bruceb news

All my best wishes for a prosperous and healthy new year, filled with technology that does wonderful things for you (and, with luck, requires just a bit of assistance from your friendly IT consultant).

I wanted to share a couple of the comments that have come in recently in response to articles I’ve posted here. It’s one of the rewarding side effects of creating a site like this – knowing that I’m touching people who are moved to contribute. Here’s one that came in today:

Together with many thanks for such a excellent articles and reviews; this can be a kind of undeniable fact that sustains everyone however out your evening.I’ve forever long been finest all around for the web page next When i seen regarding these types of coming from a buddy in addition to had been thrilled as i was able to uncover it following hunting for a little while.

[…] continued

The entire team at Bruceb Consulting would like to wish everyone a safe and joyous holiday! Thank you for your support and your trust in 2010.

I worked harder – and had more fun – this year than ever before, trying to stay on top of the always-changing technology landscape and give you better tools to get your work done. 2011 is going to be even better!

• I’ll be rolling out new tools to manage your computers behind the scenes so you can spend more time working and less time fussing.
• We’ll continue the inexorable move to the cloud, giving you access to your stuff from whatever device works for you – a smartphone, a tablet (and there will be more choices soon than the iPad), a notebook, or more computers scattered around the home or office.

[…] continued

I’m starting to think this social networking stuff has a future, by gum.

I’m joining the 21st century. Visit the official Bruceb Consulting Facebook page! Push the Like button! At the moment it’s nothing more than recycled articles from Bruceb News and offensive cartoons from my Tumblr page – but with your help we can turn it into something vibrant and alive, a conversation simply throbbing with high tech energy!

Or not. Hey, I can dream, right?

Facebook users – you might be interested in the article I wrote this summer about how Facebook is able to make those scarily accurate Friend suggestions. […] continued

Now I know the answer to a lingering question: if I embed videos into a news post and send it out to my email subscribers, the video links will just vanish. Poof! Nothing to click on.

You’ll have a better idea of what the Ze Frank post is about if you visit the news page online, where the videos should show up quite nicely. Sorry!

Ooh! A milestone! I’m sure you’re as excited as I am! This is article number 2000 in the never-ending series of Bruceb News posts!

I get such joy out of writing these articles for you, using too many words to describe things that normal people find uninteresting. There’s such a reward when I’m in the zone, able to combine being condescending on the one hand and inaccurate on the other, selflessly trying to serve my devoted audience of fifteen readers. Hi, mom! Oh wait, fourteen readers. She unsubscribed. Well, the rest of you know who you are. In fact, you probably know each other. […] continued

I’ll be taking a personal day on Wednesday, August 25, to help my dad celebrate his 90th birthday.

My dad taught me to solder. Remember soldering irons? We’d use them to build Heathkit radios and test kits, painstakingly matching the colored bands on the sides of the resistors that we were soldering into little circuit boards and checking off each step in the directions when it was done. I was tremendously impressed when he built the family’s color television set. A TV set! How great is that! And he could fix it when it broke because, hey, he built it! […] continued

I am pleased to announced a new service for my loyal clients: real-time server and networking monitoring.

This is the culmination of months of evaluation and testing. It represents a higher level of service that I’ll be delivering to my clients, at the same time that I’m helping reduce technology costs by handling problems before they turn into crises.

SERVER MONITORING

For less than $1 per day, I will set up 24×7 Round-the-Clock Monitoring that will check your server’s critical systems every fifteen minutes. Whenever it sniffs a problem, I’ll get an email showing the exact nature of the problem. […] continued

Thanks for your patience! I’m back in the office trying to catch up on email and phone calls. Go listen to some piano music from Andrew’s recital and I’ll be in touch soon with everyone who missed me!

The vacation continues – still cut off from phone service and Internet service is erratic. Back in my office on July 1!

My loyal clients know that I haven’t taken a vacation in more than four years, due to my fanatical devotion to their best interests. I simply couldn’t stand the risk that something would need my attention if I was unavailable for even a few hours. No, no, no need to thank me – I guess that’s why I’m the highest-paid and best-loved computer consultant in the western United States.

Possibly not all of the western states.

I suppose if you were going to quibble, it would be more accurate to say that I’m the most-skilled computer technician in my immediate family, but let’s not get caught up in details now, shall we? […] continued