IT Legends – Tech in Connecticut

I have a new business, home based, just a couple computers. I downloaded and installed Microsoft Security Essentials for free. To some of the people I trust to evaluate these things (Steve Gibson of GRC and Leo Laporte of the TWiT network), it has been dubbed a “good enough” solution for anti virus and anti malware. OK, so its a nice free utility for home users and small, home-based businesses. Awesome! But… it does use about 150MB of RAM constantly. So if your older XP machine only has 512MB of RAM, maybe invest the $30 you would normally have invested in antivirus into a RAM upgrade instead. You’ll have better performance overall anyhow.

… but no. I have Comcast Business Services for Internet. I have a server hosted elsewhere that is on a nice fiber connection via AT&T. Somehow, One Communications has to route the traffic between them – and of course they are down. But, I didn’t buy anything from One Communications! So, when I ask Comcast what their solution is, the answer is to wait. They try to explain to me how the Internet works and how everyone is dependent on others, how we just have to wait for One Communications to fix or reroute the traffic. I ask them what they are going to do if One Communications fails. The Internet is designed to be able to route around these things. They were not able to adequately explain to me why they had to wait for One Communications and why they could not simply tell their gateway routers to push traffic elsewhere. Clearly I get other places on the Internet. You can route around the problem areas – some technology is even “self healing”. I will be calling them back tomorrow and I will speak to a network engineer this time. No more Tier 1 support techs and their managers. Actually, the Tier 1 support tech was nice. Her manager just kept repeating the same thing over and over, no matter how I asked my question, which I guess is his job but seriously – why did you have to talk to me for 30 minutes after I was on hold for so long before you told me there was noone at the office at that time that could answer my question?  Were you stalling until 6pm?

I’m not sure how One Communications is in your neck of the woods, but here in Connecticut I have been moving my clients away from them as fast as possible. Their own networks here don’t talk to each other. When I get them to fix the issue(s), they break again. For example, I have 2 clients in Hartford and they have a colleague in Waterbury. All were on One Communications as an ISP, various levels of service. Between all 3 of them, none could route traffic to the others and they all have their own email servers in their office. I have another client in New Haven, and they have to email the Waterbury office too. Couldn’t do it (on One Communications). All 4 companies can email anywhere else, just not to other local One Communications destinations (including my accountant, who is also now moved to another ISP). So I call One Communications, they eventually (days later) find the problem and temporarily fix it. Until it comes up again 6-9 months later. About the 4th time it happened I decided I was done with them because they just couldn’t get their act together to even fix it temporarily that time.

So, I love my crockpot.  They are so great.  Efficient, slow cooking, set it and forget it (wait, did Ron Popeil trademark that phrase?)!  I love chicken.  Its fewer calories for the protein than beef.  Its usually cheaper.  So, I wanted to cook it in my crockpot.  A lot of recipes out there say to use boneless, skinless chicken to cut on fat.  Well, ok – but you also can cut a lot of flavor that way.  And end up with tough, though wet, chicken.  Also, in order to save money I bought some whole chickens.

Now the dilemma: how do I cook a whole chicken in the crockpot without getting it super greasy?  Vegetable steamer – stainless steel and some of them have removable center posts (like the one I bought).  Take the center post out (if you can’t, just spear the chicken – I’ve done this too).  Do your normal roast chicken prep, like dry rub or something.  Keep the cavity empty for this one, though I suppose since you’re cooking 8 hours you could technically stuff the bird.  I put some seasonings on the skin, then cut up some veggies (specifically this time red peppers, onions and carrots) and placed all of this on the steamer in the crock pot.

I cooked it on low overnight.  Basically had it in there by 9 pm, stopped it about 7:30 am.  All that grease drops to the bottom.  There’s still some fat in the chicken, but the meat isn’t sitting in rendered fat.  Its tender, fall off the bone kind of chicken.  Easy to separate bones from meat (use the bones later for stock).  And you have the stock at the bottom for use later (maybe in making rice…  i usually cool it off in the fridge first and scoop off the congealed fat before using).  So…  rice, chicken and vegetables – so good.  Take the skin off or your personal trainer will yell at you!

We’ve decided over here at IT Legends that we need a new theme.  So, we are looking for WordPress Themes (we use the latest stable release, always).  We’re dark and according to James very 90’s – they want their background back.  Hey James, we want you to write again – get back up on that horse man…  or maybe we’re just looking in the wrong place?

So, if you’re getting this post on facebook or an RSS Feed instead of going to the site directly, please run to the IT Legends site and poke around a bit.  We like the layout, but we can be convinced to find another theme.  Does it need to be free?  How about free as in beer or less than $50 (but we prefer free since we’ve only made $3 – actually considering the cost of the domain, hosting, etc – we’re still in the red).  Yes, if you send a theme suggestion that we end up using, we will buy you a beer (or a beverage of your choice) the next time we are in proximity.

Have you ever gone to a 3-day intensive training and feel like you didn’t absorb all the information?  Somehow you missed out and now your boss expects you to be an expert in the topic.  If we establish an analogy of learning to food, you could compare these types of trainings to 3 days of multi-course meals, one after another.  Your body can’t digest all of that material.  So much goes to waste.  The same with training.

Digestible training would be training in chunks of size that your brain has an appetite for and capacity to assimilate.  Perhaps not all training can be done in this fashion, but the tools available to us today to provide skills training at a distance are incredibly easy to use.  I think trainings can be broken down into small, 15-minute or less digestible chunks.  If a topic at hand truly takes 8 hours, then break it down into something more easily processed and retained.   If its self-paced distance learning, it gives people the opportunity to work at their pace to properly absorb the skills and information.  People that learn fast can take on more chunks at once than someone who might be new to a subject or got stuck on one point and needs to research a little more to grasp a concept.

It is my goal to issue a series of digestible training videos to my clients and different ones the public at large.  There are a lot of good examples of this type of training already out there, but I still see a lot of these intensive 3-day training camps that, in my mind, are more of a waste of money and time than a benefit (if there were other ways to teach the topic – some skills to not lend themselves to distance learning).  Here’s a good example of how to make an MP3 podcast in digestible chunks.