The Juggling Entrepreneurs

If you work with zip (compressed) files as much as I do, you will find that the installed compression utility in Windows Vista is very slow.

My recommendation is to install 7-zip, a free, open source program.  This is great for Windows XP as well.  If you open the pop-up menu (right-mouse click) for any item you will find a new 7-zip menu that gives you several easy options for compressing and uncompressing files.

It also handles several other compressions such as Unix gzip and tar format.

For those of you just getting started with Office 2007, make sure you check out the menu options under the Windows logo in the upper left corner of your Office window to the left of the save button.

By clicking on the logo, you will open a menu that includes:

• Save As
• Recently Opened Documents
• Print, Email and Fax
• Publish on blog or website.

I have Automatic Updates enabled on my Windows XP computer, but I really hate the “Do you want to restart your computer now?” prompts that show up every five minutes.

Here is a link on how to disable or change the time that lapses before it appears again.  If you don’t usually shut down your computer, I do not recommend disabling it - but just delaying the prompts to remind you.

You can also change the settings to have the computer wake up from hibernation when it is on AC Power at a specific time to install software updates.

Are you considering converting from a PC to a Mac?  If so, check out these two tools.

Outlook2Mac:  A great little tool for $10 that helps you migrate your Windows Outlook files to MacMail or Entourage.  (tip submitted by Kathie Goldsmith of Life Balance Virtual Assistance)

MissingSync:  Syncing with your Palm, Blackberry or Mobile Phone on a Mac can be frustrating - especially if you are used to syncing on a Windows PC.  MissingSync bridges the gap.

How secure is your Internet connection at your local free Wi-Fi hotspot?   Not very.

Pogue’s Posts blog posting, “How Secure is Your Wi-Fi Connection?” (read the great comments with this posting), explains how a person can intercept your transmissions between your computer and the Internet.  A person involved in this activity is called a sniffer.

 Note: Cell phone transmissions can be captured as well.

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PC Magazine recently released a series of slides on how to build a secure Wi-Fi network.

The article is about how to create a secure home network that attaches to free wi-fi service, but it can be used for any connection.  Just attch your Cable or DSL connection to your Wi-Fi router.

Source: Karp, David A., “Free Wi-Fi, the Safe Way“, PC Magazine, August 15, 2007.

Other reads:

• Practically Networked, “Securing Your Wireless Network“
• Microsoft, “Windows XP: Improve the security of your wireless home network“

PC Magazine released an article on July 11th on Simple Photo Editors.

Most of us only need the very basics in image editing for our photographs and images we use on business websites and in publications.

In my virtual assistance business and for personal use, my tasks include the following:

• Resize photographs for printing and use in publications.
• Removal of red eye and fixing the color and brightness.
• Resizing images for websites to make them smaller.
• Cutting out parts of images to overlay with others.
• Making color photographs or images black-and-whites for dramatic effect.
• Adding text to images.
• Making your company name into an image.
• and so forth.

I use a combination of Google’s Picasa and Adobe’s Photo Elements (a much more affordable version of PhotoShop) to handle all my needs.

Google’s Picasa is what I use for my photo catalog and basic photo editing such as cropping, red eye, and brightness adjustments. The free application has the ability to upload my images to Google’s Photo Gallery and to several print shops such as Snapfish and Kodak’s PhotoGallery.

Adobe Photo Elements is what I use for business purposes. It is very easy to change the width and height of images in pixels for my website.

HINT: For websites, change pixels per inch to 72. This makes the image file smaller and therefore it will load quicker. The image will not look grainy as this is the standard used by browsers for displaying images.

For printed documents, the image should be 300 pixels per inch. Otherwise it will look grainy.

It is important for a business, no matter how small, to use accounting software. Not only does it give you more detailed information such as charts and financial statements about your business’ finances, it also gives your business integrity with banks and the IRS.

PCWorld’s Mailbag column recently released an overview of four different accounting applications (Intuit’s Quickbooks, Sage’s Peachtree, MS Office Accounting, and Sage BusinessVision).

Here are some other resources:

• PC Magazine, Review and Price Comparison of Accounting Software.
• Mac World, Review: Business Accounting Software.
• About.com: Peachtree Accounting 2007.
• AllBusiness.com: Where Can I Get Information on Accounting Software?

What do I use?

I use Quickbooks for my Business and Quicken for my personal finances.  There is a version of Quicken that allows you to track business expenses, but I prefer Quickbooks because it has additional features.

Accounting software allows you to:

• At a glance know whether you are making a profit or a loss.
• See what you are spending your money on so you can budget better.
• Make budgets.
• Create and send invoices that are already tied to your account receivables.
• Track your inventory.
• Depending on the software, create a business plan.

Part of my summers are spent in Oscoda, Michigan in our home. It is a great place for the kids because of the beach, the hiking, and change of pace. =-)

However, it is a difficult place to work out of. Cell phone coverage is non-existent at our house. The only option for high-speed Internet is cable which is expensive.

NetZero

Instead, for the past two weeks, I have been using NetZero’s Accelerated Dial-Up Connection. It worked pretty well. The websites were accelerated when you use NetZero software in conjunction with Internet Explorer. They are able to speed up web browsing by reducing the clarity of images and caching popular sites.

It’s slower than my home connection, but it gets the job done. There were two disadvantages for me.

• I had to use Internet Explorer in order to get the maximum web acceleration.
• I could not send email until I changed my email client to send outgoing mail through mail.netzero.net.
• I could not use XAMPP, an application that allows me to have my business website locally on my computer so I could make changes.

Free Wireless Internet Sites

I also have been able to go to several franchises that have free Wireless Internet connections including the library, McDonalds, and Subway.

Working Offline

Overall, I have gotten better at working offline.

• Used web-based email clients instead of your computer’s email client.  Yahoo and other web-based email services allow you to check any POP3 email account.
• For Outlook and other email clients, change your settings to set a maximum message size to download and not to download attachments.  You can download the attachments/emails when you need to view them.
• For Outlook and other email clients, setup a scheduled time in the evening for your computer to automatically log in and check your mail. By reading/writing email offline, it will queue messages I want to send for the next time I am on line.
• In Internet Explorer, use Synchronize (under Tools menu) to log onto the Internet at a scheduled time and cache (or save) selected websites for viewing offline. I used this feature to save weather, and online news sites locally.
• If you plan on working on website revisions, save your website to your computer prior to your vacation. Make the changes locally and when you get back home, use ftp to synchronize your web content.
• If your blog provider has it, submit new blog postings by email so you don’t have to wait for the site to load.
• Have business calls forwarded to the house phone and train your family how to handle incoming calls. With RingCentral, I am able to change the phone number that my business line rings to. An introductory message is played so family members can just hang up the phone in order for it to go to voice mail.

According to AWeber, it is not a good idea to use Free Email for sending eNewsletters. Why?

• Delivery rate for eNewsletters is lower.  It’s a free account that many people use for illegal purposes  such as spamming.
• Hard to remember.  It is very hard to remember a series of numbers and letters.
• It says you are cheap. It only costs about $10/year at GoDaddy.com to have your own domain name and an email address.
• You are not building your company’s brand. You are building the brand of the company you get your email from.

In Conclusion

If you don’t have the time to build a website, then just get a great email address.

As mentioned above, the cost for purchasing a domain and having an email address is about $10/year (GoDaddy.com).

In most web hosting contracts, your email addresses are included.

Consolidated View

Ok… so now you have to check both your free email account and your business email account.   It doesn’t have to be any more painful than if you have one email address.

With many email clients (Outlook Express, Mac Mail) and web-based email systems (Yahoo, Hotmail), you can view email from multiple addresses in one spot.