Highest Paying Certifications

This was published on About.com and I found it very interesting as I am looking at changing over to a PM track in my career.

http://tiny.cc/u9ySz

Good reading!

Diana

Hww to show Classic Google after you sign up for iGoogle

I recently signed up for iGoogle and am enjoying it but it created a problem for me. After a couple of days I could no longer type in Google,com and get tto the classic Google search page. No matter how I tried iGoogle came up. Now I like iGoogle and have it customized so I can see what is important to me, but I am in a job search and need to have a fast loading search engine, not to have to wait for all my modules in iGoogle to load.

After playing around with it, I came up with this URL that allows the classic Google search page to load.
http://www.google.com/webhp

Since I use IE7 and have the tabs, I have 2 home pages load, classic Google for the first tab and iGoogle for the second tab. That way I can do my searching and not have to wait for iGoogle to load.

How to Handle a Help Desk

I just had an article published on Tech Republic (http://www.techrepublic.com/) you can see it here - http://tinyurl.com/4aw3rs.

I deal with help desks on a weekly basis and have learned a few tricks from not only being the customer but I spent 10 years answering the phones for various companies (ex: Hewlett-Packard). Having been on both sides of the phone I can tell you that things go much better when you keep your temper and document EVERYTHING!

Teaching Computers

I find that I am spending more and more time teaching people about their computers. They read an article in the paper on sending your photo's via e-mail, or about a new service (LinkedIn) or want to know about the hottest sites and they call me. Sometimes we just chat about their idea, others it turns in to a 3 or 4 hour consulting gig. I do not mind the calls, as a matter of fact I enjoy them but I do not like hearing about how my customers asked a question of some other tech only to be told that "It is not part of my call?". How can you tell a customer that you will not answer a simple question? If you are at a customers house doing a cleanup of a computer you are usually sitting waiting on a program to run or going through and deleting files or programs. Neither of which should require all your attention. So why not answer the customers questions or show them how to insert a picture into an e-mail? You are on site already, sitting there waiting and not currently busy, right? So answer their questions! Now I am not talking about business's but about the home user who is sitting next to you, they are curious and want to learn more. To my mind the more they learn the better customer they are. If they have read that adding more memory to their computer will speed things up, they will call me to ask. I have a charge for the phone call and another charge to actually go install the memory. Win, win, right? I make more money, make my customers happy and they get a faster computer, all because I will answer their questions and not make it into a big technical question. I have more follow up business than allot of techs in my area (I asked) and I feel it is because I take the time to answer a question.