7 Step Consulting

Career Change Options

I work in the IT recruiting field, but we have a sister company that works in more of the automotive / warehousing / blue collar arena. If you’re considering a career change or maybe you just graduated high school and are interested in those type of fields then this post is for you.

Personally, I know jack squat about using heavy equipment. It’s one of those things that you see Mike Rowe do on his show Dirty Jobs. (Which, by the way, is one of the best shows ever.)

There’s a website — ATS Heavy Equipment Training Services Network. They help you find a heavy equipment training school in your area. The neatest part of their website is their heavy equipment school blog. That’s a very unique proposition if you ask me. What other technical school offers something like this? ITT Technical Instititute doesn’t as far as I know.

The blog is very unique and offers lots of different perspectives. Past students talk about their experiences, and periodically the blog explains the differences in the different types of equipment.

If I were in for that type of career change, I would definitely take a look at this website again. What do you think?

Nothing like it

Sitting on the couch.

Storm rolling through.

Blogging away.

Everyone’s happy. Life is good. Going out of town tomorrow. Love it.

Antivirus Software: Get it

In this day and age of computers, e-mail, Blackberry’s and servers it seems everyone is using Windows in the corporate world. That’s all well and good … except for the fact that viruses are prevalant. And by prevalant what I mean is if you plug a networked computer into a cable internet modem without a router attached, it takes about 45 minutes for a Windows XP machine to be absolutely taken over by virii.

To combat this, you need to protect yourself. A computer armor or shield if you will. Antivirus Software is the order of the day. Mix in some antispyware software to boot as that is rather prevalent these days as well.

Now what do you need in a quality antivirus software? The typical package will include manual scanning abilities, but a real winner will have automatic scheduling and quarantining.

Cyber Defender’s Early Detection Center has some high ratings on various website and the price is a winner. Compare it to Symantec’s software suite at a cost of $69.99… and Cyber Defender’s product is only $29.99. That’s a bit more than half off the cost of Symantec. It also adds spam protection for your e-mail — an added bonus!

Grand Frustrations

Hitting some frustrations. I’ve had some rework come back for a couple of projects I’ve done. That’s really annoying when you’ve already counted the revenue.

Such is life in the business world.

Foreclosure MLS

What if you could find a list of foreclosed properties without having to pay $100 to join a foreclosure-only website? There’s a new website that is in development to do just that. I’m not sure how they plan to make money doing it, but it seems for now that there isn’t much up front cost involved.

They are also focusing onScottsdale, Arizona and can show you all of the Scottsdale home prices currently.

Are we at the bottom?

The economy has been in the news for the last… forever. Especially the housing market. We bought our house last September… makes me wonder — have we hit bottom?

I’ve read some reports of investors starting to get back into some markets. Obviously it will be different from place to place. I sure hope so!

We have a dog

I think I’ve mentioned this in the past, but we’ve got a dog… well really a puppy. She’s been a handful and our house will never be the same, but she is also just awesome. Thankfully we haven’t had any sort of pest problems, but if we did we would go all out bombing fleas.

Wait, it just got weird

I just realized the forum I talked about below is doing something especially odd. I think the drug they are talking about it for pets or something like that. It hasn’t really been tested for humans according to the Wikipedia page.

Sounds pretty drastic… but can you blame the person that will try anything?

An interesting idea

Let me start off by saying cancer flat out sucks. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Cancer is probably one of the most “not fair” disaeses out there. You can do everything right — eating healthy, exercising, never smoking, etc. and still end up with cancer. That sucks.

There is a resveratrol forum that is coming together to donate one pill from each user to this guy who only has four months to live. They’re going to try and almost overdose his body with the drug in the hopes of killing off the cancer. Weird idea…

I’m on vacation

Woohoo! I’m on vacation this week. I’ll still be around, still blogging. But I am enjoying the time off, catching up on my sleep, and maybe getting some stuff done around the house.

Apparently this is a pretty popular time for people to take off — the last week of July before things start getting crazy for school.