Month: May 2008

Mobile Productivity

Notes from the Road and Travel Tips

We’re in our second quarter “mini busy season” here with K2, and the last few weeks have seen us present technology conferences in Connecticut, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Oregon (where I will speak today).  We’re also preparing for our first CPA Firm Technology Symposium in Overland Park, KS on 6/10.  Since this is a new, all-day course, I’ve been working with Val Steed, K2’s CEO, on prep for this course so we have plenty of material and other collateral to help our participants use technology in their firms as effectively and efficiently as possible.
USA Today (normally just good for recycling, but there are exceptions) has a nice article this morning on how to pack for a long trip, as well as some tips for the chronic overpacker.  Doug Dyment, the creator of OneBag.com (a site dedicated to traveling light) does a nice Q&A on how to pack for a trip.  Since I’m headed to Connecticut (two teaching days), Montreal (Canadian GP), and Kansas City (three teaching days) in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be reading this article with interest.
There is also a nice chart in the article which lists who will have to pay to check bags with various airlines.  Fortunately, the other airlines have not been as quick to match American’s policy of charging for the first bag (although they are almost universally charging for the second checked bag.)  One of the few (hard earned) benefits of being a super-elite frequent flyer (Delta Platinum Medallion, Skyteam Elite Plus) is that I can check up to three bags for free.  While I very rarely use this benefit, it was nice to be able to handle all of the bags for free for my two companions when I went to Florida for the Memorial Day weekend.
Some travel links readers may want to use for their upcoming trips:

  • TripIt – www.tripit.com – This site will create itineraries from your confirmation e-mails from the various sources and put them into an iCal feed which you can add to Google Calendar or Outlook 2007.  You can also have “friends” on the site and share info with them or see when you will be in the same area as one of your far-clung cronies.
  • Sidestep.com – This is a meta-search engine for travel which will look on numerous travel sites for a particular trip, and then allow you to find the best match of price and schedule for your trip.  While most people use this for airfare searches, the car rental searches are where I tend to save the most money, and they also offer other category searches as well.  I can’t recommend this one highly enough.
  • Google Transit – lets you plan trips using numerous public transportation systems around mostly North America and Europe.  While this is a new service, I’m expecting that the depth of integration with organizations and schedules is going to be really good on a going forward basis.  I’ll let you know more once I’ve used the schedules for Montreal on my trip there next week.

I’m also in the process of implementing a hosted document management system for my little firm.  I actually installed the client software yesterday, and am now populating the database with a few documents until I can get a feel for how best to organize my documents (which don’t really fit the typical organization structure for a CPA Firm, since I do so much oddball consulting).  I’ll report more on this effort after I do the second revision of tags, categories, and other ways to implement this system.  K2 has some good tips on their Totally Paperless site, but I’m working to capture the various steps and factors considered as part of this whole process in a document which can be used for either blog content or teaching classes.  I’m also working with this vendor on integration with portals for secure interchange of information, and I hope to be able to write more about this in the near future.

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Leisure

And Now, For Something Completely Different….

 

It’s good to be headed back to work this week. I’ve spent the last four months writing sessions and doing some consulting with various organizations, and it’s nice to be headed back to teach some stuff live.
It’s been a good year, and although I have some pretty big challenges this year, I think this is going to be an exciting year.
There’s lots of good gear these days in the mad scientist’s new lair (shown above). I bit the bullet and bought a 1U dual processor server earlier this year, and wired the new office with gigabit ethernet (more on that later). I’m very thankful to be able to teach classes for a living, and I get to work with some really cool technology vendors. Big projects for this year include:
+ I want to improve the document management in my office this year. I’ve been in touch with Fujitsu and HP about hardware, and hope to try out some of the document management systems out there in my office. I have a lot of hardware sitting around that really just needs to be configured to do the document management thing. While I’ve been doing electronic content management for some time, it’s nice to finally be at the point of having the resources needed to do it right.
+ I’m going to have to rewire my office. Like an idiot, I did it myself, and used the wrong parts (trying to do gigabit ethernet with Cat 5e is just a bad idea). I will probably redo the office myself, but am also going to get someone who does this for a living to certify the cabling with one of those $5k Fluke Networks devices. I am also going to have to see if I need to replace my gigabit switch, as I’m told that its backplane leaves a lot to be desired. Word to the wise: Talk to someone before you put in a lot of cabling- it’s an arcane art which can cause you serious pain if you don’t pay attention to it.
+ This year is the final year for the Mafia-Mobile, my 1996 Cadillac. While it has served me well, it now has just short of 200k miles on it, and although it still runs, it really needs some dough pumped into it if I am going to continue with it. I’m considering a mid-sized to full-sized SUV or truck (used, of course). I understand that a lot of people are selling these to get out from under the operating costs. Since I usually only drive to my son’s school, the UPS Store, and the airport, the fact that it gets crappy mileage really isn’t that big of a deal.
+ I’d like to juice-up my servers and website this year, including implementing virtual servers in the office for just about everything. I’m going to have to juice the RAM in everything to make this happen (and it’s ECC RAM, so it’s going to be pricey), but I think it will be worth it. The stats I’m seeing on virtualization really make me think that it’s the way to go. That, plus 4-5 of those cool 320GB HDDs for backup in m
y safety deposit box should really help out with the disaster recovery plan.
+ I also seem to have some PC’s which have broken IDE buses which are otherwise workable. I think it would be interesting to run Hyper-V on them from a flash drive, and then do everything from VM’s off of USB HDD’s on the otherwise good PCs. (First one will most likely be a media center PC for the treadmill.)
On a personal note, I have to get ready for some running later this year. Although I publically declared myself a candidate for the 2008 NYC Marathon earlier this year, I’m going to have to back away from that goal, and head for a more modest one of doing a 5K/10K later this year, followed by Bay to Breakers with K2 CEO Val Steed next May, and a marathon of some kind in 2009. Val is a multiple time Boston Marathon finisher, and I’m a guy well on his way back from weighing 200kg- so I’ve got my work cut out for me.
I also have a soon to be six year old son who wants to ride his bike with his Daddy- so I have to spend as much time with him as long as he will let me.
Either way, my almost 40 year old body is really hacked off at me for my time as a super-large guy, and has been complaining loudly and prominently over the last few weeks as I try to make the transition back to a more healthy lifestyle.
Finally, I’m hoping to pull my ratings up a little bit and give Mac a real run for his money as the champion speaker at K2. As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. The competition is definitely fierce, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

Computer Applications, Fraud, Web/Tech

Fraud from the Ukraine….. in Texas… Affecting People on Long Island.

If you don’t believe that it can happen to you…. or if you’re avoiding dealing with those pesky PCI standards for not retaining credit card numbers, etc….. you should read this article.

“Three alleged hackers have been arrested for allegedly  using “college-level knowledge of computer programming skills” to steal and sell credit card numbers from customers of Dave and Buster’s restaurant chain, the Justice Department said Monday”…..

“One of the men arrested, Maksym Yastremskiy, of Ukraine, was found in possession of millions of stolen credit card numbers, unrelated to the restaurant, on his laptop when the Turkish National Police arrested him in July.”

“Private account data was captured almost immediately at the point of sale. Similar attacks have occurred at other retail outlets, including T.J. Maxx, DSW shoe stores and Polo Ralph Lauren.”

So… how did they do it?

The government said the hackers illegally accessed 11 of the national chain’s servers and installed packet sniffers at each location. The sniffers vacuumed up “Track 2” data from the credit card magstripes as  it  traveled from the restaurant’s servers to Dave and Buster’s headquarters in Dallas, according to the indictment.

Estimated damage to financial institutions?  $600K, and 5,000 people were affected by the breach.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

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Accounting Software, Computer Applications, Mobile Productivity, Web/Tech

The Future’s So Bright, We Have to Wear Shades

There’s a very interesting article by Andy Kessler on the editorial page in the Wall Street Journal this morning which discusses the coming war in technology; the link is here.  While Microsoft and Google are the armies currently fighting the skirmishes around the future of technology, this is really simply a proxy war about how we will use technology in the future.  Just as there are different methods of transporting goods around the country (think: rail vs. truck vs. airplane), there are also different models of computing

(browser vs. local vs. mobile).  Processing power (thanks to Moore’s Law), bandwidth, and wireless technology have changed the level of real time information sharing.  HP has even come out with a laptop (HP Compaq 6720t) which is designed to be used as a thin client into corporate systems and which doesn’t even have a hard drive!.

Many accountants are rightly concerned with the security and information control implications of using online services for their

mission-critical applications.  While these are legitimate concerns, the reality of our digital infrastructure has generally made these concerns less of a problem now than in the past.  High speed internet is getting faster.  Last week, I received a flyer from my local telephone company offering a fiber internet connection which would have 25Mbps down/10Mbps up connectivity to my home.

While I’m still mulling over whether or not I really need that fast a connection at home since my current connection is 10Mbps down/1Mbps up through my cable provider, it’s really interesting that this level of service is now available in Knoxville, Tennessee, which, although a nice-sized city, is admittedly not one of the first cities you think of when you imagine fast internet speeds.  My current internet connections (cable and Sprint wireless) continue to impress me with the speeds which are possible; my cable connection averages 8 Mbps down, 970K up whenever I test the speed, and my wireless connection (backup) has been running over 1.1 Mbps down/300K up on the road lately with EVDO Rev A.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that telecommunications and other utilities are also more reliable than we have had in the past.  Where I used to reboot my router and modem every morning, I now go for months without rebooting these devices, and they seem to just work now.  My collaboration with others within K2 suggests that their experiences are similar:  I have noted only two critical outages among the team during the first four months of the year.  When I started my career 15 years ago, we would have two or three power outages during the busy season which would shut us down and cause us to lose work.  While utilities aren’t sexy, they certainly seem to have made significant improvements in the last generation.

If you haven’t tried some of the latest evolutions in Web-based applications, here are some for your consideration:

While the future direction of computing hasn’t been finalized, there are really interesting things happening in technology, and some things (like those pages or CD’s for reference materials) are on the way out. The future appears to offer more choices for how tools are delivered to users, which will make it much easier to work from anywhere – even a condo in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Brian Tankersley is a CPA and CITP based in Knoxville, Tennessee.  You can learn more about him at http://www.bftcpa.com.

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