Working for Yourself

In a small business you get pretty busy.  In the past I have become so busy that there were things I couldn't get done.  I could work full-time on my customers computers.  I could work evenings and weekends whenever I wished to.  I was so busy I didn't have time to do any marketing (there wasn't any more time to sell anyway).  I didn't have time to research and learn about the latest and greatest. 

The truth of the matter as I now realize it is that I wasn't working for myself.  I really was working for my customers.  Ok... so that's a good thing.  However it is pretty short sighted.  You see when you are busy at your customers office and spending all your time working on the task-at-hand you really don't have any way to see what's coming. 

What was coming in my case was a major slow down.  There are many reasons for this and some have to do with the overall economy and some have to do with terrorist attacks but in reality I wasn't paying attention.  I wasn't working for myself.  I was stuck.  All the sudden I had time for research and I had time for marketing, I was now working full-time for myself.  That's not such a good thing because I don't pay that well. 

See it wasn't all the economy.  Before the slow down I had a great customer with lots of money to spend.  I had worked with them for many years and we had a great relationship.  They were a major source of my income and --They were growing.  I couldn't keep up.  I didn't have any way to expand my operation.  At least I didn't think I had any way to expand.  I considered hiring but there were a lot of difficulties with that. 

To cut to the point... things are rebuilding.  That's good but I don't want to rebuild the way I did the first time.  I would like to think I've learned something.  I am about to install a network using other people without hiring.  I'll probably write more on this soon-- the specific project as well as the shift in thinking.  I'm trying to be creative, make lots of money but still keep my eye on the future.  I'm hoping that this time I will actually get to work for myself.

Linux Project - WiFi Success(sort of)

Well I was reading up on the netcard drivers to try to see if an upgrade would help.  I read that WPA Security was there but not really supported.  I use WPA so I thought maybe I should do something else.  I grabbed a Linksys Wireless Router I had sitting around and turned it on.  It was set back to all the defaults and I got a connection from my Laptop.  The laptop seemed to stay connected and with a good connection for a while.  I changed the SSID and the password to something other than the defaults and everything still worked well.  So then I don't really like all my neighbors to be able to connect to my connection (like I could to theirs if I wanted) so I like to turn off broadcasting of the SSID. 

Once I turned off broadcasting the thing fell apart.  I would get disconnected and had problems.  So I'm going to try to broadcast but use encryption.  WPA encryption that is.  I tried WEP without much success.   Did try the WPA and as long as I broadcast my SSID I get connected for decent lengths of time.

While I had a good connection and in just playing around for a couple of hours on the machine I had my Firefox windows lock up a couple of times.  I was able to close them out and get back to a good state without rebooting but there were a few lockups or times when I did have to reboot.  The times I had to do that was when I was playing with the network connections and broadcasting and if I got disconnected my machine would keep trying to connect to my neighbors' wireless systems and I would have to reboot to get it back on track.

I did find and download new drivers for my wireless card but the Install instructions said that they don't provide specific install instructions because of the variety of ways it may need to occur--consult your system documentation (?????)  Ok sound user friendly?

I did get good downloads of Firefox but still don't know how to download that.  I have to say I was impressed with Skype.  They had 8 different options for LInux but the one that matched my computer had an install feature and it was pretty easy.  I am looking forward to testing the Skype on that machine to see how well it works.  I did test it and it works great.

People have always told me that, LInux could run on lessor machines and run faster than what was required for Windows.  They told me it was easier than Windows and they told me it was more stable than Windows.  So far, although I can agree that it may be as good a program as Windows I don't think I would say it is better.  Still enjoying this project though.  I haven't done much with this computer for a week now but maybe I'll get some time to test more soon.