If there was ever an industry to get into, Information Technology must be it. The opportunities abound for earning a lucrative living and now is the time to get on board.

But how? If you have computer skill but no experience (or qualifications), the employment agencies will tell you the same old line, “You need experience before anyone will look at you.”

It’s just plain old Catch-22. You need the work to get the experience but you can’t get that first job to give you a track record and therefore verifiable experience. With this logic, it amazes me that anyone actually gets into IT!

Qualifications help but even that is no guarantee nowadays of getting an IT job. And what do you do when you don’t have qualifications but you want to start now? I mean right now, not 3 months later after you’ve paid a fortune for certification and given up your job to have enough study time.

All is not lost. You have two alternatives.

#1. Offer your services free of charge

For a company to take on - as an employee - someone with no experience is a risky proposition. But all companies need IT help. Therefore, do the following:

a) Make a list of 10 local small businesses with approximately 5 to 10 employees. This size of business is too small to have a permanent in-house IT manager yet big enough to have need for IT support.

b) Call each with the following script:

“I’m calling about the possibility of working for your company free of charge in exchange for work experience. So, I’d like to speak to the owner about this please. Could you see if they are available?”

This will get the attention of whoever answers the phone as they’ll realise it’s not just another sales call. You’ll have a high chance of getting through to the boss.

c) If you get through to the boss, say…

“I’m approaching you because I want to work for your company free of charge in exchange for work experience and a good reference. My area of expertise is in IT. I’m an expert on computer systems and feel sure I can provide some valuable input to your company. And it won’t cost you anything. Can we set up a meeting to explore this possibility?”

Get straight to the point as business owners are very busy creatures indeed. Go for a meeting where you have the opportunity to explain in detail how you can help them out. When you explain over the phone, it is much easier for them to terminate the call without hearing your full story.

d) If you fail to get through to the boss, say…

“Can I leave my number so he can call me if interested? The number is 123 456-7899. I am contacting a number of other companies today so the earlier he can contact me the better. Thanks.”

Put the pressure on them to respond quickly or forever loose the chance of using you free of charge.

e) When you arrive for your interview, you would have already prepared your resume so the boss can see at a glance what your background is. In addition to that, outline your IT skills and where you think these skills would benefit a company. For example, if you were good at website design and promotion, say…

“I could improve the number of visitors to your website and get them to leave their email for you.”

This may then lead into specifics on how you can help that company.

f) If you end up doing some work for that company, keep it to 2 to 4 weeks. You don’t want a zero wage forever! After your no-charge stint, offer to provide future support at a reasonably competitive rate. They may be very pleased with what you did for them and there would be good will established because you did it all for free. When they need future IT support the chances of them choosing you are very high indeed. There you go, your first fee paying customer.

#2: Start up on your own

Yes, you heard me. Start your own computer consultancy - it’s not as difficult as you might suspect. All you need is to know more than 90% of the population, which is quite easy when most have poor to mediocre computer literacy. In addition, if you have good skills in a specialist area, you are likely to know more than 99% of the population.

There is one factor working in your favour here: fear of computers. This illogical phobia will open doors for you because what is perceived to be extremely complicated may be a walk in the park for you.

While I’m talking about starting up on your own, this need not mean you will always work for yourself. You can do, but you don’t have to. The primary aim here is to get a track record, first and foremost. Then you can decide what to do.

Starting up as an IT consultant is a sizeable topic in itself, but that doesn’t mean to say it is not easy. You just need the right information.

The important thing to remember is this: don’t listen to anyone (and I mean anyone) who says: you need qualifications; experience; capital; contacts or any of that rubbish. It’s simply not true. Sure, all these things help but they are not pre-requisites for you to make a blazing success starting on your own. I started my own consultancy from scratch and I had no money, no contacts, no computer consultancy experience, and worse of all, I was heavily in debt.

Nowadays - after 5 years experience - I have contracts that pay me over $200 per hour. This is a far cry from the pitiful wage I used to earn before I got into IT.

What does it take to get into IT by starting up on your own?

Two things: Knowledge and Action.

Action Action is the easy part. You just do it! Of course, you need the motivation to get going, to overcome your inertia. But once you start seeing the results, you get pulled along by it all. Your results give you the motivation to take action and the action brings more results. You get caught in an upward spiral.

Knowledge Knowledge is more difficult. The reason is simple: everyone is full of good sounding advice and it’s difficult to know who to listen to. After all, if you listened to most people they would put you off starting in the first place. That is self-defeating.

My recommendation is to only listen to those who have been where you want to go. Talking with someone who runs their own business will give you great insight into what it is really like. Talking with someone who has never run their own business will teach you nothing.

Best of all, speak to someone who is in the industry you want to get into. The information will be 100% relevant and therefore quite likely to be effective. Don’t take everything they say as the gospel truth. They may want to help you out but will not divulge their closest kept competitive secrets for fear of losing business to you. This particularly applies if you are local to each other and may therefore cannibalise each others area.

How do you get this information? Again, there are many methods, some easier than others. You could phone up a small business (1 to 5 employees) outside of your locality and ask if you can take the boss out for lunch. Be up front that you want to get into the same industry and would like some advice. I had one guy ask if I would help him a few years back. I was happy to and took great pleasure in it. Now, he is earning a very healthy living doing what he enjoys.

The alternative is to buy related books and materials where you can get in-depth information “How to do it” style.

Conclusion

It does not matter whether you have experience or not. If you have some reasonable computer skills and you want to get into IT, you just have to decide to do it. There is so much opportunity in this rapidly changing industry that your chances of success are very high indeed.

Take those vital first steps now!

Jon Lawrance

After a three-month implementation, ENERFAB went live with Encompix, the nation’s leading ETO (Engineer-to-Order) ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) System. Moving from a “green screen” system to Encompix was a big change for the Sharonville, Ohio, firm. “We were very impressed with the inventory and purchasing functionality and by eliminating duplicate data entry we have cut our purchasing time by half,” said Dave Lutz, IT Director.

ENERFAB is a leading process solution firm with design and build capabilities serving the process industries including chemical, food and beverage, mining, pharmaceutical, power generation, and pulp and paper.

ENERFAB has over 2,600 employees in 10 locations and plans to increase its use of Encompix. “We are looking at expanding our use of Encompix into other areas of the business and are planning to bring on our Spare Parts Division in a couple of months.”

Encompix (www.encompix.com) has filled the manufacturing software requirements of Engineer-to-Order companies since 1992. The company name reflects the commitment to developing business application solutions that encompass the complex areas of project-based and job-based manufacturing. Encompix provides ETO manufacturers with a competitive advantage by improving bottom line results.

According to TR Cutler, spokesperson for the ETO Institute (www.etoinstitute.org), “This ENERFAB implementation is indicative of the type of efficiency process many ETO manufacturers are completing to stay competitive in a global economy.” Encompix www.encompix.com Roger Meloy 513-733-0066

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Welcome,
The Villa Malamerenda vacation house, located among the beautiful Sienese hills with breathtaking views and just a short distance from Chianti, offers its guests extremely elegant apartments.
Your stay at Villa Malamerenda will be a time for relaxation and calm, surrounded by a garden and the countryside outside of the city walls. The city center is just a short drive away where you can enjoy the Piazza del Campo and Duomo during the suggestive days of the traditional Palio horse race.

Just a stone throw’s away from the most beautiful places in Tuscany.
Villa Malamerenda is also very near to other beautiful cities in Tuscany like Florence, Pisa, Lucca and Arezzo, easily reached thanks to the Siena-Florence motorway just a few kilometers from us.

A valid point of departure to discover our fascinating province.
Following the ancient Cassia (the old via Francigena) road to the south, you cross the Sienese "Crete" and you can visit very beautiful places like Montalcino, the Val D’Orcia, Bagno Vignoni, Montepulciano and Pienza.

The motorway north towards Florence takes you to San Gimignano, Monteriggioni, Colle Val D’Elsa and the Chianti region passing through Castellina in Chianti, Gaiole in Chianti and Radda in Chianti.

We are sure that you will enjoy a pleasant stay in the company of some very special owners.

Villa Malamerenda vacation homes apartments are well cared for and offer all the necessary services for a comfortable stay.

Services
General:
– heating
– air-conditioning
– bed linen
– bathroom linen

Outside:
– swimming pool opened from June to September
– garden
– parking

In the Apartment:
– use of the kitchen
– dishware
– fridge
– washing machine
– dishwasher
– kitchen linen

Other Rules:
– no pets
– no smoking

If you are interested in a cheap hotel in Siena, pls visit our catalogue of Hotels all over Italy, where you can find also a wide range of Bed and Breakfast in Rome and Hotels in Florence, from cheap to luxury, togheter with Sorrento Tours

Hair Hygrometers were invented during the 1700s and were used to measure the amount of water in the air. They were used as an aid to predict weather changes and are still used today for that purpose. They are also used to monitor the environment where cigars and other moisture sensitive materials are stored. They are not very accurate and if moved around must be allowed to ‘adapt’ to the new environment of a period of time before they can be used at all.

In an effort to improve the accuracy of these instruments digital hygrometers were created in the late years of the 21st century. They are indeed more accurate but the are also much more expensive. But in museums where high humidity promotes mold growth and biodeteriation the cost is not as important as reliability and stability.

Levels at 60% RH are considered the threshold for damage - over that level and the museum will eventually have trouble. Because many collections are hygroscopic, the humidity levels affect dimensional stability. For example, some types of wood board can vary up to one inch in length over a foot between 10% and 90% RH. Variation in relative humidity can loosen furniture joints, cause paint to chip from canvas, and cockle paper. In addition, fluctuating relative humidity can lead to chemical reactions which cause metals to corrode, dyes to fade, and damage to glass and mineral collections. In short it is critical that the RH levels be accurately monitored and maintained at the proper levels.

The ThermaViewer, a recent addition to the ranks of hygrometers. It uses thermistor and electronic RH sensors to sample temperature and humidity every 10 minutes and save the results. A chart is drawn on the large LCD display that employees, maintenance personnel, and docents can read. Ten months of information is stored and displayed by the ThermaViewer. Periodically the information is downloaded to a computer that maintains an archived copy of the environmental conditions. The ThermaViewer is a giant step forward from the hair hygrometer as far as accuracy and reliability goes.

This is a pretty useful feature to get somebody to print on a printer in a networked environment. Let’s say PC A and PC B be two networked computers, If a Printer, P is configured in the computer, PCA, you can print to the printer P by asking the user of the PC A to share it.

Steps to share the Printer on PC A:-

1) Go to the Printers Folder. 2) Choose the Printer, go to File->Properties. 3) Click the Sharing tab. 4) Choose the “Share this Printer” and give the printer a share name

“P-Shared”. Click Ok.

The user can print from PC B using the printer by following the below steps:-

1) Browse to the Printer shared (P_Shared)

2) Right click and choose connect to make a printer connection. This will install the printer driver on the machine with the correct printer settings.

3) He/She can then print to the Printer from any application on his local machine without having to bother about configuring the printer.

This is also called Point and Print mechanism and is used by administrators for setting up a printer on a server, and asking users to connect to the printer shared from their computers, hence avoiding local printer installations on individual computers.

DVD Player - This is a generic term, since there are DVD-Audio, DVD-ROM, DVD-Video players–while DVD-Recordable and DVD-RAM drives are not yet ready for the market. DVD-Video has complex hardware and firmware requirements on the player, and the DVD Player Reference Model specifies the capabilities for a DVD-compliant player for consumer market–outlining the standard and optional sets of features. DVD-Video displays to a TV monitor, but DVD-ROM players will have the hardware (boards) to play DVD-Video and DVD-Audio titles. But, DVD-Video copy protection and regional code issues further complicated and delayed the marketing of players, precluding the implementation of some otherwise acceptable software options, or external devices. It is expected that newer players will implement the required copy protection and regional codes.

DVD is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound quality. DVDs resemble compact discs: their physical dimensions are the same–12cm or the mini 8cm–but they are encoded in a different format and at a much higher density. DVDs contain a file system, called UDF, which is an extension of the ISO 9660 Standard used for CD-ROMs.

DVDs are made from a 0.6 mm thick disc of polycarbonate plastic coated with a much thinner (reflective) aluminum layer. Two such discs are glued together to form a 1.2 mm double-sided disc. The substrates are half as thick as a CD to make it possible to use a lens with a higher numerical aperture and therefore use smaller pits and narrower tracks.

A single-layer DVD can store 4.7 Gbyte, which is around seven times as much a standard CD-ROM. By employing a red laser at 650 nm (was 780 nm) wavelength and a numerical aperture of 0.6 (was 0.45), the read-out resolution is increased by a factor 1.65. This holds for two dimensions, so that the actual physical data density increases by a factor of 3.5. DVD uses a more efficient coding method in the physical layer. CD’s error correction, CIRC, is replaced by a powerful Reed-Solomon product code, RS-PC; Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation (EFM) is replaced by a more efficient version, EFMPlus, which has the same characteristics as classic EFM. The CD sub code is removed. As a result, the DVD format is 47 percent more efficient with respect to CD-ROM, which uses a ‘third’ error correction layer.

A DVD can contain: DVD-Video (containing movies (video and sound)) DVD-Audio (containing high-definition sound) DVD-Data (containing data)

The disc medium can be: DVD-ROM (read only, manufactured by a press) DVD-R/RW (R=Recordable once, RW = Rewritable) DVD-RAM (random access rewritable) DVD+R/RW (R=Recordable once, RW = Rewritable) DVD-R DL (double layer) DVD+R DL (double layer)

Two DVDs with different bottom sides. The disc may have one or two sides, and one or two layers of data per side; the number of sides and layers determines the disc capacity.

There are several competing DVD Formats:

DVD-ROM: They are pressed similarly to CDs. The reflective surface is silver or gold colored. They can be single-sided/single-layered, single-sided/double-layered, double-sided/single-layered, or double-sided/double-layered. As of 2004, new double-sided discs have become increasingly rare.

DVD-R for Authoring: Special-purpose DVD-Rs used to record DVD masters, which can then be duplicated to pressed DVDs by a duplication plant. They require a special DVD-R recorder, and are not often used nowadays since many duplicators can now accept ordinary DVD-R masters.

DVD-R discs (strictly DVD-R for General) can record up to 4.7 GB in a similar fashion to a CD-R disc. Once recorded and finalized it can be played by most

DVD-ROM players. This format is supported by the DVD Forum.

DVD-RW discs can record up to 4.7 GB in a similar fashion to a CD-RW drive. Supported by the DVD Forum.

DVD-R DL: Derivate of DVD-R that uses double-layer recordable discs to store up to 8.5 GB of data.

DVD-RAM: (current specification is version 2.1) require a special unit to play 4.7GB or 9.4GB recorded discs (DVD-RAM disc are typically housed in a cartridge). 2.6GB discs can be removed from their caddy and used in DVD-ROM drives. Top capacity is 9.4GB (4.7GB/side). Supported by the DVD Forum.

DVD+R: Can record up to 4.7 GB single-layered/single-sided DVD+R disc, at up to 16x speed. Like DVD-R you can record only once. Supported by the DVD+RW Alliance. DVD+RW: Can record up to 4.7 GB at up to 16x speed. Since it is rewritable it can be overwritten several times. It does not need special “pre-pits” or finalization to be played in a DVD player. Supported by the DVD+RW Alliance.

DVD+R DL: Derivate of DVD+R that uses double-layer recordable discs to store up to 8.5 GB of data. Supported by the DVD+RW Alliance.

DVD-D is a new self-destructing disposable DVD format. Like the EZ-D, it is sold in an airtight package, and begins to destroy itself by oxidation after several hours.

DVD Plus combines both DVD and CD technologies by providing the CD layer and a DVD layer.

For more information on DVD players please visit the DVD players resource center.