Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Quite regularly I come across people who are just starting out in business. Often this is due to dissatisfaction with a corporate career, change in circumstances or location. Many older people who are made redundant or leave their jobs feel they have little job prospects and decide to start a new business. Many are just starting something alongside their existing work hoping it will be enough to let them quit at some point in the future.

Some (not all) talk to an accountant or lawyer and set up the right business structure for their new enterprise. Unfortunately a common mistake many make is to not talk to a trusted advisor about their technology requirements. Too often I am called into help after the investment in retail consumer technology has been made already. Often it is too late to change things, funds have been spent and computers, tablets, printers and phones have been acquired.

The mistakes I have had to fix include:

• Retail consumer level routers that are not able to handle the demands of a small business
• PCs that were purchased with retail licences of the operating system, office productivity software etc.
• Tablets and phones on retail or prepaid phone plans and accounts
• Cheap PCs that were physically not capable of meeting the demands of the office software installed on them
• Hodge podge of retail cloud services, email accounts and domain names (usually no domain name) and no professionally integrated solutions
• Cheap printers that have high consumable costs and cannot handle the demands of a small office
• No understanding of customer data management
• No backup solution (or an untested hope and pray solution) or Business Continuity Plans (BCP)
• and so on

I have upgraded my main workhorse machine.

Components are:

• Intel S2011 Core i7 3930K 3.20GHz 6x Core CPU (No Heatsink included)
• Corsair Cooling Hydro H80 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
• ASUS S2011 Rampage IV Extreme Motherboard with BF3
• DDR3 32GB (4x8G) G.Skill 1600Mhz Ram
• Internal All-in-1 Memory Card Reader Black
• 2 x 300GB Western Digital VelociRaptor 10000rpm SATA HDD
• 2 x 2TB Western Digital FYPS 7200rpm 64M SATA HDD 24x7
• 3 x NVIDIA GTX560 Ti 1GB Asus PCIe Video Card
• 6 x 21.5" Samsung BX2240 LED LCD Monitor – these can be portrait or landscape
• Corsair ATX Graphite 600TM Black Case
• Thermaltake 1500 Watt Toughpower ATX Modular Power Supply
• Logitech G19 Gaming Keyboard
• Logitech M950 Performance Mouse
• Powerware 5110/1500VA Line Interactive UPS
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

Some of my design and specification choices.

 Leopard Spaces

Last time I told you that there were some awkward moments in making the switch from PC to Mac. But in spite of those, there are so many things I love about the Macintosh. Let’s start with the minor things.

I hope you’ve seen Pulp Fiction.

You know what the funniest thing about the Mac is? It’s the little differences. I mean, they got the same stuff over there that we got here, but it’s just, with a Mac, it’s a little different.

Example:

 Well, the first time I started a program on the Mac, I couldn’t figure out where the menu was. There was a menu at the top of the screen called “Finder,” with the familiar file, edit, and view commands along with others, though clicking those wasn’t bringing up anything I understood. I saw a program called “TextEdit” on the dock, a shiny shelf at the bottom of the screen. I clicked it, and a text editing window came up. Cool. But it had no menu at all. I spent an hour opening programs with the finder window, but then having no idea how to run them. It was like there were no menus in this strange world.

“How the hell do these people open documents and save them and do all the stuff you have to do?”

I finally figured out that in the Mac world, the menu bar is always at the top of the screen, and it’s not connected to the program window. This single menu CHANGES depending on which program window is active. Mac people, who have never known anything different, don’t understand why this is hard for us. But I’m telling you it took me a solid hour to figure it out.

So the disembodied, disappearing and reappearing menus would be one of the little differences.