Boswell Lumber – 100th Anniversary Celebration

This is  a company that is interesting enough to me that I am going to publish this on both of my blog sites. I was graciously invited to Boswell Lumber Company’s celebration of their 100th year anniversary. I am so happy that I took the time to visit with them during this special time.

The company began as a sawmill in 1909 and has today evolved into a full service planing mill located on the original mill site. They stock over 140 moulds in Oak and Poplar with half a million board feet of raw lumber in many different species, ready to be worked for you.

They can ship stock moulds, or produce custom moulds. They have the equipment to fill you needs. See an example of their products by clicking here.  Beside the clean and spacious environment for their 23 employees to work in, I was amazed at the racks of prepared product that they supply the surrounding lumber and home supply companies with. On show was a door that they carved using their equipment to show just what they are capable of doing for you and your specialized project.

You can contact their sales department by calling 814-629-5625 or by emailing them at sales@hortreeproducts.com.

On Demand Online coming to Comcast

Comcast sent me a letter today inviting me to test their (Beta) of On Demand Online. I don’t know how exclusive this list is but it will be interesting to compare their online experience with some of the others that are available currently like Hulu and others. They have the technology for streaming and the ability to do on demand with their digital boxes so this shouldn’t be a big stretch. I’ll let you know what I think once I have tried it out for a few weeks

SurveyMonkey.com

If you are a service oriented company, you probably want to know how well you are performing your job from your client’s perspective. It is very important to know how well you are doing and to find out when you are not performing to your client’s expectations. You want to know where you are doing well, and mainly where you are not so that you can fix problems quickly before they start hurting your reputation.

SurveyMonkey.com provides an automated web service that allows you to create a survey questions in many different formats and styles. Then you can either email the link that they create to your survey or you can embed the code in your website that will allow people to fill out a form and submit it back to SurveyMonkey.com. You then have access to the results of the surveys and can determine how well your are doing or not!

You can choose between a free service that limits you to 100 responses per survey and only 10 questions per survey, Monthly Pro Account that costs $19.95 per month and allows you to have a total of 1000 responses per month with an overage charge of $.05/response over 1000 responses, and an Annual Pro account for $200/year with unlimited responses per month and no overage charge. For a more detailed look at the different Account Plans click here…

If you don’t know how you are going to use it, or how many people you are going to have respond to your survey's, you will want to start off with the free account. If you find this product useful you can then jump into the more advanced versions at any time.

Installing Windows 7 Using a USB Flash Drive – Part 1 – Prepping the Flash Drive

I decided to document the process that I need to go through to install Windows 7 onto a new Netbook that I am prepping for my father. I decided to try to do this without using an external USB DVD drive.I needed a 4GB drive which I didn’t have one free so I decided to use one of my SD Flash cards I use with my camera. I have previously reviewed the Mizco SD Reader that I use to read my SD Flash Memory Cards. It turns any SD Flash Memory Card into a USB Flash Drive.

So the first thing that you need to do is to set the memory card as a bootable USB Drive. I am doing this from my Windows 7 Desktop and the procedure is as follows:

Step #1: Format the Drive

The steps here are to use the command line to format the disk properly using the diskpart utility. [Be warned: this will erase everything on your drive. Be careful.]

1. Plug in your USB Flash Drive
2. Open a command prompt as administrator (Right click on Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt and select “Run as administrator”
3. Find the drive number of your USB Drive by typing the following into the Command Prompt window:
   diskpart
   list disk
   The number of your USB drive will listed. You’ll need this for the next step.  I’ll assume that the USB flash drive is disk 2.
4. Format the drive by typing the next instructions into the same window. Replace the number “2” with the number of your disk below.
   select disk 2
   clean
   create partition primary
   select partition
   active
   format fs=NTFS
   assign
   exit
   When that is done you’ll have a formatted USB flash drive ready to be made bootable.

Step 2: Make the Drive Bootable 
Next we’ll use the bootsect utility that comes on the Vista or Windows 7 disk to make the flash drive bootable. I am using an ISO file formatted file for my Win7 install disk and since I have the new version of WINZIP that can access an ISO file directly I am accessing the files in that manner. However, you will probably have a Win7 install CD and I will document accessing in that manner as well. I dropped the contents of my ISO file into a folder on my desktop and that’s how I gained access to the files the same way that you would to your CD.

(Turns out that WinZip was missing files when I performed the above procedure. I eventually burned a DVD and copied the files across as stated below. That worked like a charm. I have had great success running WinZip on ISO files and installing directly from there. That seems to work just fine.)

In the same command window that you were using in Step 1:

1. Insert your Windows Vista / 7 DVD into your drive.
2. Change directory to the DVD’s boot directory where bootsect lives:
   d:
   cd d:\boot
3. Use bootsect to set the USB as a bootable NTFS drive prepared for a Vista/7 image. I’m assuming that your USB flash drive has been labeled disk G:\ by the computer:
   bootsect /nt60 G:
4. You can now close the command prompt window, we’re done here.

Step 3: Copy the installation DVD to the USB drive
The easiest way is to use Windows explorer to copy all of the files on your DVD on to the formatted flash drive.  After you’ve copied all of the files the disk you are ready to go.

Step 4: Set your BIOS to boot from USB
This is where you’re on your own since every computer is different. Most BIOS’s allow you to hit a key at boot and select a boot option. On most Acer notebooks/Netbooks you will be pressing F2 to jump into the Bios setup when booting your system. Go to the Bios page that controls the boot device order and make your USB device the topmost choice in the boot sequence.

Note: As it turned out, I wasn’t able to complete the install of Windows 7 on this machine this past weekend because the controller couldn’t take being loaded from a USB Flash Drive. Whoops. So we stuck a USB DVD drive on the Netbook and installation went just fine. So much for trying to be inventive to work around not having a portable USB DVD drive.

Adesso Rollup Keypad

I acquired one of these a few years back and was completely taken with it. It takes awhile for you to get used to the feel but it has some really great characteristics that will make you take a look at it.

Adesso has four models in this keyboard group. Three in black: mini, compact and full size and white in full size. The keys have a wobbly feel that if you are not striking straight down you can miss a stroke because you haven’t made good contact on keystrokes. This is about the only negative that I see with the product.

So, I said there were a lot of positive features and here they are:

The flat, comfortable design offers easy typing which eliminates negative-angle stress to your wrists. Its improved raised keys provide better tactile feedback than previous flexible designs.
We've put this keyboard through rigorous testing and could not destroy it. We've tried to rip, tear, pull and yank the keyboard but it held up. We even took it to an extreme and ran it over with automobiles and machinery and guess what, it still worked!!! So while we do not recommend that you try to destroy it, you can see that it should be able to handle any environment where you need a portable, waterproof, flexible keyboard.

Waterproof
With its water-proof silicone material, you don't have to worry about damaging the keyboard because you can't! You could spill a beverage on it and all you have to do is simply wipe or clean it off and continue to use it, good as new!

Washable
The keyboard is completely sealed preventing germs from entering anywhere inside the keyboard. Great for medical facilities since the keyboard surface can be washed and disinfected at any time to avoid the spread of infectious disease
Portable
The keyboard is lightweight, ultra-slim and very compact. It would be a perfect companion for travel, school, and many industrial or medical environments. It fits easily in your briefcase, backpack or notebook carrying case and you don't have to worry about any sharp edges.

Dirt & Dustproof
The keyboard can be used safely in highly dusty environments. Perfect for factories, industrial warehouses, retail facilities or anywhere where dust may be a present.

Who can benefit from this device? Dusty, greasy or wet environments. These keyboards are completely sealed so they can easily be cleaned with mild cleaners and liquid cleaners. Hospitals, Warehouses, Manufacturing facilities and Garages. If you are on the road and you want an easily transportable keyboard, voila!, this is a perfect choice for you.

These units can be found for around $29.95 each so they are really priced well for what they give you.