Brandon Darling

Need to center something between the top and bottom of a webpage, but you want to use clean CSS and not some garbage tables?

I am no web developer, nor am I a CSS / HTML guru.  I scour the web for what I need and I share what I find.

I found these:

http://www.infinitywebdesign.com/research/cssverticalcentereddiv.htm

http://waxpad.com/waxpadarticles/vcexample.html

http://d-graff.de/fricca/center.html

You tell me if these suck, or if they’re not compliant.  I’m looking for the holy grail - a compliant, well-behaved solution for vertical centering that also takes less than a 1MB style sheet.

In business, technology is always placed in the “expenses” column of the balance sheet.  With that kind of perception, management will always be antagonistic to technology because it costs them money.  Instead, put technology systems in the “assets” column where they belong.  Doing so will then reinforce the reality that technology is an asset, and investing in that asset produces returns: that is, technology makes you money.

Some basic technology tips for business managers:

1. You don’t understand computers and you likely never will.  This is not a flaw in your character or laziness on your part.  Technology is hard and complicated and you have a real job to do anyway.  Delegate technology to someone who actually understands it (me!) and let that person worry about megabytes and gigahertz.

2. Never ask for a line-item quote.  Resist the temptation to understand each “part” of a solution and take your red pen through items that your technology professional can’t convince you that you need.  Re-read rule number one.  You don’t understand this stuff anyway.  Realize that the professional recommending these items isn’t using your money to play with toys.  Yes, there are unscrupulous folk out there and you should ask questions to test the character of your technology pro.  However, do NOT under any circumstances start pulling hundred-dollar items off the list.  You may temporarily enjoy the “shoppers high” of saving a few bucks, but you will unknowingly cause massive problems and headaches.  Again, you don’t understand this stuff and if the pro says you need it, you need it.

3. Buy early, buy often.  Computers get old after 2-3 years.  They’ve done that since 1981 and there’s no sign it’s going to stop.  You will not single-handedly change the way technology works by futilely demanding that all computers last 5 years.  Also, resist the temptation to wait to upgrade.  Everyone knows that whatever you buy today will be insanely cheap in 6 months - you will not be seen as some dope who got screwed.  It happens to everyone.  What you need to do is make that upgrade (investment) TODAY so you can get ahead of the short-sighted lump who’s putting off that upgrade thinking he’s saving the bottom line.

4. Build a good foundation.  You don’t ask the contractor to cut corners on your home’s foundation, so don’t do it with technology.  Run a lot of cabling - more than you need NOW - because you’re going to need it later.  Buy more servers than you think you need - you’ll use them anyway and you’ll have a spare for when one of them inevitably fails on you.  Buy good, hefty mice and keyboards and SAVE THEM during upgrades.  You’d be surprised what you spend on replacing those $15 3-month-lifespan mice.  Buy good quality, BIG flat screen displays (19″ minimum) and give every employee 2 screens - that *alone* has been proven to increase productivity by 15%-20%.   Volume License all of your Microsoft software.  Bring your email in-house with Exchange and get a third party to filter your email for spam.

5. Train your people.  A well trained user with a 10-year-old system is vastly more productive than an untrained user with the latest technology.  Investing in your employees is never a bad thing, anyway.  Besides, you’ll see fewer help desk calls (which saves money) and you’ll see people actually doing and producing more (which makes money).

6.  Get away from paper.  Don’t jump on the “paperless office” hype - that kind of fanaticism is dangerous. Paper will be around for awhile, so don’t shun it all at once as if every sheet were laced with the plague.  But don’t replicate paper.  Kill the copier and get a scanner.  Invest in fax-to-email technology and eliminate the idiotic process of printing an email so you can fax it someone.  Don’t create forms - get a company Intranet and use online forms with reporting and search capability to manage all your in-house documentation.  And banish those lousy PostIT notes and get a notes management application (or learn to use Outlook) so your note to remind you to do something will actually remind you!

More to come…

I was recently asked what value I can provide to people and businesses.  Sure, I can help your business run better - but no one is ever interested in *improving* themselves.

So I went through my project list that’s eight years old and I came up with a list of services.  I can provide the ability to make untraceable, untappable phone calls from anywhere in the world to anywhere else.  I can secure financial data and product data so tightly that by the time supercomputers were done trying to hack my system the sun would have burnt out.  I can create an entire parallel “Internet” where every dot com is available once again and only the people we want on our Internet can get on our Internet.

I can also obtain information.  You would be surprised how much information is being given away by businesses and private individuals.  I don’t mean hacking or other illegal activity, here.  I mean scouring the hidden data on websites, in emails, and chat sessions to gather information that most people don’t realize they’re releasing.

All you have to do is give me the challenge - I can complete the job.  Let’s see if anyone wants to take me on.

Get your pen and pencil out and take some notes.  If you manage, own, operate, or otherwise write your meal ticket in business, then you’re LOSING business because of your website.

Then again, you might be Google - and you’re printing money with your website.

But if your not Google, your website is surely turning away more business than it’s bringing to you.  And the worst part is, you don’t even know it.

Take everything you’ve ever heard about websites, online marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), linking, tracking, pay-per-click, and forget about it.  It doesn’t matter to you.  You’re running a business - providing a service, making a widget, selling schwag.  The question you should be asking of your website is “what have you done for me lately?”

Blogs are generally useless (for your business).  Portals are even worse.  And if you have a website that hasn’t been updated in the last week, then you’re irrelevant.  Your 10 year old website is an eyesore on the web and people - perhaps potential customers - are looking at that slovenly mess online and hitting the back button fast than you can say AOL.

Think your ecommerce site is an asset?  Wrong.  Sure, you convert 10 sales per month.  How many are you losing?  Probably 10 times that.  Why?  You’re website is old, probably hard to use.  It probably is set in a color scheme someone hates.  You likely have misspellings and grammar errors.  You probably had your brother’s friend’s uncle’s shuffleboard partner who “knows computers” build your website.  You spent $300 and you patted yourself on the back.

You are an idiot.

What’s the answer?  Online guerrilla warfare.  How many people visit your site and leave?  Did you get their information?  Do you know why they left?  Do you know where they went?  Do you know how they found you?  What words they searched on when they hit your site?  What sites they were on before you?

You can obtain all this information.

Then you have to act.

The fact is that you’re lazy.  I’m lazy.  People are lazy.  This is not because we are bad, or because of Original Sin.  The Universe tends toward entropy.  Things are cooling off, slowing down.  So it’s easy to drink that koolaid and become nothing but a pundit of the status quo.  Of course, some young punk driving a car that costs more than your house is right on your heels and about ready to eat you and most of your suppliers for lunch.

You are not invicible.

To that end, you need tenacious, covert, and intelligent online help.  You need me.  Face it - no one else is going to tell you the truth.  Sales guys want to be your friend and lie to you all day long.  You want to hear those lies, because they make you feel good.  They make you feel successful and important.  You feel like you’re worth more than that kid trying to sell you something because he kisses your ass so well.  The fact is, he’s worth more than you because he has drive and passion.  He’s hungry for more than cheetos and doughnuts.  He wants your money and he largely gets it.

The deal is your revenue flow is never guaranteed, and about the time you get comfortable is about the time you start losing money.

Back to your website - you have no idea how many people are turned OFF by your site.  The truth is that it’s better to have NO online identity than a bad one.

I open this for discussion:

Should a small business (under 20 users) opt for their own infrastructure: that is, servers, domain controllers, file sharing, Windows SBS, Exchange, Outlook -

OR

Should they buy $300 machines, run Linux, and use Google Apps?

Can Google Apps effectively replace all the email, file sharing, collaboration, shared calendaring, and other basic business needs?  There are even online time-tracking and accounting applications.

Is the world of the business network dead?  Will Software as a Service replace IT architecture?

Your comments are needed.

When it comes to technology, there is no such thing as knowing everything, there is only knowing that which you do not know.

While trying to explain the role of IT consultants to a client, I came up with this analogy:

The relationship of business and Information Technology is like an orchestra: there are three major components: players, instruments, and sheet music.

The players (or musicians) represent the employees of a company (users).  The instruments represent hardware (computers, printers, fax machines).  The sheet music represents software (Word, Excel, Quickbooks).

Put a bunch of musicians in a room with instruments and sheet music and you might get something that sounds okay - you may also get something horrid.  Or you may wind up with something inspired but disorganized, like jazz.

The word orchestra is defined as “a group of players that accompanies action.”  If you want your employees to be able to use technology to take *action* then you need the final, and required, component of an orchestra - the conductor.

A conductor is an interesting person.  While the real performance is going on, that is, while the orchestra is performing for an audience, he is simply flaying his arms like a madman.

In some sense, a consultant does the same thing.  While the business is humming along getting things done, it appears to any casual observer that the consultant is doing little or nothing.

If you watch an orchestra, or any performance, what you *don’t* see is all the “behind the scenes” work - rehearsals, research, practice, and study.

The consultant spends countless unseen hours training, refining, practicing, solving problems, and truly *learning* their craft.  A consultant can come into your business and reduce your problem to a paragraph or a sentence - maybe a single word.

You - as a business owner - think that your business is more complicated.  You think you’re unlike anyone else, and that unless someone has spent the blood, sweat, and tears that you have building your business, no one can understand you.

Get over yourself.

You’re too close to your own business to know what’s good for you.  Someone can summarize your problems, process, or your years of experience in a flash.  Your business is not unique.

Getting back to the orchestra - if you want your business to run well, if you want freedom from problems and “poor performance,” you need a good conductor.

While you might think that your business/technology consultant is wildly flayling his arms like a conductor, realize that he has spent thousands of hours rehearsing and studying.  He’s trying to get your people, your hardware, and your software to make music for your business.  And he can do it better than you can.

As a business owner/manager, your are a spectator of the great orchestra of business.  You pay the bucks to support the orchestra, and you reap the pleasures of hearing great music.  You do not, however, possess the skills of the conductor.  To you, he gets in the way of the music (only visually) but without the conductor you would have no music - only chaos.

www.opendns.com

If you’re looking for a dead-simple, free content filtering solution, Open DNS is for you.  Go there and sign up for a free account.

Open DNS works be replacing (or augmenting) your DNS servers.  For individual workstations, you simply point your DNS servers to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

If you have a router or multiple computers on your network, login to your router and set the DNS servers for the local LAN to the IP addresses listed above.

If you have Active Directory or a network domain - DO NOT replace DNS entries on your workstations or servers!!!

I say this again: Active Directory domains REQUIRE that all servers and workstations use the Internal DNS provided by Active Directory.

To use OpenDNS with Active Directory, go in to the DNS administration settings on your Domain Controllers, and setup forwards to the OpenDNS servers: 208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220.

On the OpenDNS website, you can filter groups of content: violence, sex, social networking, job sites, etc.  Once this is setup, you’ll have a nice dashboard to monitor your DNS usage and you won’t have to deal with trash on your network.  You can also block known phishing sites with a single click!

If you use OpenDNS, drop a line on the blog here.  I would like to gather feedback from other users.

Check out www.serverfiles.com - a good list of software that we IT pros need to survive!  Updated regularly, too!

It never ceases to amaze me how many companies will blindly trust most computer vendors.

Big computer service companies are big.  By definition, they are averse to change, they are slow to adapt, and they are generally driven by politics and bureaucracy. They will not provide most businesses with highly flexible, insightful, and dynamic value.  In other words, they help maintain the status quo.

Big computer service companies have departments: sales, service, and accounting.  Management sits on top.  Call sales anything you want: customer relations, client advocacy, account management.  It’s all sales.  Sales people at computer companies know little or nothing about technology.  Most of them were selling insurance about six months ago and will be selling cars or going back to school in another six months.

Sales people have one job - to sell things.  They are adept at manipulation.  They will take an interest in you and your company.  They will pander to your fears and your demands and they will dutifully regurgitate everything you say, to both make you feel important and make you think that what they’re proposing is really your idea.

And you - YOU Mr./Ms. manager - fall for it every time.

Every. Single. Time.

Once you bite that hook, the sales person disappears. Sure you have their direct line and their email.  You have problems you say? “I’ll route you right over to support,” they say.  They don’t understand what they sold you, let alone how it works and even less, how to fix it.

All that stuff is not their job.  Their job is to sell you things.  If you need help, that’s when you get to experience the other department at most computer service companies: support.

Now here’s pain and torture if I ever saw it.  This is a room full of guys in their late twenties to mid thirties.  They’re moderately educated but socially, they’re adolescents - or maybe prepubescent teenagers.  They probably have major problems with authority and they certainly despise you and your company.  After all, THEY compiled their own kernel for their home LINUX machine and anyone who can’t do that shouldn’t be using a computer…

These folks are the same batch of numbskulls that you’ll have the joy of hiring if you think hiring in-house IT staff is in your future.  Good luck with that.

So, you have a slick-sales-droid pumping your company full of technology you don’t need (or isn’t adequate) for which you have the pleasure of paying a 40% margin so Scott-the-service-tech can come onsite and be condescending to you while he frowns and gripes at your newly purchased equipment at the rate of $200 per hour - including the time it took Scott to reach your office (and his stop-off to Fantasy Games & Hobby along the way).

Once you decide you’re not paying because the problem reoccurred just as Scotty was walking out the door, you get to deal with the former bail bondsman that is the accounting department.  Here’s a guy that will use the words “legal action” in his second sentence.  He, too, doesn’t understand a thing about technology, your company, or your problem.  He too has one job: get your money.

Been down this road to hell?  Of course you have.  You thought that your choice to go with Professional Networking and Technology Solutions Professionals was a good one.  They showed you lots of pie charts and bar graphs in the presentation.  The brought lots of paper.  They brought eight people in for that $20,000 proposal.  They wore nice suits.  And that account manager, boy was she ever sexy!  This HAS to be legit.

Here’s how your $20,000 breaks down:

$1,000 - actual cost of labor/taxes/insurance
$2,000 - software
$4,000 - parts/equipment
$8,000 - commissions

the remaining $5,000 is the “agency overhead,” or profit.  Management runs a tidy operation at about 25% gross margin.  That’s a good take.

You on the other hand got $7,000 worth of value.  That’s paying a 185% premium to work with that technology company.

Again, you might like your technology company.  They make you feel good.  How’s that 185% premium feel, though?

And remember - they are *trained* to make you feel good.  Remember, you are in business.  You work relationships.  You make your customers feel good.  And you get sold by technology people all the time.

Just because you *think* you’re getting good service and have the right technology, configured the right way, working the right way for you - doesn’t mean you actually are.

The fix?  Get a technology company - not a sales company.

We don’t want to be your friends - just your experts.

www.orbistechnology.com