Category: Data Management
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Keep the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Independent
In 2008 the United States suffered a previously unimaginable financial blow stemming from negligence, scandal and fraud at multiple levels of banking, Wall Street investment firms and government. We suffered but survived it by coming together, accepting the major financial setback to our lives, and taking steps to ensure that it did not happen again. One…
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Short review of Windows Fax and Scan
Windows Fax and Scan is a utility program built into all modern versions of Windows operating software. I did not use this utility program until recently when I became discouraged by my lack of ability to maintain my earlier version of an Abobe Acrobat program in a Windows 10 operating system without switching to a…
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Why I switched from Google for Work to Microsoft Office 365 Premier for Business
Editorial note: After publication I was corrected and learned that Google can be used offline. The editorial is incorrect in that regard. About a month ago I dumped my Google for Work account and decided to upgrade my Microsoft from a personal account to a business account. Here are some reasons why I turned away from Google…
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Soaring cellular data costs
I live and work in an area 50 miles south of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and 20 miles east of Dover, Delaware in a rural part of New Jersey not served by cables or phone wires. We used to have regular telephone wires that were used for basic internet in the 1990s but service was always spotty and…
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Cleaning up my old blog posts
I just finished manually de-duplicating my personal web page blog posts and found 267 duplicates of the 1200+ gross count. A few were reproduced up to five times. I do not know how that happened. It is possible that they were imported from different publishing sources years ago. There seems to be some harmful impact…
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Nonprofits and small businesses lack security measures
I started the week by reviewing IRS’s publication about guarding taxpayer data. The publication is meant for tax firms but the concepts apply to all organizations that handle sensitive data. Last week I reviewed an accounting firm’s operations and, for the second time this year, declined to work with a service provider solely on the…
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How to deduct 98% of your cell phone bill
A few months ago during tax season I wrote about how changing wireless phone billing practices are having an impact on income tax preparation practices. But I did not realize the extent of that change – and how it directly applied to me – until now. I concluded that I can legitimately deduct 98% of…
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Disaster Recovery as a Service for small businesses
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can be a cost effective insurance policy for small businesses. Instead of having to buy and maintain separate servers, SAN, storage, network, firewall, rack space, the business can store copies of data and backups of that data on remote cloud-based services. This offers redundant methods of recovery from a wide range…
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A missing email mystery
I had an unnerving computer experience this week that remains somewhat of a mystery. At home in the living room on the evening of Tuesday November 24 I spent about an hour preparing a client email communication. I recall that I was pleased with this work; that it contained some innovative ideas; and that I discussed…
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Online security of seniors
Are older people at increased risk of becoming victims of online data mining and scams? This is a simple question that deserves a straight answer. I conclude that even if our hunch is “yes”, there is no available published data that can allow us to answer the question directly. I conclude that most coverage of…