30% of in-house IT pros admit to snooping!
Alexander Muse , June 20, 2008
According to a Cyber-Ark survey reported by Reuters, one in three IT professionals abuse admin passwords by gaining access to their colleagues salary data, personal emails or board-meeting minutes. Ironically, 1 in 3 admit to the snooping and 47% said they had access to information not relevant to their job.
“Paraskevidekatriaphobia”
What is it? No its not a word I made up. No, its not a Russian word that I would say growing up either. It actually describes people afflicted with a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th (today) - and according to psychologists, there are about 21 million of us in America. Roughly 8% of our population wants to stay in bed for fear of bad luck on Friday the 13th. Some sources say it may be the most widespread superstition in the United States. Some people won’t go to work on Friday the 13th; some won’t eat in restaurants; many wouldn’t think of setting a wedding on the date.
Why do we have a fear of Friday the 13th anyway? What started all of the devilish discussion about the freaky Friday, bad luck day? There is a history actually, its quite amusing to read about. These kinds of myths and legends were essentially created by one religion demonizing another. One story about Fridays is from as early as the sixth century. Christian missionaries from England traveled to Germany or Russia (go Russia!) to stamp out other religions like the Norse goddess Frigg?, goddess of sky, love, fertility, and motherhood. As Christianity gained popularity throughout Europe, missionaries demonized her and demoted her to a witch even though many saw her as a beautiful woman. But, there were some who still believed in the power of Frigg and wanted to remain as her followers. As the Christians continued to shun Frigg even more strongly, her followers started meeting secretly in caves to worship her. This only added to society fearing Frigg and the speculation is that followers gathered in the caves on Fridays. Later, her name was linked to the derivative of the word Friday, which became known as the day of worshiping the witch. The belief that Friday was an evil day followed.
So is this really a reason to fear the actual day of Friday the thirteenth? Not for me, but others maybe. My thought is that if I pretend to be superstitious like this then maybe I can go home. Just a random thought.
Alexander Muse: Entrepreneur of the Week!
VenturePad selected our very own Alexander Muse as their Entrepreneur of the Week. Here is a snippit from Jerry Bowles who wrote the profile:
To say that Alexander Muse is a serial entrepreneur is like saying that Warren Buffet is a guy who buys stocks. Surrounded by diverse team of more than 50 business people, engineers, software developers and assorted creative types the 36-year-old ex-Marine is actively involved in the day-to-day operation of more than ten businesses including: Architel, an IT services company; Big in Japan, a social software company; WhiteBox, a finance and collection company; ServiceGuy, a contractor referral service; and SocialTones, a social ringtone service.
Check out the full article here.
Smoking = Brain Damage!
New studies out of France prove that smoking presents an increased risk for memory loss in people at mid-life. The study found a strong link between smoking and cognitive and memory problems later in life. The study explains,
“First, smoking in middle age is associated with memory deficit and decline in reasoning abilities,” they wrote in a report in the June 9 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine “Second, long-term ex-smokers are less likely to have cognitive deficits in memory, vocabulary and verbal fluency.
If you smoke, consider quitting before you forget how…
Managed Services Audit Program
Earlier this year we launched something we call our ‘Managed Services Audit Program’. The program is designed for business owners who employ their own in-house IT staff. To start our engineers will install our network monitoring device within the business owner’s network. The alerts and notifications will be delivered to the business owner’s IT staff via email or SMS. Next we set up our online backup service (up-to 100GB of backup) offering the business owner’s IT staff access to the same tools we offer to our fractional IT clients. Finally, we conduct a complete audit of your systems each quarter, providing the business owner a third-party’s opinion of your IT infrastructure. All of this for $5,000 per year (paid in advance). To summarize:
- Network and System Monitoring
- Online Backup (on-site and remote storage of data)
- Quarterly audit of IT infrastructure
Businesses who purchase our Managed Services Audit Program can switch to our fully managed fractional IT solution at any time and we will waive our installation fees. Contact Scott Ryan at 214.550.2010 if you would like to schedule a meeting to discuss our Managed Service Audit Program.
