Liquid Beverage Damage to Dave’s Laptop: Delicious, but deadly!
… So, for those of you who think that these kinds of perils can’t happen to your favorite IT company – think again! …
This time, it was Dave’s laptop that was the victim of liquid damage – specifically, the display. Yes, this does really happen – even to IT people. How exactly Dave’s laptop screen got damaged by liquid is not important. The type of beverage involved in said liquid is also not important, although I will say that had it been alcoholic, I probably would have felt better about how things went over the next few hours than I actually did…
The laptop’s LCD screen, shall we say, was not very happy to be entirely saturated in liquid, regardless of whether it was a beverage, or not, or regardless of its alcoholic content (or lack thereof). The LCD screen took on kind of an unhealthy, “puffy”, almost “swollen” sort of a look, kind of like it had gotten punched in the face, or some kind of strange infection…
Organization Goes Low Tech
Happy New Year!
What are your resolutions for the year? I’m guessing almost everyone wants to be more organized, correct?
I am no exception. My desk is never as neat as I want it to be and I always seem to have tons of receipts and pieces of paper in my purse and computer back. I’m a tech geek, I am proud to say, so all my contacts, emails and calendar items live happily on my laptop, iPhone and iPad.
But…I like lists. To Do Lists. Grocery Lists. Lists of things to pack on vacation, lists of development ideas – well, you get the idea.
Who Owns Your Data?
As a provider to cloud-based services, we always talk to our clients and prospects about understanding ownership of their data hosted in the cloud and to understand what happens if the hosting company or provider goes out of business or is sold.
The Washington Post has a great article about this very topic today: view the article at www.washingtonpost.com.
This article focuses mainly on personal data, such as sites that host your photos and such, but it is something that anyone – individual or business – thinks about when they copy their data elsewhere.
Happy New Year!
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Cloud Power
Office 365 revolutionizes Small to Medium-sized Businesses (SMB’s) by now offering productivity and reliability options that have been either cost- or equipment- intensive up until now. With Office 365, SMB’s can now choose to host their business-critical data and applications such as Microsoft Exchange E-Mail, Microsoft SharePoint, etc. fully in the “Cloud”, helping to reduce the expense, maintenance needs, and reliability challenges of “hosting” such a complicated and critical system in a traditional SMB office setting. The familiar Microsoft Office software is also now available with a Cloud option, as well. For more information, contact RiteTech sales at (703) 561-0607, or sales@ritetech.net
More Ways To Save
Microsoft Volume Licensing helps save money!
Is Your Data Safe?
Rite Tech can help protect your organization’s data!
RiteTech offers a number of traditional (on-site) and off-site (Internet-based and site-to-site) data backup solutions that are affordable, proven, field-tested, and are also the same ones that we use internally to protect our own critical servers, accounting systems, web sites, and databases. Don’t let an unexpected PC failure or virus attack ruin months or years’ worth of work!
Live Blogging – SMB Nation 2011
SMB Nation has gotten off to a great start at 7:00 local time here in Las Vegas. It is early, but there is a lot of excitement.
I’m currently watching the main keynote with Cisco, which is making a big push into the small and medium business space. Since SMB’s drive the economy, this is great news.
Some of the points being made are that they need technology to stay competitive, are shifting to the cloud for efficiency and reliability and are shifting away from a full time IT staff.
At RiteTech, we’ve been working with Cisco for over a year by testing some of their new devices and services.
We also urge our clients migrate to the cloud and consider ourselves your “outsourced” IT department, so we are right on track.
I look forward to the rest of the conference!
Cisco Features RiteTech and Dave Bainum in Video
Back in July the RiteTech office was busy preparing for our big screen debut. We cleaned the office, painted the walls and wrapped the vehicles! All our efforts paid off, for the video is great! Check it out: http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/sell/smb/onplus/grow_my_business.html.
For over a year, RiteTech has been working with Cisco to perfect their OnPlus network device and service. This device allows us to better monitor our client’s locations and network. We know within minutes if a network goes down – invaluable information in our line of work.
Variable Placement in SQL Queries
When I’m creating complicating queries, I tend to build the query in SQL Query Analyzer before copying the code into my ColdFusion page. Other times I will copy the ColdFusion debugging code into Query Analyzer with the variable values to recreate a result set. Either way, handing variables can be tricky. I either have a hard time locating the variables to put in static values, or forget to remove static values and put back in the variable place holder before pasting back into CF. Anyone else do this?
To make my life easier, I’ve starting declaring all of my SQL variables at the top of the query. This has several benefits:
1. I can easily see all the variables and their data types at the top of the query
2. I don’t have to hunt around to find/replace values
3. I only need to pass in the same variable value once
Here’s an example of a query in Query Analyzer:
DECLARE @startDt DATETIME
, @endDt DATETIME
SET @startDt = '1/1/2004'
SET @endDt = '1/31/2004'
SELECT *
FROM SalesOrder SO
INNER JOIN SalesOrderDetail SOD ON SO.SalesOrderID = SOD.SalesOrderID
WHERE 1 = 1
AND (
@startDt IS NULL
OR SO.SalesOrderDt >= @startDt
)
AND (
@endDt IS NULL
OR SO.SalesOrderDt <= @endDt
)
For testing purposes, I’m getting all sales in January 2004 (Sorry, my test DB has OLD data). When I past this into CF, I only need to change two lines:
SET @startDt = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_date" value="#startDt#"
null="#IIf(IsDate(startDt), DE("no"), DE("yes"))#" />
SET @endDt = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_date" value="#startDt#"
null="#IIf(IsDate(startDt), DE("no"), DE("yes"))#" />
If either value is empty, a NULL value will be passed into the query and the WHERE clause will properly handle that value.
While it does create more code, it is a much more elegant – and stress free – way to design a query.
