The hard core geeks know that to optimize your wireless networking experience you want to select a channel that is unused by other nearby wireless devices.

If you run Windows 7 (or Vista), use the following command at the Command Prompt to see the channels and signal strength of nearby networks:

netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid

The channel numbers will be in the range of 1 to 11.  Find a hole, ideally at least five channels away from your neighbours, and change your wireless router configuration to use that channel.  If you are in an area with lots of wireless networks, focus on avoiding interference with the strongest competing signals.

Slightly Deeper Explanation

Your 2.4 GHz wireless device does not actually use the exact frequency of 2400 MHz.  If your wireless networking device is configured to use channel 1, it is operating using the frequency 2412 MHz.  If your wireless networking device is configured to use channel 6, it is operating using the frequency 2437 MHz.

Radio frequency communication is not as neat and tidy as those single frequency numbers imply.  Your wireless router actually operates over a frequency range or spread.  Channels are 5 MHz apart but the frequency spread of each channel is 25 MHz (12.5 MHz above and below the channel’s center frequency).  That means you have to move 5 channels (5 x 5 MHz) to completely avoid interference between channels.

Chances are good that you already have a credit card with a microchip in it.  Transactions using the chip require you to enter a PIN rather than signing a receipt.  It steals from you the tactile pleasure of scrawling your chicken scratch on a scrap of paper, but otherwise the new system is intended to be less susceptible to fraud.

Starting in October 2010, Canadian merchants without point of sale systems that accept the microchip-based credit cards from Visa and MasterCard will assume liability for fraudulent transactions if a chip-based card was presented.

Credit card fraud in Canada is over half a billion dollars per year.

That means if Joe’s Shake Shack swipes the magnetic stripe on a chip-enabled credit card and the transaction is later reported as fraudulent, Joe takes the loss.

My personal and business credit and debit cards all have chips in them.  What has surprised me is how often I have seen vendors struggle with chip-aware point of sale machines, frequently falling back to the swipe + sign method because they cannot get the card reader to work.  The information I’ve seen states that the credit card companies will also hold merchants liable for fraud in cases where the chip + PIN was not used successfully in a transaction because of inadequate staff training.

Canadian business owners, take heed.  Visa and MasterCard have half a billion reasons to shift as much liability to you as possible.  Bite the bullet and get your systems upgraded.

(photo courtesy of Ingorrr)

I am still waiting for your Christmas gift.  While I wait, I’ll share a few numbers I dug up on Christmas spending from Consumerism-mas 2009.

Retail in Canada

Despite the media’s incessant wailing about the economy all year long, Canadians spent more during the 2009 holiday season than the 2008 holiday season according to data from the largest debit and credit card processor in Canada.

December 22 was the busiest day (up 4.5% over last year).

December 24-29 saw a 7.9% increase in debit and credit card purchases.

"Every major merchant category experienced spikes in consumer spending on debit and credit cards throughout December 2009."

The spending increase was highest in Prince Edward Island.  Albertans, on the other hand, spent less in the weeks leading up to Christmas than they did last year.  That is because all the Atlantic Canadians working in northern Alberta send their money home for their families to shop with.  <oh snap />

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Moneris-Solutions-1098650.html

Online Spending

Holiday spending on the Internetz was also up from 2008, but keep in mind that 2008 was down from 2007.  comScore reported an increase for "the holiday season from November 1 through Christmas Eve. During this period, approximately $27 Billion was spent online, which represents an increase of 5 percent over the same period a year ago."

http://ir.comscore.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=433560

Your Experiences?

I noticed this year that online retailers were offering free shipping much closer to Christmas than I’ve ever seen before.  That didn’t do me much good as I didn’t order much online this year (though I wished I had after finding a few items incredibly difficult to locate locally).

What were your Christmas spending experiences?  Do you wish you had spent more?  Less?  Wish you had given more to charity?

(photo courtesy of Sister72)

In my household, my wife manages the Christmas card mailing list.  I take the annual Christmas photo and sometimes write a Christmas letter, but it is my better half who handles the important task of deciding who gets a Christmas card / letter and keeping the mailing addresses up to date.

Our Christmas card mailing list is kept in a little address book that is full of entries that have been crossed out as addresses, marital status, and family members have all changed.  And despite good intentions of keeping everything in order, friendships are rarely formed alphabetically.

I was thinking today it would be handy to use an online tool to replace that little tattered address book when it struck me:  CROWD SPACE WOULD BE PERFECT FOR THAT!

Crowd Space (http://crowdspace.net) is the flagship product of my little web company.  It’s perhaps a tad embarrassing that it never occurred to me before that Crowd Space would be ideal for Christmas mailing list management.  Here’s a quick rundown of why Crowd Space is a great solution for this:

1. Crowd Space lets you track individuals and group them into families.

2. Crowd Space stores addresses and can print mailing labels.

3. Crowd Space lets you define custom fields so you could, for example, keep track of which people get Christmas cards, Christmas letters, Christmas emails, or small Christmas gifts.

4. Crowd Space sends email so you can mail your holiday email greetings directly from Crowd Space.

5. Crowd Space also tracks birthdays and prints birthday reports so after Christmas you can use it to manage your birthday card mailings all year long!

Now that Crowd Space has an affordable Personal plan option, this feels like such a natural fit.  I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.

By the way, Crowd Space is launching an affiliate program in January 2010. Go to http://crowdspace.net/affiliates if you’re interested in getting more information.

…please do not start your video with “I haven’t made a video in a while…  I just figured I’d get on camera and talk to you a little bit…  Not much been goin’ on here lately…”

You should produce online video that informs, entertains, or baffles the mind.

Please.

Viewers will move on quickly if a video does not respect their time.  In the world of online video, attention is a form of currency.  Video needs to be a good value.

Over on the Crowd Space blog I posted an introduction to online photo sharing.  If you aren’t already familiar with Flickr or SmugMug, check it out:

http://crowdspace.net/how-to-share-photos-of-your-events

Never in the history of humankind has it been so easy to take photos and share them.  Digital cameras are everywhere.  Your cell phone probably even has a half-decent digital camera built into it.  So the question is:  when you run events for your community group, team, or church, do you take pictures?  Do you share them afterward?

The Joy of Sharing

Photography is amazing; it captures a moment in time like nothing else can.  We all love looking at photos of special events.  Proud parents, grandparents, coworkers, parishioners, and pretty much everyone else with a heartbeat will flip through photos when given a chance.

For really special occasions we put photographs in special places like frames on the mantle and photo albums on the bookshelf.  But what do you do with photos from the not-quite-really-special events?  What about the little league semi-finals or the church picnic?

If you don’t live near southeastern New Brunswick, Canada, ignore this announcement.

Final Friday is a monthly meetup for folks in the region around Moncton, NB (southeast New Brunswick, Canada).

Final Friday is about the Internet and business. It’s for folks who wear various hats.

Take one part social lunch. Add one part networking. Add one part technology. Add a dash of geek and three parts awesomeness. That’s the basic recipe for Final Friday.

(Final Friday is free to attend, but you are responsible for picking up your own bill for drinks, food, dessert, etc.)

Next Gathering:

Friday, October 30, 2009
11:45am – 1:15pm
Kramer’s Corner (lower level)
700 Main Street, Moncton

Register: http://finalfridaymoncton.eventbrite.com/

Website: http://finalfriday.ca/

“We live in an age of unprecedented writing…  Unfortunately a lot of those people are writing some pretty bad stuff.”

http://crowdspace.net/6-ways-to-be-kinder-when-writing-for-humans

Several times a day I find myself launching a set of desktop shortcuts at the same time:

I had keyboard shortcuts set up but it was still a multi-step process for opening up my main communication tools (HootSuite, my webradius.com email account, and my hatchard.net email account).

Here’s a simple way to create a master shortcut to launch everything:

1. Find the .lnk files

Right-click on each shortcut and go to the General tab of the Properties window:

The shortcut is actually a .lnk file.  The General tab will show you the location of the file.  This will normally be either your desktop (e.g., C:\Users\derek\Desktop) or your computer’s shared (“public”) desktop (C:\Users\Public\Desktop).

My shortcut called “Webradius.com Mail” is actually located in the file “C:\Users\derek\Desktop\Webradius.com Mail.lnk”.

2. Create a New Text File

Next start Notepad.  Depending on your computer, do one of the following:

i.) Select Run from the Start menu.  Type notepad and press Enter.

ii.) Press {Windows Key}+R.  Type notepad and press Enter.

iii.) Open the Start menu and type notepad and press Enter.

Enter the full path to each of your .lnk files on separate lines.  At the beginning of each line add start "" /b.  You will end up with a file that looks something like this:

start "" /b "C:\Users\derek\Desktop\Hatchard.net mail.lnk"
start "" /b "C:\Users\derek\Desktop\HootSuite.lnk"
start "" /b "C:\Users\derek\Desktop\Webradius.com Mail.lnk"

3. Save the File With a .BAT Extension

This next part is really important.  In Notepad, go to the File > Save menu.  Change the Save As Type box to "All Files (*.*)" and then enter launch.bat as the File name (or whatever name makes you happy, as long as it ends with .bat).

Make sure the location is your desktop and click Save.

4. Test the Master Shortcut

On your desktop you should now have a file called launch.  Depending on your computer’s settings, you may or may not see the .bat extension on the file:

Double-click the file and all your programs should open up.  You can even make a shortcut to the .bat file and add it to your Start menu or the Windows quick launch bar.

I have been thoroughly satisfied with my Dell Latitude E6400 except for one large annoyance:  it regularly hangs when resuming from sleep mode.  It isn’t completely frozen when this happens – some applications will respond to mouse clicks but my web browser, IM, and Skype windows become unresponsive.  Eventually things come back to normal but the wait is embarrassing if you’re sitting beside a Mac user.

Fortunately I think I have found a solution.

This week I was finally fed up with the long hangs and did some troubleshooting.  I found that killing the DCPSysMgr process would instantly bring things back to normal.  DCPSysMgr is part of the Dell ControlPoint System Manager.  After uninstalling that application, my computer resumes from sleep almost instantaneously.