Beer and Chips

Droid

AJ — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:39:47 +0000

So I did it… I finally made the jump to an Android phone. I gotta tell you, I’m loving it!

I went with the Motorola Droid. I tried and test drove a few others, like the HTC Droid Eris and Incredible. I didn’t really care for the Eris, for me it was too small. I did love the Incredible, the phone is amazing. The big killer for me what not having a hard keyboard. I just couldn’t type with the on screen keyboard. So, that brought me back to Droid. I really love this device.

Coming from a Blackberry, Android is leaps and bounds above the 9630 Tour I was using before.

Now in my quest to learn about Android I found a number of great reference sites that I’d like to share.

www.androidcentral.com

www.androidandme.com

www.thedroidsector.com

All great websites with lots of infomartion, hint, tips, tricks, wall papers and ring tones to offer. Enjoy!

Filed under: Android, mobile technology

How important is getting an IT certification to you?

AJ — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 21:53:38 +0000

If you are in IT than you know there are a number of certifications that you can pursue. From A+ to Cisco and Micosoft there are a number of technologies that one can become certified in. But, how important are these certifications? I’m studying for my MCDST, Microsoft Certified Desktop Support Tech certification, since I am a Help Desk support tech this certification makes the most sense to me. However my employeer has already said that it doesn’t make a difference to them, “You either know it, or you don’t.” Very true… Many people can study for, take an exam and pass it, but what really counts is the real world experience.

As a reader, what are your thoughts? Is it worth getting certified, does it really make a difference? Is your employer concerend about the certifications you hold?

Posted in Uncategorized

Web Colaboration

AJ — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:22:48 +0000

yes folks its 2008, there are much better ways, and cheaper ways, to get together and share ideas. With gas climbing above $4.00/gal its hard to justify a short ride across town to get together for a meeting. The solution, Mikogo. Mikogo is a free, yes thats right I said the F word, online screen sharing tool.

How will screen sharing help you? Easy. Say you need to give a presentation, just open your presentation software, start a Mikogo meeting and give folks your meeting ID. Once they have your meeting ID all they need to do is go to www.mikiogo.com and click in upper right hand corner where it says “join a meeting.” Once they enter in your meeting code and their name they will be able to see you screen. For security purposes you can be selective about which parts of your desktop, or programs you choose to share with your clients/friends/co-workers.

Once connected you can give your presentation or perhaprs work on a document together. You can even give mouse and keyboard control to folks who come to your meeting allowing them to add their two cents to the document. You can also share photos with family and friends.

Now, it is 2008 afterall (as I stated previously) and I’m sure you are wondering about security. Well have no fear. Mikogo uses the industry leading standard of 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) to secure all the connections to and from the Mikogo servers. This should give you great piece of mind when sharing those documents that have company trade secrets or those pictures you really don’t want anyone else to see! (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)

All joking aside you really should check out Mikogo. Extremely easy to use, can be used in some MANY situations, safe & secure and of course its FREE!!

Special thanks to Andrew for providing me information on Mikogo and introducing it to me.

Cheers!

Blackberry Wheat

AJ — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:37:45 +0000

So I was just looking at all my posts and realized that I haven’t blogged about Beer very much, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense considering the name I gave this blogg…. Anyway! As I was looking over my blog also have in my hand a Blackberry Wheat from Long Trail Ale and man is tasty and a hot summer day! Hell its tasty any day! This Wheat ale has some great golden color, filtered and of course some great flavor! As soon as it hits your tongue you get great bitter flavor and the after taste is amazing. The bitterness is complemented with some great, yet subtle, blackberry flavor.
Now this, in the past, was traditionally a summer ale put out by Long Trail Ale, but because of it popularity Long Trail is going to be selling year round. Good things really do come to those who wait.

Long Trail Ale is a Vermont based brewery located in the southern part of the state. If you ever get a chance I highly recommend stopping by their brewery, inside you’ll find a self guide tour, a brew pub and a great little store where you can buy lots of cool Long Trail items, from pint glasses to t-shirts and of course beer.

Stay tuned for more beer and brew reviews, including more from Long Trail Ale.

Cheers!

Remote Assistance

AJ — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:43:12 +0000

I recently found a new website/product called Cross Loop. Whether you are looking for assistance, or looking to be able provide assistance, cross loop is what you need. Cross loop is safe, secure and easy to use. If you need asssistance you can just go to www.crossloop.com, click on ‘I need help’ and search for people that may be considered experts on what you need help with. If you think you are an expert and want to provide help you can also go to www.crossloop.com and click on I can help and go from there.

What exactly is cross loop you say?

Well as I said before it is simple, safe and secure. What does it do? Well if you need help it will share your screen with your tech support person and will even give them control of your mouse and keyboard. If you are tech support you can take control of a user’s computer and fix things for them. You can also teach them how do anything on their computer.

Why cross loop? Well that is simple, its free!! There are other products out there that will share screens and control of the mouse and keyboard, one such program is called Go2Assist made by Citrix. Now, I use Go2Assit at work and i love it! Its makes helping people at remote sites very easy, much easier than sometimes trying to guide someone over the phone. However Go2Assist is not free, and unless you have some extra income or a good source of income from its hard to keep paying monthly for products like go2assist. Why pay? Why not just use Cross Loop? Good question! There are a few extra things you can do that Cross Loop does not enable you to do, like have multiple sessions going at once and Go2Assist uses a different type of encryption to secure the screen sharing session.

I recommend you try it next time you need help. See my Tech Support page, which you can find a link for on the right side of my blog here. For more answers to your questions and to see a demo video check out www.crossloop.com.

Cheers!

FireFox 3 is released!

AJ — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:50:07 +0000

Thats right just yesterday FireFox 3 was released. I am using it to write this very post and I have to say I really like it. If you haven’t yet switched to firefox you need to go do that right now!!

PP1 Released for Beta testing

AJ — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:48:29 +0000

Power Pack 1 for Windows Home Server has been released by the WHS team at Microsoft this past Tuesday, June 10th. This is a welcome site as PP1 fixes some bugs found in the original release of WHS. It also adds some additional features. Among the new features are support for x64 clients and the ability to backup the server itself. it also fixes some of the data corruption issues while working with files across the network that were encountered in the original release.

I myself will not installing PP1 until it was completed its beta testing and is released via Windows Update. I do not have a second server I can setup and this server is far to important to me to risk using it for beta testing. I will try to keep my eye on the WHS team blog and see how the beta testing progresses and post note worthy information back on here.

Cheers!

Blackberry Curve is here!

AJ — Wed, 14 May 2008 21:38:34 +0000

And by here I mean in my pocket! Thats right, on Saturday just a mere day or two after Verizon released the Blackberry Curve I walked into a Verizon Wireless store and picked one up! I gotta tell you I love it! 2 mega pixel camera, video capable, expandable storage, full QWERTY keyboard, bluetooth enabled brilliant screen and the list goes on. This is by far the most incredible phone I have ever had! Weather you’re a Blackberry fan or not once you pick up this phone you will be!

Blackberry Curve on Verizon!

AJ — Fri, 09 May 2008 02:02:07 +0000

Thats right, the CDMA curve is here! I’m sure if you’re a true Blackberry (aka Crackberry) fanatic then you probably already know this. I am a crackberry fanatic but I havent had a whole lot of time to blog about this because I’ve been to busy reading other blogs trying to figure out when it was coming out! I don’t exactly have insider knowledge…

Anyway, the plan is that I will eventually get a Curve, since I am a Verizon customer, and I will post all my feedback on it here. If you have a curve I would love to hear what you have to say about it.

Microsoft stops selling Windows XP, but Dell Doesn’t!

AJ — Fri, 09 May 2008 01:56:55 +0000

So late last month Microsoft officially announced that they are indeed going to stop selling XP, however Dell has probably found a hole in the plan. Dell plans to continue to sell Windows XP. To do this they will claim to sell Vista by selling the computer with Windows XP but ship it with a Vista Upgrade disk, what customer choose to do with the disk after that is up to them! We’ll see how long this lasts…

I, for one, am embracing Vista. However since I work in an Enterprise IT environment and see that some of our important applications don’t work on Vista. Now this really isn’t the fault of Microsoft and Vista. These companies have known for a long time that Vista was going to be coming, and now its been out for nearly 2 years. Its time to move forward.