Find your closest site here >> http://dellreconnect.com/

Any of you that have asked my advice on PCs know that I’ve been critical of Dell’s consumer line of products, mostly because of the decline of their tech support in the 2000s, and will know I am no  corporate cheerleader.  They have however raised the bar on their server support in recent years and maintained the excellent customer service on acquired companies like SonicWall (which is a fav of mine).  I will reexamine their consumer products, but this is an excellent reason to start, or continue, to use their enterprise products.

I am currently using Seagate 2nd Gen SSHDDs and Samsung Evo 840 SSDs.  Depending on what you are doing and how much storage you need an SSD or 3rd Gen SSHDD  is going to be a huge improvement for your system.

First of all the concept of internet speed is a misnomer to begin with.  Electrons travel at the same speed along copper wires and photons travel at the same speed along fiber optic cables regardless of how much you pay and how your connection “rated”. This is limited by laws, those of physics however and not the FCC.  Probably the closest thing to speed you can measure is the time it takes to “ping” another internet address.  All of this is affected by a variety of factors including the distance and the speed of light and resistance of the medium traveled.  None of this has any impact on the “speed” the ISP touts.  

That “speed” is also referred to slightly more accurately as bandwidth or even more accurately as capacity.  Think of it as a straw that you use to drink your big gulp.  If you get a bigger (larger diameter) straw, you can suck down your sugary drink quicker.  The fluid doesn’t enter your mouth at a different speed, you just get more in the same amount of time.

Think of your internet connection then as a pipe, or even more accurately as two pipes, and the diameter of those pipes is what we are going to evaluate.  For almost anyone that streams anything, download times are very relevant… to a point.   For household usage, depending on the amount of media you might be trying to stream at the highest peak of usage, this would be your biggest limiting factor on minimum download bandwidth.

For businesses this is a more complex scenario.  For download speeds, you want to look at the size of files you might get emailed or your staff might retrieve.  Are you using the cloud and if so how much data are your moving across your Wide Area Network (WAN) connection?  Streaming could be a consideration, but probably not your top priority.  In reality business download bandwidth is not something that generally needs to be as fast as residential.

So now the question of upload bandwidth.  Does it need to “match”  or be synchronous?  Almost always the answer is “No”. For residential usage, the biggest reasons that you would want the speed to be fast is a) you are using Slingbox or some other media redirection so you can watch TV remotely,b) need to access files or remotely control your computers.  While remote computer control applications like Remote Desktop or Log Me In work better with higher bandwidth, they are only sending screenshots.  And how often do you need a 5 gig file from your home PC.  The only times you would “notice” it from home is if you were to upload a large email attachment or transfer a very large file to someone.  Most consumer email cannot receive the size file that would be at issue, Facebook, Twitter, and others limit the size of the files you can upload, and none of this has the slightest effect on downloading data, which is the primary thing residential consumers do on the internet.

Again business usage is more complicated.  Do you host an application that others access from outside? For this your would want to identify any points where your application needs to send large amounts of data quickly to the client.  This can be identified by flattened humps rather than peaks on a network traffic monitor, indicating that the data has to wait to be transferred.

If you transfer large files outside your local network, than this is another consideration.  Finally, site to site Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or extending your enterprise into the cloud are other prime considerations for high upstream bandwidth.  These are not very common scenarios, yet, and even when present usually do not demand extraordinarily large bandwidth allocations.  If you have these requirements, then you most likely knew everything in this article and probably could even improve on it.

In conclusion, the likelihood that you need synchronous or “matching” bandwidth speeds is directly proportional to your knowledge of your WAN requirements and absent the knowledge that you need higher upload bandwidth, you most likely would have no use for it.  In other words… If you don’t have a reason to need it, you don’t need it, and certainly shouldn’t pay more for it!

1. Get a spare OEM battery.  Seriously get an OEM not a knockoff.  It makes a HUGE difference. Get 2. Or 3. Not 4.  Get them on Amazon.  The price for OEMs ratio to the likelihood
   

   Get these if your phone can use them

   they’re fake is better there than Ebay.  You are going to need another battery at some point.  GET IT NOW.

2. Get an external battery charger for your specific battery.  This isn’t a Mophie, that is an external battery… this is a battery charger that will charge your battery outside the phone.  You can charge all the extra batteries up the night before a big event (with enough planning between your phone charger and the external 3 is about the most you can mange and the reason not to get 4)  You can also leave a depleted battery charging at the outlet without having to be tethered along side it.
3. Ok, I know, you have an iPhone.  Neither of those options work for you.  If you have a GSM SIM card … Get a burner (prepaid) phone on your carrier’s network.  Whether or not you have an iPhone it can be really useful to have another phone in case yours dies or is crushed, soaked, etc.  For about $60 you can have a spare phone.  You can also use the spare phone without the SIM for Wifi access.  This will also more likely be an Android or Windows (really not a bad option) so you can go back to 1 & 2 and do the battery thing now.
4. Use your laptop.  Many now don’t even need to be “on” as they have a USB charging port that is colored yellow.  If you are carrying around your computer, put it to use.  No yellow USB?  Turn your laptop on, then put it to sleep (usually just shutting the lid works) and you should be able to freeload your phone.  I found this was a GREAT way to use my Surface!
5. Manage your device.  If you need to eek out every last drop you can turn down the brightness, turn off the radio, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, turn off synchronization. Check any apps that may be running without it being obvious.  A quick good way to get a baseline of no apps running is turn off your phone, then be very selective on what you turn back on.  Be especially wary of apps that constantly are assessing where you are or what you are doing, like maps, as they are constantly active and that means wasting power.
6. Go for a ride.  “A ride… now that’s a good idea!  Let’s Go!”  Unless the late great Dennis Hopper is suggesting it, a ride might be just the trick.  And depending on your car (my Explorer for example) will power the DC 12v even with the key out of the ignition. This can make a good charging “locker”, just keep your gadgets out of view or your locker may turn into some unscrupulous person’s vending machine.  There are also true charging lockers in many places now, especially conferences and airports. This isn’t a great option over plugging into a wall though as you are forced to be either tethered to your phone or leave it behind.  At least in your car you have a comfy seat and a bit of  quiet or radio.
7. My last suggestion is the one I recommend in addition to any and all of the above suggestions.  This is to get an external universal battery.  A BIG ONE.  4000 mAh is probably the smallest I would suggest.  I got an 800 mAh Enercell from Radio Shack.  The only nice part is it is small and needs no cables, but it would only charge to about 25% and then it would start sucking the power back out of the phone.  Yikes!  I still have it and keep it for desperate situations, but it is not worth the money. I loved my Mophie.  I am going to get another Mophie.  I had no issues with it and used it often.  It is sized in a way that is convenient.

Here is the final reason to get a big external battery.  They are a great investment! You become one of the most useful people in the world to someone that needs a charge to their device. Talk about instant rapport and standing!  Think about how long you can maintain a conversation with someone if they are using your charger?  Or, you can leave it with a person (why you should always use more than one of my suggestions above) and have a reason to be in contact later as a follow up.

And hey you could land yourself several awesome thank you meals!

Oh and if you want to go all MacGuyver on this… http://www.instructables.com/id/Lost-Your-Charger-How-to-Charge-any-Battery-Survi/?ALLSTEPS

This is an awesome way to adapt a universal power supply when you don’t have (or they don’t make) a specific tip…  http://www.instructables.com/id/Hacking-your-iGo-Universal-Power-Adapter/?ALLSTEPS

When I finally got around to looking at the DC, the problem was obvious, some process had gone haywire and it was out of memory, but a quick reboot and it was fixed.  After kicking myself for wasting so much time, I realized that there was a lesson here:

Sometimes when something goes wrong after you make a change, it was going to go wrong anyway.  So don’t always be sure that you are the one that is in the wrong.  AND… Some times those hooves really are zebra.

Photo Credit: (c)Tomo.Yun (www.yunphoto.net/en/)

It was a blessing in disguise, as the server needed a refresh, but at 8PM on Friday, with a bunch of processing to be done on the weekend, it wasn’t the time to get fancy.  The OS was mirrored on a PCI raid card, and the other 2 drives were just plain old SATA, the drives were housed in a cage and finding a machine to accommodate that enclosure was the challenge.  By taking the cd out of an older ThinkCentre I had a place to pass the cables and was able to boot!  #WOOT!

Aside from some of the security settings on the shares needing to be reset, all appeared well, until the mail attachments stopped coming…

It seemed that any attachments much larger than 1MB were getting stuck trying to be delivered from the mail scrubbing service.  The messages were listed as “In deferral” because their communication with the server was interrupted.

Ok, well first thing I knew was the server was in my office which meant a lot more copper wire between it and the gateway.  So moving the franken-box server was attempt 1.  #fail.

Ok, well maybe the NIC was the issue, cheap easy fix.  #fail x 2

Ok, we were in the process of being transitioned by our mail scrubber to a new system.  Perhaps the old system had been deprecated.  Time to finalize the move.  My test email at 3 AM seemed to go through, looks like success.  NOPE… no one else’s seemed to come through.  #failfailfail

Ok, time to start going backward.  Luckily the easiest thing to change was the network connection.  There was no way to go back to the original NIC as it was on the failed MoBo.  But the other big change was the switch.  So I grabbed the old network cable and swapped it with the new CAT6 cable I had upgraded it to.  Bingo.  Flood of attachments coming in.  #ITWin.

It will take some down time once everything settles to identify exactly the issue, but my money is on the fancy Gigabit switch that all the new boxes use.  It should have throttled back on the bandwidth and the MTU, but my guess is there was some sort of incompatibility.  Or it was just homesick for its old switch, computers have feelings too.

http://www.irs.gov/Retirement-Plans/Retirement-Plans-FAQs-regarding-SEPs-Contributions

Depositing and deducting contributions

When must I deposit the contributions into the SEP-IRAs?

You must deposit contributions for a year by the due date (including extensions) for filing your federal income tax return for the year. If you obtain an extension for filing your tax return, you have until the end of that extension period to deposit the contribution, regardless of when you actually file the return.

If you did not request an extension to file your tax return and did not deposit the SEP plan contributions by the filing due date for that return, you are not allowed to deduct any SEP plan contributions on that year’s return. The contributions may be deducted on the following year’s return.

If you improperly deducted SEP plan contributions on your return, you must file an amended tax return as soon as possible.

This means if you don’t have the cash on April 15, you can just file 4868 and have an extra 6 months to fund the account.  Be mindful that the account needs to be established in the tax year you are taking the deduction, so if you haven’t set it up yet, do it now for 2014 and you can have until Oct, 15 1015 to fund it!   Roth and traditional IRA contributions do NOT get this special treatment.

My purpose for this site is to share information that you can immediately put to use.   I am going to be writing at least three times a week in hopes to help you with business and personal strategies that hopefully have a slightly different approach.  A lot of my posts will be technical in nature, but I will also share social media and marketing information and the ubiquitous general life lessons that I have learned and think are helpful sprinkled in.

I certainly want you to be successful; and given my Myers-Briggs personality type of ENTP, I will always be looking for more effective, efficient, and economical approaches.  But also true to ENTP, I won’t tolerate boredom, I refuse to keep doing the same old things, I’ll take different perspectives for kicks and giggles, and I will hopefully keep throwing metaphorical (and metadata) monkeywrenches into the mix.   I will be setting up the ability to do office hours online, where I can post my availability and help as I can via Google Hangouts.  I hope to convert this into a video series, because if one person asks a question, probably 10 are thinking it.  So through this I hope that together we can solve some of your bigger problems.   Please sign up to my email list (coming soon), and email me or tweet @StanReeser your issues, I will respond to as many as I can!   I will also be starting a newsletter in the upcoming weeks so signing up to my list will get that in your inbox as well.

Finally,I also hope to share a bit with you about how I harness serendipity and why it is such a key factor in my life.  I foresee it being a recurring theme in my posts.

Oh, and by the way,  introduce yourself!