My wife and I have been on a journey over the past year to look at options that make sense for us to help us look at the next chapter of our lives and what that looks like financially and from an employment standpoint.
We have looked at buying businesses, and found a few that we wanted to move forward with, but for one reason or another, couldn’t make all of the pieces fall into place.

So instead, we’ve decided to start our own company. I say we very loosely as really, it is my wife’s company, and I am just tagging along for the ride.

The business is EverMark Publishing.

EverMark Publishing is a ghostwriting and publishing company where she takes the stories of others as clients and creates literary works that continue the legacy of individuals long after they are gone.

I am so excited about the possibilities and can’t wait to see what is yet to come.

The post EverMark Publishing first appeared on Random Thoughts.

Let me give you some background. Last year, I read the book 4 hour body by Tim Ferris (Fantastic Book!), and there was a section on this type of shoe, and he referenced a couple of brands like Vibram Five Fingers and VivoBarefoot. I read through it and while I found it interesting, I didn’t really give it too much thought as there were all sorts of nuggets of information in that book that I wanted to cover instead and try to implement.

A couple of months ago, my wife had asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I didn’t really have an answer. The truth is, we are very blessed and don’t “want” for a lot of things, but still want a lot of things. Typically my vice has a power cord or a battery and can do something that really wows people and can be found on Gizmodo at some point. But there wasn’t really anything out there that I wanted that fit that criteria. So I started thinking about other things I was passionate about and one of those things was health. So I decided to take Tim’s advice and get two things for my birthday.

• A Kettlebell

• A pair of minimalist (barefoot) shoes

The illustration that really stuck out to me is the one below.

The Heel

This illustration is exactly what is wrong with the shoes that most people wear right now. They aren’t actually made for normal people to walk around on all day. Yes they are cushioned and soft and protect your feet from harm, but are they really made for our bodies or do our bodies have to conform to the idea of shoes in order make the shoes comfortable? It’s amazing that no one has asked this really in the 1000 years that we have been wearing shoes like we have today.

As you can probably imagine, shoes are not a new idea. they all used to be flat soled, fairly thin, and were simply meant to protect the foot from both the elements, and foreign objects on the ground. But shoes that have heels can be traced all the way back to the 9th century, and were meant to help with keeping feet in the stirrups of horses. Makes sense doesn’t it?

Unfortunately that one specific function turned into fashion and became commonplace, and now all of our shoes either have the classic heel or the heel is simply higher than the toe area of the shoe, like in athletic shoes. The flat shoe is almost an oddity when you go to a shoe store and try to find one, unless you want to wear flip flops.

Not only did this fashion trend cause issues for us in terms of our joints, but it actually made us less stable than we were previously by putting too much cushion under our feet and forcing our toes to fit into a specific amount of space. Tom’s underground has a fantastic article focusing on the arch of the foot and why the arches in shoes actually make us less stable and are worse for our feet than flat soles.

The Toes

The picture on the left shows the feet of those who haven’t been constrained by shoes for 20, 40, 60 or more years versus those who have. Do you see the difference? I’m sure you can because the feet at the top aren’t “normal”. They are caveman feet, as my wife calls them. The major difference that you see right off the bat is the big toe. It is actually in line with the rest of the foot instead of being pushed to the center by conforming to the shoe’s shape.

The people without the curved toe will have better balance, and will be a lot less likely to have toe issues because their toes can grow naturally without being constrained by the shoes they have to wear.

So, with these two illustrations in mind, I started looking for shoes. I had a few criteria. The primary one was that my shoes couldn’t look anything like the picture above. I work in a typical workplace setting and I am pretty sure that if I showed up wearing something like that, it would sound some alarms throughout the building immediately. So I needed to find something that looked pretty normal. As I began looking, I found that this was harder than I thought. A lot of the designers of these shoes like to stand out and want you to notice that their shoe is different than the typical shoe. But that isn’t what I wanted. I read forum after forum about different brands and different things you needed to look for when you were doing this, and I found more information than I had ever imagined I would, but had a hard time finding normal shoes that weren’t ridiculously high.

The Criteria

So, like I mentioned above, I had pretty minimal criteria starting out, but as it turned out, after reading the forums, I had more specific criteria in regards to the way it was made and less about the design.

• No height difference between the front and back of the foot, called “zero drop”. This is better for your back as having a tilt in your shoes is bad for your back and the joints in your legs and hips. Some of the shoes have just a few millimeter drop, which is a lot better than shoes we typically wear, but still not perfect. Ideal shoes would have the zero drop.
• Something that has a large “toe box”. This is the term used for your toe area so that they can go where they want to go instead of being stuck pushed together. It’s better for balance and helps to keep you free of a lot of toe problems because your toe is getting pushed inward in all of your shoes right now.
• A thin sole. This gives you more of the feeling of being barefoot so that you can feel what is under your feet. This is better for balance, as well as gives a form of reflexology to the bottom of your foot that is better for your whole body. So you get a mini massage when you walk over something that has contours to it instead of just feeling your shoe tilt and turn underneath you. People also talk about being “more connected to the earth” and things like that, which I don’t necessarily get, but I guess that’s a bonus.

The Find

I looked at a lot of shoes, and finally came out with the shoes on the right.  You can see them next to a pair of Vibram FiveFingers in that picture from Birthday Shoes. They actually look a lot like the clogs that I wear on a regular basis to work, primarily because they don’t have a back, so I can slip them off and on easily since I don’t like wearing shoes.

The shoes I decided on are actually similar to a moccasin where it doesn’t have a thick sole, and essentially just tighten around your ankle by way of elastic. They are called the Suede Roo’s, made by Soft Star Shoes. They have two different models of this shoe. One is a typical suede moccasin, and the other is a suede moccasin with a leather sole that is meant more for hard surfaces. I thought about how much I would probably wear them if I liked them and opted for the leather sole. It cost about $20 more, but I figured that if I wore them in public, I would appreciate not having to worry about the sole getting dirty or wearing out as quickly.

The Verdict

Let me just say that I absolutely love these shoes. It isn’t necessarily the shoes that I love, though I do really like these, but instead the change for my feet. I have been wearing these shoes for about two weeks now and can’t imagine going back to the typical shoe.

• My feet feel better at the end of the day, instead of being stuffed into a tight shoe. I actually forget I have shoes on once I am home because it just feels natural. Almost like having house shoes on all day.
• Oddly enough, my knees feel better, which I did not expect, because my feet aren’t being pushed forward, which isn’t hurting my knees as badly as regular shoes did. I still have bad knees, but just walking around the office doesn’t hurt them like regular shoes did. I just realized a few days ago that my knees hadn’t hurt in some time and the only change is my footwear.

And these are just the immediate changes I’ve noticed. I am sure I will notice more, and hope that my toes spread, at least a little, so that I can see if it does make a difference in the amount of stability I have compared to the way I usually am.

The Consequences

A couple of things I have noticed regarding these shoes is that once you go barefoot/minimal, it is hard going back. I have never been one to pay attention to shoes, but now that I wear these, I can’t help but think about my shoes, and what other people wear. Not only that, it makes me want more than just my one pair. I will have to purchase some that are more durable for the outdoors and for things like sports. I can’t imagine playing basketball in these, not because they wouldn’t be comfortable, but because they just aren’t made for it.

Another thing I have noticed is that when I walk a lot, my heel actually hurts. I looked into this and it is because I am walking wrong. I think a lot of people do it and don’t realize it. When we walk in shoes, we typically take very long strides that force us to put our heel on the ground before our toes touch the ground. This is actually incorrect. When we are barefoot, we don’t do that, so why should we do it when we wear shoes? I find that I do it most often when I am in a hurry. The way I should actually be walking is by taking less steps that are a little more calculated than striking my heel on the ground every step. I should either be putting the ball of my toe down or the outer edge of my foot to the ground before my heel touches. It should be more fluid and graceful than my typical caveman walk where I stomp around on my heels all the time. I think this may be part of the reason my knees don’t hurt like they did. I am forced to walk differently while barefoot compared to in shoes, so if I put my toe down first, then my knees don’t have a chance to lock back, hurting my knee further.  I still have a lot of work to do to make it comfortable and normal, but I am making progress and it feels more normal everyday.

The Links

I have read a lot of good articles and want to give you the same articles I have found to look over. There is a lot of research and hard facts in these articles, as well as a lot of personal testimony. I recommend at least scanning through them to get some info.

The Case for Minimalist Footwear

10 Reasons to go Barefoot Running

How to Walk Barefoot 

Why Minimal?

The Children

I actually found quite a few links talking about how it was much better for kids to be barefoot and how it would help them later. I couldn’t find a lot of those articles when researching for this post, but I did find some of them, and there is information in the list of links above also. Some of the things I found most amazing were items like finding that our feet aren’t fully formed until later in our adolescent years. They are actually made of cartilage and turn to the 12 bones in our foot later on. So kids have more of a chance to have less foot problems if we start them early. Plus, kids are more clumsy because they can’t feel what is under their feet because of the thickness of the soles of shoes. This causes them to fall or stumble more often than normal, whereas adults have gotten used to it and know how to recover a bit better, so we don’t notice it as much.

Get Your Kids Into Minimalist Shoes to Ensure Natural Foot Development

When it Comes to Kids, Minimal can be Affordable

Healthy, Active, Barefoot Kids

Summer Tips for Barefoot Kids

The post You’re walking wrong! first appeared on Random Thoughts.

I bought a Linksys WRT54G in 2008 and it has been great for us in terms of speed and coverage, as well as reliability. Now, part of the reason why it has been so fantastic is because I have been using DD-WRT as the firmware on it, which is open source and adds a lot of extra features.

In Mid-December, it finally gave up the ghost and wouldn’t even turn on anymore. So off I went in finding a replacement wireless router. I could have gone with something that was pretty much the same, but I figured, if I am going to get something new, I want it to have some extra features and be something I don’t have to replace in another year.

I looked at all of the big brands and lines from companies like Linksys, Netgear, D-Link, Asus, and a ridiculous amount more. And in each brand, they had quite a few to choose from, which made my decision even harder.

I finally decided on the Netgear N600. It was dual band Wireless N, had built in DLNA streaming by plugging in a USB hard drive, could work as a time machine backup for macs, could work as extra storage for TiVo, and could even share printers directly from the device. All in all, it was exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, it wasn’t near as reliable as I had hoped for the $130 price point. The wired network seemed to work pretty well and consistent, but the wireless seemed very likely to drop in midstream. I probably wouldn’t have noticed, but our Google TV streams DLNA over wireless, and it would drop midstream pretty frequently. With that, I decided to send it back to Amazon and eat the restocking fee in order to get something that actually worked.

As a replacement, I bought the Belkin N600. This router was also dual band Wireless N, worked as a print server, did backup, and worked as a UPnP server for videos as well. Again, it sounded great, but it was even more shaky than the first one. Not only was the interface extremely slow with every change I would make,  this piece of junk actually would drop wireless about 5 times in a single hour and a half movie. This drove us absolutely crazy. So I was off again to find a replacement and send this thing back as quickly as possible.

So, what I found was that the best option for me was the Linksys E3000. This guy has the same dual channel wireless, as well as the UPnP server for hosting video and music over USB. Plus, one of the coolest things, and something that I am very happy about, is that I can go right back to my old faithful DD-WRT firmware if I would like since it is supported for this model. This model has been the epitome of stability. It has actually been much easier to use as well. This is really the model I probably should have gone with in the first place, but I saw all of the cool features of models like the Netgear and Belkin routers.

I would highly recommend this model if you are looking for some of the same features I looked for.

The post Finding the right Router first appeared on Random Thoughts.

I think sleep is very important, and if you don’t do it right, then you can really be in for a terrible time down the road. Ever since I read Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris, the true body hacker, I have been a bit more aware of my time sleeping. He has an entire section about Perfecting Sleep. In that section he talks about ways to track your sleep and tools he uses and has tried out to help you sleep better and learn from each night’s sleep.

That section had me intrigued because obviously it included gadgets. I looked at a few of the gadgets and I must say that I would love to have them all. Some of these tracking devices will track your sleep, others will wake you up at the perfect time. And some will track you all day too in order to track your activity and diet habits.

I thought I had found the perfect mix of all of these things in the Jawbone Up, but unfortunately the product had a manufacturing fault where many of the units became unusable pretty quickly. And because of this, they stopped manufacturing and you can’t buy any, and probably won’t be able to buy any until the summer.

So, here I am back at square one trying to decide on what I want to get for my sleeping needs. Below is the list that I have used for choosing how I would like to go about this.

It seems there really isn’t a perfect option out there unfortunately. The above list is a modified version of the list that Wakemate has on their site, so if it looks a bit skewed towards them, that’s why.

For me, the silent alarm is a major want because we have a baby on the way in the next month or so. So that pulls out almost all of the different sleep tracking options out there. And with the Jawbone not shipping, it really only leaves two options. The Lark looks nice, but considering the sleep assessment costs an extra $60 per year, and the alarm simply wakes you at a specific time, and not at the best time, that kind of takes it out as well. So that leaves the Sleep Cycle App for iOS.

I have been trying out the app for the past week, and while it works well for tracking the sleep and being able to see the sleep graph, I have tried out the silent alarm, and since it doesn’t actually touch you, but instead sits under the fitted sheet on your bed under your pillow, it hasn’t worked for me yet. Now, the actual alarm does work pretty well as far as waking me up, but I don’t notice any real difference in my energy levels or how I wake up since it just so happens that I am moving at the time so it feels the movement on the mattress. One thing that is interesting is that I can see the points where I typically am moving around the bed, or my wife is.

And that brings up another issue with the app. Since it isn’t actually attached to me, it can’t differentiate between my movement, and my wife. Of course, it probably isn’t that big of an issue because if she is moving that much, then I suppose it probably wakes me up as well. So it’s probably not too far off course. I have seen other reviews of the app, and it seems that most single people’s charts show that it is pretty close to deep sleep for most of the first part of the night, and then get closer to awake as the morning comes. But most married people have a lot more spikes because it gets a lot more movement from two people, and especially when one of them is pregnant.

I am definitely not sold on the app, though, like I said, I do like seeing the graphs of my nights and seeing the statistics, but as far as the actual alarm function, I am sure it doesn’t work as well as the actual dedicated devices for waking you up at the right time.

I am definitely going to keep looking, and will maybe check eBay to try out more than one for a cheaper price. I’ll definitely write another blog post as I try out more of these products.

The post Documenting your sleep first appeared on Random Thoughts.

• Youtube – We don’t watch a lot of it, but we do watch it. When our little girl wants to watch Mickey Mouse, and there isn’t any on the Tivo, we can flip it over to the Youtube app and stream our favorites, playlists, and search for everything else on Youtube.
• DLNA video – I have a Windows Home Server that has Tversity on it, and creates a DLNA stream across the network. So, I can go to the Logitech Media Player app and it sees everything that is on that server for video, music, and pictures. And since I have ripped most of our DVD’s to file, we can watch whatever we want without putting in another disc.
• Streaming Music- There is a Pandora app that comes pre-installed on the device because that is the big name. And we do use it, though my personal streaming preference is Mog. And since Mog is just a web app, all I have to do is just go to the Mog site and find what I want to listen to. I can do the same thing for Amazon Cloud music too. It will start playing whatever music I would like just as quickly as it would on my laptop through the Chrome Browser. And not only that, it also has a real Google Music app that works fantastically if you have all of your music in the cloud.
• Airplay through AirTight – This is a recent addition to my arsenal of apps on the Google TV, and one of the only ones I have paid for. It was $.99 and was totally worth it. It runs in the background on your Google TV, and if you have an iOS device like an iPad or iPhone, when you have a video or picture on your device that you would like to see on the TV, you simply have to choose to push that item to the Google TV of your choice. Then it shows up on the screen, but leaves the control on the device itself. It works fantastic!
• Universal Remote – We typically use a Logitech Harmony remote to control almost everything in our home, but I had an older H688 that died on me on Sunday, so I had to bring out the dead, remotes, and put batteries in them all so that I could control each piece of hardware separately while I waited on the replacement. But one thing that the Logitech Revue does, that the other Google TV’s don’t, is it acts as a universal remote as well. So I change the volume on my stereo, turn on and off the tv, and change channels on the Tivo, all from my Logitech keyboard or my smartphone. It is a really neat extra feature that doesn’t get much praise typically from reviewers of the device.
• Discussion Notes – We have a small group of people from our church over each week to pray and have bible study, and the Google TV makes it really easy for everyone to have all of the information in front of them without having pieces of paper around them. We have a Google Doc for each week that has prayer requests and any questions/notes for the week. We can have the Youversion site up on the screen for looking at scripture, and since we are going through A.W. Tozer’s Pursuit of God, I can actually put the Amazon Cloud Reader link in and pull the book up on the screen with my notes attached. This works great so that everyone can see the same thing.
• TV Guide – There is an app called TV & Movies that actually pulls guide data for your local TV channels, so for the Google TV in our bedroom that doesn’t have a built in guide, this is a great way to find out what is on and coming on soon.
• Picasa Picture Viewer – Since we push all of our photos to our Google accounts, this is a great way to get them on the big screen. it is a really nice photo viewer and my daughter loves seeing herself on the big tv, both for movies and pictures.
• Netflix – Just like with everything else, Google TV has a really nice Netflix app. it has the updated interface where you can search, browse by genre, or check out recommendations without getting on a computer.
• Amazon VOD – In addition to Netflix, it is also fantastic for Amazon Video on Demand. Any new movies that we want to watch at home, this is the best way to watch them. It works fantastic on the Google TV because, unlike my Tivo, there is no download time. It is just, turn it on and start watching. And if you are an Amazon Prime member, then that means you have a few thousand films and tv shows that you can watch for free too.

And as I said above, we liked the first one so much that we ended up buying a second one for our bedroom, which works amazingly well for watching stuff from the bedroom.

Now, even though it is a fantastic device, there are a few things I either plan to add or wish it did.

• Placeshifting – I know that Slingbox just announced a web app that is compatible with Google TV for watching a Slingbox from your Google TV. That is fantastic, and something I am looking into, but I hate that it only works with the newer, $175 and up models, of the devices.
• Timeshifting – I do wish that it had some sort of tuner and recording functionality. We have a Tivo, and I would love to be able to get rid of it, even though it is the best DVR out there.  But having that built in and having to watch TV through the HDMI port is a little different.
• Network TV – Since it doesn’t do timeshifting, it would be fantastic if it could do some kind of streaming from the big 4 networks or Hulu. Initially it was allowed, but after a couple of weeks, they disallowed it and cut off Google TV devices completely. There is a hack for one of the networks, but the rest don’t work at all. This would be the killer item if it even had Hulu+.
• Video Chat – I would love it if it had video chat. I know that the Revue has a webcam you can hook up, but it only works when chatting with proprietary software or other Revue’s. It would be best if it worked with facetime, Skype, or even Google Video Chat.

Overall, it’s a fantastic box, and quite cheap, especially for what it does. It’s not perfect, but it’s much closer than the other boxes I’ve tried. If you have $100 and want a streaming box that does a lot, then I would say dive in.

The post The best uses for Google TV first appeared on Random Thoughts.

photo credit: Gage Skidmore 

In the 2008 election, I watched things every now and then, and saw this person in the Democratic party start emerging, he was eloquent, very well spoken, and had me snowed. Then I actually looked at the issues and found that he was completely contrary to my beliefs, so he wasn’t going to get my vote.  Whereas on the Republican side, I think most people knew McCain was going to get the GOP nomination, and I was hopeful that he would, even though he was probably the worst candidate the Republican party could have gone with, win in the Presidential race. So I voted for McCain in the presidential election. He wasn’t the ideal candidate, but he was better than the alternative.

Obviously Barrack Obama, the Democratic candidate, won the election, and we are deeper in debt than ever. More people are out of work than ever before. And the personal control he has over the governmental system and is continuing to gather is getting more and more scary.

I know I am not the only one who feels this way, and the GOP candidates know this as well. This is the reason why these are the issues that are brought up at every debate and in every ad.

As I said before, I am not a political person, and I am sure that each candidate on the republican side will fare better than our current president, but I do definitely have a preference. Ron Paul.

When you look at the field of nominees, they are fairly similar on most things. They are politicians who don’t keep their word and say what the world wants to hear, whether it is their own beliefs or not. But that’s not what I want in a president. I want a president who will stand up for what he believes in no matter what obstacles he sees, and who has always been consistent. I want someone who is a lot smarter than I am, who can make informed decisions that will benefit our country at the right times, instead of worrying about that next election.  I want someone who will make cuts to our bloated government, and give business owners the opportunity to capitalize on this by growing jobs and helping our economy. And above all, I want someone with Christian ethics and values that values life and my choice to worship Jesus Christ.

When I look at the field, I see bits and pieces of each of these traits in the different GOP candidates, but I only see all of them in one candidate. Gingrich is a brilliant man. He is extremely smart, seems to have a memory like a steel trap, and values human life, as long as it doesn’t mean bringing our troops home, and he may be the most similar in my beliefs as far as religion goes. Romney seems to be a very shrewd business man, and would probably be good at helping with some of the economic issues we have by giving more control to business owners, especially since he is probably invested in many of them already. And Santorum seems like a typical politician who has changed his opinion a million times depending on what is popular at the time and might give him extra votes.

But the one person who embodies all of my wants; consistent, intelligent, frugal, Christian, and a value for life, is Ron Paul.

He was an obstetrician, so he obviously cares for human life and has been in a field that knows how the process works, and knows that there is nothing more valuable and innocent than a child. And because of this, he wants everyone to know where he stands, and I definitely stand with him. Not only was he an obstetrician, but he was also a flight surgeon in the Air Force and Air National guard. So obviously he knows a little about the military and what is best there. He wants to bring the troops home. We are so worried about what other countries are doing, we don’t worry about how it affects families at home, or think about what would happen if we actually were to get attacked here in the states. How would we defend ourselves when the majority of our military is spread out all over the country trying to make decisions for groups that they don’t know from Adam? The amount of lives we have lost by doing this “nation building” has been far beyond what anyone twenty years ago could have imagined.  Not to mention all of the money that we are spending on these trips overseas for all of our military personnel.

He is also the only candidate who has a solid record of voting consistently on all of the issues, not just certain ones. If you look at his voting record, he is consistently saying no to all of the spending that the rest of Capitol Hill so easily says yes to because there is extra money in their pockets for each yes vote. When you look at his economic plan versus the rest of the candidates, he is by far the most fearless. He knows that changes need to be made in order to save this country from economic meltdown, and he knows that those changes are not going to be small, unlike the other candidates who make trivial changes that won’t impact the overall economic health of the country.  He has put forth a plan that would cut $1 trillion in just the first year, compared to the other candidates who talk about a couple hundred billion over their entire term!

And Ron Paul is a Christian, which is the most significant trait in a leader. This means he would look to God for guidance, instead of thinking that he is above the law and think that he can make all of the decisions on his own. And this is where all of the above traits come from. He values human life because God created it. He tries to be frugal, because God calls him to it as a servant. And he is consistent, just as God expects us to be. I am definitely not saying that Ron Paul is perfect, no person is, especially, it seems, in politics. Such as his stance on drugs which I don’t agree with, but I understand where he’s coming from, so it makes sense.  But Ron Paul is probably the country’s best hope for a turn around. By turning to a Christian man who is intelligent, consistent, and God fearing, we could make this country more similar to its foundational roots than it has been in at least a century.

I think the major hurdle for Ron Paul is that he doesn’t get the coverage that the other candidates do. He gets a tenth of the coverage that the front runners, Gingrich and Romney, seem to get in each show. If his name is mentioned, it is a win, if he gets an entire segment, it is a miracle. The mainstream media doesn’t give him the coverage because they don’t want him in office. Why they don’t want him in office is because change is possible under him, where they know that it is much less likely with the other candidates.  I believe that he has the best chance of winning the presidential race as well. I have more than a few friends who are die-hard democratic voters who have said more than once that if Ron Paul won the nomination, then they would vote for him as well. They all have different reasons, but they all feel that he would be the best person for the job. This is a testament to how people actually feel about Ron Paul, instead of what the polls and media keep feeding us day to day.

I doubt he has the ability to get the nomination, because people tend to get their information from the media instead of doing the research themselves. This is like being spoonfed dirt, when there is a feast in front of you that you simply have to dig your hands into. I am sure that very few people will read this post, and if they do, they may not like what I have to say. But I feel it is my job to inform people of the differences, especially for those who haven’t done the research and kept up with things as much as I have.

I have turned comments off because this isn’t a discussion, but more of my forum on the matter. If you want to talk about it, then you can do that in another way.

The post Why I support Ron Paul first appeared on Random Thoughts.

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How do we forget about this every year? This is a much bigger deal than Halloween!

The post Happy All Saints’ Day! first appeared on Random Thoughts.

The post How to make a budget first appeared on Random Thoughts.

What is it?

Google+ is Google’s answer to Facebook/Twitter. Now, typically I would compare it to one or the other, but the truth is, it’s a competitor to both because it has features of both networks. You have the public aspects and the ability to follow without being a friend, and then you have the privacy and intimacy of keeping certain updates between you and your real friends. So, it actually is very much a competitor to both services.

How is it different?

Well, if the two major networks had a love-child, for the most part, it would be Google+. Not completely, mind you, but for the overall concept, it is definitely a mixture of the two. You have the publicity and the ability to follow famous people that Twitter has, but you can use something called “Circles” to create friend groups to keep things private, and even share specific posts with only a subset of your friends. So if there is a certain group of friends that are interested in tech, like me, then you could create a circle of friends called tech folk and share technical articles with them, because other people will just glaze over when they see the words Linux or PHP in something. It also separates your news stream into these circles. So if you want to look at only your family’s updates, then you can click on your family’s circle and it will show that group only.

It’s also got a skype or webex competitor feature called Hangouts. Hangouts are a group video chat. You can either create a public hangout, where you turn on your webcam and tell anyone who wants to come and video chat, to come and video chat. Sometimes there is a specific topic, sometimes it’s just to shoot the bull. Then you can create a private hangout where only specific people are invited and can see when it starts. It switches to the person talking automatically, and even allows for everyone to watch a Youtube video at the same time. A very cool use that we’ve seen in these last couple of weeks is that celebrities are having public hangouts where 9 people can come in and talk face to face with them to ask questions or have a conversation. Even Newt Gingrich had a Hangout with some people in order to talk about issues. Completely impromptu and with some great conversation.

It also integrates some of Google’s other services directly into the interface.

Latitude – If you check in to a latitude location, it goes directly onto your wall with whatever visibility you want, public, or other circles.

Chat – Chat shows up on your home page with the ability to chat with your gchat contacts that used to only show up on your Gmail. It gives you an opportunity to chat with those people you are used to chatting with and if you start a chat in that window or another window like gmail, then it keeps it open while you navigate through Plus.

Picasaweb – This is what Plus uses as its photos hub. So if you have already shared photos or a photo album with someone and they are your friend on plus, then they will be able to go to your profile and hit the photos tab and see things no one else can, or you can make albums public. Picasaweb is my favorite online photo tool, and the integration here is extremely tight.

Profiles – Google accounts have had profiles for a long time, but they haven’t really been used for anything. But now your plus profile is a much nicer version of the old product, and it is actually useful.

Buzz – If you have a buzz account and anything shared to it, then it shows up in your profile under a buzz section.

+1 – If you have +1’d any sites, then a tab shows up on your profile that shows a few sites that you like and approve of.

Is it any good?

It’s very good, and this is just the beginning.

Especially for those of you who live in Google products, it is great. My typical browser usage keeps a few tabs open all the time, and then the rest change all the time. Reader, Gmail, Facebook. But Facebook has been supplanted by GPlus, and I couldn’t be happier about it. I still go to Facebook to look around a little, but then I come back to Google Plus and check things out cause I know I have missed some very good conversations.

What tips do you have for everyone else?

Create circles, but not too many. Limit yourself to less than 10 circles, because in the end, you probably won’t be sharing with more than a couple of groups of people, or to the public.

Mute this post can be used similar to Mark as Read. So if there is a conversation that you have looked over and just aren’t interested in any longer, then hit the arrow on the post and Mute it.  That’s how I manage my feed, especially since, as of right now, if there is a new comment on a post, then the post jumps back to the top of your feed. This makes it difficult to keep up with what is actually new.

Get an Android Device. The Google+ app is fantastic, and even includes a nearby section so you can see conversations that are happening around you using latitude’s coordinates. Plus it has a really nice group messaging app called Huddle, which works very well if multiple people need in on a text messaging type conversation on mobile phones. It also automatically uploads, to a private album, all of the photos you take, automatically if you want, so you can put them on your plus page easier when you get back to your PC.

Dig through the settings. If you don’t, then you won’t be able to find out what settings you can tweak to make it better. And keep checking the settings to make sure nothing has changed that would make your experience better.

How can it improve?

It is new and has a ways to go. The Google team has been fantastic at crowdsourcing the next features and changes for the service from the beta testers, even going so far as to have hangouts so people can explain their ideas and problems in person.

Speaking of hangouts, if you could share your desktop, it truly would be a webex killer. Free 10 person meetings with screen sharing would be absolutely amazing, especially for Google Apps customers.

Google Apps customers do not currently have access. You have to actually have a gmail account to get in right now, but we have been told that is going to change, and Google Apps customers may find this a very useful tool in the long run.

Shared Circles could be a great addition. What if I could have public circles for things like tech posts, so the people who wanted to follow my tech news could just see that and wouldn’t have to see posts about underwater basketweaving or whatever else. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Business pages are another item that they haven’t gotten into yet. They will need something similar to facebook pages so that brands can build their pages and have multiple admins handling the account. And with Google Analytics on board, it would be extremely useful for large and small businesses alike.

There is a section called Sparks which is supposed to be news you are interested in that you can share, but it would be more useful if it was my Google Reader articles, especially since I have already, obviously, defined my interests through it.

Events page. I would love to see a full featured events page so that people could have a wave-like page that included calendar invites and docs integration. It would be great for having multiple people plan an event.

I wish there was a way to be able to see everything that I have commented on or interacted with. Kind of my personal activity feed. As of right now, you can only see items you’ve posted, not everything you’ve commented on or done.

There isn’t currently a super easy way to import your Facebook friends or info into Google Plus, but if they could figure out a way to use the facebook export to import specific info like photos, updates, friends, and everything else. That would be fantastic, especially if Facebook keeps blocking plugins that connect to Google Plus.

Conclusion

I really could talk about this all day, but no one would read it.

It is a fantastic site with a lot of potential. There is going to be a point down the line where people will start coming en masse to the site, but it could be awhile. It has a lot of features and integration, but it will keep some people from joining simply since they have to create another email address, and if they don’t have a gmail address already, then they may not want to go through the steps.

The features for me, are great, and extremely useful, and much more of what I want. If it would get rid of the use for Facebook AND Twitter for me, that would be absolutely fantastic. It’s on its way, and it is still in beta!

In a few months, it could be a completely different ballgame and Google Plus could hit critical mass with people leaving Facebook in droves once they see just how great it is.

The post My thoughts on Google+ first appeared on Random Thoughts.

Apparently not.

Sleep problem number 1

A couple of years ago while my wife was pregnant, I started getting headaches and my jaws were hurting. They were hurting so bad, that there were times where my jaw would lock to a point and would take serious work to get back into a normal position. I went to the chiropractor and he said told me that I should buy a Bruxing guard. I had never heard of this before, so he explained what it was. It’s a mouthguard you wear in your sleep. Kind of like this one. Apparently, while I was asleep, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Or at least the gnashing part. I was grinding my teeth while I slept. I think I was more than a little stressed over the pregnancy and though I was calm during the day, it was taking a toll on me at night when my body was supposed to be repairing itself.  This was my first sleeping problem.

I never thought that I could sleep WRONG. I thought my habits were perfect. I got enough sleep, my surroundings were good. I thought I was doing everything right, but there are some things that you just can’t control, and this was one of them. When you are asleep, your body just does whatever the heck it wants, whether you like it or not. And for me, grinding my teeth was something my body did regardless of what I told it to do.  As time went on, I realized that I also clenched my teeth when I weedeated or mowed, or did anything where all of my focus and concentration was on one thing for a relatively large amount of time.

After awhile of wearing the guard, I didn’t wake up with my jaws hurting anymore, and they didn’t pop nearly as much as they used to, though my wife still doesn’t care to hear me chew in a quiet room. They still pop quite a bit, though they don’t hurt near as badly.

Sleep problem number 2

About a year ago, I started waking up with my neck killing me and, once again, headaches. So, I went to the chiropractor again and he told me that I really shouldn’t be sleeping on my stomach anymore. While it may feel good, it was killing my repair process and making me hurt all day because of it. The natural curvature in my neck was totally out of whack, so he set me up with a double cervical pillow that has two humps so that you can lay on your back to sleep. And after you get used to the smaller hump, you move to the larger hump in order to increase the curvature of the spine. One good thing was that since it was something that I pretty much had to have, my insurance actually paid for it, which was wonderful. I hated this little pillow, but loved it at the same time. It took me a few weeks to get used to it, but I did get used to it and no longer woke up with a stiff neck and headaches. I slept on it for about 9 months and then, rather than taking it on the plane with me for our vacation, I decided I’d sleep with a regular pillow instead.

It was wonderful…for awhile. It worked great and I slept really well for a couple of months, but then I somehow got one of my wife’s pillows and it was thicker than the ones I normally used. It was so firm, in fact, that I kept rolling off of it all night, and rather than get another pillow, my neck was super stiff the next day from constantly readjusting and trying to stay on the pillow. After that, I don’t even think about sleeping on anything but MY pillow because there is nothing more frustrating than wanting to wake up rested and only feeling more tired and sore than when you went to bed.

Sleep problem number 3

Even though the cervical pillow was supposed to keep me off of my stomach, I somehow would end up on my stomach from time to time anyways. At some point, I apparently kept going to my stomach and was waking up with a killer neck pain since the pillow was curved and my neck was completely facing the wrong direction. I had to go to the chiropractor a couple of times to get it fixed, but it was fixed, so in my infinite wisdom, I thought one way I could keep myself from sleeping on my stomach was to have my arm in the way. So I ended up sleeping on my arm, on my stomach. What did this mean? It meant that I had shoulder problems on the way.

I had apparently pulled my rotator cuff out of place because I was sleeping with my shoulder in such a bad position for hours at a time, and not only would I do this on one side, but I would flip over and do it on the other arm. What was I thinking? So here I am 5 months and lots of chiropractic sessions later. My shoulder is finally getting back to normal, though I still have some work to do. I would go in for my weekly sessions, but then he would give me homework to do in order to rehabilitate my shoulder. I would do them here and there, but not consistently. Once I was doing them consistently, the repair and healing was much quicker. Now I am moving to the next stage of the rehab in band exercises to get my shoulder back to full range of motion.

Sleep problem number 4

I thought that my shoulder woes were behind me, I was sleeping on my back, sometimes my side, and I wasn’t putting my arm underneath me, so I thought I was all set. Wrong.

A couple of weeks ago, I was waking up with my shoulder popping like crazy, even more than it did before I started therapy, and I could not figure out why. I thought that I was sleeping right, once again, and once again I was proven wrong.

I woke up the next day with my shoulder above my head and above the pillow and found out that it was severely aggravating my shoulder, and from what I have read, can actually be bad for your heart too. I went to the chiropractor, and sure enough, my shoulder was terribly out of whack.

How did I gain these terrible sleep habits?

I think it’s primarily from aging. When I was younger, I could sleep however I wanted to and would have zero repercussions, but now that I’m older, i’m not as bendy and able to bounce back as I used to be. I also think that stress has been a part of it. I used to have a very cush job where I came in and did my job, then went home and didn’t have to think about it until I came back the next day. But my current job is a little more high intensity, and is a 24/7 support position, so there is an obvious upgrade in the stress department. The last, and major thing that I believe contributed is my lack of physical activity. Since Lyla came into our lives, my activity level has decreased substantially, almost to nil because I want nothing more than to be with my family. I want that even more than going to play basketball with the guys or going to the gym, and I believe that has taken a toll on my body. I am stiff more often from lack of movement, and my muscles aren’t able to stay strong enough to keep things in place where they should be.

How can I fix these problems or not have them at all?

The first thing is to stay active. As with most things when you get older, you have to work harder to stay in shape and keep your joints and muscles in good form. We joined a gym last month and are trying to find a happy medium where we can spend time at the gym enough to be healthy, but not be gymbugs who are there all of the time and never at home with each other.

The second thing is to go to the chiropractor as soon as you start feeling these things creep up on you. When my issues started, I waited way too long each time to get it looked at. I thought it would fix itself, but without the proper attention that just wasn’t going to happen. So go to your chiropractor and get it looked at just as soon as you realize that something is out of whack and bothering you. We go to Sunshine Chiropractic in Knoxville/Maryville and are very happy with the results.

The third and final thing is to really pay attention to the way you sleep. Don’t just fall into bed and stay that way. Really think through your sleep habits. Whether that’s the amount of sleep, the position you sleep in, or your surrounding environment. If you can’t sleep well, then your body can’t repair properly and you won’t feel rested the next day, only sore and tired.

That’s about the end of it. It’s really not in our DNA to think about how we sleep and to just get comfortable, but if you don’t think of it now, you will think of it when something goes wrong. So do yourself a favor and think about it before you have problems, so that you don’t have to go down the same road I did.

I read an article about sleep positions last week on CNN. It’s a really neat article to read through and determine what kind of sleep position is best with pros and cons for every position. Check it out if you want to learn more.

The post Don’t kill yourself to sleep first appeared on Random Thoughts.

If you asked me what was the perfect device for home use, I would have to get a qualifier depending on what you want to do.

• If you want to play games or read a book, then I would suggest either a smartphone or tablet (iOS or Android) device.

   

   

   

• If you want to surf the net, it’s much easier on a laptop or netbook of some sort. (The full browser makes this much easier)

   

   

   

• If you don’t want to have to deal with viruses or installations of any sort and amazing battery life, I have a Chrome Netbook that works really well.

   

   

   

So, “It depends” is actually a valid response because my dad has completely different uses for his computer than I do.

So, with tomorrow’s Google I/O conference beginning at noon, I would like to put my idea of the perfect couch computer out there.

Ideally, I would want all of the above in one device so that I could play games and work with apps, but also have a full browser with a file system, extended battery life, and no problems with viruses.

I know this is a lot to ask, but Google’s operating systems together actually are so close to fitting my criteria that it hurts.

Think about it, Android is not very good with battery life, and the browser is rough, but you have apps and a great e-reader, it has a file system, and has a lot of functionality.

Chrome OS doesn’t really have much of a file system since it is supposed to be just a browser, but it has amazing battery life, a full keyboard for typing, an amazing browser, and no problems at all with viruses.

So if you could put all of the features together here, it would really be an ideal world and wouldn’t take near as much work considering they are owned by the same company.

There are two ways that I could see this working.

1. Create an Android version of the Chrome browser that would do all of the things we know and love Android for, but would give you a full browser with extensions and access to the file system.
2. Create a dual-boot device that shares the file system of Chrome and Android. So upon startup, you would choose either Android or Chrome OS depending on what functions you want and you would have access to the same file system so that if you were working with a picture on Android, you would be able to upload it at next boot on the Chrome browser to Facebook.

As far as hardware goes, I really like the Xoom. I played with one for a short amount of time at Staples last week and really liked it. It was a really nice device with a really good feel. I don’t think you can get rid of the touchscreen because for gaming and many new applications, touch is the easiest way to navigate and get the job done, but for those who need a little more user input control through a keyboard, I believe it would be beneficial to have a real keyboard. I personally would like to see a flip and swivel keyboard. What this means is that if you were wanting to use Android as it is today, then I would just have the touchscreen to work with, but if I wanted to write this post on the device, I would just unlatch the keyboard from the back of the device and swivel it around to be more like a typical keyboard on a laptop. This would allow me to have the best of both worlds, especially if the weight, size, and battery life were similar to the CR-48 I currently have at home for Chrome OS.

So, overall, I think Google has a couple of great products, but in order to create a device that does it all, the Chrome and Android teams need to work together to integrate the platforms. I know that Eric Schmidt said that Chrome is for regular computers and Android is for touchscreens, and I agree with that to a point. But if they want the home user market to sit in front of the TV with a device, it’s going to be hard to outperform the iPad. If I can get my extensions and bookmarks on my Android device’s browser and include a real keyboard, then you just might see me move to one device instead of piecemeal depending on the function of the day.

The post My Ideal Home Device first appeared on Random Thoughts.

He does this because he has a goal and wants those around him to agree with his goal of moving people back away from Google Apps. Much of his information is incorrect, though to the common reader who has not done the research themselves, seems plausible. Below is my story about how we moved to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange with much success.

We are a 200 person company where about half of our users have email accounts and we’ve actually moved our company over to Google Apps with great success. It took some training since Gmail is obviously different, but it’s been a great experience. The $360 Help Desk Support Services in the graphic is a supplemental service that you don’t have to get. If you buy your Google Apps licenses from a partner like Ltech or CloudSherpas, where the price is still $50/user/year, then you actually get support for free, though only to the account administrators. So the administrators troubleshoot and if it goes above their head, then they come to the partner support.

And if you factor in the amount that it costs for support and maintenance of the hardware and software of an Exchange server, which is the primary reason we moved, not for office and such, then you definitely come out ahead.

Because the piece they aren’t talking about is that you automatically get offsite storage for all 25GB of your mail, multi-site redundancy, Enterprise messaging and video/voice chat through Google Talk, and you can buy the message security piece, which is the add-on postini piece from the infographic, but you get postini filtering for free. Do you realize how much this would all cost, and how piecemeal it would be if you tried to create a Microsoft Exchange based solution of the same thing. Last year we did the pricing for 100 people and here is what we came out with.

On-Site solution with off-site redundancy

Exchange hardware – $2,000 per year with 5 year depreciation

Exchange License – $2,000 per year with SA

Spam Filtering software – $1,200 per year

Archiving product – $1,900 per year

OCS Hardware/Software with SA – $2,900 per year

off-site redundancy for all of these products – not even going to go there

Total of $10,000 if you don’t have off-site redundancy in place

OR

Totally off-site solution

Hosted Exchange with a lot of additional storage since most only come with 1-5GB of space – With 1GB space – $6,000 per year

Hosted OCS – $2,400

Offsite spam filtering – $2,100

Offsite archiving – $5,400

Total of $15,900

Now, for Google Apps, here is our pricing.

Google Apps completely hosted

Google Apps bought from LTech – $5,000 per year

Power Panel – $400 per year

Single Sign On – $900 per year

Postini Message Discovery Extended (10 year retention) – $3,300

Total – $9,600

So, as you can see, Google Apps is still cheaper than both of the other approaches, even without redundancy of the first Exchange scenario.

People just haven’t actually done the research on this in order to see the cost savings most of the times, and salesmen like this have a very clear goal and manipulate the numbers to meet that goal. So do your own research if you are actually interested in this and don’t rely on sales techniques.

At any rate, Exchange is not as cheap as this article suggests in order to get all of the features of Google Apps. And the vast majority of businesses aren’t even to the size of our corporation, and spending $100 per year on each user for email in a 10 person company makes a lot more sense than setting up all of the infrastructure needs of a fortune 500 company where you need a full time support professional just to troubleshoot all of the server/desktop issues for mail and collaboration alone. Plus you get Google Docs, sites, and lots of other features for free with no maintenance downtime and a 99.9% SLA.

Personally, I am going to push this to any organization that I work with or consult with, and our company has been extremely satisfied with all of the features and plan on staying with Apps from here forward.

Plus, it definitely helps that I just got my Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialist certification, so I do kind of know what I am talking about.

If you’re interested in moving to Google Apps, check out their site, or let me know if you have any questions and I’ll be happy to tell you all about it, or maybe help you make the migration.

The post The Hidden Costs of Corporate Email first appeared on Random Thoughts.

This past Christmas I got one of the e-Print printers as a present and it took all of 20 minutes to setup and get configured the way I want. I got the HP Photosmart D110A Wireless e-All-in-One Printer and have loved it. At the time, I think it was about $50 around the holidays, where it’s now more like $70.  But still it’s a great deal on a nice printer. So, other than the wireless printing and the email printing, which I used just this week to print an email from work on my home printer, what else does it do?

Well, it copies and scans as well. Plus it has a memory card slot so you can print directly from the card. And it has apps. I know that apps is kind of a buzz word, but it really does have apps. It has applications that you can install on the printer to make you print more. So, for example, I can flip through the apps and print a coloring page for Lyla from Disney without ever going to a computer. You just go to the apps on the touch screen and click on what you want to print and it prints.  Sarah can also do the same thing with coupons from coupons.com. She is able to go to the printer and choose the coupons she wants to print and print them directly from the touchpad. It’s a smart ploy to get you to print more. I like it personally because it actually does make sense as you are going to have to be at the printer anyway to get the papers, so why not just do it all from there?

Also, it is AirPrint capable, which means that you can print from your iPad or iPod touch or iPhone just by hitting print and it will find the printer on your network.

Not only that, but yesterday, Google announced that all HP e-Print printers are also Google Cloud Print Capable. What that means is that from your Android device, or on any computer that you have Chrome installed with the ePrint option checked, you can print to your other printers. You simply go to the Cloud Print Start page and add the printer’s email address, and it adds it to the account that you are logged in as. So it added to my google account right then and I was able to see it as an option on both my Chrome browser and my Android phone. Very cool stuff.

It won’t be long before we won’t have to have print servers anywhere. And especially at that low of a price. Now, there are higher priced models that contain things like tablets like the HP Photosmart eStation All-in-One, but really, for most people, the model that I have does everything that most people need.

So, in my personal opinion, I think that your next printer definitely needs to be an HP e-Print printer to make sure that you are compatible with the wireless technology in the future.

The post My HP e-Print Printer (and all its wonders) first appeared on Random Thoughts.

At the same time, I have been listening to a podcast called Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott who said at the first of the year very definitively, “I am going to lose weight this year”. He never really went much further than that, but a few weeks later, he mentioned a book called Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, which is what he was basing his statement on, that pretty much anything white, potatoes, pasta, bread, rice, are not good for you, and that an overabundance of those things are what is making America fat.

Our culture has turned these cheap, white foods into the basis for all of our meals and snacks. If you look at pretty much any dish in magazines, there is almost always some sort of carb and/or sugar on the plate because that is what we see as normal, and it is cheap to produce, but in other cultures, only the poorer people eat a lot of potatoes, bread and rice because they are cheaper and filling. But just because they are filling doesn’t mean that they are good for you obviously.  And his book is, like the 4 hour body, based on scientific findings, not on exercising and fads.

But one thing that the 4 hour body allows is an anything goes, eat as much as you want of anything cheat day. So, about 5 weeks ago, on February 21, I started doing the 4-hour body diet, and placed Saturday as my regular cheat day each week. I am not going to say that it hasn’t been hard, because it has. There are many times that I would much rather have sweets or bread or pasta over what I am having, (I had someone today set 5 full size snickers bars on my desk as a thank you for some work I did), but I know that my goal is to lose weight and feel better. So I push on and look toward Saturday. Like I said, I started on February 21, and here we are at March 31, and I have lost 10.6 pounds. I went from 215.4 lbs to 204.8 lbs in 5 weeks. Not too bad huh? And especially since I am not that big of a guy, I just wanted to get back to a comfortable weight for me since I have put on my married weight.

But I don’t think I would have stuck with it as long and I would have fallen off the wagon much more if it weren’t for those Saturdays where I could eat the things I missed throughout the week.

One thing I wish that I would have done early on in this diet is to take my measurements to see how much I have lost in inches instead of weight, because that is a better gauge of how much I have lost. But oh well. I know it’s working because my stomach is a little flatter than it was and I think that my face has gotten a little thinner as well.

My goal is to get down to 200, so I am very close, but I may stay on a little longer to get to 190 if things are going well. But we’ll see how it all goes. I like the diet and think it actually is a pretty sustainable long-term diet, which really becomes more of a lifestyle.  Because of this diet, I will be making changes for the long term that I believe will help me in the long run. I eat more protein in the morning (eggs, bacon, tomatoes, and yogurt) instead of my smoothie (apple juice, strawberries, mixed berries, peaches, and keifer), which has helped me to regulate my blood sugar so that I don’t have a sugar drop in the afternoons like I used to.  And I now know that I don’t have to always eat bread with every meal or there are other options besides french fries when I go out to eat (asparagus is always a welcome change).

Overall, i’m very happy with it and will keep going with my diet for awhile longer to get to the point where I’m happy with my weight and feel good as well. I would recommend the 4 hour body to just about everyone because it doesn’t just talk about how to lose weight, but also how to gain weight, workout, sleep better, as well as lots of other things in the process. Plus it’s a very interesting read because the author, Tim Ferris, has done lots of self-experimentation in order to find what works and what doesn’t. And obviously he has found the easiest way to lose weight with the least amount of effort. Hopefully I will be able to keep most of these changes permanent, but if not, at least I have some headroom before I get back to 215.

The post My 5 week 4 hour body progress first appeared on Random Thoughts.

Most small businesses over-invest in IT hardware and software, as well as create too much complexity for less than 10 people on a network. And with a business this small, it really doesn’t make sense to have a full time IT person twiddling their thumbs the majority of the time.

I’ve said before how much of a fan I am of Microsoft Home Server. It makes my life here at home much easier as I don’t have to think as much about what is going on with my network. So if only that could be translated to the business world. And I believe that it can if you have the right setup where you can actually set it and forget it.

So, the major pieces that a small business needs are email, file sharing, collaboration, remote access, printer, and a website. The best way that I can see to do this is to use two major tools for all of the needs, and then some bits and pieces.

The first tool would be Google Apps. Google Apps Premier Edition is $50 per year per user and includes email, calendar, document sharing and editing, voice, video, and text chat, group forums and mailing lists, enterprise spam filtering, and easy intranet and internet sites. It is essentially everything that major corporations have at their disposal without the maintenance, without the on-site IT staff, and at a fraction of the cost. It even gives you the software you need through Google Docs to replace Excel, Word, and Powerpoint. I have even set up Google Apps to host corporate, public-facing websites so your corporate identity is all set as well. For 10 people, it would only cost $500/year for email and collaboration that the big boys enjoy.

The second major piece is Windows Home Server. Specifically the HP Mediasmart EX495 which has a 1.5TB drive in it and is expandable with 3 more internal bays and 4 USB ports. So you could buy 3 more large drives internally where you could replicate the files so you have redundancy, as well as allow it to backup all of the PC’s on the network for quick recovery. You could also couple it with Carbonite backup for cloud storage so that all of your files are backed up remotely for easy recovery for only a little over $50 per year. So you would get offsite backup, as well as onsite backup for very cheap.

As I have said before, Windows Home Server also gives you access to your files and computer remotely so that you can access them anytime and anywhere. And it also allows you to search across all of the file shares so that you can find what you need easily.

Printing in a small business is always a bit of an issue, as well as scanning or copying. But with HP’s ePrint technology, you can not only print wirelessly while you are in the office, you can print wirelessly from your phone anywhere you have internet access just by sending an email to a specific email address. And the cost isn’t any more than a typical printer. We got the base all in one model for about $50 bucks and it copies, scans, and prints, and works great. All the way up to the high end multifunction that is more like $300. So you could put one at each person’s desk or just give everyone access to a couple of printers and even if one had problems, you wouldn’t have to go through the driver issues, but instead could just print to a different printer.

Couple all of this with the laptops and desktops needed for the users, a nice Meraki access point that can be managed from anywhere and is super easy to setup, a small network of wired switches and you have essentially an entire corporate network on a smaller scale without the major maintenance of the enterprise network.

So, for 10 users, you would have to buy the computers for less than $500 each for a total of $5,000, plus the $700 for the Server and extra storage and a router and wired switch for less than $300, 2 printers for $50 each, and a Meraki access point for $300 and you have all of your equipment for less than $7,000

Then your yearly cost of $50 per user for 10 users comes out to $500 per year and the online backup adds another $50 and you have recurring costs of $550 per year. This takes care of pretty much all of your major IT needs for a company smaller than 10 users with 10 computers without a lot of the hassles of a typical network.

So, a summary.

Initial Investment
10 computers x $500 = $5,000
Server = $700
Extra storage, router, and wired switch = $300
2 HP ePrint printers x $50 = $100
Meraki access point = $300

Total Initial Investment = $6,400

Yearly Costs
10 Google Apps user accounts x $50/year = $500
Carbonite online backup for Home Server = $50

Total Yearly Cost = $550

All in all, not a bad setup for a business just starting out so that they can hit the ground running with all of the tools they need to be up against the big boys.

The post Ideal Small Business Network first appeared on Random Thoughts.

So, first, of course, you need to install uTorrent on your computer so that you can get the downloads flowing freely. If you aren’t quite sure how to do that, the uTorrent site actually has a nice little tutorial up on what to change and do to setup uTorrent with your internet connection. Then just setup the webUI in the options

Next up is the mobileui. This interface is just a web interface that allows you to add/remove/change torrents from anywhere you have access to the web. For me personally, I just have it as a bookmark in Chrome so that i can check it whenever I want without having to type it in. And that is probably the easiest way too.

Next is the actual webui Firefox extension. This extension runs in the lower corner of your screen and tells you how many torrents you are running, as well as the upload and download speeds of them all put together. And if you click on it, it will open the webui in a sidebar in the browser. It is a nice little extension to have running for anyone who likes to keep an eye on what’s happening at home.

Or the uTorrent for Chrome extension that gives you direct access to your torrents like it was running on your remote machine.

And finally, the last thing is tying them to the app infrastructure.

On the Android, you can install something like Transdroid to manage everything that goes on in your uTorrent installation, or the official uTorrent app to do the same thing. But then there are items like EZTVDroid that helps you to search for TV shows, and can add them directly as well.

On the iPhone, you have to use the Project Falcon Alpha in order to get to your torrents since not just any app can get through the app store approval process with Apple.

So, with all of these little helpful applications running on your computer, won’t it kill your home PC beyond usability? Believe it or not, even with all of this running, you will barely even notice the difference since uTorrent is written so lightly that it barely touches your memory, and in terms of CPU usage, unless there is a problem, you won’t even notice.

I used to use Azureus because of the java applets you could run on top of it to make things easier, but it was such a memory hog that I could not handle it anymore. I moved to uTorrent and haven’t looked back since. I couldn’t imagine downloading in any other manner. If you haven’t downloaded uTorrent before now, maybe you should look into it.

With these pieces in place, you should pretty much be able to do anything you could do on the host machine from anywhere. It works great, and hopefully it helps.

The post How to get more out of uTorrent first appeared on Random Thoughts.

As with most things Amazon, they went all out. It launches with 5GB of storage out of the box just for having an amazon account, an Android app, as well as a nice web player that works quite well. All of your playlists and music automatically sync so that you can have the same experience, no matter what device you are using.

And if 5GB isn’t enough, it won’t be for me, you can buy more storage 20GB for $20 per year, or buy an MP3 album and automatically be upgraded to that 20GB plan. There are even albums for less than $1 on Amazon that meet the criteria.  And if you download that album or any MP3 from Amazon to your cloud drive first, then it won’t count against your space. So you can buy as much from Amazon as you would like and it isn’t part of the 5GB or 20GB size restriction. It can sit there indefinitely. Also, if you go to your amazon MP3 settings on each computer you will be accessing it from, you can set your download setting. “When you save your Amazon MP3 purchases to Cloud Drive, you can download new purchases from Cloud Drive to this computer automatically.” So I can have it automatically download files to my desktop, but download on demand on my laptop. Pretty sweet.

And you don’t have to just store mp3’s on there, but also any other file you would like, but obviously you get the most flexibility out of MP3 files. And when I say MP3 files, I don’t necessarily mean MP3’s exclusively can be used, you can actually upload Apple’s m4a files as well so that you can listen to them using your amazon cloud player as well. Wav files and ogg are out of luck, but most people have mp3 and m4a as it is, so you should be good with most of your collection.

And of course, Amazon makes it easy to click on an artist and shop for more music from that artist in the Amazon MP3 store.

There is even a really nice Adobe Air MP3 uploader from Amazon that automatically scans your Windows Media Player and iTunes libraries for files and playlists and lets you choose what you do and do not want to upload.

I am listening to it right now on my Android and it is working extremely well over a Wifi connection and I’ll have to try it out over a 3G connection to see if it can keep a good connection. But if Pandora can do it, there is really no reason that Amazon can’t.  It does give you the option of downloading the files from your Cloud Drive to your Android device in case you will be out of range and need something to listen to, but that kind of defeats the purpose.

I do have a few things that I wish I could do that I can’t.  I have a few files that I have ripped that didn’t have track info and it uploaded and of course the album and artist are “unknown”. I wish there was a way, other than re-uploading the file, that I could edit that information, but as of right now I don’t find a way to do that.

I also do wish that it had an iOS app, but I am sure that is coming. It probably just takes awhile to get it through the app store approval process. I tried to use the web player on the iPad, and though it loaded, I couldn’t actually get my files to play. But I was able to download them to the device, which I guess would work if there was one file you wanted to listen to.

I also wonder how long it will be before there is a Roku app or it is built into my Tivo. Because that is one piece that will make things much more interesting as Amazon Video on Demand is already in the living room, and putting Amazon MP3 in the living room would seriously upgrade the home theater capabilities of most people’s homes by having their MP3 collection easily accessible without having to go through all of the steps of finding it on your network.

The real test is going to be when Apple or Google announce an inevitable competitor to Amazon so we can see how each of these monster companies handles the same task.

But with Amazon being the first player of the big boys to do this, it definitely gives them the edge. If people get comfortable with their product and invest early, then that gives them an upper hand on these other competitors that would be more likely to own this space and allows them a good shot at owning the cloud MP3 space.

Anyway, try it out at Amazon Cloud MP3 or watch the nice little intro video to learn more.

The post Amazon Cloud Player first appeared on Random Thoughts.

I was running a Xampp installation on my computer using the newest version of WordPress, version 3.1. It had PHP, MySQL, all the good stuff already up and running. I use this install for testing wordpress in all its glory for themes and plugins because it is a lot easier to use than doing it on a remote server for things like customizing a theme and then uploading the changes.

I thought, well, I can just install another wordpress site and have it all back. If only it were that simple. I imported the sql.gz file using phpmyadmin, then pointed the new wordpress install to the existing database and thought that should do it. Two things I didn’t think about were that the database was using the old version of wordpress, somewhere around 2.6, and I would have to have access to the actual URL in order to get logged in to the site.  I tried that, but upon trying to login to the site to get my posts, it sent me to the old URL which I no longer have access to.
I decided that since the content is in the database and I can see the content, there has to be an easy way to get the posts out because that is really all I care about.

I looked for converters and different methods but couldn’t find a way to get wp_posts to turn into a wordpress export file.

But then I thought about the structure of the wordpress database and that there were common themes between the database of the existing test I was running on localhost, and the new database I just imported, they both have a wp_posts table.

So, I thought it was worth a shot just to send the new wp_posts table to the current, running database.  So I stayed in phpmyadmin and went to work.

I went to the existing database, called wordpress, and selected the wp_posts table from the left-hand nav and went up to the top of the page and selected “Drop”. This will drop all existing content in the wp_posts area, so all posts are gone for good.

Then I went to the new database and selected the wp_posts table and went to the operations tab.

From there I chose to move the table to my existing wordpress database with the same name for the table of wp_posts.

I hit Go, and everything is set. Now all I have to do is login to my existing wordpress site, and I can export my posts very easily. I can do the same thing for comments if I would like, using the wp_comments table.

Hope this helps some of you. Let me know if you have any questions.

The post Restore posts and comments from an old mysql backup of WordPress first appeared on Random Thoughts.

So I thought I would look at some of the second tier carriers like Boost, Virgin Mobile, and US Cellular.

I was trying to find a way to compare US Cellular’s Android offerings and came across a site called DroidThing.

DroidThing is a very easy way to compare Android devices even across carriers.

You just put in what parameters you are searching for and it will bring up the phones that meet that criteria. It’s well done and works really well.

Below is a video about how the site works and how to search it effectively.

The post Compare Android phones with DroidThing first appeared on Random Thoughts.

So, today Angry Birds Rio came out.

Not only did it just come to the market, but it also came to Amazon’s new App store FOR FREE for the Android as well. Unfortunately for those of us on the AT&T side of things, this means that we can’t install it as the file comes from an unknown source.  This means it doesn’t come directly from the android market and AT&T decided to turn this option off by default on all of their android devices. So you have to find a workaround. Luckily there is just such a workaround.

You can go to this page and scan the QR code or have them send you an email/text with the link to the app store for download.

When you download, it will go into the downloads folder on your internal memory.

That’s the easy part, now comes the part that adds a little more complexity.

First, turn Debugging on in your settings. Settings–> Applications–> Development –>USB Debugging. Next, you need to use your USB cable to connect to your computer so that it shows up as a drive on your computer and go to your downloads folder to find the amazon-appstore-release.apk file. Next, transfer that file to your computer.

Now, download the sideload wonder machine following the steps documented here and install the amazon apk file.

Next, sign in to your amazon account and try to download the Angry Birds Rio file.  It will download, but when you try to install, it will fail.

So, we’ll sideload this application as well. It can be found on internalstore/android/data/com.amazon.venezia/cache as a random apk file. Mine was called vnz56419.apk.

You’ll go through the same steps that you used above to install the amazon app store.

After that, just unplug your phone and start playing Angry Birds Rio, which looks great and I especially like the jungle level with the monkeys.

This isn’t just for Angry Birds, but any app that comes from the Amazon Marketplace that you want to install.

The post Get Angry Birds Rio for Free on AT&T Droids first appeared on Random Thoughts.