New Cyber Security Videos, Vote, Giant Jenga, free Training and Vote!

First of all, vote.  I know, you don’t want a political message to kick off reading my monthly ramblings.  Go vote.  I get that.  And notice I’m not suggesting which party, candidate or criteria you should use.  Vote.  Honestly don’t care how you stand on issues.  Vote.  Just go and friggin’ vote.  You can do it at voting locations prior to Tuesday if you’re going to be busy on Election Day (the missuses Julie and I voted last Saturday).  It’s the easiest way to get that smug feeling of superiority over a good percentage of your neighbors.  Just sayin.

Vote.

Ok, enough of that.  Last month we had both Halloween and our booth at the Ohio Society of CPA’s Accounting show at the IX center.  Both seemed to be a rousing success.  Trick or Treat in Hudson was last night (Halloween), and we had a caravan of 4 grandkids, 2 daughters, 2 son-in-laws and one grandmother out casing the neighborhood while yours truly stayed home and dished out the goods.  And by that I mean large candy bars.  No “fun-sized” (what a misleading name…since when does “smaller candy” translate as “fun”?), no fruit, certainly no freakin’ toothbrush.  I heard one kid telling a younger kid while walking away “See?  They’re the big candy house.  Every year.”  Any dentist reading this should thank us.Oh yeah, the Accounting Show.  This was our 4th year presenting (talking Dark Web this year) and our 3rd year with a booth.  And we introduced a new booth based on a Giant Jenga game (good IT strategy is a combination of platforms, technologies and practices).  We had the most active booth throughout the day (ok, plus we gave out a lot of my books, gotta admit).Today we’ll be at COSE’s BizConCle, also at the IX Center.  It’s a one day affair (CPA show was 2).  Also talking there, and also have our Giant Jenga set up.Then it’s off to Florida next week to the annual IT Nation conference in Orlando for about 3,000 or so MSP’s.  For the first time I’ll be speaking there, presenting on “Co-Managed IT services” to about 100 or so fellow MSP’s.  Yeah, we feel our CoMITs is a competitive advantage, but I also feel it’s important to share good practices with the industry.  This will be my 3rd time speaking publicly about this topic.Speaking of sharing, if you’re a customer of ours, you might want to set Wednesday December 5th aside.  That’s the (tentative) date for our newest endeavor.  We’re putting together a new “day of training” that introduces our customers to all the services and portals we offer as part of our services.  We’re looking to make this a quarterly event.  It’s going to be broken down into 3 sections, 2 of which will be on the technical side.  And there will be (of course) no charge.Just like there will be no charge for our 8th annual “Geek Raffle” on December 12th at the New Malted Meeple location in Stow.  Once again, our techs have gone out and bought a bunch of stuff at ThinkGeek.com and we’ll be raffling them off to support the great work done at Hattie Larlham.  Free food, but bring some cash to buy some raffle tickets!More changes are on the way.  We’re currently working on finalizing our project load for the remainder of 2018.  If you’re looking to get on our dance card let me know as soon as possible!  We’re experience tremendous growth (one of our best years ever), but we want it to be controlled growth.  New Business Manager John McCarthy are measuring our efforts to make sure we’re able to deliver what we promise to new organizations.  For some reason that seems to matter to me.And I suspect we’ll be looking to add an entry-level technician to our curious family in the next month or so.  Keep your eyes peeled for that.Oh, and I just posted a new video on YouTube about one of the latest (and, in my humble opinion, most creative) scams to get money from credentials found on the Dark Web.