Growing in a Down Economy

Trimming the Fat I am all in favor of trimming the fat. Every company has inefficiencies and employees that aren’t adding value to the company. This exercise of fat trimming should be an ongoing exercise, quarterly. If a company larger than 200 employees is firing 10% or more o...

Backup Your Files

One of the worst experiences you can have as a computer operator is to realize you (or something else) just did something and wiped out your files. The purpose of this article is to show you how to automatically backup your files often and automatically. I use this setup to back...

Portero Raises 6.6 Million

I am happy to announce that Portero has raised $6.6 million in funding. The round was led by LFE Capital joined by returning backers including Grosvenor Funds. TechCrunch picked up the announcement early this morning and featured us on their home page. As I have a bit of an i...

Backing up MySQL

I don’t know very many people that haven’t been devastated by the loss of data… Yet I am baffled that millions of professional IT workers still ignore backing up their data. Since computers are great at doing repetitive things like backups.. why not spend 20 minutes sett...

One Hundred Pushups

A while back a bunch of people were twittering about the 100 pushup challenge. Thanksgiving was the catalyst for me. I began my quest for better health about a week ago. The premise of the challenge is quite simple. It is a six week program, that if followed, you can do 100 cons...

How RIM handed the mobile market over to Apple

Hint: It has nothing to do with touch screens. While RIM scrambles to create the next greatest device, or their “iPhone killer” it needs to recognize that it’s no longer about the device. RIM don’t you remember that touchscreens aren’t new.. Palm had them back in the 9...

Hire Your Next Consultant Using Twitter

At Portero we had an issue with our network. I know enough about networking to understand the basics. I actually used to work on the IOS back during the dawn of the internet. Though things have changed since then, the biggest issue is I don’t remember enough to fix network...

Promotion

Permit me to shamelesly announce my promotion to Chief Information Officer at Portero Inc. Here is the Press Release on the wire this week. Portero, Inc., is pleased to announce the promotion of Steve P. Francia to the position of Chief Information Officer (CIO), effective imme...

Why are you still shopping offline?

Today I visited one of the largest national office supply outlets. I had a specific purpose in mind. I needed to pickup 2 wireless routers and 1 audio cable. What transpired caused me to wonder why anyone does any offline shopping anymore. My experience at the store caused me to...

Managing Multiple Firefox Profiles in OS X

One of the great features of Firefox is the ability to manage multiple profiles. This is a very handy feature with many different uses. Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to do on a mac. I will show you how to setup multiple profiles on a mac that appear and run like normal mac appli...