My neighbor is a grandma, who calls us out whenever she has a problem with her computer (a leftover client from the days when we did computer building and repair). She periodically buys a new computer and asks me to help her install AVG. Her newest purchase was a Netbook. By Acer.

I’ve been looking at those. They are cute, lightweight, and are designed to access the net on the road. My laptop is a 17″ Dell, with very high specs. Loaded so that I can work efficiently. It contains my entire business – if it were stolen, I’d be in a world of hurt. Sure, I have backups, but the process of buying a new laptop, and installing the programs I need, and restoring the backups would take DAYS at a minimum. I can’t really afford to lose that kind of time. We’ve been thinking for some time that it is probably better if we don’t travel with our primary work machines anymore. Hence, the need for a set of travel laptops, which would cause less of a disaster if stolen or lost.

Most of our business is now online – which means we can do 90% of our work while mobile, regardless of whether we have our backup data on our personal laptops. That other 10% is critical for long term function, but can be done without or compensated for during travel – a good thing since I do NOT want to have to fuss with syncing two computers. So we can use less functional equipment on the road. But we still have to do SOME graphics and web templating work, so a minimum degree of functionality is required, and it is probably higher than most people would require.

I’m SO glad she bought that Netbook. Because she called me in to set it up for her – remove the unneeded mind-meltingly stupid games, and install Mozilla and AVG. It gave me a chance to test drive the little thing.

The reason I had not yet bought one is because they are limited to 1 GB of RAM. Even running XP (which many do), that is STRANGLED. So I’ve been looking for an option with more RAM.

Sure enough, her little Acer was all that I had feared – actually worse. I suspect that any Netbook would be, if still limited to 1 GB of RAM, I don’t think the Acer brand had anything to do with it. The people at Staples tell me that HP makes one that has a higher RAM amount. I wasn’t interested – the last HP laptop I had was a disaster too. Way too slow, and with annoyances that were not bearable under work conditions. It was built to be a toy, not a serious work tool, and it just could not stand up under 8 hours of use per day.

Back to the Netbook – it took 2 full minutes just to show the desktop. Then it sat there unresponsive for about 3 minutes before I could even launch Mozilla. Mozilla took 45 seconds to launch. So far, I’ve wasted more than 5 minutes of time, and it hasn’t even DONE anything useful yet. Everything it did was unbearably slow. I felt myself visibly age while it opened the Control Panel and populated the programs so I could sort through them (it seriously took so long I thought the thing had froze).

The keyboard size was also really annoying. So small that I had to cramp my fingers together. It was difficult to type without typos every other character. This is an issue of personal preference – but since I have to move back and forth between a full sized keyboard and whatever I use for travel, I needed it to not be a pain every time.

So I went to look for a viable alternative. I found it at Dell. An Inspiron 11Z. They also have a really slick looking Vostro 13″ laptop that is slim and svelt. Both of these laptops are suited to my needs. We went with the Inspiron for one major reason: The specs were fairly comparable, but with the 11Z, I could get DOUBLE the amount of RAM, 4 GB, for the same price as the Vostro with 2 GB. The screen is smaller on the 11Z. Neither has a DVD drive. I can live without that. The keyboard is slightly larger than the Netbook keyboard – a nice perk, though it is still smaller than what I’m used to. But the RAM is the real benefit – it maxes out at 4 GB, but I can still get the thing for under $600, even with all that RAM.

We like Dells, they are made to be used by businesses, with workhorse capabilities in mind. And I can order just the system I want, configured exactly how I want.

So from Dell, I can get all the benefits of a small form factor, without the excessively cramped feeling of the Netbook, and I can get the benefits of a larger laptop in RAM and hard drive size. I’m still not sure how I’ll do with a screen that is so much smaller, but which has fairly close to the same pixel count as my 17″ laptop, but I think it is worth the compromise while on the road. I’m sure it will help if I can get new glasses too!

We’ll be ordering our new laptops within the month. We have a number of events coming up that we’ll need them for. I’ll be thanking my neighbor the next time I see her.

UPDATE: Another neighbor arrived for help, with an HP mini. It was quite zippy in comparison to the Acer. I can see that it might actually be a viable option for a lightweight laptop for one of my kids, though I cannot see it being functional for any degree of business needs.

A few days later, the Acer owner called again. She could not login to her user account. After restarting the computer, we got a missing system file error. We attempted to boot from the restore partition on the hard drive, but it gave a similar error. Apparently her hard drive has been trashed. I have yet to figure out whether the drive was faulty to begin with, or whether she got tired of it and shook it vigorously. Either way, my attempts to repair it have given me one firm and unmoveable resolution:

I will NEVER buy a laptop EVER that does not have a CD Drive and Restore CD as long as that is the standard for restoring a computer!

We spent part of yesterday in Guernsey Wyoming, at the Oregon Trail Wagon Rut site. We’ve been there before – twice in fact. I have photos of my now 22 year old daughter, when she was about 10, trekking up through the deepest of the ruts.

Previously, we took the trail with the stairs, and went right to those deep ruts. This time, we took the paved trail from the other end. We passed a long stretch of shallower ruts before we even got to the deep ones. Coming at things from a different angle was very enlightening – we saw some new things we had not seen on our previous visits. We also noticed something we had not noticed before – there were more than one set of ruts in some places.

Inspired by that insight, we began looking for places where more than one route had been taken across the rocks. We found them all over! Wheel marks went in all directions in some areas. We hiked down to where the ruts began on one end, and looked for evidence where the wind had blown dirt into the tracks. It was apparent that there were many routes across, some more deeply marked than others. And the deeply marked ones were not always the “best” way, or even the easiest. They were just the most visible.

Those secondary ruts crisscrossed the deeper ones – merging with them, then diverging again. They didn’t completely leave the trail, they just found a different way over some of the roughest parts. And it was a REALLY rough trail. Steep, rocky, uneven, and probably scary to drive an ox team and wagon over. You can tell that those who traveled it first had to carve it out – hacking down parts of the rock, and filling other parts with dirt or wood. So to diverge from the trail to find an alternate course meant a lot of work for those who did it first.

How often life is like this. We see the obvious, because it is pointed out to us. We think that the obvious is the story, or that it must be the best way.  It is only by looking outside the normal expectations and by looking beyond the common that we discover that there are often many ways to do things, and that the best way for us may not be the way everyone else assumes is best.

This analogy extends far beyond that simple correlation. It takes in other factors – the design of the individual wagon, the animals that it was pulled by, the load it carried, the number of people with it, the number of people on the trail and how much congestion there was within a single pathway, the goals and objectives of the travelers, etc. But I don’t really need to expand on that, use your imagination and you’ll find some concepts to ponder.

We had a fun time – but for me, the great thing I took from the day was the discovery of all those other ruts. All of them traveled enough to make marks, but since the marks were not quite as deep and impressive now, largely ignored and unremembered. But for thousands, those secondary ruts where the path of success, the way they made their own piece of history, and the defining element in their life, if only for a day. It made me think about the beaten path, and how much I have achieved by leaving it and carving my own ruts on a little different route.

And I wonder if the marks I leave will still be visible in 100 years, or if they’ll be worn and covered by the effects of time and natural forces.

It was an absolutely DELIGHTFUL story. Charming, evocative, mysterious, fun, and cheerful for the most part. One of those stories that is just made for reading aloud, and which keeps the audience enthralled to the last word, and which provides a simultaneous sense of satisfaction mixed with disappointment when it ends. We read it together as a family, and it was thoroughly enjoyable. In fact, it is high on my list of Must Read books for children – oh, not very YOUNG children, because the story is too long for them, and requires connecting the dots between several story lines woven skillfully together. But 10 to 18 year olds – yes, even teens love this story. A lovely way to create bonds of shared memories for families with teens that they aren’t sure how to connect with again.

But the story itself is not what provided the lesson. It was the movie. We bought it, in hopes that it would capture some of the essence of the story. To our great disappointment, it failed in every respect. Other than the name, and a few shared names of characters, and the mention of soup, the movie bore no relation to the story in the book.

The creators of the movie, from some misguided notion that they had to rewrite the story to capture the movie audience, managed to strip it of every defining characteristic, and to create a story that was not only devoid of any of the charm or enjoyment that the book possessed, but completely, and utterly uninspired and pathetic. It was a waste of money to even make such a travesty. Other reviewers have agreed that the movie was on the low end of the scale. In fact, it is something that could only be appreciated by someone who had a very short attention span, no taste, and who had no previous exposure to the original story (the very young kids who appreciated the endless string of Land Before Time movies comes to mind).

It truly was not even the same story! They changed the settings, left out essential elements, threw in completely meaningless and worthless replacements, created environments in the story that had no reason for being there, and in short, utterly ruined it. I am not too harsh, in fact, there are not words available to truly describe the vandalism perpetrated by the unskilled crew who created the appalling monstrosity.

The sailing ship in the opening scene was the first clue that something catastrophic had occurred – the book does not go near the sea at all. The absence of essential character discovery, and the remake of the dungeon into something like the dark side of the rat city from Flushed Away were obvious and unpleasant changes which displayed the ignorance and amateurity of the vandals who posed themselves as screen writers. The cook – a female character with personality and some humorous appeal – was replaced by a male chef who was merely a caricature, and a bad one at that. The movie was replete with illogical changes such as this, bad whims, carried out with no purpose, and with a sense of pathetic uselessness. The crowning atrocity though, was the vegetable man (an incredibly stupid creation of dancing vegetables which completely destroyed the story line without any kind of benefit whatsoever) – which had all the feel of an addition by a recent graduate artist, who had created something like it for a school project, and just HAD to use it SOMEWHERE, whether it fit or not.

This book could have been recrafted as a movie that was worthy of the excellence of the original story. But because this company purchased the rights, and made such a travesty, they not only polluted the world with so much animated refuse, they also blocked those who would do it right from doing so for some time to come. I think that is the saddest thing about it. In the afterlife for film creators, there must be a special torture chamber reserved for the perpetrators of such heinous actions – where they are first blessed with the good taste they lacked in mortality, and then forced to view bad films through eternity!

The lesson is applicable to many business concepts. Great business ideas contain an element of genius – a bit of something different, skillfully woven into the fabric of the business, which define it as something unique and attractive. It succeeds BECAUSE it is different.

Often, a thriving business will be bought out, or will go public and have other voices dictating decisions, or it may just reach a point of growth where the business owner starts to automate or delegate the wrong things to the wrong sources. In the changes, the wrong things are changed – the very things that define the uniqueness are lost, and it becomes like every other mediocre look-alike.

In the case of bringing in other decision makers, they often wish to recreate it in the image of that which is familiar, little realizing that as they do so, the very thing that made it successful is diluted or lost completely. After all, if it were like all the rest, based on familiarity, it would not have grown in the first place! It is the DIFFERENCES which define a good business. And it is those differences which uninspired or uncreative people simply cannot wrap their heads around. Genius works – but is often not appreciated by those who would like to capitalize on someone ELSE’S genius, when they do not possess it themselves.

The moral is, that in making changes to something that works, don’t lose the ESSENCE of what works. The movie of The Tale of Despereaux is but one example of the destruction of something precious, and the lowering of something effervescent to the worst of the common.

The unexpected, the twists, the uncommon brilliance is in fact, what makes it work.

Most security problems online don’t happen because a really brilliant hacker slaved to break into your bank account, website, or eBay account. Most of them happen because you left the house with the doors unlocked and the windows open, and the burglar walked right in.

See, most of them happen because someone programmed a bot to go looking for obvious easy targets. Just like the burglar who goes looking for unlocked doors or open windows. They aren’t looking for a hard job to show off their brilliance, they are looking for a quick and easy mark.

Unless we understand how online security compromises take place, we won’t understand how to reduce the risks. The good news is, that the vast majority of problems occur from things that are VERY easy to stop. They happened because someone made it easy to take advantage of them, and the bad guys are mostly opportunists. Stopping most just means not giving them easy opportunity. In other words, just lock your doors and close your windows. Cyber criminals aren’t much different as a whole than the average burglar – for the most part, they spend a few seconds on easy possibilities, and then move on to find a sucker if they can’t get in.

Some simple rules:

1. Don’t EVER click a link in an email to go to a secure site. Go there by entering the address into your browser yourself. No matter how convincing the email sounds, DON’T TRUST IT. Any email that tells you that a sensitive account (including email accounts, bank accounts, etc) requires validation or it will be shut down is a LIE, and sent for the purpose of stealing YOUR data.

2. If it sounds too good to be true, it absolutely is. If it is on a one page website with tons of hype and dozens of invitations to click here to buy, there is a 99% chance it is not legit. If they pressure you to buy now, don’t. Listen to that voice of caution in the back of your head, it knows what it is talking about.

3. Change default usernames. If you do an install of some popular software into your website, it has a default admin password – Change it! (Joomla users, that means YOU.) NEVER leave a website username as “admin”, or anything else that was there when you got it. Every scammer in the world knows what the default was on that kind of site, and they’ll go looking for sites that didn’t have it changed. Username and password combinations are easier to break when they only have one of them to guess.

4. Use a more secure password. Don’t use just a single word, or two words. Add a number or two. Use a capital letter or two. Make it easy for you to remember, but hard to guess. Adding numbers and changing a letter or two to a capital does that. Symbols make it even harder to guess, but not all systems allow them. Some sources tell you to use different passwords for every site, but really, you can’t. There are too many! The reality is that most people do use the same password for everything. But it is wise to use a separate higher security password for bank accounts, and do NOT use a password reminder or key program to keep the high security ones.

5. If you have a website that uses software, make sure it is up to date. Periodically, someone will find a way to break into a site structure – like Joomla, WordPress, OSCommerce, or whatever. And when they find that way, they publish it to all the other unsavory sorts. If you keep running an outdated version that has a known security hole, it is only a matter of time before one of those persistent little bots finds it, and walks right in through that open door.

6. Don’t share your passwords. Not ever. Once it gets out of your hands, it can go anywhere, and someone you trust may let someone else know, because THEY don’t value it as much as you do. No one can guard your own security quite as well as you can, you are the most motivated person.

7. Don’t trust web professionals to keep things for you. You have to trust some people with access, but give them as little as possible, and always make sure YOU are the one who can kick them out, not the other way around.

No need to be paranoid – just be sensible. Just like closing all your windows, locking the door and throwing the deadbolt. Unless you are in a high risk online neighborhood that makes you a particular target, there really isn’t any need to put up bars or hire a bodyguard. Just like you do the simple and sensible stuff for home security first, do the same with online security.

Don’t make it easy for someone to rip you off.