The Internet

The book I read to research this post was Tubes: Behind The Scenes At The Internet by Andrew Blum which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is several years old but was quite successful and was number 1 on the kindle computing e-book chart. It was inspired when Andrew had to call out a computer engineer to fix his internet connection outage which was because a squirrel had chewed through a wire. It got him thinking how fragile the internet is that it can be put out of action so easily and got him thinking what is the internet? This book looks at the infrastructure and history of the internet. Even before the internet big organisations like NASA had their own telecommunication networks. The ARPANET which would eventually become the internet and was initially a computer network run by the Department Of Defence in the USA came about because they wanted a network that was resilient to nuclear attack. The result was a network run along telephone cable and using the TCP/IP protocol which is still used in a similar form today. If you visited an ISP's internet base you might be surprised that the router they use for all their customers is a cisco router not much bigger than the router in your home although it has many more wires and is much more expensive. Apparently a typical capacity is 800 billion bits a second and don't forget this is constantly increasing. You would see a huge wiring network at this internet base with many components interconnected. The big data-centers that are just starting to become a reality which cover a huge area of subscribers often aren't that big. In this book Google is quoted as having a billion searches a day and Facebook has 6 billion photos uploaded every month. The kind of storage used on networks such as these is set to rise exponentially. 2 billion people use the internet in one form or another every day according to this book and don't forget that's  probably more by now. There was an amusing incident when a pensioner accidently dug through a fibre optic cable in his garden in the republic of Georgia and the entire country of Armenia was offline for 12 hours as a result. I enjoyed enjoyed reading this book which is a little bit anecdotal and keeps your interest throughout. The title stems from a comment by a USA senator that the internet consisted of tubes which was ridiculed but if he is referring to the fiber optic cable which is hollow and is used on many high capacity networks he might have a point.

Gimp 1

I have just started on a video training course called Using Gimp by Que at Safari Books Online so will do a series of blogs on what I learn. Gimp which is pronounced with a soft g is an acronym that stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. You can do either graphics or photography with in this program. It's open source which among other things means it's free and it rivals Adobe Photoshop in terms of features. I think there is a lot of snobbery when people insist on using and learning how to use Photoshop. This program might not be quite as intuitive but let's face it everyone should be learning how to use it because it's free. There is a toolbars button under the windows menu button. The box that comes contains all your toolbars and each button corresponds to a different toolbar. You can draw a straight line by selecting one point of the line with a click of the mouse. Then you press shift and select the next point of the line. There is a crop feature where you set your guides up first and with the crop tool select the portion you wish to keep selecting from top to bottom and press enter to discard the excess of the picture. If you import a photo you may wish to reduce it and this can be done by entering how many units one of the dimensions will become and because there is a link button it should resize it automatically and you just have to press enter once you are happy with it. Of course if you press the link button it breaks that link between the dimensions. Another popular job is removing red eye from photographs where you zoom into the photo and select the red eye removal tool. This works by adjusting the sensitivity to red on a sliding scale so the rest of the photo should be left unharmed. I must admit this tutorial seems a little better than the Wordpress one which contained a lot of programming. From what I have done of it so far it seems great.

Public Relations

The book I read to research this post was Public Relations For Dummies by Eric Yaverbaum which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Katherine Hepburn once said she doesn't mind what the newspapers say about her as long as it's true. A lot of Public Relations is about being true and sincere. A big corporation might have billions of dollars to spend on Public Relations including tv campaigns and advertising in the tabloid newspapers. A small company can compete with a big company without spending anything like their amount on advertising. They can use social media where a lot of customers can be obtained for little outlay. If you run a small company you might want to handle Public Relations yourself rather than bring in a PR Agency. If you are tempted to bring in a PR Agency consider how important your companies account is to them. If they are a corporate PR Agency and you account for 0.01% of their business they are unlikely to pay much attention to promoting your company. Also ask to see previous work by the agency and compare what they told other companies they could achieve with what was actually achieved. You may find that rather than paying for advertising you can get stories out like a product launch which will still get coverage in media like magazines and newspapers and for free. Whatever you do if their is a crisis, don't bury your head in the sand, answer it and do it politely. Obviously if someone is really irate about your product offer to discuss it away from prying eyes, either by phone or email etc. This book also looks at promoting your product using podcasts and blogging etc. Another thing you ought to look into is social bookmarking with sites Technorati which can send you a lot of traffic. I did really enjoy this book which is also on quite an interesting subject.

Robot Building

The book I read to research this post was Robot Building For Dummies by Nancy Stevenson, which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Just like computers have gone from being something strictly for hobbyists in the 70's to the mainstream nowadays, robots are set to do the same in the near future. At the moment robots tend to be a bit limited in what they can do, but especially for the more common serious hobby ones you often download controlling programs from the web and transfer them to the robot. Part of the A+ exam is that you have to control a simple robotic arm or similar from a computer. An important point they make is that you must read the instructions even if construction seems simple as there can easily be something important you miss out and it won't work. Often you need to things like wires and it's important the solder melts properly to make a proper connection. They look at constructing a robot called Soccer Jr. which is a basic one and one called Arobot which is a more expensive and complex one. They also look at adding things like temperature and motion sensors. A couple of good robot products website is http://robotstore.com & http://jameco.com. It's interesting to note the military are heavily into developing robot technology and drones and other robots have actively been used for surveillance in Afghanistan. Many people like to build a robot and a perspex semi circular cover on it which looks good but hinders access if it breaks down. Of course having robot wars where robots smash each other up in a duel is big business and there are even tv programmes devoted to this. I did read in another book that it will be possible to buy a computer that will be able to match the processing power of the human brain by 2030 which is very exciting and gives you an idea of what can be achieved with robots. In all probability we will have robot assistants to do things like housework by then. I did really enjoy this book and there are shopping chains like Radio Shack & Maplins that carry extensive lines of robot project parts. At least to start off with you are probably best off assembling a kit rather than designing and building one from scratch. 

Conrad Hilton

The book I read to research this post was Be My Guest by Conrad Hilton which is a very good book which I bought from a local secondhand bookstore. This book was written in 1957 but is essentially an autobiography about how he built up the Hilton Group of hotels. At that time there were many luxury hotels like the Waldorf Astoria in New York going out of business and he bought them up cheaply. Many of his gains were made when there was a recession and he knew there was a market for luxury hotels. Of course the wealthy will always have to stop in a luxury hotel whether or not there is a recession. One of his substantial gains was made in Hawaii in 1941 when World War 2 was going on and many thought the Japanese might land there. He thought if the Japs land there we're all done for and bought a luxury hotel in Honolulu quite cheaply. He did his research and checked the hotel was empty beforehand. Of course he had lots of money when he needed it and bought one hotel chain for $111 million. This is a fascinatinating account of how someone built a business empire and I really enjoyed it. Many businesses cut back on investment when there is a recession which is exactly the time when it's cheapest and the time to strike. This version of the book contains a foreword by his son Barron Hilton. At one stage he was so poor a bellboy had to give him enough money to buy something to eat. 

Foursquare For Business

The book I read to research this post was Foursquare For Business by Brett Allen which is a very good book which I think I downloaded for free from kindle. This book is fairly and there is another book called Foursquare In 10 Minutes which is more comprehensive although this book is quite interesting. I can't understand why there are so many books on things like Facebook & Twitter because there is such competition between the different titles it's hard to see how any can be very successful. I think Foursquare has more potential for budding writers because it's popular but there aren't many books about it. Foursquare is a location based marketing social media site. The idea is you take a smartphone equipped with the app and check in from time to time to let your friends know where you are. Foursquare is the most popular location based website on the planet. Most businesses which market on this site have special offers and virtual pins which many offer are quite sought after. You can change the pins you offer each week and many people will want the full set so will buy from you. You can have special offers and many places target these to Foursquare users. It's difficult to register your business because basically they have to make sure you do indeed own the business and are who you are. It's quite easy for normal users to register. Apparently Foursquare is 3rd behind Facebook & Twitter in terms of mobile users of their site. I did quite enjoy reading this book and while you can probably work out how to use Foursquare, this book will save you time. 

Particle Physics

The book I read to research this post was Particle Physics A Very Short Introduction by Frank Close which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is part of a series of approximately 300 which get an expert in a field to write roughly 150 pages as an introduction to their subject. They are generally fairly although this book is quite complex in places. It is interesting though especially the stuff on colliders like the one at CERN in Geneva which is 27 km long and underground and uses powerful to bend atoms which are sent around a kind of circular tunnel and made collide with each other. They do this kind of thing to find what comprises an atom, make anti matter and also make plasma. Plasma is a state of matter in much the same way as a liquid or gas except it is super heated by something like a star and contains free flowing electrons. If nucleus of an atom was magnified to the extent it was visible to the human eye, the atom would be 10,000 km across. Most of an atom is comprised of nothingness. This is good because a nucleus is extremely dense for its size. There is also a kind of straight tunnel underground at Stanford University in California that is 7 km long where atoms are fired down and smashed together at high velocity. In the case of most atoms, the nucleus is relatively stable and these tend to have a fairly small nucleus with an equal amount of positive and negative charges. Where we get large nucleus's with different amounts of positive and negative charges, the element decays and gradually turns into something else which is a radio active substance. Not all elements occur in abundance in the Earth's crust, astatine for example has a total amount of less than 1 ounce and generally has to be manufactured in a laboratory. Atoms are also in a constant flux of being recycled and the atoms you are made from have only been in that form for a relatively short period but are as old as the planet and are 1/3 as old as the universe. I did find this book very interesting and enjoyed reading it.

Building Websites Using Wordpress 2

I have been doing a video training course called Building Websites Using Wordpress with Infinite Skills which is a dvd rom which is offered on a subscription basis at http://safaribooksonline.com. You pay them £29.95 per month and they give you unlimited access to their courses and e-books which you can use online. Anyway I am doing a blog daily on some of the information I pick up. Today it was still using Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop. To transfer a film from one to the other you use control and x to move it to the clipboard, then control and v to move it to the page in photoshop. It's the same as this in most programs. You often find Photoshop moves some of the objects on you page to the centre and they have to be repositioned. In Photoshop the items on your page are called layers and in Illustrator they are called objects mainly because they are very different programs that have different rules concerning items on a page. If you want to avoid stuff moving around on a page as you transfer it, one way is to make the blank page a separate object in Illustrator. You remove any colour and lock the object but leave everything else on the page unlocked and then do the transfer. You will also find you don't want everything on the same layer which prevents editing. You will transfer everything once so you can see where everything goes for alignment and then break apart the page in Illustrator and import them separately. To group several objects into one layer with in Photoshop you highlight each object and use control and g which groups them into the same layer. Prior to doing a website they recommend doing a version in programs like Illustrator & Photoshop so you can see where everything and it also lets you make it opaque and be able to align everything. Illustrator will primarily do your graphical content and Photoshop will do the photo editing. There is a magic wand tool in Photoshop that lets you select the space within enclosed lines and then you can delete what is inside prior to inserting a photograph. When you import something from Illustrator to Photoshop it will often look a bit funny which can normally be corrected by rendering it. I'll try and do another post in this series tomorrow.

Building Websites Using Wordpress 1

I have been doing the video training course Building Websites Using Wordpress by Infinite Skills at

http://safaribooksonline.com and thought I would do a series of posts on what I learn. The course is split into 12 parts and I have just done the first 2. The course contains just under 9 hours of video. When designing a website you will typically do the artistic and text part in Adobe Illustrator which is what this part looks at then will do the photo elements in Photoshop and then construct everything in Wordpress. You can use the eyedropper tool to match the colours up. When you are constructing it you will usually make it opaque to correctly line everything up. Some tricks are you can use control and r to activate the rulers and when you set the rulers you make sure they aren't locked and then when they are in place lock them. Your toolbars are found under the windows command menu. You will often select what you are working with and choose the properties toolbar. You can group items so they become 1 with the shortcut control and g. You can duplicate which saves you having to redraw it using control and d or alt and drag. One trick if you are doing something like a logo and want it to look fancy is to let it overlap the other elements on the page slightly. Usually you will draw the elements so they are roughly in the right place then highlight them and using the properties toolbar enter round numbers in the x and y axis to position them and enter rounded numbers for how big each box has to be. You can do a search for lorem ipsum in google and copy and paste this special text into the placeholder if you doing something like a template and haven't any ready text. In Illustrator you will see a red mark to indicate a box has too much text in it which is what you want in the case of placeholder text as any gaps are unslightly. What I've done of this course is great and easy to understand also I'd suggest if you are doing the course rather than buy it on dvd rom consider joining Safari Books Online as they have hundreds of courses and online books that you just pay a flat charge for and then you can use it as much as you like.

Foreclosure Investing

The book I read to research this post was Foreclosure Investing For Dummies which is an excellent book which I bought from kobo. Foreclosure investing in general has a bit of a bad reputation. There are a lot of people who buy properties that have defaulted mortgages or other loans secured on them and have been greedy and done things like make the previous owners. In many cases it pays to get the mortgage payer on your side and it is often a good idea to rent the property back to them. When there is a bankruptcy or similar hearing a lot of weight is put to what the bill payer wants. It pays to at least listen to them. In general a mortgage less than 10 years will only have had the interest paid off and not the principal so you are probably better off avoiding mortgages like that. You may have to renovate a property so make sure allow for that when buying the house. A lot of organisations like the government and the veterans association can't renovate houses and will often sell houses that don't need that much done to them quite cheaply. This book is an American so if you live somewhere like Britain like me a lot of it isn't applicable. Contrary to popular belief if you miss one mortgage payment you won't have the house repossessed and by law you must get in touch with the payer if you are the lender and try and resolve it. You have to spend out at least 4 official letters and the whole process takes months. In a lot of cases it is best to compromise and do something like let the payer just pay off the interest for a while if they are having problems. If you buy foreclosed properties you will often be approached by the mortgage payer to buy the property if they are having problems. Especially in the case of a maturing mortgage it will often be necessary to make some kind of payment to the mortgage payer and or agree they can rent the property. A secured loan often called a junior lien can often be a risky proporsition for buying because the mortgage and tax has to be repaid first and many bankruptcy will cancel payment of the secured loan as part of the bankruptcy process. I really enjoyed reading this book and it is an interesting subject.

Blog Design

The book I read to research this post was Blog Design For Dummies by Melissa Culbertson which is an excellent book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

Steve Jobs the former boss at Apple once said that good design isn't just about how something looks, it's also about how something works. If you think about something like the iphone or ipod you will see what he means. It's the same with a blog and I know a lot of my blogs have a basic design which is why I thought I'd read this. Many web designers use heat maps to help decide where everything goes on a web page. We know the average person decides within 3 seconds whether they like a website or blog. In the western world they tend to look to the left which is probably because we read from the left to the right. Therefore information like an about page secition, some featured posts, and maybe author information will tend to be on the left. A heat map is a map of where a person tends to look in the first few seconds of arriving on a page. The page has to be easy to navigate and if it is a business should have information like business address and prices displayed prominently. The colours on the site should be coordinated. There's a website called Kuler owned by Adobe that has swatches that can be imported into programs like illustrator and photoshop that help with this colour coordination. Another thing particularly with blogs is themes and if you have a wordpress blog a free one they recommend is thesis which I am considering having for my blogs on that site. There are also widgets although you do find many of these are for the self hosted version. There is also the issue of importing fonts and if you go http://typekit.com which is also owned by Adobe you can get fancy websafe fonts. Another issue is photos for which they recommend a free program called picmonkey among others.  There is also dabbling in CSS & HTML which if you use Wordpress you must purchase the extended version to do. There is also a lot in this book on Blogger & Tumblr which are also very popular. It's a really good book I enjoyed reading & I learned a lot from it.

Hospital And Healthcare Security

The book I read to research this post was Hospital And Healthcare Security by Russell Colling which is an excellent book which read at http://safaribooksonline.com

I assumed this book was about electronic health records but while there is a chapter on IT security most of it looks at security in a physical sense with things like security guards and intrusion alarms. Some big hospitals might have 3,000 intrusion alarms so your security infrastructure is very complex. This book is done from an American perspective so for example they have a privacy law that limits how detailed a background check you can do on a prospective employee. 42% of the population in America have experimented with drugs which is crucial information ie if you are employing a nurse. One persistent problem hospitals get is people's cars not starting and you should a clear policy for your security personnel on this. After all they aren't a motor mechanic service. They may need a small van with things like a battery charger, tow rope & a spotlight in the back but in general they should me made to phone a garage and let them sort it out. Dummy cameras have no purpose in a hospital and can give victims of attacks a false sense of security which the hospital can subsequently be sued for. Many hospitals have a creche to help retain employees. Often the doors to and from the creche have card or electronic locks and sometimes parents are given access to the creche to leave or collect their children. Many creches don't give parents access to there and instead have an outer they can go in. They often have an outside playground and they recommend having at least a 6 foot fence all the way around. I must admit I enjoyed this book which I think is probably aimed at hospital managers and would be of interest to security guards. 

Social Media Engagement

The book I read to research this post was Social Media Engagement For Dummies by Aliza Sherman et al which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

A lot of what is in this book is in other very similiar books which I have reviewed. It's obviously about promoting your business on social media platforms and concentrates on the main ones twitter, facebook, pinterest, google+ & linkedin. Apparently google+ has overtaken twitter and is the 2nd most popular social media site. There is also blogging, podcasting and conferencing. You should try and contribute other stuff apart from what is related to your business especially stuff like humor and should add a human touch. One of the most common complaints about businesses promoting themselves on social media is they appear to have no personality. Something which might also help is apps like hootsuite & tweetdeck which merge your social media information into one program making things easier. Something else the book looks at is location based marketing like foursquare and yelp although these probably work best for locally based businesses like restaurants seeking local customers. YouTube which funnily enough is owned by Google, the biggest search engine, is reputed to be the 2nd biggest search engine such is the huge amount of video uploaded on that site. If you are promoting your business on YouTube, humor is probably key to it being successful. One company had a lot of success doing a video where they crushed an iphone in one of their blenders. I did quite enjoy reading this book but it's something I knew a lot about already and didn't find a lot of new information.

Venture Capital

The book I read to research this post was Venture Capital For Dummies by Nicole Granagna which is an excellent book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

Some companies like ie Apple Computers have grown exponentially through venture capital funding in their early days of business. The idea behind venture capital is someone invests in the company in exchange for a portion of the business and the company can grow quickly as a result and then be sold at a profit or go public on the stockexchange. The venture capitalist will normally get a seat on the board and may be a useful advisor particularly if like a lot of these people he specializes in investing in that type of business. He may also be able to suggest other people who can hire as advisors. You normally will have to approach quite a lot of venture capitalists before you find one that will invest. Many don't invest their own money and you should see a red light if he asks for an exclusivetey clause. There are a couple of useful social media sites at http://angel.co & http://www.gust.com that specialize in putting you in touch with venture capitalists. These sort of sites are often free to entrepreneurs. There is also sites like linkedin & facebook which may be of help. Many bosses are put off the idea of venture capital because of the idea of going into debt and giving up a share of the company. It's not for everyone. Most businesses a venture capitalist invests in won't make but it's outweighed by the businesses that do. A potential business will only have a small group of investors who each have invested a substantial amount and won't have any investors who negotiated stranglehold terms. The best companies are often ones that manufacture something on cutting edge technology.It should also generate substantial mark up for the company. This is a very interesting book which looks at this topic realistically and I must admit I personally won't be using venture capital as although I am self employed I am a small company and this works best on a large scale.