manufacturer to see if they have XP drivers before you buy.

If you have already purchased the thing and are now stuck with an XP installation that has no sound, ugly video, no network connection, and has a really loud fan: google it from a working computer. Find your model number and search for “XP drivers”. Chances are that someone else has done it before and posted about it. My particular case (Compaq CQ60) required me to make a custom XP install disk with SATA drivers slipstreamed into it (future blog post about that).

This gathering of drivers took me a few hours to find them all and get them working, but now the computer is running XP quite nicely!