Reading through my previous posts, I realize this place has nothing much to offer folks passing through from the far reaches of the Internet. I’ve neglected my duty to post more mundane content over the past 6 months primarily because I’ve been focusing on trading hours for dollars. Perhaps that’s a good thing, considering everything I’ve posted here to date has been relatively useless stuff. It really does me no good and I can almost guarantee it hasn’t helped anybody else out either.

It’s a shame really. The net is chock full of information that actually is useful. I should know as I’m an avid (ab)user of the informational component of the Internet. I probably google at least a dozen times a day for things I’m interested in, from mindless browsing to things that make my life (and job) easier. Through all the browsing and hunting I’ve come to realize that the one thing I might be able to do here is to put useful information at not only my fingertips, but within reach of others as well.

You see, over the past year I’ve worked for hire on many different projects, from contract software development to mediocre attempts to help companies improve their site visibility through search engines. I’ve fixed numerous computer hardware and software problems, and helped many friends, family and other acquiantances fulfill their computational desires through better computing. I’m certainly no computer god, but it’s something I actually do well from what I hear.

In that time I’ve spent countless hours, nay days wading through sites full of junk just to get what I want: an answer. Things such as, why does my ATI Radeon X800XL display “No Signal” when I try to use the VIVO feature to watch TV through a cablebox? Or, how do I convert text output in VB6 from ANSI/ASCII character sets (UTF-16?) to UTF-8 so I can preserve non-English characters during file export? It hit me during my last adventure to figure out which motherboard is likely the best bet for an Intel Core 2 Duo: wouldn’t it be great if I could find this info somewhere that makes it simple and easy to get the answers? I mean the real answer, not just a bunch of conjecture and supposition.
So here I am with bandwidth so plentiful that I hardly scratch the surface of it, and I’m basically letting my site sit here and waste away. Why don’t I just start putting all that great info I find here in one spot so I can point friends, family and other technically afflicted folks to it for quick and simple answers? That MIGHT make this thing more useful! You think?

While this may be a great intention, I will attempt to hold true to my desire to make this place useful. In the coming days and weeks I’m sure to find a great many more solutions to problems I run into all the time, and hopefully the answers will be here for you when you need them. While I am a software engineer by trade, I have been asked by many, from all walks of life, to answer questions on firewalls, networks, remote desktop, VPNs, servers, wireless networks, web sites, web advertising, search engine optimization, software development, coding, debugging, troubleshooting, computer upgrades, etc. The list goes on and on. And the one thing that helps anyone in those situations is this, the great Internet. Blogs, forums, search engines, development sites, you name it. If someone has tried it before you’ll likely find that person has posted something somewhere on the topic at hand. At least, we all hope so.

Here’s to giving back to the great network that so capably has taken care of me and just about every question I’ve ever come up with. I hope you find some of those answers here as I work to get something useful and interesting posted on my site.

Thanks for sticking around to read all that.