Along with the last piece of advice about online safety, it’s wise to do more than advised. Meaning, although you may have an anti-virus protection, you may still be at risk from scammers and hackers. Not to mention real thiefs, or a computer hard drive meltdown. The best way to protect your computer information from all of the possible negative situations is to use remote backup .

If anything does happen, you’ll be happy to know that your information is securely backed up somewhere else besides your computer.

With an increase in my salary not too long ago, my husband and I were able to save enough money to pay 20% down payment on our own house. Yet, even amongst our excitement I must say that we weren’t prepared for all the work involved in looking for a home, not to mention all the paperwork associated with a mortgage loan.

With a very helpful buyer’s agent and bank, we were able to sign all the paperwork and move into our new place. I learned a lot about mortgages, and also that our county was one of the first to implement county filing, a fast way for lenders to send the deed and other legal documents to the county recorder’s office. The county, along with the government are also trying to implement an e-mortgage solution.

Hopefully by the time we sell this house and move into a bigger home, e-recording and e-mortgages will allow us to sign all those papers from the comfort of our home computer.

I love that now you can listen to music on hold when calling cell phones and businesses. I prefer listening to upbeat, modern music while waiting rather than listening to silence.

Besides listening to music, maybe I should advertise my services on my cell phone while people are waiting for me to pick up. Okay, so that may be more useful for a company, but a custom on hold message is a great and easy way to advertise services to customers. Professional voices on a hold message can enhance your business image, increase caller awareness and services bought, decrease caller hang-up, inform clients of your website and your company’s basic information, and advertise tradeshows or new products. Plus, it does all this while you have the customer’s full attention. I think a hold message is probably the best advertising you could ask for.

If your company is like most companies, you probably don’t follow your company’s document retention policies, leaving your documents at risk.

Yet there is compliance software that helps you to meet your company policies and track documents easier. You can easily track the trail of your documents, through changes in email, hard drives, and other sources, and identify which copy is the most up-to-date version. This helps you save the final copy on the server, eliminating the loss of documents on inidivual hard drives.

In other words, it is an easier way to do business.

Although I am an adult, my Dad still worries about me. He calls me and urges me to drive safely frequently, or advises me to get a flu vaccine before I catch the epidemic going around.

Recently, his home computer just crashed and he wanted to warn me to get online backup before mine did too. Although I sometimes heed his warnings (and sometimes not), I decided to get online backup before I lost all my valuable pictures and information on my computer too. I guess Dad knows best.

A quick note of advice for small business owners: invest in a quality and reputable communications system, such as the Avaya IP 500.  Doing so may cost more initially but it is definitely worth it given the features and capabilities it provides.  The IP 500 can scale as your business grows and has features such as fire-wall protected internet, integral security, and high-speed dial-up access, all with standards based telephony. 

When I was driving last week I got a traffic ticket that I’m pretty upset about. The moron cop pulled over 8 of us at the same time for the same offence (driving in the breakdown lane to reach an exit about 50 feet away to reduce some of the traffic congestion)

Anyways, I went to pay the citation on the phone today and the RMV left me on hold FOREVER! I can’t believe how bad it was. And the message was so irritating. I think they should use one of those creative on hold messages that make waiting more bearable. Finally the girl got on the line and she sounded liked she hated her job as much as I hated being on hold.

I was happy to just pay the stupid thing and be on with it. No more breakdown lane driving for me.

Unless the cops aren’t looking.