Hard Drives Fail, Period.

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Hard Drive Failure Rate

Hard Drive Failure Rate

Here is a sobering thought; according to a Google Study 18% of hard drives will fail within the first three years.

For a long time I’ve known that hard drives fail.  I even thought of starting an online back up company back when 28kbps was considered high speed!   I now use a service from Kineticd and I’m grateful that I do.  Last weekend I decided to upgraded my laptops hard drive from a spinning disk to a solid state drive (SSD).   I thought I was doing things correctly but I was wrong.  Suffice to say I made my source drive unreadable and potentially lost data.  I say potentially for two reasons:  1/ I had important files backed up and 2/ I knew I could take the drive to Recovery Force for them to perform their data recovery voodoo and get most of my data back.

Lucky for me I had most of my important files backed up but unfortunately I’m not sure what I lost.   That’s why I took the drive in to Recovery Force for them to salvage what they can from the drive.  I’m a pretty handy guy and don’t mind a challenge but this was one area where I didn’t want to mess around.  My best chance for data recovery is to let the pros at Recovery Force take on the challenge.

What did I learn from this experience?  You can’t have too much back up.   Storage space is relatively speaking inexpensive.

Banner Ad Plugin

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dashboardFree is good until it’s not good anymore.  That was the case with a banner ad plugin that I was using on the Ontario Geocaching Association website.  As an association we don’t have a lot of money so I used a free plugin to display some ads.   The plugin was free but there was a catch; I would frequently receive emails inviting me to buy the plugin or some other software on offer.   This got annoying.  Not to mention the free version put a link on the page just under the banner.  I didn’t like that either.  I was happy to find that the good folks over at Tribulant had a solution to my problem.   I was able to buy their Banner Ad Rotator Plugin using a coupon which gave the association a bit of a break on the price and stopped the annoying features of the previous plugin.

I might have been motivated to use the Tribulant plugin because of the coupon but I’m glad I made the switch.  The software is easy to use and can be used in flexible ways.   Something that we weren’t expecting to get that has turned in to a bit of a hit was the dashboard.  When we log in to our WordPress admin section we now see a chart showing impressions for the various ads we are running.   I’ve received a number of comments on this feature and we weren’t even expecting to get it!

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One of the features I like about this plugin is the ability to use some provided HTML to display the ad on another website that isn’t running the banner plug in.   In this way you can track impressions of an ad that is running on someone else’s website.  One more handy feature in this plugin.

I can’t help it – To Sell Is Human

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Dan Pink's New Book - To Sell Is Human

Dan Pink’s New Book – To Sell Is Human

Something happened this week that kind of surprised me. My friend does some neat things on Social Media that I wanted to talk to him about so I invited him out for lunch.    He immediately assumed that I wanted to sell him something.   He was wrong, I just wanted to share ideas, but his reaction made me think; am I always in sales mode?

According to Dan Pink’s new book, To Sell Is Human, we are all sales people in one way or another.  I tend to agree with Pink’s assertion.  I have even said so when I used to give presentations to the Junior Achievement group here in town.   Sales frequently gets a bad rap as being slimy.  There are some good illustrations in the book about our word associations with sales and many of them are not flattering.   We are most familiar with the idea of selling a product or service.  We exchange money for something   The truth is that anytime you try and persuade someone to part with their time or attention you are also in sales.   Want to go on a date?  You are in the sales game.   Want to get your kids to clean up their room?  Sales again.  In those two cases you are selling the recipient on a different place to give their time and attention from what they might have had planned.

As always Pink’s book is easy to read an uses interesting examples.  The book is a combination of sales cheerleader and sales how to.   I don’t think the book will change society’s impression of sales people but perhaps it will encourage a few people to go about sales a little differently.