Archives for 2005

The past month or so, I’ve been working on revaming our Free Blog Hosting service. When the new version of the script came out, I decided to re-launch the service under a new name and brand. The new service is called Blovi.com. I’m really happy with how the site is turning out so far. It has many features, such as free blogging with over 50 customizable templates, the ability to podcast and moblog, as well as forums and photo galleries.

Now I’m working on marketing the site. I’ve had Jack write up a blurb about it on ISpyJack.com, as well as exchanging links with a few other sites. But I’m going to try a new marketing tactic. One that is tried and true in many industries, and that is submitting a Press Release. Right now, I’m researching what all should go into a press release, and will be submitting it to PRweb soon.

It’s kind of exciting, doing a press release, yet it’s daunting at the same time. Since so many news agencies will be looking at it, and possibly publishing it, it seems like a big task. Well, I hope all goes well.

Today I stopped by a local computer shop, Rockbochs Inc. My friend Chad runs the place, and he gets the best prices on stuff anywhere in town, and even online at times. Well I stopped by to pick up a couple older computers from him. P3 450mhz and the like for about $20 each to use as development boxes for testing various setups/software before implementing it on our regular servers.

While I was there, I asked Chad if he had any older, cheap laptops. I wanted a laptop to run linux on to use as a test machine. Run network diagnostics etc on it to scan our client’s networks for vulnerabilities. He didn’t have any old laptops, but he had a cheap one. So I ended up getting a brand new Dell Inspiron 1200 from him. It’s a 1.3ghz CeleronM, 256 ram, 30gb HD, 14″ screen etc. It’s not the fastest car on the block, but it will do the job. And at the price of $550, I couldn’t complain.

One of the problems of shopping at Rockbochs, is that you can buy stuff from them for so cheap, that you end up spending more money because you buy more. In the past 6 months, I’ve spent thousands at Rockbochs. Buying things like my Digital Camera (Cannon S500, 5.0 Megapixel), a 19″ Dell LCD monitor, and 2 17″ Viewsonic LCD Monitors, the Rack we now use in the office to house some local servers, oh and the Xbox we use to host www.xbochs.com. I also go to Rockbochs to buy equipment for clients. I’ve gotten at least 4 UPS’s from them for use with various consulting clients, as well as other various hardware/comptuer purchases.

Now I get to configure my new laptop, I’m installing Open SUSE 10 on it. It will be a nice new tool and toy. 

Well, today was a pretty fun day at work. I needed to take a break from all the projects I was working on to give my mind some rest. So I put together a nice new site. I got the idea for the site after playing with the camera that was dropped off for us to play with yesterday.

I spent most of the afternoon working in flash, well, learning how to use flash, and working in it at the sam time. I put together a neat little flash video. All in all it took me about 6hrs to make the entire video, and that included the time it took to learn what to do in flash.

You can see what I put together at ISpyJack.com the video is found on THIS page.

Well, enough sitting in the office, time to head home, eat, and watch Alias on DVD.

So today, a client of ours that we do some consulting for (actually a lot of consulting) stopped by to get an update on the wireless project we are working on. He also dropped off an Axis PTZ 213 Netcam to play with. So we spent a couple hours playing around with it, and then decided to throw it up on the T1 for the world to experience.

You can check it out for yourself at: http://ptz.utaria.net

Username: view
Password: camera

Feel free to have a look around our offices, yes you can control the camera.

Enjoy!
~Aaron

The past few weeks, I have been forming a routine to start my week off in the right direction. Every Monday, I meet with my friend Jeremy at the local Perkins for breakfast. Jeremy is a friend, a fellow business owner, and a strong Christian. We meet each week to talk about business ideas, see how each other’s past week has been, and see what each of us has for the week ahead. We also uplift each other with prayer and keep each other accountable.

I just got back to my office from this mornings breakfast with Jeremy, and I have a very bright outlook for this week. I have an opportunity in front of me that will grow my business very quickly, but I am in need of financial support to do it. Jeremy gave me the number to the Northeast Entrepreneur Fund, an organization that helps stimulate business growth here in the Northland. He also encouraged me to step forward and call the bank, which I had been thinking about.

One of the things that really struck me today as I talked to Jeremy, is that I need to take action. I’ve already given God control of the steering wheel to my life, but I still need to hit the accellerator to move forward. God can’t steer me in the right direction unless I’m already moving. I need to step forward in faith, and God will open or close the doors that will send me where He wants me.

Well, I figured it was time to do some updating, so I’ve been playing around with some new WordPress themes. I’ve found this one, and I like it a lot. I think I’ll keep it. It does, however, need some updating, so I’ll be updating the header image and doing some other minor customization.

I’m playing with a new idea for marketing a few of my sites. I’m still formulating the plan in my head, but I think it should work quite nicely. The idea came to me while driving home to my parents for Thanksgiving, and it’s stuck with me. I seem to get most of my ideas while driving, usually along the 3hr trip to either my parents house, or to US Internet where my servers are housed.

I’m not prepared just yet to reveal my new marketing idea, and for obvious reasons.  However, this idea of mine is going to require me to call upon some of the skills I learned in my Intro to Acting class that I took last year, along with the help of some of my friends. I’m hoping I can put my idea into practice before Christmas, and publish full details here.

In other news, I was looking over the statistics of this site. I hadn’t paid very close attention to this site these past few months, but apparently others have been. Visitors to my site have increased significantly during October. I’m not sure why, but it is a pleasant suprise. Perhaps now I’ll have more of a reason to post more often.

And lastly for today, I’m fairly excited about an opportunity that is arising. One of the clients my business does consulting for is looking into the possibility of taking me to Australia with them to demo the wireless system that I helped him assemble. This would be a great opportunity to demo the tactical capabilities of the system to Australia’s Fire Fighters for use during their upcoming fire fighting season. If things come through, I’ll be in Australia during Dec. 11-17. In either case, there is a good possibility of going to Australia later on in February. I’m excited as I’ve always wanted to venture outside of North America. I still have a goal of visiting Europe before I graduate college, but I’ll settle for Australia. Besides, it looks like it will be a while before I graduate, now that I’ve dropped my classes to focus on business for a while.

For some odd reason, today has just been the bugger of all mondays. I get in to the office this morning, only to find I have no internet access. Jim and Lyle reconfigured the firewall for the building’s T1, so now my office has no internet. I’m supposed to change my IP settings in my router to fix it. It should be fixed, but now the CSU/DSU for the T1 is giving errors, and no one has internet in the building.

What makes it even more fun is that I finally have my business phone line routed to my office, rather than my house. So the line is plugged into the PBX box for the building. Unfortunately, Jim is to busy to set up the PBX system, so when you call my phone number, it gets picked up and automatically routed to New Tech Concepts. Great! I’ve already received calls on my cell from customers asking me about this.

Last week, I purchased a copy of ACT! by sage. It is supposed to be this great CRM software for managing client relations. Well, it would be great if the software worked properly. For some reason, it is having problems rendering things on the screen. The images get screwed up when viewing the data fields, and the calendar does not show up at all.

What a way to start the week

Ahh yes, the week after labor day! School starts once again. I just need to keep reminding myself “I’m $30,000 in debt with student loans, I need to finish my degree”. I guess I now know how Bill Gates kinda felt when he was in college. With the pressures of my business demanding more and more of my time, I honestly have no idea how I’m going to find time for class this year.

I have 18 credits left to get my Bachelors degree (that is unless I need to retake some of the classes I got D’s in). These are going to be the longest 18 credits of my entire college career. This fall semester, I’m taking ‘Archeology of Cities’, ‘History of the Holocaust’, and ‘Strategic Management’. Why in the world I’m taking the first two classes, I don’t know. But in order to graduate from UMD’s School of Business and Economics, you need to have so many upper division electives from other colleges. And those 2 classes were some of the only ones that didn’t require lower division pre-requisites.

The temptation to just quit school and continue my business full time is a big one. But then I’d be $30,000 in debt for nothing. At least when I get my degree, I’ll have a $30,000 paper that I’ll probably never use, but I’ll at least have something.

I just got off the phone with EV1.net tech support. Do I have a server with EV1.net? No. But I did about 2 years ago.

The reason I called EV1 is because I had been receiving complaints of spam and hacking attempts coming from my servers. But I couldn’t find any evidence of such.

Finally, I found out why. The person who was experiencing the spam/hacking attempts was getting them from a certain IP: 216.127.XXX.137. And when they did a reverse DNS on the IP, it came up with one of my domain names. So they contacted me!

I didn’t recognize the IP address in question, it definately was not one of mine. So I did a reverse DNS/IP whois on the domain, and lo and behold, it belongs to EV1! Apparently, when I cancelled my server with them 2 years ago, they didn’t remove their reverse DNS entries. So the new owner of the server was causing trouble, but my domain still showed in the reverse DNS.

EV1 is now removing those reverse DNS records, and I commend their support, as it was a rather painless phonecall to make to get everything cleared up.

So, the lesson to be learned here, if you have ever had servers somewhere, make sure that they remove the reverse DNS records after you leave their services!