I'm sure everyone is aware that in my business internet connectivity is a must! I can't go without connectivity so I have a Suddenlink cable connection plus a Verizon EV-DO card for my laptop.

Here I am sitting at my keyboard working away at 12:55am putting together a Google Analytics account for one of my website clients plus modifying my own Analytics account. I hit submit on the button and..and..and...boy Google was taking forever to respond! That's really odd? Low and behold I look down and my Skype icon had gone dim. A quick glance at my Motorola SB5120 and darn it! The cable connection was down.

Now I have to admit that I've been very pleased with my cable connection. It is a rare thing that it goes down. As a matter of fact, the only issues I've really had were DNS issues which are common among many providers. I solved that with a switch to OpenDNS. Other than that I've only experienced a few outages. Unfortunately, this was a bad time for one.

No worries though. I just popped in my V640 smartcard, dialed in and presto! - Broadband access! Green light to Skype, Hamachi, and all my other web apps and away I go!

I finished up my Analytics work, logged in to Blogger to post this, and think I'll head to bed now. After all, I have a client due to call around 6:30am and one dropping off a laptop at 8:30am. Its going to be another long day, but I love every minute of it.

It's been a few days, well almost 2 weeks, since I've posted, but life and business have been very busy to say the least! That's my typical and predictable excuse.

Over the last week I've been to extensively work with Google's Blogger both for myself and for a client. So far its been fairly straightforward and things have worked relatively well. On this SmarterGeek blog, I am pushing the blogger content to my smartergeek site via the FTP interface. This was pretty easy to setup and works fairly well and quickly. My personal blog is hosted on Blogger's servers and using some DNS settings with my domain, I'm able to keep all the URL's pretty much like I want them. This gives me 2 scenarios to play with, which in turn allows me to advise my clients better.

As luck would have it, I gained a new client and guess what? That new client, Stephanie Stahl, wanted to setup 2 separate blogs. I've got to be the luckiest guy alive. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - I wake up every morning hoping there are enough hours in the day to do all the cool stuff I need to do.

Needless to say, after an initial meeting and agreement on services, she is well on her way to blogdom! Now, I'm playing with the templates to further tweak and refine the blogs. I may also try to do some cool stuff on this blog with ASP and includes to really jazz up the blog. We'll see how it works.

LMAO - now this is funny! Its a few days old, but still funny as hell. It seems that consumerist.org setup a "honey pot" computer to catch a GeekSquad agent stealing porn from the pc!

If you read the entire story, they are actually trying to prove a point that porn and file theft (or prying eyes) are rampant in the pc repair industry. As a professional repair technician among my other talents, I take my client's data and privacy very seriously. While I do often deal with client data for imaging or archiving purposes, actually "taking of the data" is a no-no!

Of course, this raises the issue of whether the client's porn was ripped from a website, downloaded via bit torrent, or home-made? Either way, it just goes to prove how incredibly stupid most of the GeekSquad agents really are. Haven't they heard of The Pirate Bay and bit torrent?

No wonder I don't consider them competition!

Ok Ok - a lot of my tech friends have wondered why I haven't ever started a blog. I have a podcast, which is out of date by 1 year, and that probably explains why I haven't started a blog. It's all about time management and lately my time has been very unmanageable.

My tech support and consulting business has doubled over the last year. That's a good thing and I'm certainly not griping, but it makes things like podcasting and blogging take a back seat. That's unfortunate since my podcast and newsletter usually would generate me new business. Which came first - the chicken or the egg?