CPA Technology Blog

Brian Joins K2 and the

Brian Joins K2 and the Delta Crown Room. What's next- the apocalypse?

I recently started doing some work with K2 Enterprises. For those of you who are wondering, K2 is the leading provider of technology CPE for CPA's in the US, and they teach for most of the state CPA societies. I am slated to teach quite a bit for them next year. For more info on k2, visit their website at www.k2e.com. My K2 e-mail address is brian@k2e.com.

I am on the plane to teach a course in Virginia right now, and spent quite a bit of time this afternoon in the Crown Room. For frequent travelers, the airport lounges are a must. I spent 2 hours in a cubicle there this afternoon, and it made all of the difference in the world. Some people say that they are in it for the free booze. I will admit, it's nice every now and then to have a gin martini, but I'm in it for the facilities. I can get a T-mobile monthly pass when I'm on the road a lot, and it works at any Crown Room, and works at Starbucks, Kinkos, and other places as well. It's so nice to be able to go into a cubicle, plug in my phone and PC, and return calls and recharge. I billed time in the Crown Room in excess of what I paid for it ($150) the first time I used it. Good stuff.

One of the things that really hit home with me today was the wisdom of using a hosted Exchange and Sharepoint provider. K2 uses a hosting provider for all of this. The recent events of Hurricane Katrina really brings all of this home. K2's headquarters are in Hammond, LA, a few miles from Lake Ponchatrain. The office didn't have power for a week after Katrina, but there was no loss of e-mail- they just kept on going. Since K2 is a 'virtual' organization, the field force (that's me) never lost connectivity with each other through their hosted Exchange accounts. So I ask you- do you really need to have Exchange in house? The best answer for your disaster recovery plan may be 'no'.

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

Graphire Tablet, Redux

A friend posted this comment to my blog today.

Brian - How do you use the tablet in your presentations and what else can it be used for? (BTW - Graphire - I looked it up).

First and foremost, thanks for the spell-check.  I compose many of my posts on my PDA, and the PDA-based blogging program I use, HBlogger, doesn't provide for a spell-check.

I've been using the Ink feature in Powerpoint to annotate slides with the pen.  It takes some getting used to, but it is pretty useful.  The tablet also comes with a "real" mouse, and when combined with a USB extension cable, you can use both from 10'-12' away.  The tablet isn't perfect, but I like it enough to keep it, and am confident that I will get better with it over time.  I'm also experimenting with the ink features in OneNote, whereby you can select images of web pages and other items and put them in virtual notebooks.

Best regards, and hope the road is good to all of you.

Brian

Super USB Drives for No-Cache Surfing and E-mail

The browser cache is a fine invention- it stores recently used pages and gives parents and employers a way to see if the computer has been used in an inappropriate manner.  It is also an identity thief's dream- if you use public computers, you can be subject to identity theft from the same records used to keep home and work computers safe.   A new innovation appears to allow users to store and run programs from a USB Flash Drive, which places the cache on the thumbdrive and not potentially on a shared computer.  This is huge for students, low-tech road warriors, and others who regularly use public computers.  It also gives these same users an option other than laptop, PDA, or webmail.  The other really nice thing about Thunderbird is its support for RSS feeds, Newsgroups, and digital certificates.

Popular Science reports that customized versions of the Firefox web browser, the Thunderbird email client, and the OpenOffice productivity suite can be run from a USB drive, resulting in greater portability and increased privacy (since the cache of temporary files is stored on the USB drive instead of on the hard drive of a shared PC.  The custom versions, posted by John Haller www.johnhaller.com, fit into about 128  MB of storage space.  The thumbdrive allows users to store links, settings, files, and messages to a drive the size of a 25 Cent pack of gum. 

I recently picked up an extra thumbdrive so I could test out the functionality of the programs- since USB is slower than SATA or ATA, speed was an obvious concern.  While the load time was excessive on USB 1.1, the load time under USB 2.0 was really good, and if you use IMAP folders on your mail server, you can check your email on your phone or PDA, at your office, as well as on your USB Drive.  (If you need a USB drive, check prices at www.salescircular.com, newegg.com, or techbargains.com.   I saw a Staples sale last Friday which had a 1GB USB drive for $40.)

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]