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

Jennifer Murray with Alltel sent me an email today to inform us of an upcoming change that will impact all Alltel telephone and Internet customers. Alltel is separating its land line business from its wireless business and merging the land line business with VALOR Telecom. The new company will be named Windstream Communications.

To promote the merger, Windstream (formerly Alltel) is introducing new promotional Broadband offers to compliment the Windstream company launch. The new promotions will run from July 17th – September 30th. The promotional rates are only valid for new Internet customers. See below for details.

DSL Lite Broadband 1.5Mb Broadband 3MB Broadband 6Mb
Stand-alone or with Dish $19.95 $24.95 $29.95 $39.95

A company in China has created a browser called Maxthon that allows users to visit websites through their proxy server, and thereby avoid China’s aggressive censorship policies. The tiny Beijing company (also named Maxthon, has attracted millions of users in China for functionality that can circumvent government controls on information in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Baidu.com.

Here is an example. Do a search for the word Tienanmen at www.google.com (Here’s a link). The first results you see are about the Tienanmen Square Massacre where Chine ran over protesting students with tanks.

Sorry about the outage this morning folks. I could just pull a “Baghdad Bob” and say outage? What outage? There was no outage…

The truth is we had to cooperate with an investigation that required our hosting company to pull some log files from our server. It required a few hours of down time, so for those of you who did not get your Schrock Blog fix, feel free to indulge now!

I am proud to announce that the National Council on Economic Education has selected Schrock Innovations to perform a significant upgrade to their website, http://www.econedlink.org. The NCEE website allows teachers to look for or submit lesson plans for multiple grade levels designed to educate kids about economics.

Schrock Innovations placed a bid with the New York non-profit organization to rewrite their current ColdFusion website in PHP with a MySQL backend. We will also be developing a new lesson plan development tool that will allow NCEE employees, volunteers, and interns to design web pages that display lesson plans in a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) environment.

Schrock Innovations is proud to sponsor the Deer Park Neighborhood Association’s new tshirts! The shirts will feature the slogan, “A Rich Past – an Exciting Future”

The Deer Park Neighborhood Association is one of Omaha’s most active neighborhood associations. The Association recently raised over $125,000 to build a brand new park in Omaha off of 13th and I-80. It was impressive to see so man families picnicking there this holiday weekend.

Our second newsletter of the year has been printed and is ready to be mailed. Keep your eyes on your mailboxes in Nebraska and Iowa next week because this newsletter has more tips and coupons than ever!

For our spring newsletter we are (appropriately so) featuring the the top myths about surge protectors. For example, did you know that it is better to have no surge protector hooked up to your computer than to have a damaged one that *might* be good?

For those of you who listen to our weekly radio program, Computer This (Saturday mornings at 10:00 on Lincoln’s KFOR 1240), you know that I fell victim to a website called notebookparts.com. I ordered a *new* piece of equipment, only to be sent a used component. I returned it, only to be sent a defective component. I asked for a refund, and suddenly all sales were final.

Those of you close to Schrock also know that I have had my software development staff dabbling in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the art of posting your information on the Internet in such a way that it ranks highly in the Search Engines.

The Spring edition of the Schrock Innovations newsletter is off to the presses, which means it should be in the mail by next week. If you have ever done business with Schrock in the past, or if you requested to be added to our mailing list, you should get a copy. Once they start hitting mailboxes around Lincoln and Omaha, we will also make the newsletter available on the Schrock Innovations Website.

Listen up computer shop owners out there! whatever you do, do not do business with notebookparts.com or any other company owned by Abbassi Rahim (a.k.a. “John”)!

This company is questionable at best in my opinion. I ordered a new 8x CD-RW drive for an older Gateway laptop from notebookparts.com. I received a used, defective drive. I called notebookparts.com and Abbassi Rahim agreed to send me a replacement. The replacement was supposedly *new* but is also defective.

Industry wide, April is typically a slow month for computer repair. For the past three years, Schrock Innovations has braced for a slow April as people get out in their yards, start taking their children to practices, and generally spend less time at home in front of their PCs.

This April has been very different. There were two massive spyware outbreaks with the SpyFalcon and MoviePass infections that caused annoying pop ups and threatened to damage consumer’s credit reports. Additionally, the sudden increase in computers with the “missing windows/system32/config/system” error brought us a workload that we haven’t seen in many moons.