OK - so maybe you’ve never had the chance to save a little old lady getting mugged or disarm a bank robber, but heroism could still be within your grasp. Data loss makes people cry like little children who’ve lost their parents. We’ve seen it. It’s awful. On the other hand, SAVING someone’s data makes even the scrawniest, zittiest, World of Warcraft playing, uber-dork look like he’s 10 feet tall. Instant Rock Star! Yes - we’ve seen this too.

Onyx Consulting has been working on a product launch for awhile now and it’s finally up and running. OnyxSync is an automated internet backup solution with business class capabilities and rates that no one else seems to be matching or beating. The target market for this product is small to medium businesses who’ve been searching for a cost effective total solution to the preservation of their data.

Over the years as technology has advanced, we’ve employed a wide range of backup and archiving solutions for hundreds of Atlanta businesses. Previously our efforts were always restricted by what the customer could afford and whatever varying products and solutions were available. We’ve been through every possible combination of storage device, portable media, tapes, drives, RAID’s etc. Mountains and mountains of products with varying degrees of reliability. Often we employed multi-tiered or “bullet proof” solutions for our mission critical clientele so if one aspect failed, another two would still preserve all data. Even the very best of these solutions left plenty to be desired. The issues of maintaining the equipment and monitoring functionality had to be dealt with. Every four or five years certain aspects had to be replaced entirely - on and on it goes and the costs definitely add up. There didn’t seem to be any way around it - until now.

OnyxSync provides the ability to forget all about the data preservation dilemma. It can be installed in any business to provide easy access and full control to all data maintained off-site in a secure facility. All of the neccesary encryption and security standards are employed and it operates on multiple platforms. It’s an amazingly simple interface for any client to navigate and utilize. Best of all, it’s local to Atlanta and related to Onyx Consulting. Our technicians can perform the initial data collection at the clients location. After that, daily incremental updates are set to occur over the internet with any degree of frequency. The choices for configuration are limitless. Any additional needs can be addressed promptly through support provided by Onyx Consulting.

If you’re an IT administrator who’s ready to put this data storage and preservation issue to bed - for good, you owe it to yourself to look into this product. There is strong potential here to save your company an enormous amount of time, money and trouble. What would that be worth to your employer? What would their gratitude be worth to you? Click on OnySync to get started!

Bernadette and I  watch entirely too much crime TV or “murder and mayhem” as we’ve taken to calling it. Law and Order, 48 Hours Hard Evidence, Law and Order SVU, Cold Case Files, Solved, Snapped, I Survived, Women Behind Bars, The Interrogators etc. Horrible and morbid as it all is, it’s become an occasional source of mindless “checking out” entertainment. I’ve wondered why I remain interested in the endless parade of depravity and tragedy it presents and I’m faced with two likely possibilities:

1) I’m the guy who can’t help looking at the auto accident scene as I drive by.

2) I really want to see the perps get caught and punished for their crimes.

In all honesty it must be a mixture of both with emphasis on the latter. That being said, it never ceases to disgust me how lenient and impotent our so-called justice system is. No one ever seems to really get what they deserve - in my ruthless opinion. I find myself frustrated time and time again by the injustice. Oh the Humanity!

So what can we do about it? I used to think there was nothing to be done. I put it out of my mind. There are cops and prosecutors and a whole army of people who’ve taken the oaths to handle these people “for us”. But as soon as you jail one, another pops up or another one is released or “rehabilitated”. Yeahhhhh. Rehabilitated sex offenders. Love ‘em. When can they come over for dinner? Anyway - realizing these bastards proliferate as fast or faster than they can be taken off the streets, you quickly reach the conclusion that the number of victims continues growing exponentially. Seems like helping the VICTIM to recover and leaving the bad guys to the pros is the way to go. This is what brought us to the idea of The Onyx Consulting Foundation - a way to help fund the already woefully underfunded Dekalb Rape Crisis Center. I am proud to say that our efforts have produced the first revenue disbersment for the DRCC which I will be delivering to the director (Phyllis) when we meet this Thursday to discuss our partnership.

So, tonight, as I watched the utterly horrible documentation of a “schoolgirl rapist” who damaged the lives of several young women from Rochester to Alabama before he was sentenced to life - it occurred to me: Two years of cultivating this project (with the help of my colleagues at Onyx) has finally begun to bear fruit. I turned off the TV with the realization that we’re not just gawking in morbid fascination and disgust anymore, we’ve actually become part of the solution. Maybe that will help ease the guilt of watching all that garbage.

Does everyone out there have their very own private muse? The benefits are overwhelming. I highly recommend it. You can learn all about mine and download her music at bernadetteseacrest.com. What can I say? I’m a lucky S.O.B. She offers her music at no cost, although it sells off iTunes and CDbaby. As frustrating as it is for an entrepreneur such as myself to observe, she insists that “getting it out there” is far more important to her than making a buck. It’s “art for art’s sake” and that’s surely part of why it stays genuine. Gigs are another matter. Aside from the Daddy D’z sessions, they command a respectable fee for bookings and engagements.

Much to my embarrassment as a lifelong Atlantan, a handful of dopey club owners throughout Atlanta were seemingly disinterested when the highly revered chanteuse of the Southwest introduced herself as newly arrived from Albuquerque. UPDATE - B and the boys packed Eddie’s Attic 10/8/08 and are playing there again 1/21/09. Having recently finished a gangbusters tour in France she wanted to try a couple Atlanta venues on for size. The reception was less than warm. Some fella’ at Red Light Cafe even suggested she come by for “open mic night” (?!) um…..yeahhhh - no. True to form, she flipped them the proverbial “bird” and picked the least pretentious dive in town to play a series of FREE shows for a strictly “word of mouth” crowd. Evidently, the right people were listening - Bernadette won Creative Loafing’s Best Atlanta Vocalist within her first year of being in Atlanta and playing Daddy D’z.  We took advantage of the effort to hold many a company funded evening of beer, BBQ, and some of the finest in underground music entertainment in Atlanta for all the Onyx people. It was here that Bernadette first sang the brilliant songs that Charles had written for her. This was also the place where my daughter Delia would sing an opening number of “You Are My Sunshine” or “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” when she’d only just turned four. She and Bernadette would “rehearse” at home before shows. These small private shows marked an era in our lives that I’m very sentimental about. Now that I’ve had time to reflect, I wanted to blog about what I thought was their best show since Bernadette moved here from Albuquerque in 2006.

It had been roughly a year up to this recent Wednesday show in August 2008. A year of no shows makes for a pretty good turn-out as all the people who were lamenting their dissapearance made sure to come out and bring their friends. There was a perfect mixture of people to include past fans, several of our friends, Onyx customers who’ve become friends, a scattering of family and the coveted “newcomers”. They played all their best stuff with several of Charles’ more recent songs. Everything Bernadette had been saving up over the year was coming out clear and strong. I stood at the back with a couple friends looking dumbstruck as usual - “is that MY woman up there doing that?!”. “Cabbagetown Girl” was the final number and seemed to have a   lot of locals mesmorized in what could only be described as a “you had to be there” kind of moment. It was, without a doubt, the best show I can recall. The people who came, the focus and energy of the performers, the absence of promotion or pretentiousness and the intimacy of Daddy D’z dumpy little BBQ-shack stage area - all these things converged to create the perfect underground Atlanta show experience. I was proud. I was re-energized and inspired. It felt good to be there. It really did.

You’ve just found the most capable company for Atlanta Apple Repair, Atlanta Macintosh Service, Atlanta Mac Warranty Service, Macintosh Warranty Atlanta, Atlanta’s Best Computer Consultants, Best Macintosh Service, Mac Service, Macintosh House Calls, Mac Home Service, Apple House-calls, Fast Macintosh Service, Atlanta Apple Technicians, Macintosh Experts, Atlanta Mac Experts, Atlanta’s Best Apple Service, Apple House Calls, and on and on and on to see where we come up in the ranking. Britt has always been very good at this business and he’s watching it as well. We used to use a specific program to constantly bombard the search engines, but things have changed quite bit and now it seems to be all about content and volume of the actual site. I see a few Atlanta Mac affiliates ranking higher here and there. We’re going to have to fix that. Onyx has over 10 Apple Authorized Technicians on staff and growing. I think that likely makes us the most qualified company in the Southeast to work on Macs other than the Apple Stores themselves. What a lot of folks don’t know is that our field service is actually more PC based than Mac.

Although Apple’s market presence is certainly growing at a healthy rate, it would have been very difficult to grow past a few personnel 5 or 6 years ago if all we did was Mac work. There were a handful of other Apple affiliates out there trying their best to claw to the top of the pile along with us. Fortunately, their best wasn’t even comparable to our worst and they have all since spun off into obscurity - much like Darth Vader spinning off into the abyss in his tie fighter. I think I even heard them gurgling that same sound he made “Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!”. Our depot work is another story though. Because we are an Apple Authorized Service Center Plus, we perform over 100 Apple warranties a month. We also do legacy repairs (old Macs), PC’s, printers - pretty much all related equipment worth repairing. The Apple store has had very good response from referred business, so it seems we have earned their trust and goodwill. That has resulted in continually increasing referrals and a strengthening of our credibility and reputation. Many of our burned out competitors failed to recognize the relationship potential. Breaks my heart I tell ya. Now if by some remote chance anyone is actually READING this disjointed ramble, I will admit that I’m merely trying to build metadata and their is really no structure or point to all this flap about Apple Macintosh Warranty Service On Site In Shop Carry In Service Mac Repair Service Mac Techs Mac Technicians G5 Powerbook Mac Book Macbook G4 G5 G4 G5 iPod Repair iPod Battery Replacement iPod iPod iPod!!!

To blog or not to blog….that is the question. Britt has advised us that the more blogging we do, the more metadata created to drive search engine hits, web crawling etc. The only problem is my aversion to blogging in general. There’s something terribly pompous and self-important in this whole blogging business. I’m not quite sure how/if I can find a way to be “OK” with the whole thing. We’ll see. I suppose I can just give a disclaimer and blog my everlovin’ ass off for the sake of metadata. Hmmm.