Sarasota's Google Bid makes it into CNN

In a news article printed by the Herald-Tribune (published: Saturday, March 27, 2010):

Sarasota sprinted toward a Friday deadline for applications to become Google Inc.'s high-speed Internet guinea pig with an appearance by its mayor on CNN.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based search-engine company, meanwhile, said it has fielded more than 600 applications since its Feb. 10 announcement that it wanted to work with a U.S. community to push Internet speeds to the home and office to roughly 100 times the current U.S. average.

The company will narrow the field in the months ahead and expects to make a decision by the end of this year, according to a Friday update from Google’s product manager James Kelly.
Sarasota Mayor Dick Clapp, jumped into a tank filled with bonnet head sharks at Mote Marine earlier this month to drive home the point that Sarasota has educational, eco-minded groups that could benefit from Internet speed.

In a Herald-Tribune interview, Clapp indicated that officials have been inspired to gather more information regardless of Google's decision. The chief information officers from both the city and county "are trying to get an inventory of dark fiber that FPL put in that is not being used," Clapp said. FPL Group, parent company of Florida Power & Light, operates a wholly-owned fiber optic cable unit. "It is not in the interest of Comcast, Verizon or Bright House to lower prices or give away speed," Clapp said. "Google is out there stirring the pot saying, 'If you aren’t going to do it, we are going to weigh in."

In overall presence, Sarasota comes in fifth, bettered by No. 1 Grand Rapids, Mich.; No. 2 Duluth; No. 3 Topeka, Kan.; and No. 4 Baltimore. Sarasota was ahead of other major contenders, including No. 6. Fresno, Calif. and No. 7 Madison, Wis.

Sarasota's attention-getting actions -- temporarily renaming City Island as Google Island and having singer/song writer Lindsey Ray record a song about its efforts -- have pushed the community to fourth place in the entire nation for a metric Greiner calls "activation." Greiner even provides an activation timeline showing spikes in digital activity related to specific stimuli, such as the naming of Google Island. Greiner said Sarasota has a real edge in this regard.

Google "loves theatrics," he said.

Summer is here! Free internal cleaning

Summer is here!

We all love the heat during the summer, lounging out by the pool or basking in the sunlight on the beach. And my favorite... summer bbq's and grilling outdoors. But heat can be deadly, especially to your costly computer components.

Computers are built out of many digital circuits. These circuits are constantly switching state; i.e., when doing calculations. Heat is a by-product of these calculations. Computer chips, central processing units (CPUs), and graphic processing units (GPUs) are getting more powerful every day. With newer technology comes faster processing. Faster processing leads to more heat being generated. Without proper heat dissipation, components can be damaged beyond repair.

Our computers have cost us our hard-earned dollars. We save up to buy the very best and we expect reliable performance. But, just like a car, a computer requires proper maintenance. Keep them cool and clean and they’ll last you a lifetime. Ignore them and you they will start costing you more in the long run. Be cool and keep it cool!

In the summer you may notice your computer freezing and crashing. This could likely be caused by heat build up. Dust, pet hair, smoke residual, and faulty cooling components in the computer can cause excessive heat build up and possibly lead to catastrophic failure.

During the summer months ODI is offering a free internal cleaning of your computer and inspection of its cooling components. Bring your's in today! Don't let your computer get beat by the heat!

Sarasota Sheriff Press Release

If you're new to ODI's blog, then great news is to be read today!

ODI Consulting has completed and launched the new website for the Sarasota County Sheriff Department!
This new website offers the public and media access to a ton of great information and services to the public.

Read the Press Release submitted May 5th, 2010

Sunbelt MVP!

A Huge congrats to our very own technician Tim Gardner for being nominated as Sunbelt Software's MVP!!!

Nick Hallin, a Tier III Customer Support Technical at Sunbelt, has nominated Tim Gardner for their MVP program.

"We greatly appreciate all the time you spend volunteering on our forum helping others and would like to reward you .... As a MVP on the Sunbelt Support Forum, Tim will have the title “MVP” beneath his author icon and a MVP icon added to his signature."

Another outstanding reason why ODI's technicians are the best at what they do! Call us today to find out for yourself!

Rogue Antivirus'

Thank you to our friends at Sunbelt:

All antivirus companies are being hit with the next wave of malware: Rogue antivirus tools like Antivirus 2010. This code throws messages on the user's screen that they are infected, and "download here to get rid of the malware". Sure enough, that gets the Trojan installed.

The reality is that no AV vendor, ESET, McAfee, Sunbelt, Sophos, Symantec, etc. can give you 100% coverage against it.These new fake antivirus variants are some of the most vicious, polymorphic Trojans this industry has seen. They use extremely complex obfuscation techniques which make detection quite challenging by even the best antivirus engine. Many of these rogues are also service-side polymorphic. That means every time an exe is downloaded, it's recompiled on the server-side into a different piece of code.

There are about 75,000 new tier-1 pieces of malware coming out every day. Educate yourself! The vast majority of infections these days are caused by social engineering. A user will get a funny video link on Facebook or some other social networking site, click on it, and it will say that they need to "install a special codec", or "update Flash". Or they will be doing a Google search and a malware site will have attached itself to an innocent keyword. The user will click and start getting crazy warnings that their machine is infected. This is the malware trying to get the user to install. If something does not look right, it probably is not right - DON'T CLICK ON IT!

Be sure you have a current version of your AV program installed or updated. If you’re not sure what you have, throw caution to the wind and consult an ODI rep. Too often we’ve found clients have not 1, but 2 AV programs installed and more times than not, they either hog up space on your computer- slowing it down something terrible, or they conflict with each other! Give us a call today!

PC Clean Up

Does it feel like your computer is dragging?

There can be several reasons for this, but if you've recently purchased a computer with Vista or Windows 7, then more likely it could be related to memory.

In Windows Vista and Windows 7, if you look at your task manager under the performance tab you will see a graph labeled Memory. This is how much memory your PC is using at that moment. Sometimes that number is larger than the amount of RAM you have in your system. The "overflow" is stored on your hard disk drive for (not so) quick access.

For example, let's say your computer has 512MB of RAM. If you look at your memory graph in Task Manager, chances are your computer is using more than 512MB of memory. If that number in the graph is 768MB, this means that the PC is using all 512MB of RAM, plus it is storing 256MB worth of commands on your hard disk drive (virtual memory).

The solution is either add more memory or clean up some of those unnecessary commands. Give us a call. We can log into your PC and clean up programs that aren't needed which will bring that number down. We will also provide you a quick overview of the hardware you’re using and it's capacity. Is it an acceptable amount of storage, or do you need to upgrade?

Computer Registry Cleaners

Often, clients who thought they were doing a good thing by installing a registry cleaner find out they’ve possibly made a small problem bigger! They install a Registry Cleaner program, run it, and then problems start; Bootup errors, missing .dll errors, etc. This happens because the registry cleaner removes a key that it shouldn't have.

When you boot up your computer, the registry is loaded into your RAM not the hard disk. This means the performance you gain from cleaning the registry is so small that you will probably not notice any difference.

Running a registry cleaner may clean up 75-150 keys - not worth the risk of the registry cleaner removing something it shouldn't.

Call or email one of our certified technicians for assistance or more information!