Towards the end of the fiscal year, IT department are usually using up all the budget they have for the current fiscal year and at the same time the IT head is writing down tens of pages of IT proposals which include plans, roadmap, budget required, improvements to be implemented, purchases to be made, raise in IT staff salary and so many things.

When the economy is good and the company is doing well, the head of the I.T. department wouldn’t have problems convincing the decision makers to approve of the budget requested. But during tough times, these proposals are …read more

Number 1, we picked the name for the confessional — correction, you picked the name for the confessional — and it will be…
The IT Confessional
I know, you’re all surprised and excited. I know I am. The second piece to this post is what you’re all want to hear. Who won the contest?
The winner of this particular contest is Kevin Potter for his awesome, “Is that a big or little zero?” story! I will be contacting Kevin (or better yet, if he wants to email me at jesse.middleton at b5media dot com) to get him his KB.
I want to thank everyone …read more

I recently came across Adocu.com – blogging gone nano through a good friend and while the product that they are proposing, Twitter with only one word, sounds strange, the underlying concept makes a lot of sense. Why do we bog ourselves down with so many words? Technical support could take a lesson from these guys.
Many of the responses that nonits (non-IT folk) receive from IT start with a, “Have you checked the amount of free RAM on your computer?” or, “What processes were running when this occurred?” My guess is that if you knew the answers to …read more

So this post will take a little bit different angle than the last few. See this one is about information. Not the kind like where the latest and greatest porn site is or where Miley Cyrus has shown her booty today… This is the kind of information that can help you in your everyday life. Sites like ReadBurner, Alltop and Technorati are trying their hardest to help you find this information and they’re doing a damn good job at it so far.

I hear this argument all the time from users. First off, it’s not a valid argument as we were taught in Philosophy 101. But more important, it’s usually said because people are uneducated about what Linux is and what it does. They would rather stay with a clogged up, aging OS rather than a new, spunky, and sexy OS. There are positive and negative points to this state of mind.
Clair, over at New Linux User, wrote a post about the wrong way to go about showing people what Linux can do. And I agree with her completely. The wrong way …read more

Look, I know 15 character, multi-symboled, including 3 numbers and 4 capital letter passwords are no picnic or walk in the park and should probably be outlawed but this is no way to store them. There are plenty of password managers out there like KeePass, Billeo, and PassPack (now known as Passpack) — so please use them instead of this.
Check out the blog post at SECURE-ID’s blog below.

Image Courtesy Of: http://securid.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/new-way-to-store-passwords/

It’s never easy to do but its a necessary evil. Sometimes you have to open up and tell the people what’s going on. This is something that Twitter has learned recently. With all of their downtime and problems, they have found that simply notifying their users that something is wrong makes everyone feel a bit more comfortable that their favorite micro blogging service will be around.
The IT folk out there could really learn from this. Inform, don’t shelter.

Photo Courtesy of: http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/004566.html

I love hearing great stories from IT people and nonits (what I’ve decided to call non-IT folk) and below is part of an email that a lovely IT reader sent in:
If something does break and there are error messages that come up, WRITE THEM DOWN. I can’t stress this enough, those error messages appear for a reason and usually indicate the problem. If you can’t duplicate the issue then it’s not an issue anymore.
To explain this a little clearer, lets break this apart into easier to digest chunks.

When an error message pops up on the screen, it means there is …read more

This is my first post on That Damn PC and I’m happy to be here. I’ve spent my life tinkering with computers, blowing up electronic equipment and picking on the end-users at all of my IT jobs… Now I want to give back. I started blogging over the past couple of years and made it a point to be honest, open and most important of all, sarcastic. I have a couple of blogs that I write for in the Philadelphia area (as this is where I’m from) and they all have a twist of sarcasm, wittiness …read more