Avoid ISP email addresses
Whether it be an @rogers.com, @sympatico.ca or some other smaller internet service provider, this just sends the wrong kind of message to prospective clients. Email addresses like this work as beacon to the rest of the world telling them you probably aren’t very well versed with the online world. If your address is from an ISP people could draw the conclusion that you’re just a part timer or that you may only access your email when they get home at the end of the day.

The biggest issue I find with these emails is what if you decide to change ISPs? Sometimes these changes are inevitable, be it for poor service or maybe you find a better deal with another provider and want to make the leap. Swapping hosts also means abandoning your email address. To make this change you need to tell everyone in your address book to update their contact info for you. This can be a huge task, as you can’t always count on people taking action. I have an old email address that I abandoned 5 years ago and still have a few stragglers that send the odd email to me there. If you’re using your ISP email address for business communication, you could even suffer from the added hassle of having to reprint business cards and other professional materials to reflect this change. Ideally you don’t want to be losing business leads because you decided to save a few bucks on your internet bill.

Avoid free online email accounts
Odds are pretty much everyone on the planet has a free email address from either Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail. I signed up for my first Hotmail account way back in 1996, before Microsoft bought them. These addresses are quite handy, but don’t give off the greatest signals when used for business purposes. As soon as I see a free email service used as someone’s point of contact, how I view them as a professional goes down a notch or two. Even worse is if the actual account is something silly like billybob3892@yahoo.com, it just shows you have little regard for how you present yourself online. If you have to go with a free provider for your email, the best bet these days for salvaging a shred of professionalism is Gmail.

I find the worst lapses in judgment for people is when they actually own their own web domain, yet haven’t made the effort to get email address aliases created and instead use a Hotmail.com email address. It’s like they’ve already run a marathon, then forgot to cross finish line.

Buy yourself a domain name
The cost of registering a domain for a year can be less then what you paid for yesterday’s lunch. Prices can typically range from $6 to $12 dollars, depending on what type of domain you’re registering. So really the barrier of entry is pretty low. If you don’t intend on creating a website right away, many registrars offer the ability to host email for you for a monthly fee. While this typically isn’t cost effective when compared to a hosting package, $3 a month for your own personal, professional email address is money well spent. If you are looking to create a website along with email addresses, I’m sure SlideawayMedia could help you out. If you’re looking for a good Canadian registrar, I use NamesPro.ca and host my sites with PinchHost.

Services like Gmail actually allow you to combine multiple email addresses into one inbox as well. Here’s a tutorial on how to combine multiple accounts into Gmail I wrote awhile back. This is handy on so many levels as it keeps all your mail in one spot and allows you to seamlessly use emails from your web domain, while still having the handiness of using Gmail to access your mail from virtually anywhere.

Projecting a professional image online requires the total package, including the use of professional email addresses. If you’ve worked really hard at crafting your image and reputation, don’t sabotage that by using a bad email address.

I wanted to comment on the idea that canceling the Drayton Theatre project would be a boon for Cambridge taxpayers.  I think making a move like this would be quite shortsighted and hurt our community in the long run.  Cambridge is in need of a facelift, badly.  In a recent Conference Board of Canada report we were given a “D” grade, which lumped us among Brantford, Windsor and Oshawa when it comes to attracting new people into our community.  That is not the type of company we want to be keeping when compared to other cities.

Cambridge needs to progress and evolve our community away from its manufacturing roots and begin to attract new, sharp, forward thinking minds to the area.  We need to work be towards a knowledge and information based economy in our region.  This can be achieved by giving people a reason to move here, investing in innovation and the arts instead of shuttering projects like the Drayton Theatre.  Stimulating the arts helps make our city a more vibrant and desirable destination for newcomers.

I think people of this community will forever feel second fiddle to cities like Kitchener, Waterloo and Guelph because we’re doing so little to attract new thinking and ideas to our area.  I’m a local web designer and frequently go to get togethers and meetups in Waterloo to interact with like minded people looking to enrich their skills and make new contacts.  I know of many other people from Cambridge making that same trek into Waterloo, since there isn’t any similar type of community available here.

We need to encourage the arts, not crush them in the name of shortsightedness.

Writing a letter to the editor definitely makes me feel like an old man. It’s the first time I’ve ever done it, so hopefully it gets into the paper.

Hello,
I was curious as to why there is no free wifi available at City Hall?  I went there today to the Small Business Centre and found it to be closed for another hour because of a meeting.  I tried to access the internet through my phone, but found that the big stone walls of city hall allowed for little to no connectivity through my Rogers iPhone.  I know myself as a small business owner I would appreciate that I would be able to send and receive emails while conducting my business at City Hall.

For a public space claiming to that “the future is high tech“, I would anticipate something that every coffee cafe in Cambridge can offer would be able to manage what has essentially become a common courtesy to offer patrons.

Is there currently a plan to implement wifi in Cambridge City Hall, and if so when?

In building a beautiful new facility like the one Cambridge has I would figure it would be the goal to want to bring people to use and spend time within the facility.  Guelph is in the process of offering free wifi at their new city hall.  Burlington already does.  Cambridge needs to cater to their local technology community as the city looks to transition away from being a manufacturing based economy.  Offering simple things like wifi in public places helps keep smart, technologically engaged people living in the area instead of losing them to more progressive municipalities.

Thanks for your time,

jamEs harris

I’ll update this post if and when I get a response.

Update from February 2nd, 2010

Dear James,
Mayor Craig asked me to follow up with you regarding your note.  We appreciate your feedback.  As you can image, there are a number of services we provide through the Small Business Centre and most recently we upgraded the internet connections and provide a separate line, outside the city network firewalls so that entrepreneurs can access sites that are traditionally blocked by our network.  I was advised by the centre that there was a sign on the door which would have directed you to the second floor to Economic Development division as there is only one staff member who works at the centre.  Should you have needed the resources of the centre, it would have been opened for you where possible.

City Hall is a Wifi hot spot for Atria, however, access is not free and you would require a stick to utilize the service. There are no plans to provide this service free of charge at this point because of budget impacts but I have passed along your suggestion to our technology services team.  In terms of sending emails and using Roger’s service, I am not sure what might have happened for your system to fail.  The City uses mobile devices from City Hall without issue and in fact, service throughout Civic Square has been tested on several occasions.

Thanks for pointing out the old questions email.  The front page of our website and other areas within the site have been updated, however, the section you reference is a separate website and I will be sure to connect with the team that manages this content – it’s an older site but still part of our online materials to give the history of the project.  I really appreciate you taking the time to point this out.

I hope I have answered your questions and would be happy to reconnect should you require anything further.

Regards,

Lin

As far as I’m concerned an Atria pay solution simply does not cut it. I understand that there is cost involved, but setting up a wireless router on the main floor of the building doesn’t seem like rocket science. Even restricted network service that blocks content is better then nothing at all.

For those not familiar with the concept of a coworking space, I’ll try to give a brief rundown. The idea is to create a working space for small business owners, sole proprietors, freelancers and non-profit organizations to have a place to meet and work. Office space is costly, running from $300 to $1000+ a month to rent your own business space. So many small businesses are like myself, they do their business working alone from their home and meet clients outside their homes at public places like restaurants or coffee shops. The problem with this kind of arrangement is it can tend to be rather isolating. I know myself sometimes you just get bored of your surroundings and want to get out of the house.

This is where a cowork comes in. It allows for a collaborative workspace where entrepreneurs can get outside of their regular work confines and get the opportunity to do some valuable business networking. I’ve been working on my own for roughly 8 months and sometimes you just wish you had somewhere to go to work, enabling you to separate your home and work life a bit.

Over the last 2 months a group of locals, mainly having been connected through Twitter are hashing out the groundwork for a coworking space to be located in downtown Galt. Colin has rather smartly setup a shared, public cowork Google doc for collecting Cambridge cowork ideas. If you feel like getting involved, feel free to get in touch and I’ll help you get in the loop.  I also created a Twitter list of Cambridge Cowork contributors.

I was able to open the file by using Open File under the file menu, but still that’s pretty funny.

Ignite Waterloo

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the first Ignite Waterloo event at The Children’s Museum in downtown Kitchener. In the last 6 months I’ve started to hit the circuit of geek networking events in the area, but I found this event seemed to be in a class all it’s own.

The premise of an Ignite event is to have a variety of speakers talking on a variety of subjects. Each presenter has 5 minutes to speak. They have a set of slides that auto-forwards every 15 seconds. This makes for a quick, rapid fire presentation. It’s quite the cool concept.

Presenters spoke on a variety of topics, ranging from solving a rubik’s cube in 90 seconds, comparing policing now to 20 years ago, creating a hacker space, engineers in Africa, diagnosing high altitude illnesses and the story of a 2000km fraternity road trip (Full list of presenters). It was an event that had a little bit for everyone.

Pacman Cupcake

One of the attractions for the event was a cupcake decorating competition. This definitely yielded some amusing results with the winning entry receiving a netbook courtesy of Communitech. Mike Shanks and I were the intrepid ones who decorated the first cupcakes. I opted for a cupcake rendition of Pacman.  I knew I wouldn’t win, but thought it turned out well.

Cupcakes at Ignite Waterloo

I look forward to the next event in March, it was a great networking opportunity. I’d highly recommend checking it out next time around.

Other event impression blogs

• Ignite Waterloo was a sweet affair
• We attended Ignite Waterloo & all I wrote was this lousy blog

DemoCampGuelph 11 at eBar

Yesterday I had to opportunity to attend my second DemoCampGuelph, which was hosted at the eBar in Downtown Guelph. The premise of the gathering is to allow local startups and businesses to show off what they’re working on to the local tech community. Guelph, Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge have a pretty vibrant entrepreneur and tech community, so having a big gathering to be able to engage and connect with is a pretty cool opportunity to network.

Last night’s special guest speaker was the Globe and Mail’s Mathew Ingram. He spoke about how an old school publication like the Globe and Mail has been working to become more web savvy and agile with their online presence. It was rather interesting to hear how slow moving monoliths like newspapers are working to adapt to a constantly changing playing field like the web.

As for the demos there was tribehr.com, a solution for managing company HR needs, RhymeBrain, for easily finding rhyming words, LaunchStart, a Blackberry app that allows for custom icon install onto BBs and a conversational programming language called Cucumber.

Overall it’s an awesome event and a great reason to get out of the house, and as an added bonus they have free beer and appetizers. I almost suspect at the rate the event has been growing that it’ll outgrow eBar soon enough as a viable place to host the event. Looking forward to the next event, which I’m guessing will probably be in December or January.

I am proud to announce that I have finally launched the newest iteration of Slideaway.ca. The site is now more reflective of my business as I have recently transitioned from a part time freelance designer to operating my business on a full time basis.  I am currently taking on new clients, so if you have a business in Cambridge, Kitchener, Waterloo, Guelph, Brantford or anywhere else in South Western Ontario and are looking for professional design services, feel free to fill out the contact form and I will be in touch.

Applications needed: Photoshop 6+

Skill Level: Easy

1. Start with a new 400×400 pixel document and give it a neutral background. I chose a tan colour to work with.

2. Add some texture to your background by going to Filter>Noise>Add Noise. Use a low setting to achieve a small amount of graininess.

3. Just so things don’t appear too sharp we’ll apply a blur by using Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. We now have a background to work our picture into.

4. Now import the image you’ll be working on into a new layer. I’m using an EPS illustration I created. For this technique it best to have an item that features a muted colour palette. Repeat steps 2 and 3 on the new image.

5. On your new layer turn the opacity down to about 95%.

6. Now choose the eraser tool and adjust the opacity to 50%. You will then want to choose a rough spray-paint style brush to use. Here are the settings I used for my example. Feel free to experiment with the settings.

Brush Tip Shape: Diameter 16px / Spacing 54%

Shape Dynamics: Size Jitter 34% / Minimum Diameter 12%

Scattering: Scatter 545% / Count 1 / Count Jitter 16%

7. Now begin erasing the imported image randomly. You’ll want to go over the whole image distressing some places more then others. Take your time and make sure not to overdo it.

8. Create a new layer and select a darker version of the colour you picked as your background colour. Then select the Brush tool, change the opacity to 10% and use the new brush preset we created for the eraser. Now use the brush all over the document to create some darker colour variation.

And with that you’re done.

For me, PDF is an essential part of my job.  Since I started as a designer we have used PDF as a means of sending proofs to our clients and receive feedback quickly and easily.  It assures that when I send a proof it’s going to be properly represented on the screen to the client and they will be able to make an accurate judgement of the work and be able to give feedback.  This concept is of vital importance.  Using other formats that rely on people having certain fonts installed makes sending files a crapshoot.  This very problem came up this week when I needed to output some formatted Word documents that were emailed to me.  I needed to reformat the document and make it look proper before I could print it because of font issues and the use of special characters.  While it wasn’t a big deal to change, it still left the presentation of the document up to chance.  PDF takes the guesswork out of how something should look.

Now the reason I think Adobe is shooting themselves in the foot because Word is the key to solving this problem.  Practically everyone has Word on their computer.  It’s the standard in the business world when it comes to word processing.  Many people don’t venture too far outside Word when it comes to their computing experience.  They use Word for everything, including visual layout.  It’s very hard to get these people to use new programs.  Relying on the fact people will use 3rd party tools to save a PDF out of Word seems fool-hardy.  Having the functionality built right into the program is key to getting the business world using PDF.  It seems to me that offering a means with which to guarantee the work done in Word will look proper on someone elses computer should definitely have an appeal to the Word using masses of the computing world.

I’m hopeful that Adobe and Microsoft can work out an amicable deal.  Broadening the use of PDF will definitely make the lives of business and creative people alot easier and improve their ability to colaborate.