Fear

"Never negotiate out of fear."

Fear drives the market, drives bad business decisions, and drives people in/out of relationships. Stop, don't be afraid. If you have good fundamentals, good core, good base, good values, you're fine. Sit back, relax. Don't over pay for stuff: house, stock, etc.

Paraphrased from Colin Cowherd, The Thundering Herd on ESPN Radio - 1/23/08

Email and Web Hosting

Research Notes:

• Mac Mail is synced with Address Book, iCal and other programs
  
• Entourage may work better with work email
  
• For Yahoo! POP, must have a Yahoo! Plus email account which costs $20/year. Gmail offers free POP service.
  
• Mozilla Thunderbird offers a third option, but since I already have two programs, might as well use what I've got.
  
• Probably just look into personal home network that supports time machine and a network printer. Possibly one with NAS capability (Mirra). Don't necessarily want software that automatically syncs all network computers. Can do that on my own and don't want business to mix with home usage.
  
• For web hosting, .mac account seems reasonable at $100/year. Can use own URL and supports email, blogs, etc. using iWeb.
  
• Look into Google Apps

Network Notes

Acronyms:

• IP Address - Internet Protocol Address
  
• URL - Uniform Resource Locator
  
• WAN - Wide Area Network
  
• LAN - Local Area Network
  
• WLAN - Wireless Local Area Newtork
  
• MAC - Media Access Control
  • any device with networking hardware has a unique MAC address
• DNS - Domain Name Server
  • converts IP addresses to URL names
• WEP - Wired Equivalent Protection
  • a passcode to protect a WLAN
• SSID - Service Set Identifier
  
• Hexadecimal Digits - 0-9 and a-f

Test

This is a test post. I'm using the ScribeFire plug-in for Firefox 2.0. I actually installed it months ago but didn't become a regular blogger until later and forgot I had it. Hope this works, it would make life a lot easier.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Hard Drives

I'm looking into buying an external hard drive to backup my laptop. At first I thought I would go wihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifth a small portable drive since I only have one computer and don't store too many files. But while researching options I stumbled across a few drives that let you access your data through the internet, effectively creating your own server. I really like this idea and think it could be a good fit for my needs, especially since I'll be traveling a lot in the near future with access to a separate machine than my home unit.

My chief concerns are:

1. Security
   
2. Price
   
3. Mac and PC compatibility
   
4. Size: I don't need a lot of space, but I would like room to expand.
   
5. Heat, noise, general disturbances caused by running the unit

Here is a list of links with my research thus far:

• CNet - Drives that let you access your data wherever you are
  
• Buffalo has gotten very bad user ratings on CNet
  
• Western Digital - Bad ratings for MioNet software package
  
• Linksys - Poor transfer speeds
  
• Iomega - Poor software
  
• SimpleTech SimpleShare NAS Server - cheap, software has very high reviews, tech support mixed reviews, note: quiet, Mac and PC Compatibility (apparently not for Vista), not sure if it works as a server

Presentation Zen

Notes from Guy Kawasaki's blog: How to Change the World

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds

Edward Tufte - books on designing appropriate visuals

TED a site with presentations of 'ideas worth spreading'

I don't make many presentations at the moment, but I likely will in the future. Along with some practice through a local ToastMasters group, these should serve to help me become an effective presenter.

Things to remember

• Real Estate book by WSJ from Frank
  
• Printer/Scanner/Copier at Costco for $85
  
• www.bankrate.com
  
• MacWorld Expo
  
• Wikinvest