Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

I successfully migrated my Nucleus CMS database to WordPress using a nifty automated script.

I will be out of town for the next few days, but I will try to post if I can. Honestly though, most of my attention will be focused on getting this blog looking sleek and cool, so don’t expect anything too profound.

By the way, for my visually impaired users out there… How does this interface sound on your text to speech programs?

This blog uses the Nucleus content management system (CMS). While it is a great system and I learned a lot from it, WordPress has so many more options for advanced blogging that I have to give it a try. I am beginning the arduous task of migrating this blog to WordPress, so if some things get jumbled, please be patient with me as I work it out. I promise to have a better layout, some great new content, and more nifty gadgets than ever. Thanks for your support and please check back in the next day or so!

Syndicate This While it may appear to be a conflict of interest I wanted to take a moment to let you know about my interactions with John Spatz, candidate for Lincoln’s 4th district City Council seat.

Schrock Innovations designed a website for John’s campaign (hence the possible conflict of interest), and in the process of working with him personally I have learned a great deal about John’s personality, his tendencies, and his moral compass.

We have designed and hosted campaign websites before and 9 times out of ten getting content out of a candidate for a website is like extracting sap from a petrified tree. Then, when we would finally get some content for the site (pictures, videos, copy) it was drier than cotton mouth.

This was not the case with John. John embraced the idea of using his website as a conduit to communicate with the constituents in the city. He was able to learn from visitor’s concerns, raise a little campaign money, and use his blog to respond to current events as they unfolded in Lincoln.

John expressed to me from the start that he did not want any online shenanigans. He wanted a clean online campaign that helped him get his message out to people that the traditional media could not (or would not) reach. And that is exactly what we did.

Today is election day in Lincoln and I would encourage you to vote for a candidate who knows the meaning of hard work and dedication. John Spatz is a natural leader who **shocker** is really in this race to better the city of Lincoln. If you are undecided about who you will vote for in the 4th district City Council race, I would encourage you to visit John’s website and learn more about him. He is a good man and will make a legendary city council person.

The above picture is of Johnny Cash in his “One Piece at a time” Cadillac that was featured in his hit 1976 song. It is funny how a 1976 song that is silly at best could come to personify installing Windows XP on a notebook that came with Vista preinstalled.

I am sending major kudos to our Senior Repair Technician, Blaze Johnson for sorting out one of the biggest hardware driver headaches we have seen since Windows 95. If you are planning on buying a new notebook computer with Vista preinstalled and hope to install Windows XP yourself instead, you have some surprises in store for you.

In this particular case we had purchased a brand new Gateway notebook computer that had Windows Vista preinstalled on it (as almost all notebooks now do). Our client needed to have Windows XP Professional on the notebook, as their IT department was not supporting Vista yet (as most will not at this time).

Blaze opened up the new laptop and wiped the hard drive in what would normally be a quick and easy XP Professional install. Then the driver fun began.

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Syndicate This After I exposed the defacement of the NOAA’s website last month, I was approached by a company contracting for the Defense Department in Qatar (pronounced cutter), a country outside of Iraq. They managed some servers for the troops in Iraq and needed a network administrator. They offered me $100,000/year plus benefits to take the job.

Of course, I refused the generous offer, but it highlights the fact that in today’s world, unsolicited job offers can be real and they can come out of the blue. While it is always a compliment to be specifically recruited, caution is needed to protect yourself from the wide array of possible scams that arise from such offers. In a world where many people post their resumes online, all sorts of undesirables can end up contacting you.

Take for example an email I received this afternoon from a company called Expanxion, a California-based recruiting firm that scrapes the resumes you put online and then spams your inbox with poorly targeted job offers. This particular email made it through not one, not two, but three separate email filters I had in place.

The email was from Matthew Strassberg and he was offering me a job as a Security Researcher. Ironically, the skill-set they were looking for was the exact skill-set that would be required to put together a system to scrape email addresses from websites and then send unsolicited email to them.

I was in a bit of a playful mood, so I decided to give Matthew a call to see if he was a real person, or if there was some spammer out there soiling this company’s name. It turned out that Matthew was indeed a real person, and he did indeed have a job for me if my skills match the position. But I thought that is why you send me an illegal spam message in the first place Matthew… Now the fun really began!
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The question is almost as old as ink jet printers themselves… Can I get my old cartridges refilled or should I just buy new ones?

Most people don’t know that printer manufacturers typically make their money on the purchase of ink for their printers. When you buy the actual printer, companies like HP actually LOSE money up front on the hopes of making it back later on down the line.

Their business model was working perfectly too, until the ink cartridge refill stations came along. It all started about 15 years ago when messy home cartridge refill systems first appeared. Soon thereafter the kiosks at the mall had people who would do the messy job for you. Then came the multi-state corporations who pay money for used and empty ink jet cartridges.

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Syndicate This Last Friday the Nebraska State Legislature gave first round approval to LB415. The bill would prohibit teens 18 and younger from using a wireless device like a cell phone while driving.

The bill makes no differentiation between hand-held devices and wireless phones (phones equipped with Bluetooth for example). Fourteen other states have similar laws that restrict a teen’s use of wireless communication devices while driving.

Before every teen who reads this goes completely nuclear, it is also of interest to point out that the bill only allows teens to be ticketed if they are pulled over for another offense and happen to be on the phone. So if you are speeding or get into an accident and the officer asks you if you were using the phone, exactly what will you say now?

Syndicate This Apparently there are a lot of you out there that think I really would sell Schrock Innovations to Best Buy if I was given the chance. In fact, 17 of you thought I was serious and two of my employees nearly quit over the deal!

Yesterday morning I updated the homepage of this blog with a new header and claimed that I had sold Schrock Innovations to Best Buy. What I thought would be a harmless April Fools day prank soon developed into one of the most viewed and commented upon posts ever placed on my blog.

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You heard it here first folks! Google is offering free in-home high speed wireless Internet service to anyone who signs up for it today only! Visit http://www.google.com/tisp/ for more information!

Syndicate This Today is the day that in previous years we had set our clocks ahead for DST (Daylight Savings Time). Since this is the first year that Congress’ DST changes have taken effect, many of you may have manually adjusted your clocks because there was not a patch available for your computer or electronic device.

If you did manually adjust your clocks a couple weeks ago, you might want to double check them again before you go to bed tonight. If they attempted to adjust themselves for the old DST rules, you may find yourself an hour late in the morning!