We are proud to announce the newest member to the group — Steve Riekeberg of the Geek Cred Podcast.  Steve has been a supporter of the group for quite a while and seemed like just a good fit for membership — no pun intended.

Steve’s podcast covers everything geek from tech to sci-fi including a regular quiz to test your geek cred.

On behalf of all FiT members, welcome to the group.

You can find the Geek Cred Podcast over at http://www.geekcred.net.

As you may, or may not, know, one of the things we try to do with the Friends in Tech site is highlight not just the techie aspects of our members through their various podcasts and blogs, but also showcase them as regular people as well. People with a variety of interests, hobbies, and projects that are not part of the normal FiT world.

In that regard, over the next few weeks, or months as time allows, we’re going to be putting together some “mashups”. Basically, these are mashed together RSS feeds of other online projects that we are involved in that you can subscribe to and keep track of what the various Friends in Tech members are doing in one place. The first of these is FiT Photography.

FiT Photography was an obvious choice for the first of these projects because so many of us have an interest in photography. Most of us have Flickr or Zoomr accounts, if not a seperate photo blog, to use as part of the mashup, and thus it was just a matter of finding a good mashup tool, and putting them all together.

The tool I used to create the aggregate feed was xFruits. It is a very powerful tool for doing a lot of different things with RSS feeds, I highly recommend checking it out. Then I am routing that finished product through FeedBurner, which gives us even more power to use the feed in a variety of ways, if we decide to, or to gauge what sort of interest there is in the topic, which will help us decide what more we might want to do with it going forward.
Anyway, if you’re interested in subscribing to the feed, you can locate it here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/FitPhotography

Greetings to all!

Kevin asked me if I would like to act as a community punching bag, uh I mean blog about Microsoft topics related to Small Business.  Since I don’t get enough abuse at home I immediately accepted his offer!

First, a little about myself:

My wife and I own an IT services company in Central PA (PC Works Plus, Inc.)  I started this company in 1989 after a 4 year stint in the US Army.  My official job in the Army was a 63E (M1 Abrams Tank Mechanic).  I spent the last 12 months of my enlistment in an unofficial job role assisting our Battalion Motor Officer get data out of a new system that had been deployed.  Basically I took data out of an Informix SQL database and used dBase III and Clipper to put that data into a useable format.

Our beloved Kevin Devin joined in on the fun by coming to PA and working with me for about a year following his term in the Army.  Even though business was picking up, Kevin decided that eating and actually making a living outweighed all the ‘fun’ we were having and decided to head back to California.

Luckily things continued to improve and before I knew it we were well past our 5 year mark.  By that time I had convinced my wife to join me in the business which is arguably one of the best decisions ‘we’ ever made.

The past 17 years of my career have included plenty of software development.  Initially I was writing apps using dBase, Clipper and FoxBase/FoxPro.  In 1995 I started working with Lotus Notes which continued until 2003 when we decided to move to the .NET and SQL platform.

As for networking, I started with Novell Netware 2.15 and Lantastic (yes Lantastic!).  I obtained my CNE around the release of Netware 3.11 and kept it until after Netware 5.0.  Netware 5.0 marked the end for our Netware days and the beginning of our Microsoft focus.

So, today our company is made up of three components.  IT services, Telecom services and application development with a total of 15 employees.  We are a Microsoft Gold Certified partner and we focus 100% of our IT and Appdev services around Microsoft products.  At one time our business model was  a ‘break-fix’ type of service.  Today 99% of our clients are contracted managed services clients.

As my new friends from the Cleveland geek dinner can tell you, I am VERY supportive of Microsoft products and I don’t try to hide that.  I am looking forward to blogging about how we implement solutions for SMB clients some of the issues and challenges of running an IT services company.

Well, that is the best I can to do wrap up my first blog entry and the last 17 years of my life.  I hope to have something interesting next time!

DW

Over time one of the most troublesome parts of any high-tech career can be the routine that is a large part of any computer job. Day in and day out, you punch the same buttons, change the same tapes and answer the same support calls. You might think that routine is killing any affection you might have had for your job. In fact, if you use routine in an appropriate way, you will find that it can give you the freedom and flexibility to rise above the day-to-day humdrum realities of your job and reach for something more.

We have all had some experience with them…creative geniuses, experts in their field, those who have accomplished much, but leave a path of destruction behind them. We see them as the brilliant movie director who everyone comes to loathe personally or the star programmer who alienates the rest of the staff. We see their staff catering to their every whim in a futile effort to keep them from lashing out. We see the regular workers just trying to get through a day without being abused. We see everyone apologizing for them or forgiving them because their genius somehow allows their attitude.

Often, when in the heat of an argument, one person will bring out the ultimate reason for their transgression, “Well, everyone else does it!” or its companion, “That’s just the way it is!” Few things will spark my anger more quickly than these phrases. In a few words, they seem to sum up so much that can go wrong in the world. These phrases carry a sense of finality and abandonment. A feeling that seems to say, “give up!”

Whether you are designing a new payroll system, web site or a point-of-sale system for a new cash register, as a high-tech careerist you will have to face one issue again and again. Too often high-tech projects are instituted and managed by those people who will use it the least. If you want to develop truly useful products and systems, you have to dig down into a company’s structure and find out what the workers really need, not what management thinks they need.

The Roots of Change

In many businesses, technology is a two-headed beast. On the one side, it fosters innovation, productivity and income. On the other, it produces seismic change in business practices once thought stable, fosters discontent, and can even make a business obsolete. Succeeding in your high-tech career, and helping your company to succeed, requires deft handling of both sides of this equation You need to be constantly applying technology without ignoring those facets that could change the world beneath your feet.

Sunday nights show is going to be a big one. Tell your neighbor, friends and remind your dog…Chuck and Kreg interview Adam Savage from the MythBusters! He talks about past Urban Myths that they have tackled, upcoming events on the show for the new season, and what life is like as a MythBuster.

Be on the look out for that, over on Technorama over at chuckchat.com.
The show is released late Sunday night.

Have you ever felt the rain?
From the Archives — Originally published March 23, 2001

The Southern California winter may not bring much snow, except in the mountains, but it is our rainy season, with large storms rolling in out of the west. This year we are also experiencing a similar Winter in the high-tech world. Storms of company failures and associated layoffs are rolling in. You cannot control when you might suffer a layoff any more than you can control the weather, but you can control your reaction to a layoff to insure that you keep your career headed in the right direction.

October 21, 2005

Many years ago, when I was still working in a corporate IT department, there was one pernicious problem that seemed to have no solution. Each day was a constant battle to balance the needs of the department workers, our clients, with the mandates and requirements of corporate IT. It is a fairly typical situation where clients want the opportunity to test and implement every new piece of technology that comes along while the IT department is doing its best to standardize and leverage the use of technology throughout the entire operation so that departments and divisions can communicate and work well together. In my particular case, it was a simple matter of fact that the biggest issues I would face each day were somehow related to this almost impossible balancing act. Unfortunately, the passage of years has not made the problem magically disappear. It is still with us today. (Continued)