The history of Mother's Day is centuries old and goes back to the times of ancient Greeks, who held festivities to honor Rhea, the mother of the gods. The early Christians celebrated the Mother's festival on the fourth Sunday of Lent to honor Mary, the mother of Christ. Interestingly, later on a religious order stretched the holiday to include all mothers, and named it as the Mothering Sunday. The English colonists settled in America discontinued the tradition of Mothering Sunday because of lack of time. In 1872 Julia Ward Howe organized a day for mothers dedicated to peace. It is a landmark in the history of Mother's Day.

In 1907, Anna M. Jarvis (1864-1948), a Philadelphia schoolteacher, began a movement to set up a national Mother's Day in honor of her mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis. She solicited the help of hundreds of legislators and prominent businessmen to create a special day to honor mothers. The first Mother's Day observance was a church service honoring Anna's mother. Anna handed out her mother's favorite flowers, the white incarnations, on the occasion as they represent sweetness, purity, and patience. Anna's hard work finally paid off in the year 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May as a national holiday in honor of mothers.

Slowly and gradually the Mother's day became very popular and gift giving activity increased. All this commercialization of the Mother's day infuriated Anna as she believed that the day's sentiment was being sacrificed at the expense of greed and profit.

Regardless of Jarvis's worries, Mother's Day has flourished in the United States. Actually, the second Sunday of May has become the most popular day of the year. Although Anna may not be with us but the Mother's day lives on and has spread to various countries of the world. Many countries throughout the world celebrate Mother's Day at various times during the year, but some such as Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey, Australia, and Belgium also celebrate Mother's Day on the second Sunday of May.

Kotori Technologies, LLC, a Goose Creek based technology services provider, announced they have hired a new Network Engineer, Jeffery Brown. Mr. Brown will be responsible for the evaluation, troubleshooting and repairing computer and network related issues to reduce the overall downtime for any Kotori client while maintaining a proper service level.
 
“We are very pleased to have Mr. Brown join our team,” said Neadom Tucker, Kotori Technologies’ owner. “Jeffery brings with him an excellent attitude and experience, which will help Kotori better serve our customers and help continue our success.”
 
Prior to his new position, Jeffery was an IT2(SW) Network Administrator with the United States Navy.
He will also be in charge of providing customers with warranty/maintenance and sales information.
 
About Kotori Technologies, LLC
Kotori Technologies is a computer consulting firm with a group of highly skilled technicians delivering larger-enterprise IT solutions to small and midsize businesses founded in 2006. They combine cutting-edge technology and innovative minds to create customized solutions that resolve today’s business issues and anticipate tomorrow’s needs. Kotori Technologies has helped clients increase efficiencies and decrease operating costs. Kotori Technologies is headquartered in Goose Creek, SC. For more information about Kotori Technologies, go to http://kotoritechnologies.com or call 843-553-8800. 

So last week while Neadom was training our new network engineer, Jeffery, he logged into my computer to show him how it is done. That was fine and dandy with me, until he logged out. Once he logged out of my computer, my task bar was at the top of the screen. Neat idea for some, but when you are not used to it, it really throws you off track and makes your mouse work double time, because of habits.

Well, the first thing I did was to do some research to figure out how to move it back. It is really a simple solution for most Windows users.  All you have to do is right click an open space on the task bar to “unlock” the taskbar, then click on the taskbar and drag it to the side or top of your screen. I have since upgraded to Windows 7 and am loving come of the features I have discovered so far. Some of that has to do with the taskbar. I think my favorite is the ability to rearrange the tabs on the taskbar. I use quite a few programs on my computer daily and open them in a certain order so that I don’t have to keep searching the taskbar for them. If for some reason I have to close, say Outlook (the second tab) midmorning, and reopen it, it used to be at the end of my taskbar, causing me lots of confusion. Well now, if I have to close the program, the icon is permanently in the same place on the taskbar. (To save an icon on the taskbar, simply right click and select “pin to taskbar”.) When I come into the office in the mornings, all my “essential” programs are already in the correct order on my taskbar and with one click of the icons, they are up and running. And if I choose to rearrange the tabs, all I have to do is click and drag it.

I was just upgraded to Windows 7 on Wednesday, so I am still experimenting and will update you on the new features and, of course, any tips I find.

As you may or may not know, Kotori Technologies, LLC uses Sunbelt Vipre for most of our clients' Anti-Virus needs. Here is an interesting article from Sunbelt in reference to the Antivirus Product Wars:

All antivirus companies are being hit with the next wave of malware: Rogue antivirus tools like Antivirus 2010. This code throws messages on the user's screen that they are infected, and "download here to get rid of the malware". Sure enough, that gets the trojan installed.
Our CEO Alex wrote about this: "For what it's worth, as someone who is on the inside of an AV company and is intimately familiar with these threats, the reality is that no AV vendor, ESET, McAfee, Sunbelt, Sophos, Symantec, etc. can give you 100% coverage against it.
These new fake antivirus variants are some of the most vicious, polymorphic trojans this industry has seen. They use extremely complex obfuscation techniques which make detection quite challenging by even the best antivirus engine. Many of these rogues are also service-side polymorphic. That means every time an exe is downloaded, it's recompiled on the server-side into a different piece of code.
And, there are about 75,000 new tier-1 pieces of malware coming out every day. So your AV vendor, realistically, is only going to be one layer of protection, no matter what the sales guy might say. (That being said, AV is a must. Just look at viruses like Conficker, Sality, Virut, etc. These are viruses that the industry does a pretty good job at, and if they get into your network and you don't have endpoint protection, it's quite messy.)

Key things to do are:
     a.  No Admin Privs. Try to run as many users on Limited User accounts as you can (always difficult, I know). It won't stop all infections, but it does make a difference -- probably 80% reduced infection vector. 
     b.  Patch aggressively. The key exploit vectors right now are PDF and Flash, then Windows/IE. When I browse the web, I obsessively check Adobe and Flash to make sure I'm fully patched, and I constantly check Windows update. If you're tight on funds and can't afford a professional patch management solution like Shavlik or Lumension, Secunia has an excellent free / inexpensive solution. Or do it yourself, which depending on your network size, can be challenging. However, it really is an absolute must.
     c.  Educate your users. The vast majority of infections these days are caused by social engineering. A user will get a funny video link on Facebook or some other social networking site, click on it, and it will say that they need to "install a special codec", or "update Flash". Or they will be doing a Google search and a malware site will have attached itself to an innocent keyword. The user will click and start getting crazy warnings that their machine is infected. This is the malware trying to get the user to install.
     d.  Do malicious web filtering. There are tens of thousands of pieces of malware daily, but only a few thousand new malware sites a day. Many endpoint protection tools, including ours, offer malicious web filtering. Or use a web gateway proxy. If you're tight on funds, setup a simple Linux gateway and download URL block lists places like malwaredomainlist.com. It's not perfect but it's not bad either.
     e.  Submit malware files to AV vendors. Most, if not all, AV vendors take customer submissions very seriously, and the internal escalations are always senior to anything else.

See original articel by Sunbelt at: http://www.wservernews.com/archives/wservernews-20100322.html

Well as you all know, when calling on a customer you have never meet before, selling Managed Services, you must have the skin of an armadillo, and the courage to continue, rejection after rejection.  It can only make you stronger, or crazier, whichever comes first.  After being in Sales all my adult life, and having a rather easy time being successful, getting into a field that is ever so changing (it seems daily), can be mind boggling at times.  Things I thought I knew about networks and computing in general are very benign.  The past few months in this industry, I have become a sponge learning all that I can.  What I’ve really learned is how much money most companies are wasting by having an “IN-House” IT department, or the ones that have none at all.

 Managed services, if you can get your foot in the door, not only helps you and your company to make a living, but really helps a business owner save a tremendous amount of money. Let me try to explain in my best “Street Smart Business Ideas”. First take a company of 10 to 50 users (PC workstations), they have Chad, the computer guru, that’s been hacking and playing on computers since he was 13.  He’s now 30 and making $5000.00 per month as the “head of the IT department”. He‘s usually busy all day long because most of the computers have a problem at least once a day. This is unfortunately because he “thinks he knows more than he does”, no offences to Chad, but you know the tech I’m talking about.  Now as a business owner, if he had just a few minutes to asses what’s going on with his company, trying to cut all the costs he can in these trying times, he has no idea of outsourcing his IT department, to Kotori Technologies’ My IT Department.  Let’s say for $4000.00 per month, you can have an IT department outsourced and Managed Service without anyone else in the company who is getting paid to do nothing more than “mess with the computers all day”.  Be able to rest easy knowing all your data is safe from disasters, monitored 24/7 and “Down time Free”. That would be worth way more than just the savings of $12,000.00 a year that was going to Chad, after add in the money from the down time from the other employees when they weren’t able to do the job they are paid to do.

 Now let’s take the example of the smaller company that has less than 10 workstations, but a very busy office. The office manager Sally is paid to be an office manager; not an IT Tech. She has absolutely no knowledge of networks, but is learning fast on her own. Everyday it’s something new, if it’s a printer not working, a slow internet day, or just PC’s freezing.  She is now spending most of her day “messing with the computers” and not getting her job done. Not only is it costing you money, but your customers are suffering from lack of customer service that Sally does want to do, but can’t. Here’s where Kotori Technologies’ My IT Department comes in.  Maybe we can help this company for $1000.00 per month. How much would the owner save throughout the year? How much would it cost him if all the data was destroyed through a disaster? How much is he spending with Sally wearing 12 hats in the office? But let’s remember it’s not all about cost saving, although that is important to the owner and business, it’s also about efficiency.