HOUSECALL information technology

We all have information that we wouldn’t want shared with strangers. Keeping your personal information and passwords private is essential to avoid identity theft, protecting bank accounts – basically maintaining your personal privacy. You wouldn’t leave your bank statements lying in public view, so how can you prevent people from seeing your personal data stored on the Web, your personal computers and computers at work?  The best way to prevent unwanted eyes from seeing your sensitive data is to know where and when it is safe to digitally store your personal information.

Social Networking

First off, social networks are inherently insecure.  Posting to Facebook and other social networks is not necessarily private – even if you keep your account private, people can still view comments you made on your friend’s pages (if their pages are not private). It is not hard to get around the flimsy protections put in place on these sites. Many employers use social networks to gather information about potential employees or partners. Youtube videos are not always private even though you set them as such. Although anonymous account are allowed on many websites, you are not anonymous to the web server hosting your data. Each time you visit a website, your computer’s connection information is stored in the server which can then be traced back to you. Even if you are aware of how to change privacy settings, it is best to err on the side of caution and not post personal information. Overall, the internet, and social networking in particular, is not private. Do not post private information, pictures, or any other type of data that is not meant to be seen by all.

Email Safety

Recently, there have been increased attempts by malicious companies and individuals to get through spam filters.  You may have seen emails from friends or family that contain advertisements. In the past few weeks, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail account credentials have been stolen and then used to send spam emails to the contact lists of those accounts. This is a innovative way to get you to open spam mail, as you will see the message as coming from a trusted source.

If your email account is compromised you will need to take swift measures to protect yourself.  First and most importantly, change the password to your email account and make sure you use a secure password (we recommend a minimum of 8 characters containing letters, numbers, symbols, and capitals).  Next run a malware scan program (like Malwarebytes) on the computers you use to access the compromised account. Malware is often designed to harvest passwords and personal information from your computer, so if you don’t get rid of it the attackers will be able to compromise you again.  While there is certainly cause for alarm, there is no need to panic; most often passwords are compromised by hackers stealing them main authentication database of your email provider.

Do not open attachments in emails unless you know the source and know that it is not malicious. It never hurts to email the sender back and confirm that the attachment is legitimate. Also be careful of links that you receive in emails. If you hover the mouse over a link such as this http://google.com you will notice that the link may not be what it seems. The true link is the one displayed when you hover your mouse over the blue text.

What Can Be Done to Protect your Information?
Be careful supplying personal information to anyone on line. Unless you trust a site, don’t give your address, password, or credit card information. Look for indications that the site uses SSL to encrypt your information (if they do the URL will start with https:// – notice the s). Although some sites require you to supply your social security number (such as those associated with financial transactions for loans or credit cards), be especially wary of providing this information online. A final method of attack is through browser cookies which temporarily store data so that you don’t have to keep typing in your info over and over. If an attacker can access your computer, he or she may be able to find personal data stored in cookies. However, you can limit the use of cookies with just a few simple changes to your browser settings. Be careful which websites you visit; if it seems suspicious, leave!  The longer you linger the more time malicious individuals have to compromise your computer.   Finally be diligent about keeping your virus definitions up to date, scanning your computer for spyware regularly, and make sure you have the latest security patches from the manufacturer.

You know a lot of people. What can you say? You’re well loved and important. That means you are also supposed to know a lot of phone numbers, email addresses, Blackberry PINs, mailing addresses, job titles, birthdays, and many other bits of information. It can be understandably difficult to remember all of this, which is why most of us don’t. Fortunately, this is one area in which computers and smart phones really make our lives easier. This article will explore some ways you can maximize Outlook and your Blackberry to keep track of all that information about all those people. We will look at what kinds of information you can store in your Contacts and the fastest, most efficient ways to get that information there.

If you want to put all that information together in one place, Outlook Contacts is ready to help. Outlook provides places for over 80 different pieces of contact information, and allows you to define your own categories of information to organize as well. The main Outlook Contact screen may look familiar, but take notice of your ability to use the drop-down menu near many of the categories to store multiple pieces of contact information in a single category. Additional email addresses and home and business addresses, for example. When entering a new Contact, always try to include a last name or a company name. Contacts with only a first name will sometimes have problems syncing properly with your Blackberry.

Outlook also gives you a place to keep many less standard pieces of contact information. The Details tab gives you access to places for potentially useful information such as nicknames, birthday, and assistant’s name. Take a look at the information Outlook is able to help you organize and decide what will be useful to you. Outlook even lets you attach a picture to each of your Contacts to help you remember who is who!

Now, you can sit down and fill out a Contact for everyone you know, but you are a busy person and you don’t have time for all that typing, right? Though manually entering all the information you want to organize is the most comprehensive way to put it all together, there are many fast and convenient shortcuts to save the info you need while on the fly.

Let’s start with what NOT to do. You may have noticed that, after you have emailed someone a few times, their email address will start to automatically pop up every time you start to type their name. What was Mr. Smith’s email address? You start to type Smith, and it pops up. It’s like magic!

Outlook’s auto-fill feature is very useful and convenient, but it is not a good way to store information. Email addresses that are only in the auto-fill will not be available on your Blackberry, or from any other computer. Also, if you have problems with your computer or get a new one, this information can be very easily lost. If you never save the email address anywhere else, what will you do when you need to email Mr. Smith from your new computer? It is for this reason that you should add every person or email address that you need to keep track of to your Outlook Contacts. Luckily, there are several very quick and easy ways to do this.

When you are addressing an e-mail, any time after Outlook has recognized it as an email address and it shows up with an underline, you can simply right-click on the address and choose Add to Outlook Contacts. It will automatically pull up a new Contact card. Enter as much or as little additional information as you want (Even a Contact with only an email address is better than not having any information saved at all.) and hit the Save and Close button. It’s that easy!

You can also do the same thing by right-clicking on the name of the sender on any email sent to you.

You can also click on an email that has been sent to you and drag it to the Contacts button on the left side of the Outlook window to create a new Contact.

If you aren’t at your desk, you also have several options on your Blackberry for accomplishing the same task. If you work for a large organization with Blackberry Enterprise Servers (such as the House of Representatives) you may notice that, when you compose a new email, as you start to type a name or an email address, the second line that pops up below what you are typing says “Lookup:”.  If you type the name of someone in your organization and choose this Lookup option, it will find the addresses of any person in your organization with that name and let you choose the one you want.  This is great for those times when you haven’t already added people to your contacts, but need to find them while on the run. It is less usefull when you are looking for someone with a fairly common name. Using Lookup for Smith or Kim tends to come back with too many results to be useful. It can also be a little slow to wait for the Blackberry to search the whole email system.

So that you don’t have to wait on the Lookup feature and then search through the list of options for people you email often, it is faster in the long run to add these people to your Contacts. The Blackberry makes this easy. Simply select the name of anyone that has sent you an email or the name of a person you have found using the Lookup feature, click the menu button, and there will be an option to Add to Contacts. This will add the person to your Blackberry Contacts. The next time you sync your Blackberry with Outlook it will be added to your Outlook Contacts as well. (NOTE: Ask your Systems Administrator about instant wireless syncing if you don’t have it enabled).

Now that you know several new ways to save all that valuable contact information, you can worry a little less and have more information available when you need it. Happy contacting!

You built a website. You gave it a smart design and included informative content. You uploaded it to the internet. Now what? You built a website because you had something to share with the world: information about your company, a politician, your favorite hobby, or your resume. You built a website with the intention that people would visit it. How do you know if anyone has stopped by?

The answer is web statistics. Web statistics tell you detailed information about how many people are visiting your website, what they are viewing, and for how long. Web statistics contain data and graphs that might seem confusing. How do you know what data is important? What does the data mean?

This article covers how to interpret some important statistics from Urchin, Google’s web statistics software that you install on your own server. It is possible that your web host already has Urchin installed. The House of Representatives uses Urchin for statistics on many of their websites. While this article only covers Urchin,many of the terms are similar to those used with other web statistics monitors, such as Google’s Analytics, and AWstats.

The table below is the most basic summary of your web statistics. In Urchin, you can specify what dates you want to view statistics from. In this example, we have chosen a date range to display statistics for 2009.

Terms and Definitions:

Hit – Any time anyone loads one item up from your webpage it counts as a hit. The main page of a website has a items on it that when viewed as part of the whole page count as a hit. For instance, each image counts as 1 hit when loaded, so if you have 20 images on one page that will add 20 hits to your total when someone views that page. Hits do not provide much information as far as how many people are viewing a website. Focus should be more on pageviews and sessions. In the sample table below, the website had 8,000,000 total hits in 2009.

Pageview – A pageview is counted any time anyone views an individual page. For example, if John Doe went to a website and looked at the main page, the about page, and the contact page that would count as 3 pageviews. In 2009 the website in the sample table below had 1,500,000 total pageviews.

Session – Sessions shows how many individual visits you get to your webpage as a whole. For example, if John Doe went to a website and looked at the main page, the about page, and the contact page that would count as 1 session. If Jane Smith went to a website and only looked at the main page, that would still count as 1 session, and the website would have a total of 2 sessions. The website in the sample table below had 400,000 total individual visits in 2009.

The next section tells you how many hits, pageviews, and sessions you had per day. The sessions per day is the most important one to look at here because it tells you how many people per average day visit your website. In 2009 the website in the sample table below had 1096 people visit your website per day.

Average pageviews per session is also an important statistic. It tells you that in 2009 when a person visited the webpage in the sample table below, they usually looked at about 4 different pages. If the number is too high, that might mean that your webpage was hard to navigate and people were having difficulty finding the pages they wanted.

Average length per session tells you how long the average person spent looking at your webpage. In 2009, the average person spent about 20 minutes looking at the sample website.

The Requested Pages graph shows what the most popular pages are on a website. The main page is usually popular page on your website, and is usually identified as index.html or index.shtml. It may also be identified by a containing folder separated by slashes. For example if your blog was the most popular page on your website and it was in a folder called “blog” it would appear as “/blog”.

The RSS feed is commonly a popular page as well. This means that many people subscribed to your RSS feed in 2009. (If you aren’t familiar with RSS feeds, this is an entirely different subject. If you are curious, we have a blog entry about it here)

Remember that this list only shows the top 10 pages viewed. It does not mean that other pages were not viewed in 2009.

The Downloads graph is similar to the Requested Pages graph, but instead of showing pages it is showing downloads. In other words, this graph tells you what PDFs and Word DOCs people are downloading the most. The “hit” for each download shows you how many times that file was downloaded.

Another interesting piece of information that Urchin provides is where your visitors are located, which Urchin displays visually in the map below:

The darker shades of green represent areas of the globe where more people have visited the sample website. The circles point out areas were large amounts of visitors are coming from. Notice in the sample that many visitors have come from the DC area.

For more detailed information on generating Urchin reports and interpreting more data, read the article from NewFangled.com, Analyzing Web Traffic.

There are other graphs and statistics on Urchin, but the ones we discussed are the most informative and easy to understand.

Most companies and organizations have a set limit on how much space you are allotted for email. Combine that with many people wanting to save every email they ever send or receive (you never know when you’re going to need to dig it back up) and the stacks of email that a person usually gets in the average business day and mailboxes can fill up very quickly. This article is going to focus on checking your inbox size, archiving and sorting your email in Outlook and Entourage. If you’re looking to clear out your gmail inbox, here are two great articles, one from lifehacker and one from web worker daily, on giving your gmail a fresh start.

Outlook

Outlook allows you to archive and sort emails by using personal folders, which are also known as archive folders and PSTs. The terms personal folders, archive folders and PSTs are terms that can be used interchangeably, so for simplicity we will refer to them as personal folders.

To create a set of personal folders in Outlook, go to the File menu, select New, and click Outlook Data File. You will be given a choice between two types of files. Chose Office Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst). Click OK. You are then given an option of where you would like your personal folders to live. If you have space on a server, it’s a good idea to put your personal folders file there. Click on My Computer to see a list of drives available. When you’ve chosen, click OK.

Next you will be asked to name your personal folders. You can pick any name for them you’d like and you can always change the name later. Here you can add a password if you’d like, but it’s not recommended. If you lose your personal folder’s password it is difficult to recover. When you’re finished click OK.

Your personal folders will appear on the left of Outlook under your mailbox folders with the name you chose. Click the + sign to expand the folders. Here you can add more folders to organize your email. Right click and select New Folder.

Name your folder. Under “select where to put this folder” you can choose which folder you’d like to contain your new folder. The folder you right clicked to create a new folder will be the default.

Now you can archive your emails. There are two ways to do this. One option is to manually chose what emails you want to archive. In this method you drag and drop your emails directly into your personal folders. Doing one email at a time would take forever, but you can select multiple emails at once with the control (ctrl) and shift keys.

The ctrl key lets you select emails individually. Just hold down the ctrl key and select emails, then drag them into your personal folders.

The shift key selects a set of emails in a row. Select the first email you want to move, then hold down the shift key and select the last email. All the emails in-between will be selected and you can move them into your personal folders.

Your second option is AutoArchiving. To setup your AutoArchive settings, to go the tools menu, click options, and click the other tab. Click AutoArchive.

Here you can edit the auto archive settings. Choose how often you want the auto-archive to run. We recommend checking the box next to Prompt Before AutoArchive Runs so that you will know when AutoArchive is running and you can cancel it before it begins. Make sure the following boxes are checked: Archive or Delete Old Items, Show Archive Folder in Folder List, and Move Old Items to. Click the Browse button to navigate to the personal folders file you created earlier. Note that when you AutoArchive items it will create folders in your personal folders that are identical to the folders you are archiving from. So if you just have an Inbox and a Sent Items folder it will create a folder called Inbox and a folder called Sent Items in your personal folders. You can click the Run AutoArchive Now button to auto archive your files immediately.

You can also use rules to automatically archive emails when they come into your inbox. This is helpful if you belong to a mailing list or subscribe to a newsletter. See our blog entry on Outlook rules for more information.

Entourage

Archiving emails in Entourage is incredibly simple. First, expand the section under your inbox called On My Computer by clicking the triangle next to it. You can drag emails into the inbox or sent items folders here, or you can create your own folders. Create your own folders by right clicking or holding down the control key and clicking On My Computer and selecting New Subfolder.

You can create as many subfolders within subfolders as you would like.

There is no AutoArchive option for Entourage but you can move emails over manually. The command and shift keys help you select multiple emails at once:

The command key lets you select emails individually. Just hold down the command key and select emails, then drag them into your personal folders.

The shift key selects a set of emails in a row. Select the first email you want to move, then hold down the shift key and select the last email. All the emails in-between will be selected and you can move them into your personal folders.

There are many different methods for organizing your email once your folders are created. You can choose to have a different personal folder for each year, or you can have different folders for projects you are working on. Another option is the trusted trio method from LifeHacker. How you sort your email is up to you.

Have you ever seen someone open up a computer? HouseCall System Administrators are known to do this from time to time in order to replace a part, clean out the dust, or just make sure everything is where it belongs. Perhaps you’ve wondered what those pieces of metal and wires are for. Here is a basic explanation of a few of the pieces inside most personal computers. Together they run the programs you use to work every day.

Motherboard

The motherboard ties all the components of the computer together. It looks like a large flat piece of metal that is usually green and has lots of circuits, wires, and other components sticking out. Everything is connected to the motherboard in one way or another, and the motherboard makes sure that all the parts of your PC receive power and can communicate with one another. In this way the motherboard acts like a mother, bringing all the members of the family together. The motherboard also determines what upgrades are available for a machine. If an upgrade is not compatible with the motherboard, you will not be able to use it to upgrade your PC.

CPU

CPU stands for Central Processing Unit and is often simply called a “processor”. CPUs are usually very small and square and fit right into the motherboard. The CPU is the “brain” of the computer. It is constantly receiving information, deciding what to do with it, and relaying it to other parts of the computer. Recently many computers have dual or multi-core processors. These allow PCs to do more things at once. If you’re the type of person who likes to have Outlook, Word, and 12 tabs in Firefox open while listening to music in iTunes all at the same time a dual-core processor would be a smart choice.

Memory

There are two main types of memory on your computer. The first is Random Access Memory (pictured above in green), which is abbreviated as RAM. It’s “random” because you can access the memory in any order. It is used to run programs on your PC. While new data is being continually stored in the RAM, the computer’s Read-Only Memory (ROM) remains unchanged. It is used for running processes on your machine that you don’t usually think about but are essential: such as the software that makes the hardware on your computer work.

Power Supply

All the components in your computer need electricity to run. You plug the computer into the outlet, and the power from the outlet travels into the power supply. The power supply ensures that the correct amount of electricity is provided to each part of your computer.

CD and DVD ROM Drive

Most computers today have DVD ROM drives (shown above) that play both DVDs and CDs, although there are still a few with CD-only drives. The drive is where you insert the CD or DVD. The drive reads the CD or DVD gathers the data so you can access it on your computer.

Graphics Card

When you look at what’s on your computer screen it usually makes sense, or at the very least, you can recognize images and text. The graphics card (also known as a video card) is responsible for taking all the data from your computer and displaying it on the screen in a way that you can understand. Some graphics cards are separate components and some are built right into the motherboard.

Cooling System

All the electricity running inside your computer can get hot very quickly. If your computer has no way of cooling itself down it can easily become overheated and stop working properly. The heat sync is made of a type of metal with high thermal conductivity and works to draw heat away from other parts of the PC that could otherwise become damaged. The fan (shown above) is a smaller version of one you might use inside your house. It draws cool air from outside the PC and moves hot air to a heat sink to keep the computer cool. Fans get dusty easily and can slow down your computer, so they should be cleaned with compressed air on a regular basis.

Hard Drive

The hard drive is like the long term memory of your computer. When you save a file to your computer’s desktop or in your my documents folder you are saving the file to your hard drive. The design of the hard drive allows a lot of information to be stored and accessed quickly. It also saves information in such a way that when you shut down your PC, everything is still stored on the hard drive and you can access it next time you start up your machine.

Like a human body, a computer needs all of its components to run smoothly and efficiently. For more information on what’s inside your computer, visit the Computer section of HowStuffWorks.com.