Early this morning I woke up and had an idea for our name badges at our first workshop. I find that name badges at conferences are always hard to read and with a background in civil engineering I decided to create a name badge with the fonts that are used on the highway signs. Highway signs are designed to be read from as far away as possible and always present the most important information biggest and boldest. The fonts used on highway signs were developed through a decade of research starting in the early 1990’s.
So I was on the hunt for the Clearview font that is used for roadway signage. The Clearview font was developed by a design team that has received interim approval by the Federal Highway Administration for use in road guide signs. Yaffa at the New York Times wrote an article about how roads signs are changing, The Road to Clarity.
For many people, it would be a dream come true to be an entrepreneur and run your own business. It brings a freedom like no other. But the dream can become a nightmare without the knowledge of what it takes. You should be creative, talented, committed, have a good feel for business, and a courageous, determined, and fearless spirit.
Entrepreneurs are typically tough people who regard problems as challenges and thrive in finding solutions to impossible problems. They acknowledge their weaknesses and try to correct them. They surround themselves with people whose strong points complement their weaknesses.
So with that said, I’m going to write a series of posts on things that I think are important to entrepreneurs. I will also provide links to several resources like blogs, books, and articles that I feel are good resources on entrepreneurship.
The video below is a great way to start this series. It brings you back to where it all began and why we are entrepreneurs.
This video was made by entrepreneurs serving entrepreneurs from Grasshopper. Grasshopper is a company that provides “an easy-to-use phone system for entrepreneurs that wouldn’t break the bank.”
I’ve been trying to connect a Blackberry Curve 8900 to a Netgear RangeMax wireless router. The router has 64bit WEP encryption set and I have no problems connecting any of my other wireless network devices. If I go through the Wi-Fi setup on the Blackberry, it finds my network, I select it, insert the correct key, it tries to connect and then says the following: W002 – Wi-Fi Connection Failed, Meaning: The phone was unable to get an IP address from the DHCP server in order to establish a connection.
So I start down the road of trouble shooting the problem. I test other wireless routers and all that I came across worked just fine, but not my Netgear RangeMax router. So I Googled W002 – Wi-Fi Connection Failed and the first page I found listed out all the Wifi/UMA Error Codes that Blackberry’s can get . I started following the instructions for W002 to troubleshoot the problem, but didn’t have any luck.
Next, I called T-Mobile’s (Works with AT&T also) Hot line for blackberry support. If you have had a Blackberry with T-Mobile over the years, you might have run across this direct number. It’s great, an actual customer service agent answers the line and they start right into helping you. Unfortunately, after years of owning a Blackberry, you know right-a-way you need level 2 support because you have already done everything the first tech is going to take you through. So they pushed me to level 2 and level 2 pushed me to Blackberry Support. Wow, now I was talking with someone from Blackberry named Jesus in Texas. He spent several hours on the phone with me leaving me with the same problem that I called with. But we sure did re-work that Blackberry which gave me more knowledge of how they work, so I didn’t mind it too much.
My next step was to call Netgear. I reached Ryan, agent #3228 in the Philippines after a few menu choices. Ryan took me through the following configuration changes: switch to Channel 11, set Mode to b and g, and turn off WEP. Bingo, the Blackberry connected and rolled right over to UMA mode. It was great but I’m not comfortable in leaving my wireless network unsecured. So he asks me to try WPA-PSK [TKIP] + WPA2-PSK [AES], which is a higher level of encryption and the Blackberry connects right-a-way. Ryan then explains that the software on the Blackberry is more advanced than the older models, so it’s using a higher level of security. Thanks to Ryan, my problem is solved and it only took 15 minutes!
For those of you that don’t know the difference in the wireless security settings that I mentioned above, here are the basics:
TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is a choice between old and new technologies. Both WPA-PSK [TKIP] and WPA2-PSK [AES] offer good security, but WPA is theoretically breakable and WPA2 with a strong password can withstand an attack for years.
WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) is the oldest (1999) Wi-Fi protection standard and can be cracked in a matter of minutes these days.
UPDATE: If Wi-Fi goes out on your Blackberry pull the battery out and wait 10 seconds before putting it back in. Your connection should come back right a way.
It’s that time of year for me where I re-install Windows OS on my laptop. I start off by making a list of application data that I want to backup. As I was making this list I realized that TweetDeck has no way to backup it’s groups and preferences.
So as I started searching [...]
Today I was notified that Politics4All has been selected as an Official Honoree for the Blog – Political category in the 13th Annual Webby Awards. For those of you that don’t know what the Webby Awards are, they are hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by the New York Times and “The only award show [...]
To interpret website traffic metrics into practical and more strategic actions need you need to link marketing to business outcomes.
You need metrics that are more linked to business outcomes. The focus needs to be to identify movements in these areas, product opportunities, product positioning, what builds market traction against the competition, and cultivates customer loyalty. [...]
I have to say, I do think times are changing for the Republicans. But being from the technology side with a strong interest in politics and building our non-partisan platform here at politics4all.com I have watch the parties involvement over the years online. Let’s recognize that Obama’s team has a proven record and everyone else [...]
Politics4All won first place for the best political Website in Mashable’s 2nd Annual Open Web Award’s for People’s Choice. The 2nd Annual Open Web Awards is a multilingual, international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology which recognizes and honors the top achievements of websites and services in 26 categories. Over 100 [...]
The TMIweekly girls, Julia, Meghan and Mary talk about how you can get local information about politics and give you tips on what Websites to hit up during the 2008 Election. One being my favorite Politics4All and it’s mention about 3:07 into the video.
This past week I went to ConvergeSouth 2008 with Branden and we had a lot of fun. Its a conference about social networking, blogging, video blogging and PR/Marketing to cover a few topics. There was also a video walking tour of downtown Greensboro’s historical treasures lead by Robert Scoble and of the Nanotech Research in [...]
