If you travel for business, whether you own the company or work for someone else, you have to keep track of your expenses.
If you are the owner, that “boss” called the Internal Revenue Service is likely to ask for your travel and entertainment expense documentation.
If you work for a company, they’ll want an expense report before reimbursing you for your expenditures.
Keeping track of expenses is a royal pain.
I use a scanner to bring home literature without the weight.
I also converted my three 5 drawer filing cabinets into PDF files that were OCR’d so I can search and find documents when I need them using Microsoft Desktop Search.
I can also carry those 33,458 pages of scanned documents on a pocket sized hard disk.
If I were still a salesman, I’d carry all my literature, technical support documents, manuals, etc. on the same drive. Our salesmen used to have a trunk full of paper to have the information they might need with them while they were on the road.
Being able to print on the road is really handy. Being able to scan on the road is amazingly useful.
I’ve been to trade shows and brought home 40 or 50 pounds of literature. With the changes in most airline travel policies, that literature could cost $50!
Recently I’ve brought home just a few random pieces of literature.
Everything else I scan and bring home as a PDF or JPG file, either on my computer hard drive or a USB flash drive (or both as backups).
If you travel much, eventually you need to print while on the road.
There are lots of options.
One is go to the hotel business center, where they likely will charge you $1.00 to $2.00 per page.
Another is to find a local Kinko’s or office supply superstore. Cheaper, but still a lot more than it costs to print at home or at the office.
I’ve been carrying a portable printer for the past two years.
Almost everyone knows about computer viruses, those little nasties that frequently come attached to emails. Hopefully you have a good anti-virus program running on your computer.
The concept of six degrees of separation says that anyone in the world is only six “friend of a friend” steps away from you. That means you can connect to any of the world’s 660 billion people by getting a maximum of 5 introductions.
I can believe it’s possible. I know that I’m only 3 degrees (a friend of a friend of a friend) from about 6.5 million people on LinkedIn.
I find it hard to believe that there are still businesses without a web site. Having some web presence seems as important to a business as having a telephone number.
I know that a lot of businesses don’t do a web site because the quotes they’ve gotten are unreasonably high.
Be a spammer; make lots of money using the Internet! There is some truth to that claim.
I’ve got a feeling that a lot of business people view email marketing as nothing but being a spammer.
Let’s get the issue of spam out of the picture. Spam is the sending of unsolicited commercial emails (UCE), generally to people you don’t know. It works because if you send out enough (millions of emails are very common), a very small percentage will get an order. But more likely your efforts will get your emails blocked.
I am a huge proponent of backing up. I know from personal experience that hardware fails, usually at the worst possible time and as far away from your last back up as possible.
I use local drives for daily back ups. I use network drives for weekly backup. I have important data burned on DVD’s and “stored in the cloud.”
It’s hard to believe it was only last June (2008) when I had multiple systems failures, two desktops and two notebooks. One notebook never recovered (it was dropped and the extended warranty just refunded the purchase price so I didn’t replace it). I’m typing this on the other notebook, repaired by HP under warranty. The desktops, Desktop 3 and Desktop 4, were part of a 4 computer cluster I have in my office connected via the network and sharing a monitor et al via a KVM switch. I ended up replacing both with a single n
