Geoff Meredith: Tech Guru

A longtime friend & colleague of mine, Geoff Meredith, has just gotten back from a business trip to Banff with his wife, Rochelle. He turned it into an experiment of sorts to see how productive he could be away from home. He's written a fascinating pair of articles about it here and here.

Remote Desktop

Being away for a month, I had the time & space to clear my head and think. One thing that became crystal clear was that I needed to improve my workspace at my home office. So I moved things around quite a bit and am very happy with the end result. Thanks to some advice from one of my best friends, a young lad in Mexico, I figured out a way to finally clear my desk of the huge 17" CRT monitor that once consumed a large footprint on it.

Its only purpose was to access a desktop computer that I use as a "server" of sorts for running a database and holding large files. But the fact is that I only rarely need to turn that monitor on. But how to get rid of it?

The key lay in turning on a neat feature in Windows XP called Remote Desktop (though some variation of it is available on every operating system. Once activated then I could connect to the server from any other computer on my network (or even outside my network if I so wanted).

This screen appears. Once all the correct permissions are set then you just need to press "Connect".

This is the desktop screen of my server, except that I'm looking at it on my workstation. One difference is the pale yellow tab on the upper edge. It reminds me that this is a different computer I'm looking at.
Other than that, it all works exactly the same as if you were typing at your local computer. Very, very powerful!

One Of Those Tech Unfriendly Days

Last night the hard drive on my computer started making a strange clicking/clunking sound. Never did that before. After it happened, the computer seemed to go to sleep for about 5 seconds. When I woke up and turned it on, the sound started happening more frequently. I tried a few things to fix the drive but it only got worse. Eventually the computer didn't even recognize the drive altogether!

Thankfully I had copied all my critical data off the computer. So when it died, I was safe. However, I still needed a new one to get back to work. So I walked down to my local NCIX to see what they had in stock. My old one was only 30GB. I was hoping for something in the 60 - 80GB range. No suck luck with what they had on hand. So I settled for a 160GB model; much larger than I required but time was of the essence.

After running a few more errands I got back home and immediately set out to restore Windows XP onto my computer. It's pretty much been an all day affair ever since. Much of the time there's nothing to do but you still have to sit near and watch for prompts. Thankfully I had a second computer to work on.

The next time you ask a friend or family member to fix your computer - for whatever reason - keep in mind that it may take them 10+ hours to do so. The going rate for such work is usually $75 per hour. Just something to think about!

Generation Next

One of my favourite podcasts is from Peter Day's In Business radio programme on the BBC. The latest segment is called "Generation Next" and is all about how marketers are dramatically shifting gears to market [quite differently] to teenagers and 20-somethings. You can listen to it here.

One obvious change revolves around the omnipresence of mobile phones. As one marketer on the show said, "From the perspective of a young person, what kind of idiot would possibly have a landline?" [paraphrasing] I did a double-take when I first heard this, as I grew up in a household with just one phone (a big green one) and only had a second one when I reached my late teens. Nowadays, several people I know only have a mobile phone.