Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

Down to Basics - Part III: Best Practices for the Average Professional

This is the last of the “Down to Basics” series. The Average Professional is one whose life depends on IT literally - laptop or data loss counts among the worse tragedies, while personal friendster accounts being hacked into is something that I have experienced myself - reputations can be ruined to ashes when the friendly hacker becomes overly friendly with your female friends (or male friends if you are a lady). This post aims to describe some important practices that should be adopted in this world where social and technology factors interlinked closely with one another.

BACKUP, BACKUP & BACKUP
I cant help but emphasize how critical this underrated task is 3 times. If you have finished a seemingly-take-eternity-to-finish report, save it in multiple locations such as your thumbdrive instead of just at your laptop. Note, I am not asking you to back up the whole machine everyday, but at least, save new critical deliverables whenever possible into multiple places especially if the new version is worth more than 5 hours of changes. Your professor or your boss will not accept reasons like “My lBM was working just fine!” when it decided to hibernate forever. If you need a good free backup & restore tool, please see the previous post.

CHECK, CONFIRM AND CLEAR ON PUBLIC MACHINES!
Why risk your reputation and all the confidential email exchanges between you and your loved ones when using the library pc? Social Networks like Friendster may have saved your password by default whenever you log in, while key logger programs may track your activities. Ensure the machine is cleared entirely before you trust it. Otherwise, what is the hurry anyway? Wait till you get home then!

MSN VIRUS - WHATS THAT?
There is no harm is asking additional questions whenever friends on MSN or other messaging programs sends you some “nice photos”. Some bots may be smart enough to even reply you - in that case, allow your intuitions to decide - does the naming of the file seem unlikely of that party’s nature? is the reply even “normal”? Gullibility will punish you severely, and even your friends.

LEAVE THAT BATTERY IN (YOU TRUST YOUR POWER CABLE THAT MUCH?)
If you are using a laptop regularly in your office or school, take it from me - just leave it in and allow the laptop battery to depreciate and finally exchange it under warranty. Battery has a finite lifespan, with or without regular usage. By leaving it outside of your machine, you are exposing yourself to risk of power failures or someone tripping over your cables, and in some cases, others mistakenly taking out the wrong cords (blur cords). When these things happen, you may not just lose any work that was not saved, but also eventually your hdd. Most importantly, don’t take out it during presentations by just running on Power!

CACHE YOUR EMAILS
I redirect all my emails from all accounts (School, Business) to a common mail account which allows up to 2GB storage; you guessed it - GMAIL. It not only an amazingly smart search engine when you track emails a decade ago, it also allows you to label them appropriately. I use MS Outlook Exchange (Rules & Alert) to forward all my emails to this GMAIL account. In times where my web outlook fouls up, or I got locked up of the school’s account, the Exchange server would continue to redirect all mails to my GMAIL account. This also serves more advantages in allowing me an easy mind when I am deleting mails from that limited 100mb storage in my school account - well knowing that mail, if required, can always be retrieved somehow.