work

Wow. I can’t believe that it’s been over a month since I last posted something to the blog. There is a lot that has been going on recently and I’ll get to the big thing first and then in separate posts I’ll try to work my way to other things like my cast coming off and the horrible tragedy that happened here in Brooklyn last week.

The really life changing thing that has happened is that my former employer and I have parted ways. It’s scary especially in this market but I believe that it’s for the best on several levels. The big thing that I figured out during this whole process is that I would be much happier working for myself and so I’ve decided to do that and I’m hanging out my own shingle. Before I go into the future, I wanted to thank my former partners. It was a pleasure working with you for the past 4 years and I really enjoyed watching the majority of you grow your businesses. It was also endearing to get emails of support from a lot of you after the parting of ways. Emails like these, I’ll always keep and refer to over and over again.

Thanks for being my favorite channel partner dude, I’m definitely bummed. But you’ll do fine and that’s what’s most important.

Please stay in touch, I’ve enjoyed working with you all these years.

Now, how did I come to the decision that I wanted to work for myself? To be honest, I had been thinking of doing this for a while but I wasn’t able to do it for different reasons. However when I started reading this book by Tony Lawrence things really started to gel. I’ve realized that I’m a lot happier getting out there and making sales for myself and not have to deal with the bureaucracy that any company has.

Is this going to be easy? Of course it won’t be easy. However I have the destiny in my hands and that is something that I’m excited about.

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Like every father, I’ve been worried about having the kid surfing the interwebs. There are a lot of sites out there that shouldn’t be viewed by children, not to mention any malware that may be lurking around. For a while I have been using a combination of Mac OSX’s parental controls and a plug-in for Firefox called Foxfilter to manage what content she’s able to visit. I’m still using the parental controls but I’ve stopped using Foxfilter for something that is a lot more centralized and feature rich, Kerio Control. (Disclaimer: I work for Kerio, and I’m in sales – you’ve been warned)

Although Kerio Control is mainly for the SMB market, it can make for a really nice firewall for a family too. The set up was very easy as was the configuration. The whole thing took about 45 from putting the CD in the drive to having it ready to go. What I really like about Control is the granularity that you have with granting access to sites. You can select sites with Kerio Web Filter and you can manually add sites to block, with the latter also being able to be done at the user level.You are also able to white list sites as well and again this can be done either globally or on the user level.

Where Control really shines is the reporting capabilities. You are able to see exactly what is being done over the web and by which user and in an easy to understand graphical format. Here is an example where you can see who is visiting a specific site:

Screen shot 2011 05 05 at 8 08 11 PM

Pretty cool, huh? There is even more that you can do with the reporting but I won’t bore you with the details.

Anyway, if you have a small or medium and want to keep you computers safe, I think you need to give a look at Kerio Control.

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Happy Birthday to me

October 16, 2010

Yesterday was a milestone for me, I’ve now been with Kerio for 3 years. Over the past three years I have worked with a lot of IT professionals and have had a good time building the relationships with all of them. I have also been happy and proud to build up the Northeast into what [...]

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Would You Trust this Guy?

August 5, 2010

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W73rHFHg_j8 A few points about this video: This is the evil me from the mirror, mirror universe (as noted by the beard) If you pay real close attention I’m blinking in morse code “I’m being held hostage, help me!” Seriously though this is from back in April while I was attending the SMB Nation conference. People [...]

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Writing your bio

July 28, 2010

In October I’m going to be speaking somewhere and one of the things that they asked from me is to have a bio. Now, I am very bad at writing about myself and anyway what so ever so I decided to do the google and see what came up in the search engine. There is [...]

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Because I can…

July 18, 2010

I am blogging from somewhere above Colorado. I’m headed west for my quarterly visit to the home office and I’m taking Virgin America instead of JetBlue. The only reason that I am doing that is because JetBlue was $200 more than Virgin America. It’s very disappointing when your favorite airline is so much more expensive that [...]

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It’s almost biking season

March 9, 2010

With daylight savings time almost upon us I have started thinking about once again biking to work. My bike shouldn’t need much work since it’s been indoors the entire winter (much to Rivky’s chagrin). I think that all my bike needs is the tires filled with air. I just bought myself some riding gloves to [...]

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Car by Fisher Price

February 24, 2010

I’m in Pittsburgh this week for a partner training and for some meetings with other resellers. As you may have heard Pittsburgh got a metric ton of snow this month and as a result parking spots are at a premium. When I went to rent my car yesterday I decided to be clever and get [...]

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Fun with TSA

January 13, 2010

I mentioned in a previous post that I was a little worried about how stringent security would be now that the undie-bomber was caught (by a passenger, not the TSA). This morning I got on my flight to San Jose, CA for my quarterly meetings at the corporate HQ. The security line was really long [...]

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Mad Bombers and the Fall Out

December 28, 2009

By now I think we all know what happened on Christmas day and how the attempted terrorist attack was foiled. On twitter and on the blogs people are appalled at what the TSA is now planning to do to try and “protect” us travelers. I do a good amount of travel for work and up [...]

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