I came home last night and decided that I could no longer ignore the giant stack of junk mail that accumulated while I was in Eastern Europe this month. Not only does getting rid of all of this entail dutifully removing my personally identifiable information (a lesson learned from a stolen identity 6 years ago), [...]

Check out Greenpeace’s guide to greener electronics. The guide ranks the 14 top manufacturers of PCs and mobile phones according to their policies on toxic chemicals and recycling. Specifically, on how responsive these companies have been in eliminating hazardous substances from their products and implementing takeback/recycling programs for their products that become obsolete.
Here’s how the [...]

Here’s how you can enable outgoing email for your WordPress installation if you’re hosting it on a shared, Windows-based server at CrystalTech. (This process may also work for their non-Windows servers as well, but I haven’t tested it.)

I just came across this totally cool new electric vehicle from Aptera. It was originally designed from the ground-up as an electric vehicle, but they’re planning on releasing two versions: an electric and plug-in hybrid. Not only is the vehicle right out of the future, it’ll travel 120 miles on electricity, and get anywhere from [...]

We’ve been looking for a better solution for creating and maintaining documentation for our clients’ networks for quite some time.
We currently rely on a Microsoft Word template I picked up and customized back when I started X-BAR. Word works o.k. for this purpose-it provides a flexible container for storing lots of different types of information, prints [...]

I’ve been working and traveling in Eastern Europe for the past 3 weeks. Most of my time has been in Bratislava, Slovakia, but I’ve been also able to visit Vienna and Budapest, and I’m now in Prague for the weekend before heading back to Seattle next week.
With all of the talk of green of late, [...]

A few years back I was struggling to understand why my company was barely breaking even (and in some cases losing money). One of the things that I did to better understand the financial mechanisms at play in my business was to develop an Excel spreadsheet that I could use to calculate an employee’s billable [...]

I passed the Microsoft Small Business Specialist exam this morning at SMB Nation 2007 which means that X-BAR has “proven competency in marketing, selling, planning, and building solutions for small businesses.”