Office Max!

From our vantage point, it appears that professionals will most likely be spending their technology budgets on mobile devices this year, while also improving their core business software applications.

So, I have my roommate see if he can read it from his computer, and alas - no. I wash it in hot water, and whilst rubbing it, I notice that it doesn’t appear to be…well…flat. Ah hah! I shouldn’t have put it in the box to be bent by whatever else got put in there. So I went to Staples and bought a shiny new Windows CD. (This one was also sparkly and holographic-looking, but aren’t they all.)

That makes 13 in a row, but I know he’ll be off tomorrow at least because the plant has a rule that you can’t work a longer stretch than that. Why they called at such an odd hour I don’t know. They normally call before or right at the beginning of a shift and this was several hours after but it doesn’t matter to John. If I know him, and I should after 23 years, I know he was thinking- “If I go in that’ll cover everything I spent today at Office Max.”

I met John Ford at the Greensboro Web Design Meetup he was running last month. Over the following week, we traded emails and eventually decided to share portfolio and application ideas over a six-pack in my home office.

After a few months trying to work on a method through Costco’s Merchant Services (which use Nova) to accept credit cards for our upcoming auction, I found that they had difficulty with our status as a small non-profit. The IRS doesn’t require non-profits to file tax returns when the gross income is smaller than $25K and up until now, we have never broken that amount. So that was an issue.

The problem with software, business software mostly, is that people don’t want to wait. I want to fire the program up and use it.

(4) You can even run a LiveCD Router in case you want to share and firewall your broadband connection and use WIFI in a small office.

There's tons of great business improvement ideas out there...take your pick: "Good to Great", "Covey's 7 Habits", "E-Myth", "Built To Last".....and hundreds of others by best-selling business authors.

Increase your reach to the 21.1 million small businesses worldwide using PCs without servers. Learn how to target potential customers and maximize the use of Microsoft small business marketing campaigns. These practical sales guides, based on market research, are available only to Small Business Specialists.

Successfully working from home or in small offices can require the same work rules and decorum that's expected of the regular Rat Race CPAs working in big offices. By one measure, there are 80,000 tax and accounting practices in small or at-home offices, and another several hundred thousand employees working at home for firms and companies.

I’m a midget, by the way. All the other pencils in the drawer I call home are like eighteen centimeters tall. I’m only four centimeters tall, just four. I haven’t been used in years. You could say I am kind of a waste of space. Of course, all my friends keep getting taken to be used. One by one I get brand new eighteen-centimeter-tall friends. It’s almost pointless to make friends with them. Some aren’t my friends anyways, and those are usually the ones who make fun of my height.

How: Take your used ink cartridges to your closest Office Depot or Staples. The former’ll give you a free ream of recycled paper; the latter $3 off your next purchase.

The other award went to Kodak’s Scan Station 100 and it was called the Government Computer News Best of FOSE Award. FOSE stands for the Federal Office Supplies Expo and is basically the largest convention for government agencies and companies selling to the gov. The Scan Station 100 is designed to quickly turn paper documents into digital files which can then be stored on the network and shared with others all around.

The recent media coverage of Citibank debit card theft should really get retailers thinking. It appears that the theft came from a hack on OfficeMax. It appears that the debit card PINs were stored somewhere along with the key to decrypt the PIN codes! This outlines two needs:

Last night we visited the Taco Mac at Perimeter for free pint glass night. It was a bit difficult to find, since the shopping center is so new that the road doesn't show on any maps yet. Once there I was amazed at the amount of STUFF they had. I counted at least seven restaurants, and that was just in the section with the Taco Mac. There's also a Super Target and an Office Max. I imagine I'll be visiting there more in the future for the variety of food.

I was on the train back from Waterloo, and luckily I’d managed to find a seat WITH a table. This guy sits down next to me, and starts to read the paper. After he’s done, pulls out his laptop and boots it up. He also takes out a mouse with a CABLE that he has to plug in to make it work (even though the laptop had a finger pad).

Look, for example, at Pershing Square Capital Management and McDonalds, Carl Icahn and Time Warner, Kirk Kerkorian and General Motors, or K Capital Partners and OfficeMax. In each case the suitor is looking for a say in the operation of the company, with the threat of a nasty fight. For sure, talk of dividends, share buybacks and divisional divestitures is rattling boardrooms across Corporate America.

PINs, along with some other customer details were stolen through a security breach of computer files at OfficeMax, the office supply chain. It’s not really obvious, how could OfficeMax obtain these PINs from Citibank, what was that strict necessity to provide most sensitive data to a third party.

Well on Saturday, we got our first “grown-up” office chair. I was actually pretty excited about it, but then at the store is when I first realized how sick I was feeling, so I really didn’t get to enjoy it too much at first. In fact, the smell and motion of it just made me feel worse. But now that I am feeling much better, I have to say, I am loving our new chair. We actually got a black leather, massage chair which is pretty cool, although I’ve not really used the massage feature too much yet. The best part? Well, we went to office max for it, because at work they gave us these office max cards, which entitle us to get personal items at the contract prices that we get at work. So, as we were being rung up, I was hoping to get a few dollars off, expecting maybe 20 or so dollars… imagine my suprise then when it came up almost half off! That was just so totally awesome (even the guy working there was shocked… he exclaimed… where do you work??? we don’t even get deals like that working here!). I was pretty excited about that, and am loving this new card that they gave to us (really, only the administrative assistants got them, at this luncheon thing we went to for Office max, where we got to sample new products and stuff).

The problem with software is that it’s too powerful and has too many options. Companies have tried to sell simpler software - remember Microsoft Write? No one buys it - even if no one ever builds a database, but you MIGHT. It’s the SUV principle of software… He shows us Microsoft Office with all the toolbars turned on - you can barely see the text entry box.

Thanks to Richard MacManus and his review of the best web office products, I’ve discovered iRows.