PSPINC CEO Kenichi Uchikura's Blog

Gas is getting little cheaper ...

May

24

Gasoline price has gone down in last few days. The price usually goes up toward the summer. I wonder why?

#Life #Politics #Society

Yahoo and Nokia partnership

May

24

Yahoo is loosing to Google.
Nokia is loosing to Apple.

Is this a good idea?
Can they make any dent in the market?
Nobody knows if this is a good idea.

But doing something is better than doing nothing. I wish them well.

#Business #Marketing

Million dollar Mercedes ...

May

21

This car is worth $750K to $1 million and it is not much younger than me. I have never seen it up close like this.

#Blog

Marketing in L.A.

May

21

Los Angeles has the second largest Japanese community in the US after New York. We are starting to look at possibilities to expand our service to Japanese community in greater Los Angeles area.

The first step is to place an advertisement on Japanese free paper called US Lighthouse. We are already getting some calls from this advertisement. It is encouraging.

#Business #Marketing

PSP Invitational Golf

May

21

Annual PSPINC Invitational Golf Tournament will be held at Redmond Ridge on June 28th. If you are a customer or a vendor of PSPINC, you should have received your invitation already.

If you have and planning to attend but have not responded, you need to respond ASAP.

#Business #Marketing

What are we bidding on anyway?

May

20

This was the scene from the last night Seattle Executives Auction. We must had very popular item when people are bidding like this.

#Business #Marketing

Truth About Off Site Backup

May

19

Truth About Off Site Backup

PSPINC provides many hosting solutions to companies and individuals. And online storage is one of them. However, we rarely call it online backup or disaster recovery. Sure, we can store your data at our secure data centers in Seattle and Bellevue, but those are data, not system files. What is the difference between data and system files?

Lets look at this scenario. When do you need your backup? You need a backup when your computer crushes. So most likely your computer is not booting up. In order for you to boot your computer, you need to repair or replace the parts that is broken and reinstall your operating system. Or, if the computer is not repairable, you need to purchase new computer that comes with new operating system. Either way, you have a computer with operating system. So why in the world do you need a copy of operating system that is stored off site?

There are radio commercials promoting off site backup saying when you crush your system, your are protected because you have your backup. The truth is, you cannot restore your system using off site backup. When you crush your system, your system is most likely gone for good. You need to have so called recovery disk locally to restore your computer to the factory shipped state. Once you are back to the original state, you can use on or off site storage to restore data.

Besides most operating system are several giga bytes big. Do you know even with 6Mbps (common connection), it takes 22 minuets to download just 1GB of data?

Also, a lot of times your application programs need to be reinstalled again when your computer is crushed. By restoring the application from the backup, you can restore all the files except so called registry information. The registry is the area the operating system manage to keep important information about your application programs. When you reinstall your operating system, your registry becomes blank.

There are some backup software that can take a snapshot of your computer and enables you to back that up and restore it in case of the system crush. It is a good idea to use something like this software but using this to backup your system to off site is not a good idea. Remember, you need working computer to access your off site backup. When your computer is crushed, you have no computer to access your system data.

When it comes to backing up your computer, you need to

Create a system recovery disk. This backs up your system to CD or DVD and restores your computer in case of system crush. CD or DVD that you create becomes the boot disk in case your computer becomes non bootable. The software to create a bootable recovery disk(s) comes with your computer.

You need to backup your data such as documents, pictures, music files, movies and presentations to external hard disk. When you purchase external hard disk drive, you should look for USB 2.0 or Firewire connections to the computer. The external drive should not be smaller than the one you have on your computer.

Once you have your data stored in the external disk drive, you should store those data to off site storage.

PSPINC can help you setup everything you need to backup your system and prepare for the worse case scenario.

#Computer #Internet

Who owns your domain?

May

19

Have you ever heard the term "Domain Hijack"?

Yes, your domain can be hijacked when you forget to renew or sometime unintentionally sign something that looks official from the hosting company.

Also, a hosting company or a web development company who takes care of your contents can hijack your web site too. You need to make sure

Do not sign anything you receive from your hosting company without verifying.

Check who owns your domain name. You can use WHOIS service to verify that information.

Make sure your web site does not contain anything that does not belong to you. There are rare cases that web development company added advertisements rom the other companies without any consent.

Know when your domain expires. nOne you loose it, it will not be easy to get it back.

If you have any question, please contact Pacific Software Publishing, Inc., even if you are not our customer, we will be happy to work with you.

#Computer #Internet