Margret Sloan

My neighborhood is usually quiet and uneventful. The neighbors have all lived here for 4 years or more, and although we aren’t great friends, we all do try to be good neighbors and look out for each other. It seems like once a year we have some kind of excitement with the police involved. Twice we have had a car run up into our yard as a result of a police chase from elsewhere. The perpetrator makes the mistake of turning into our street too fast and loses control of the car, jumping the curb and running into a tree or a fence and taking off on foot.

I guess this year’s excitement happened last night, as I discovered this morning when I went to get in the car to run a few errands. Sometime after midnight my cars were broken into. Everything that was in the glove compartment and the middle console was pulled out and dumped onto the seats and floorboards. But nothing seems to be missing. I don’t leave anything valuable in the cars anyway. But it is disconcerting to think that someone would violate my property like that.

My neighbor and I are considering putting a video surveillance system in place that would encompass her driveway and mine, and also the front and rear doors of the houses. We are both concerned that whoever broke into my cars might get a little bolder and try to get into our houses. She knows of a place online that sells audio video surveillance equipment and it’s not as expensive as I feared.

IT Planet has a good variety of cameras and systems that can meet just about any need, from worried homeowners like us to small business owners concerned about shoplifting and robberies. I like the way you can either order online from their site, send an email with questions or call them at 866-468-6044 and talk to one a customer sales representative.

We’re going to get together in a little while at her house and talk it over again.

Read on the Yahoo main page that Microsoft is stopping support of their Windows XP this summer. They expect everyone to upgrade to VISTA.

I’ve heard a lot of people fussing about bugs in the VISTA program, but to be honest, I’ve been using VISTA for over a year and I love it. Knock on wood - I’ve not had any problems with it. There have been a couple of odd things, but usually when I restart the computer everything is back to the way it should be.

I think my only concern with the VISTA and the way I use my home PC is that sometimes I like to take a break and step away from the computer, leaving multiple windows open so I can resume my work later. But a few times when I come back to the computer, it has automatically downloaded updates and has restarted the computer on its own. So all my windows get closed and that ticks me off.

There are several things you can do to stop and prevent the onslaught of junk mail into your mailbox.

1. Get off Lists - go to the website for the Direct Marketing Association, dmachoice.org and click on “Remove my name from those lists.” This is free, takes about 4 months to see the full impact of reduced unwanted mail, and stays in effect for 3 years.

2. Don’t Get on New Lists - marketers build new lists from product registration forms, contests and sweepstakes. Don’t fill those out.

3. Protect Your Identity - Register at optoutprescreen.com to opt out of prescreened credit offers. These offers come from the four credit bureaus, Experian, Transunion, Innovis and Equifax, who sell your data to the credit card companies.

4. Remain Anonymous - Sign up for grocery store loyalty cards and other membership-based discounts when you don’t need to actually receive anything in the mail from them by using a fake name with no address.

Not every company needs to have a full IT department with the staff on payroll and the physical space for the servers and racks and extra cables, etc. But processing data and the related security issues are becoming more important every day for every type of business. Even a grocery store has data security issues, as related in a recent news story about hackers that stole grocery customer credit card account numbers and passwords.

A solution to storage space might be to consider colocation services. You can find a site anywhere that meets your criteria and relay your company internet connection and data processing through an offsite center.

Fibernet is one of Utah’s oldest internet service providers and they offer utah colocation services. This might be a good resource for your company’s data processing needs.

Everyone knows that second to San Jose, the best city in America for tech companies is Austin. The home office of Dell Computers and thousands of software and computer related companies all have either home offices or satellite offices in Austin.

This is true for Pragma Systems, too. This company was founded in 1990 to design, develop and port networking software for the big corporations, like Sony, Boeing, HP, Motorola and dozens more of the Fortune 500 companies that we all know and recognize.

A leader in SFTP, Pragma Systems is the place to go when you need secure connectivity.