After working on computers for almost ten years, Mike felt it was finally time to start a business to expand his knowledge to others, outside of simple family and friends, outside of neighbors, outside of his comfort zone. Doing this he started a wave of helpfulness, and the gratitude that his customers showed made him feel like doing more and more. With each solved problem, with each computer sped up from a fifteen minute start-up time, to a three minute start-up time, Mike felt amazing helping his customers at such a low cost to them, with an amazing turn-around time.

FixIt Computer Repair opened it’s doors sometime during the summer of 2009, with hopes and dreams that would soon aspsire into a growing business that is ripping at the seams with knowledge and enjoyment of the work that is being accomplished. The business didn’t come to full fruition until the fall season 2009 with advertisements and word of mouth throughout family, friends, and neighbors leading the way.

FixIt’s website took only a few days to fully construct and complete, and afterwords the doors were ‘officially’ open and the calls started coming in. Serving only a few local customers a week, the friendships that have been planted gained steam and everything started to fall into place.

Around Christmastime 2009, FixIt Computer Repair opened Version 2.0 of it’s website, revealing a massive rebuild including a blog with helpful tips for at-home Do-It-Yourself tips, and fully functioning and extremely helpful Twitter account in which users could ask short questions and get quick replies from all over the world.

Late 2010 was when the reformation of FixIt began. Mike began re-thinking the inner workings of FixIt and what it has become. Prices have lowered drastically and fixing computers has become more enjoyable since. The prices are now better competition for smaller companies that are in Mike’s scope and not large companies like the Geek Squad.

That isn’t what I wanted to do in the beginning of this blog, this isn’t what I wanted to do at all. I feel bad that I even started doing that. Sure, getting a ton of views throughout a day is great and really rewarding, but a lot of those people will probably never come back to the site, and those aren’t the type of people I need.

I would much rather have a small set of regular readers who tell their friends to check us out every now and then. I am going to change my ways and put up a few really good, well thought out posts a week, instead of several a day.

I guess I am doing quantity over quality.

There are hundreds of blogs out that already give you all the tech news you need to know about, and odds are I was never the first one or one of the first few to write anything about those news stories. So this will be better. I promise.

I am going to give tips on how to make your computer experience the best it can be without major modification or anything that will take a lot of money or time. From time to time I am going to try to promote products that I think are absolutely splendid or something that all PC users should use a few times on their computer.

This will be a good thing, and I besides, they will come with awesome stories as well! It will be like reading an amazing short story with each post. Each will talk about a magical fairy world where something is going wrong in the beginning, but in the end everything will be great and everybody will live happily ever after.

It’ll be much better that way. I’ll feel better about myself, as well. No more selling out.

Students who were given the laptops in the school district were given computers that had their web cams remotely activated whenever the schools administrators thought it was time to do so, and apparently this type of event has been going on for the past 14 months but wasn’t really brought to light until a student, Blake Robbins, was punished in school for “improper behavior in his home.” Normally this would be something that might be pushed aside as just an overly strict school, but because the Vice Principal provided a photo of the matter as evidence, he pretty much dug his own grave.

According to Boing Boing, a class action law suit has been filed against the school on behalf of all students issued the laptops.

The school is fighting back with this response to the reports stating that “the security feature was installed to help locate a laptop in the event it was report lost, missing or stolen so that the laptop could be returned to the student.” They claim that they have never once used it to spy on students, and frankly I don’t believe that because why would it have been activated unless it was reported missing? Just for fun? Apparently the web cams have been activated 42 times to find missing laptops in the past 14 months.

To wrap things up, Dr. Christopher McGinley, Superintendent at the Lower Merion School District also said the school was sorry for its actions. “We regret if this situation has caused any concern or inconvenience among our students and families,” he said.

I don’t think saying sorry will cover up this one, Doctor. You are definitely no Tiger Woods.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas worked on the Seadragon technology at Microsoft which is designed to retrieve large amounts of data using a fast, seamless, zoom based interface. The technology has since been used to power Microsoft’s 3D photo application Photosynth which was popularized during President Obama’s inauguration event. Microsoft has also used Seadragon technology in applications like Pivot.

Blaise’s talk at TED 2010 last week was met with great applause and excitement from the audience. The Microsoft worker demonstrated stunning integration of augmented reality maps. Blaise demonstrated real-time processing of video taken with a smart phone inside street-view type maps. The demo included a live video overlaid on static images of a market inside of Bing Maps. Photosynth and Worldwide telescope integration was also demonstrated as part of the Bing Maps showcase. Although the features are not widely available yet it provides a glimpse of what Microsoft is currently working on.

Thanks again, Neowin.

All in all, I’d say this is definitely going to give Google a run for it’s money. This is simply brilliant. The work put into this is so perfectly done and I can’t wait to have them open it up to the rest of the world. The way they showed the Pike’s Place Fish Market and the guys in their world famous orange suits, and LIVE to boot. It is fantastic that this is the type of technology we are getting into right now. We really are going to have cameras inside stores. Soon we will be able to map out our shopping trip, “Turn left at Aisle 3, right  down the main aisle..”

Magnificent.

Kids tend to not really know what they are doing when it comes to computers. Sure they are pretty good with them these days and they can probably figure out things faster than most adults, but lot’s of times they just don’t read anything, or maybe they just can’t read well enough to know what they are getting themselves in to.

It’s hard to say how much a kid really knows about computers and technology. With all of the things that they are being taught early in their career of schooling, who knows, right? For the most part they know nothing, they just zip through things really fast without ever seeing a certain window like that, thinking that there will be absolutely 100% no consequence for their action. If they get it right once, they will be the master of the computer and will know absolutely everything there is to know about it, guaranteed.

So that means that when they screw up, it can’t be their fault! Then I get the call. I don’t mind cleaning up after a child’s silly mistake, normally it isn’t anything too crazy or anything too bad. But the fact of the matter is that the kid just doesn’t really know what they are doing, and some programs can install a whole bunch of junk that we simply don’t want to look at it. If your browser looks anything at all like the one on the left, then you know exactly what I am talking about, and quite frankly, I have no idea how you even found my blog. All of those tool bars can be installed in a ninja-like fashion that can get around even the most keen of software installers, they ask to be installed when installing things like Java or Flash, or other applications, even the renowned CCLeaner asks if you would like to install a Yahoo!’s Toolbar.

Toolbar’s are never really a problem too great to remove, sometimes they just take a decent amount of time which can get pretty obnoxious for most people if they just want to get on their computer and get things done. That’s what I am around for! I don’t mind removing toolbars or cleaning up your desktop or getting rid of the thousands of icons that always lurk in your computer’s systems tray (that little area near the clock). These little things could end up having some pretty malicious programs in them, and if you aren’t sure what exactly they are, then you should probably inform your local computer guru about it, he will know the answer and know exactly what is bad and what is okay for you to have on your computer.

You never really know so it is better to be safe than sorry, in the long run it will be better to pay $60 for an overnight computer tune-up, then to pay $1,200 for a brand new computer that will probably just become messed up again for the exact same reason a month later because your child didn’t know what caused the problem in the first place, and neither did you. So it’s good to learn about your problem before finding a replacement so you know what to avoid the next time around.

To clarify my point: Kids screw things up. They probably have spilt milk all over the floor within the last week, luckily it hasn’t been on your computer. Now that would have been something that would be tough to fix! Just relax and know that it is repairable, just like your now clean kitchen floor is. In the end if it really is your little boy or girls fault, it might be a good reason to tell them that they can’t have that slice of cake after dinner.