Bet you didn’t know that Google offers free email accounts for small businesses with up to fifty accounts each with seven gigabytes of storage! Yes, with Google Apps Standard Edition, you can send and receive email via your name(at)your-domain(dot)com. This is a great way to add the functionality and stability of corporate e-mail to your business, without the added expense of costly IT infrastructure and staff. A great way to save money for your small business!

Learn how to easily set it up at Open Forum.

Posted via email from Anthony’s Posterous

There are three basic types of work we complete every day:

Bad work

Time-sucking, life-sapping bureaucratic tasks that keep growing like weeds through the cracks of your working life.

Good work

Useful work that makes up most of your working day. It’s important and productive It’s getting things done. It’s familiar and comfortable. For an organization, good work is the reliable engine of profit.

Great work

Work that challenges and inspires us. This work has meaning and makes a difference. This is the creative, strategic, differentiating work that we hoped we were signing up for when we began a job. It contains both reward and risk.

Think you need to eliminate bad work to get more great work done? Wrong. It’s actually the good work that eats up the majority of our time because it’s comfortable and familiar. There are three ways to nix busywork. See a snippet below:

• Embrace adequate. Excellence is highly overrated. Perfectionism can be debilatating. It’s okay to strive for great standards of success, but embracing ‘just satisfactory’ work in some cases is a crucial asset.

Read more about all three at Open Forum.

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You may love your hometown, but get ready to be nickel-and-dimed by it. Cities all over the country, strapped for cash, are coming up with some novel ideas for raising money, bit by bit.

These range from new charges for responding to 911 calls to taxes and fees on on sodas, bottled water, groceries and grocery bags. One budget officer compares the annoyance factor of these niche taxes to having to pay baggage fees and other airline charges.

Read more at NPR

Posted via email from Anthony’s Posterous

If you’ve got a dad who constantly sneaks up to the attic to try on his old high school football jersey, or an uncle who starts every sentence with, “Back when I was your age…,” it might be time to sit them down and have them read this article before they trade their ride in for a sports car. While it’s easy to get caught up in the past, it’s important for men dealing with a midlife crisis to learn to love the present. Here’s how to do it:

• Create new firsts. If you find yourself looking back, try creating new fun memories to get you excited about today.
• Focus on a new goal. Sometimes it’s not so much the lost youth that gets you down, but the loss of goals. So, think up a new one and focus on it. Maybe build that shed you always wanted in the backyard, or start saving for a fun vacation.
• Embrace different kinds of satisfaction. Being young is fun, and nothing will ever be quite like it again. But being a mentor to your kids, moving up in your career, and being in control of your life are things to get excited about too. Learn to love what you’ve got on your plate now.

Read the full article for more tips at The Art of Manliness.

Posted via email from Anthony’s Posterous

The ebb and flow of gas and electricity into your home contains surprisingly detailed information about your daily life. Energy usage data, measured moment by moment, allows the reconstruction of a household's activities: when people wake up, when they come home, when they go on vacation, and maybe even when they take a hot bath.

California's PG&E is currently in the process of installing "smart meters" that will collect this moment by moment data—750 to 3000 data points per month per household—for every energy customer in the state. These meters are aimed at helping consumers monitor and control their energy usage, but right now, the program lacks critical privacy protections.

That's why EFF and other privacy groups filed comments with the California Public Utilities Commission Tuesday, asking for the adoption of strong rules to protect the privacy and security of customers' energy-usage information. Without strong protections, this information can and will be repurposed by interested parties. It's not hard to imagine a divorce lawyer subpoenaing this information, an insurance company interpreting the data in a way that allows it to penalize customers, or criminals intercepting the information to plan a burglary. Marketing companies will also desperately want to access this data to get new intimate new insights into your family's day-to-day routine–not to mention the government, which wants to mine the data for law enforcement and other purposes.

This isn't just a California issue. Many threats to the privacy of the home—where our privacy rights should be strongest—were detailed in a 2009 report for the Colorado Public Utility Commission. The federal government has been promoting the smart grid as part of its economic stimulus package, and last year, EFF and other groups warned the National Institute of Standards and Technology about the privacy and security issues at stake. For example, security researchers worry that today’s smart meters and their communications networks are vulnerable to a variety of attacks. There are also questions of reliability, as PG&E faces criticism from California customers who have seen bills skyrocket after the installation of the new "smart meters." Unsurprisingly, California legislators are questioning the rapid rollout. Texas customers are also complaining.

There are far more questions than answers when it comes to this new technology. While it's potentially beneficial, it could also usher in new intrusions into our home and private life. The states and the federal government should ensure that energy customers get the protection they deserve.

Posted via email from Anthony’s Posterous