Next steps...

So now that I've whined a bit lets talk about how we roll into the next role. I've been looking various options in the market place and have landed on some interesting developments. First not many of you know this but I'm a bit geeky, well you know that, but I think if you knew me personally you didn't know of my love for learning technologies. Early in my career I had the opportunity to work for a leader in live learning solutions that has since gotten acquired but fostered in me; this long term desire to take what I've learned selling and apply it to teaching and content development. My life goal is to park in public sector gig making technology decisions about this very topic when I get a few more gray hairs or it falls (both are starting more, LOL).

Anyway, I'm excited to at these possibilities and look forward to the coming weeks and look forward to sharing more as decisions are made down the line. Having said all that I'm a spiritual guy and everything happens for a reason so I may come back with more of the same but the opportunity to be talking fulfilling dreams now is pretty awesome. So...until more about this, I won't speak about it...I'd like to get back to blogging about helping people so hit me up in the social sphere (presumably Twitter) and let me know what you want to discuss!

We can chat about anything we aren't the ThinkTank for nothing!

It's been way too long...

Hey there,

So after a long hiatus I found myself where I was 2 years ago when I established this blog...looking for work. A lot has happened since then, my wife and I had a another child ( a girl, just turned 1), I graduated from school (finally.), and I got chewed up a bit from life's changes and challenges but I'm still here!

Quick catch up; I decided to change career paths and stay in "Start-up Land" pursuing a role more as an sales guy but focused on partner recruiting and enablement...Needless to say I've had a little bad luck both companies made executive and business strategy changes and I found myself back at the unemployment line. I was taken back by the last two years but that hasn't changed my focus which is to still be a guy that can do whatever it takes to helps his company be successful period.

All that being said I'm playing to strengths this go around and may shy away - at least for now from "Start-up Land"; so I can get back to basics and being consistently successful. Stay tuned, changes are coming!

Peace, love, and chicken grease!
-Geophrey

How to conquer FAT32 in Windows

Hey Guys, sorry it's been quiet but its because I've been splitting time between the more important things like family, work, and school. Which leaves less time for things like random babble here and video games lol. I'm recently enrolled in a digital imaging class that requires me to use Photoshop cs4 on Mac; well not all Mac's can read external hard drives that are formatted NTFS. From my understanding Snow Leopard will be the first but don't quote me on that as I'm not an Apple guy.

Anywho Windows doesn't allow you to format external memory in FAT32 beyond 30GBS that means any drive exceeding this amount will error out upon formatting attempt. Moreover Windows 7 doesn't even offer a FAT32 options, mainly because it's old as hell and quite honestly a bad way to store your data. So what's the solution for a person with HDD that exceeds this amount. Here's a few:

1. Get a new smaller HDD (umm no)
2. Find a friend with a Mac and format it there or at the school lab (possibly)
3. Buy an Apple HDD that already comes FAT32 (not me I don't got the $$$ for that)
4. GOOGLE it!

Well I chose number 4 and with very little skill, mostly being able to follow directions, and a white belt in Linux-based Ubuntu; I overcame the problem and have a FAT32-based external HDD that is 150 GB.

How'd I get there? Well tune in and I'll provide all the juicy details in the coming post!

Peace, Love, and Chicken Grease

-GG

I'M BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I can officially say I've been in my own little hibernation but I'm back and plan to be back as much as I can providing all sorts of random nonsense mostly tech related or as technical as I can make it.

Where have I been?
No people this wasn't a pause on life it was life taking over my time to blog. Back in July I proclaimed to set out (with a great team) to co-found and launch a company that provides a unique approach to something very traditional since the dawn of the "dot com" era: Web Design. Since then we've launched our site and have finalized our packaged solutions and our company from this day forward shall be known as Bold Universe.

About Bold
Bold Universe is a collaborative solutions provider that is about providing our clients with a solution that solves their digital presence dilemma. What is a "digital presence"? It's a term we use since it's not just about web 2.x or 3.x, social media, community, print, logo, leader head, or even tradeshow equipment. It's about all of that being provided by the level of expertise that isn't always found at one-stop boutique agency. At Bold our commitment is to leverage our network of solution providers to join us in executing on your success.

Check us out we're happy to evaluate your digital presence and offer feedback as to how BOLD it can go!

What's next
Honestly more of the same; with the launch of Bold Universe in conjunction with my day-to-day at a great virtualization solution firm Desktone, I'm keeping pretty busy...oh I forgot to mention my wife and I are expecting our 2nd child, a girl. We are very excited!

While 2009 started off bumpy it closed out quite awesomely as I look forward to providing great information in the coming posts in 2010, on all topics but let's be honest I'm a bit of geek so I'll probably always almost be chatting about the latest tech stuff.

Peace, love, and chicken grease
-GG

Proclamation: Doing my own thing!

So after being home and spending time with the family; I’m taking this opportunity to really decide what I want to do.  And while I’ve interviewed and made great contacts with companies out there I haven’t found something that newly challenges me and makes me as passionate as my first gig did with Centra Software so many years ago.

If there’s an opportunity like that I’ve yet to find it and believe it or not people are hiring.  But I’m at a juncture in my career where I feel like I need to put up or shut up.  Many people in my life have always said, “I can’t wait to see where that kid is when he’s 35 yrs old”.  Well I can tell you if I keep in the regular “rigah-ma-role”,  I’ll be someone in middle management at a mid-size company not in control of my destiny.

With that said; I’m taking these years experience and this diverse background to begin to implement and launch a few projects and businesses that are core to my skills and passion.  I’ve been fortunate to be in great company with these ventures so I’m really excited to see what we can do.

I’m telling you all because like any good grass roots operation we’ll need your help getting the word out and who knows maybe we can do something for you too!  No problem is too small or large will be something you’ll hear preached from the onset!  So god bless all of you and stay tuned for some exciting stuff coming from us!

Peace, love, chicken grease!

GG

Is Twitter really ready for prime time?

So now after the likes of Oprah and Ellen and many other stars are adopting it's use we should take a step back and ask ourselves is Twitter ready for prime time? Plagued with inconsistent page loads and widget display errors I got to take a step back and think about the media coverage this little handy tool gets and while I understand press is press; I'm not so sure I'm convinced this product is ready for likes of mainstream adoption.

Many people know about it at this point; but for those who don't. Twitter is a social media application that allows you to provide near real-time updates to a group of connections they call followers. The updates can be as meaningful or meaningless as you like them and people can subsequently reply to them if they follow you. I like to view Twitter as a great messaging engine that connects all of my friends across all communication mediums (Email, IM, PC/Mac, Mobiles, etc) to see what I'm up to or blabbing about at a particular point in time in 140 characters or less of course. If you are looking for a great new way to connect and communicate with people in conjunction with sites like Facebook and LinkedIn I recommend checking it out and feel free to follow me @here.

Now, back to the original question; is it ready for the mainstream "fame" it's been getting? For me, I say it's not quite; for a couple a reasons. While it's a free consumer application its up-time and availability is only "near-decent" when you access it thru 3rd party applications (digsby, tweetdeck, twhirl, etc) that leverage the Twitter API's to connect users to the messaging engine. But when you attempt to perform your updates directly from the Twitter website page loads are lethargic at best and once the page loads it often does load properly prompting to refresh the page.

So what's wrong? I'm not sure since I don't work for Twitter I can only speculate but I tend to be pretty good judge of things and if I had to put on my troubleshooting hat and play armchair tech ops manager, I'd say it's a combination of two things. The application is still fairly immature and is accessed by a user base that growing by the millions each week and its possible both the code and the infrastructure (the systems that support the application) aren't configured to handle that capacity. To me, it operates like a beta (prototype) buggy product. what's sad about this is that it's not even an installed application it's web-based; I tell you my mobile phone is running an alpha (pre-prototype) version of Windows Mobile 6.5 that's more predictable then the service experiences I've had with Twitter especially now that everyone in Hollywood and Athlete-land is using it to tell their fans when they are taking their next shower or dump.

Isn't this company like Facebook and kicking around tons of venture-backed funds? Come on people invest a little make the application work the way we all know it should; stop running on that T1 pipe and man up to a T3. Invest in more developer resources to fix the issues at the application level. I shouldn't have to install a "Twitter-based" status client like the applications mentioned above to use your web browser-based application. Unless that's how you figured out how to finally monetize your business model is buy licensing your API to these 3rd party vendors.

Ok, I'm done ranting and will close-out by saying while it's obvious Twitter has some issues it still is an little application that I like to refer to as my universal messaging application. With many users adopting it and with mainstream coverage Twitter may be the first of the big 3 consumer-based social media applications to "break the code" and have a real revenue model that may prove as the much DNA for its sister companies to get the space out of the hump and make some serious dough. The first company is usually the name for that market, Google, Microsoft, Oracle all figured it out first and gobbled up the rest Twitter may do the same if Facebook doesn't do it first.

Time will tell.

Peace, love, and chicken grease.
-GG

Quick Tips to Optimize and Keep your PC Healthy

So after recently doing some routine maintenance and fixing a couple of PC's for family and friends I wanted to take a step back and provide some quick tips I've found useful for keeping my pc's up and running. These are easy and effective steps that anyone can do simply by reading the instructions, following the steps, and be confident! Also do some Googling on these various topics to gain more of an industry perspective and to get more opinions I'm only one person and these are the methods I find useful but certainly aren't the "say-all" de facto; but they have worked for me. to keep my PC's healthy.

Lastly, one point of caution; use these steps at your own risk! If even after reading the instructional materials you still feel you lack the experience to perform these tasks don't. Because you can end up putting your PC in a position to work improperly or not at all. If you need assistance and live within the North Central Massachusetts area I'd be happy to make a house call, for a nominal fee of course ;-).

The Approaches

Clearing your temporary internet files or "cache" - This is a common issue that often plagues users who do a lot of web surfing and can experience a host of slow issues like internet page loads, connection speeds, and even system processing issues like opening new files from applications like Word, Excel, etc. This is because many web pages nowadays store temp data and content in our web browsers file directory and this file store unless configured to; will not empty itself and uses up unnecessary disk space.

To easily clean these files:

1. open your Internet Web Browser (Internet Explorer is used here)


2. click Tools>Internet Options>Delete (under the Browsing History section as shown in the image below)


3. Then you can easily pick and choose which temporary areas you would like to clean; you'll notice your password data is separate from other data points

Note: Remember things like cookies do hold some "remember me" type information for many of your websites that require authorized access. So delete with care!!!

Defragging your disk - Disk Defragmentation basically reorganizes your data in such a way that allows your computer to more easily and quickly access it. When data is saved to your PC hard drive it isn't always saved in a particular order. So over time this can degrade your PC's ability to perform operations and accessing files. Most folks don't have to do this if they are simply web browsing and creating documents; but for heavy users of music/ media downloads, moving and removing files on/off the PC hard drive should do this once a month. Before you get started please note this could take some time and by time I mean hours if this has never been performed so plan to not use your PC while this function is being performed.

You'll need administrator access to perform this function (most home pc owners have this; business owner do not perform this step you have an admin this is what they get paid for :-), and if you don't have one I'm available as a contractor

To defrag do the following:

1. click Start>Settings>Control Panel


2. dbl click Administrative Tools


3. then open Computer Management (in older Windows systems it's called Management Console or MMC)


4. then expand "storage" and click Disk Defragmenter


5. Then you'll first click "Analyze" we do this to assess if the hard drive needs to be defragged


6. Once the test is finished it will tell you how you should proceed with a pop window that says "You should defrag this volume" or "You do not need to defrag this volume"

Based on the result conduct the appropriate action and if defragging allow it to complete with only that application open.

The System Rebuild - Some people say "if it ain't broke don't fix it", well in the case of a PC's it all depends on how much use your pc gets and how much it varies over time. Rebuilds are performed to keep a PC running optimum and to the specification we need it; PC usage tends to change and as it changes we accumulate "stuff" we simply don't need and it wastes valuable disk space that ultimately effect the performance of our rig.

I'm not saying stop what you're doing and rebuild but look at your usage; is it different than what it was if so how different is it? If it's drastic and your pc seems a bit sluggish then you should probably considered doing a system rebuild. I won't cover the exact steps because that's part of the fun of learning but I will give you some best practices so you are bold enough you'll be able to try it out on your own.

Some practices to consider prior to performing a system rebuild:

1. Block out a day or two as this could take that if longer depending on your experience and the systems hardware processing ability
   
2. Find ALL disks used in your initial install along with serial keys for easy reinstall (this includes all of your applications installed to the operating system aka OS)
   NOTE: If you don't have the system recovery discs or OS install disks Google how to make them!


3. Backup all of the files you'd like to keep because once you start they will be deleted until they are restored to the newly built OS


4. If you can invest software that completely purges your hard drive to almost new specification; it's always good to start fresh...here's the one I use
   
5. Consider hardware upgrades like RAM upgrades; the more RAM the better performance and more multi-tasking your PC can do (like running more than one application)

Few closing thoughts

These are some things I consider when doing a rebuild and have been successful doing. Other things that keep your PC safe and healthy and running peak are running things like Anti-virus software's and Anti-ad/spam programs. For me, I use an all in one that is free to public users and not to business called AVG Free, it has a built in Anti-Ad program which works awesome and that coupled with the appropriate web browser security settings I don't have any issues. I especially like that for the price of AVG Free; it works much better than leading "pay-for" anti-virus solutions. I also employ the use of Windows built-in firewall in addition to the NAT-based firewall on my home network router.

Performing all or even some of these tasks routinely can help keep your PC up and running and out living any of its predecessors! Good luck, and remember we covered a lot here so if you plan to do it yourself, which I encourage, work the steps and DO the research before pulling the trigger. And if all else fails invest in paying a professional; our lives have become pretty dependent on technology so I can imagine a down pc could be detrimental to your livelihood (i.e. paying bills, email, facebook).

That's all from me for now,
GG