Welcome to Smuggle Me

Today I was coming home from work and my scooter ran out of gas. You can’t imagine how much that sucked. The problem is that it was still telling me that the tank was full. After walking to the gas station, I wanted to throw my scooter off a cliff.

Therefore, when I returned home I started looking at new luxury cars. I’m super impressed with what Audi is offering in their vehicles. I think that the Audi design is one of the slickest luxury car designs out there. Take a look at what I mean:

There are even a couple Audis (A6 and A8) that are bulletproof. I could see this becoming more and more useful. Someone at work was telling me about how they were driving home yesterday in a shady part of Las Vegas and they heard a sound like a gun. She looked around to see if she’d been shot. Turns out it was only an egg that someone threw at her car. Amazing that getting shot could be considered as a possibility these days.

I guess the bulletproof Audi might be worth it.

Wow!! People are really taking gaming Digg to the next level. The website is called User Submitter. Essentially they pay you $0.50 to digg 5 different Digg articles. It’s impressive what they have put together to try and avoid having problems with digg. Unfortunately, I think that $0.50 is to low of a payout for it to become very big. The payout needs to be much higher to see some real action in the number of people participating in this type of a program.

Here’s an interesting note on their website:

There has been a surge in the amount of new Users and Submitters over the past couple days. To those new, welcome to our proof of concept.
Submitters be advised that we are now limiting the amount of submissions to process in a day.
Users be advised that stories to digg are first-come/first-serve and that we are limiting the amount of diggs in a day.
Those wanting to bury all stories coming from U/S, note that 80% of the stories are randomly selected from Digg. Some sets are entirely random.
More later.

I’ve been ordering servers for my job for the past 3 years. I love doing it, but the hardest part is staying up on the latest technology. The best server technology I’ve found has to be a Blade Server.

Why you might ask?
There are a ton of reasons. Most of which is that blade servers are huge space savers. They have a shared power supply and network lines. I was visiting IBM one day and they had a sweet blade server connected to a SAN. Talk about a sweet setup. They yanked out the power supply and nothing happened. Talk about redundancy built in. Soon you’re going to be able to migrate your O/S from one blade to the other.

So, this post is rambling a little. I’m not a salesperson. Talk to someone at ClearCube if you want to get the sales pitch. Trust me. Learning about blade servers may be the best thing you can do for your business.

I ran across an article that talked about FoIP which is like VoIP, but send faxes across the internet. This started me thinking to what a business could do connect with other businesses. Many businesses like the healthcare field use faxes like crazy. By implementing a fax server, a business in the healthcare industry are able to save $1000’s of dollars in printing costs.

It’s even cooler if you are able to implement this fax processing over the internet. I’m going to have to do this at my work since our building won’t have an analog phone line available. Luckily, we’re planning on having Cisco VoIP phones and I hear they have an adapter to handle faxes over the internet.

I am interested to see how secure this is. I’d like to run a trace on the line when the fax is being sent to see how secure it is. Security might be the biggest problem with sending faxes across the internet.

At work my boss has been freaking out about not being able to manage all of the various assets we are resonsible for. Granted we are a technology group that has a pretty large area of responsibility and a ton of computer assets. Plus, he’s paying the price when the “higher ups” keep asking him to report on what computers we have in our inventory.

Asset Management Software is really his only solution. He’s tried wasting his time with a spreadsheet and an access database (translate glorified spreadsheet). He even tried to do it in our ticket system, but trust me that is a crappy solution.

Netsimplicity seems like it might just be the right solution for us. I think I’m going to tell him to do the Visual Asset Manager Free Trial.

This lists is enough reason to spend the time trying it out:

# Automatically discover and audit Windows workstations throughout your organization.
# Manage inventory: This asset management software can inventory facility, operational and IT assets. Scan and print barcodes; track leases, maintenance, depreciation repair history and fair market value.
# Visually map assets to assigned locations and employees, locate them instantly, and manage office relocation.

The visual map’s great. The barcodes are even better. Now they just need to sell some barcode scanners.

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Last weekend I went down to Arkansas for a job interview. It was a great job and had a lot of potential. However, it only did part of the things that I love. I would be helping with their technology, but they also wanted me to become an expert witness (which is their core business). That’s a fantastic opportunity that could pay a lot of money. However, I decided that wasn’t me.

What am I? As I thought about it, I LOVE to be able to implement technology in a business and totally revolutionize the way they work. I guess that’s why I love working in the healthcare field. You can use tons of great technology to increase the level of care given to patients. Not to mention they are way behind the curve on their use of technology so I can make a significant impact.

I was talking to someone recently about technology and I realized how much I love technology. A teacher of mine in college had the entire class cheering, “Technology is where it’s at BABY!!” I guess I still have that vision. A business should learn about technology because I think it can revolutionize your processes.