Software

• Internet Access Blocked by Zone Alarm plus Visa

  15 Apr 2009 by John Seiffer in Blog, Software

  I had sporadic problems getting online. It would work fine for anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. Then (sometimes in the middle of loading a page) it would tell me sites were loading (no “page not found” errors) but they never loaded. This happened in all my browsers (Firefox, Chrome and IE). At the same time email would work and I could see other computers on the network. And any other computer could get on the internet fine. I had to reboot to get back to normal.

  All my other computers are running XP. This one is my first with Vista (Home Premium) and like I thought I was supposed to, I loaded protection: AVG anti-virus and Zone Alarm. Both free versions. They’d worked well in my history with XP.
  Solution:
  A shout out to Mark Wasserman of Janus Systems in Branford Connecticut who diagnosed it in ten minutes over the phone. Zone Alarm was the problem.  He says windows firewall is fine for what I do (I don’t spend lots of time online in what he calls dangerous environments – like airports and coffe shops) so I uninstalled Zone Alarms, turned on the windows firewall and am good to go. Mark also said that AVG is fine and virus protection is more important for me.
  Bonus – shut down and start up are a lot faster. Also I used to get an error with Firefox. If I shut it down while it was having a problem and tried to restart it without rebooting, it would tell me it couldn’t start because it was already running. This has now gone away.

  NOTE: This is a blog about business tips not my cat (or my computer) but I’m posting here because I had the hardest time finding any solution online. I hope that by posting it here the search engine spiders will pick it up and others can be helped. As always there’s a takeaway for business.

  Takeaways:

  • Technology keeps evolving. (I thought windows firewall was bad and Zone Alarms was almost a reguirement – those may have been true when I learned them but certainly aren’t now). Every company needs a relationship with someone who keeps up with it.
  • That person should not be you unless that’s your job or your hobby.
  • One size does not fit all – Mark asked me a lot about how I used my computer and would have a different recommendation if I hung out at Starbucks all day. Make sure your tech person understands this.

  [tags] Technology, Small Business Computing [/tags]

• The Journal – cool software for task management

  21 Mar 2006 by John Seiffer in Blog, Productivity, Software

  Just thought I’d share a nice piece of software I’ve been using called The Journal ($40 with a 45 day trial and as always I’ve got no financial stake in the company.) It’s designed to pop up a new page every day where you jot down your thoughts. Sort of like a journal. DUH!

  I’m using it in a feeble attempt to stay on top of all my projects using David Allen’s Getting Things Done method. The Journal lets me set up categories (the tabs you see in the picture) and they can have entries and sub-entries. Did you know it’s not uncommon to have 60 projects a person is dealing with? Makes me feel better.
  

  In the default useage, you have a new entry for each date of your ramblings. But I use that as a kind of scratch pad / TODO list. Then I have a tab for each project. In the project notes, you can do a lot of formatting (outlines, tables etc – in some cases easier than WORD) and you can assign topics to any text or picture you put in the journal. Then you can search by word or by topic. That’s the power.
  So scattered about among many projects you have many tasks. Some are assigned to your assistant. You can put them all in a topic and then search by that topic. All the tasks assigned to him from every project show up in the search. All without making a separate list. Followers of the Getting Things Done method (GTD as the cult members call it) will realize you can make a topic for calls, at home, at computer, waiting on, shopping and all the other ways you’d want to catagorize tasks. COOL