Archives for February 2024

Happy Wednesday! We’re halfway through the week. We hope your to-do list is slimming and your sights are set on ending the week on a great note!

In This Issue: Do you have an accountability partner? | Surge Protector Power Strip | Cisco Manufacture Date Lookup | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Do you have an accountability partner?

Happy Wednesday! I hope you are having a great week. This week I’m being pulled through the week by multiple cups of coffee and general encouragement. I didn’t do all that much this weekend, but for some reason, I’m dragging this week! Usually, I can pull myself out of it – but I haven’t been successful quite yet in doing so.

As you may recall, I set a goal of reading 54 books this year. Boy, am I behind. I’ve successfully listened to one audiobook this year and have only gotten a few chapters into another book. I’m trying to stay positive about it, because once I get down on myself – I have a hard time coming out of that or not giving up! For some reason when it comes to goals I set for myself, I’m so easily able to just let them know or forget about them, but if it involves someone else – I’ll do anything to make sure it happens. I guess this is why accountability partners are so key!

What do you have to do to achieve your goals? How do you keep yourself accountable to the goals you set for yourself or for the ones you set for others? Do you have an accountability partner?

Ashley

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Product Spotlights & Updates

Protecting your electronics from power surges is a crucial step to keep them alive and functioning for years to come. Power strips are not only a way to keep them safe, they are a convenient way to add additional outlets where plugs are at a premium.

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Learning Center Article – Cisco Manufacture Date Lookup

When building a network, you will shop around and compare plenty of models for each piece of hardware that you need. Sometimes, it’s hard to keep track of everything and know what items are new and which have been around for a while. If you’re investing in Cisco products, then there’s actually a mechanism in place that can help you know exactly when a device was manufactured.

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• Beyond Meat is launching a new iteration of its burger in grocery stores this spring. The company is betting an even healthier version of its burgers will lure back consumers.
• Adobe launched an artificial intelligence assistant in its Reader and Acrobat applications that can produce summaries of and answer questions about PDF documents.
• FuboTV is suing Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery over their recently announced sports streaming joint venture.
• If you really love McDonald’s, you are going to really love its newest collaboration. The McDonald’s collection with Loungefly is expanding with new mini backpacks, crossbody bags, and lots of really cute accessories- and they will be available soon! Read more here.

Happy Tuesday & Happy National Love Your Pet Day! Today is the perfect day to give your pet a little extra love – some extra rubs, treats, an extra long walk – you name it! Whatever it be, we’re sure they’ll love it!

In This Issue: Enjoying the Little Things | Cisco 2911 Integrated Services Router | Servers Vs. Desktop PCs | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Enjoying the Little Things

Good Morning and Happy Tuesday! Today feels a bit like a Monday to me as I am coming off a long weekend. I decided to take yesterday off work as some of my friends were off for President’s Day and it just so happened to be a beautiful day! I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to have some fun and it definitely filled my cup so to speak!

I spent the morning hiking and shooting some totally silly and ridiculous Instagram content. We went to Anna Ruby Falls near Helen, GA which I had not seen before. It was so pretty and far exceeded my expectations! We then went to check out a small waterfall at Crow Creek which was a short hike, but was quite pretty! It’s a place I think I’d enjoy more during the summer months as you could definitely splash around a bit there! We wanted to hike Glassy Mountain as well, so we drove miles on a dirt road to get there only to find that the gate was closed. It was kind of a bummer as we were on somewhat of a time crunch so we had to scramble to find another trail that was close by!

After hiking I headed to Atlanta to meet up with some of my former coworkers from my first job after college. It was a corporate job which always felt a bit stuffy, but I still “found my people” there and developed some lifelong friendships with some hilarious dudes who are some of my favorites to this day! I left that job over 10 years ago but am so thankful that the friendships didn’t end with the job!

Yesterday was a truly great day that reminded me how important it is to enjoy the little things in life – slowing down, getting outside, laughing, and cherishing the friendships that make life so fun!

Rebecca

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Product Spotlights & Updates

Cisco 2911 Integrated Services Router offers embedded hardware encryption acceleration, voice- and video-capable digital signal processor (DSP) slots, optional firewall, intrusion prevention, call processing, voicemail, and application services.

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Learning Center Article – Servers Vs. Desktop PCs

If you ever shop for computer parts, you might see things for desktop PCs and servers lumped together. This isn’t always the case, but it’s easy enough to see these different parts come up in a single search. Why is that? Are both types of computers using the exact same hardware? Can you mix and match between them? What’s the real difference between a desktop PC and a server in the first place?

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• Walmart is buying TV maker Vizio for $2.3 billion in cash. The move is a bid to boost the big-box retailer’s high-margin ad business.
• American Airlines has raised the prices of checked baggage and is also reducing fees for slightly overweight bags. They will also start limiting which tickets purchased through a third party are eligible to earn AAdvantage frequent flyer miles.
• Elon Musk has reported that A patient implanted with Neuralink’s brain technology can now control a computer mouse just by thinking. The billionaire’s startup says it has developed a brain implant to help humans use their neural signals to control external technologies.
• Taco Bell has announced that the Baja Blast-flavored gelato will be released at Taco Bell locations nationwide this summer.

Happy Monday! We hope you had a wonderful weekend! Wishing you a great week ahead. If we can be praying for you, please reach out!

In This Issue: Desk Essentials | Meraki Access Point | All About Ethernet Jacket Ratings | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – What are your desk essentials?

Happy Monday

And for you Presidents out there, happy President’s Day! Sorry, not sorry, but I couldn’t resist a little Dad joke there. This holiday sort of snuck up on me and it looks like the kids are out of school for the next 3 days! I don’t remember ever getting that many school days off when I was a kid for President’s Day. We don’t have anything actively planned, but I do envision a couple of trips to the park and playground if the afternoons are nice enough. Lately, it’s been very cold. In Georgia, the weather gets a little unpredictable this time of year, you could go from warm to mild to the next day being cold and rainy and then a few days later back to warm.

Over the weekend we did a couple of cleanup chores around the house. Some long neglect things that we’ve been putting off due to business and scheduling issues. It feels absolutely great to get those things done and out of mind and out of sight. Getting things cleaned up and organized gives me a sense of satisfaction and allows me to relax better. For example, I noticed that if I have a cluttered desk then my mind is usually cluttered. I try to keep what’s on top of my desk to a bare minimum with the essentials – my coffee in a CK mug, my CK coaster, my desk pad, and my phone. (alongside my computer and monitors of course). I suppose it helps me be less visually exhausted and distracted.

What type of things do you like having on your desk? I know some people like to have a pen and pad ready to write down thoughts with, for me I’m purely digital. I hope you have a great day and a wonderful week!

Cris

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Product Spotlights & Updates

The Meraki MR42 is a four-radio, cloud-managed 3×3 MU-MIMO 802.11ac Wave 2 access point. The MR42 provides a maximum 1.9 Gbps frame rate with concurrent 802.11ac Wave 2 and 802.11n 3×3:3 MIMO radios. A dedicated third radio provides real-time WIDS/WIPS with automated RF optimization. In addition, an integrated fourth radio delivers Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) scanning and Beaconing functionality.

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Learning Center Article – All About Ethernet Jacket Ratings

When you’re planning a network, you usually think about the equipment you need and how you can connect it. That’s already plenty to consider, but it turns out that your responsibilities run deeper than that. You also have to think about safety.

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• Intuitive Machines’ robotic Odysseus spacecraft snapped a few selfies with Earth in the background shortly after its Feb. 15 launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket — and we can all check them out. Read more here.
• Uber Technologies will buy back up to $7 billion worth of company shares after a strong recovery in ride-share and healthy demand at its food delivery business.
• The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage jumped to 7.14%. Mortgage rates hit their last high in October, but then fell sharply over the next two months, leveling at around 6.6% in December.
• U.S. Central Command reported that American forces hit an undersea drone during five “self-defense strikes” against Houthi rebels in areas of Yemen controlled by the Iran-backed rebels.

Happy Friday! We’re officially about 13% of the way through 2024 – can you believe it? If you set goals at the beginning of the year, are you making progress? Cheers to a great weekend!

In This Issue: Which Commercial Stole the Show? 🏈 | Keystone Wall Plate | Switching Bandwidth and Packet Forwarding Rate Explained | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Which Commercial Stole the Show? 🏈

Happy Friday, folks! Football season has officially ended since the Super Bowl is behind us. Like many others, I watch the Super Bowl mostly for the ads. Every company tries to fill its commercial spot with as much creativity as possible, which makes for some hilarious and memorable commercials!

What were your favorite commercials from the Super Bowl? My favorite was the Dunkin’ DunKings! Dunkin’s marketing plan was outstanding as they released several more videos this week, including Dunkin’ ‘The DunKings – Extended Cut’.

And, if you have some time and want to watch any again, here is a list of the top 10 commercials from USA Today.

Have a great weekend!

Chris

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Product Spotlights & Updates

Keystone plates offer maximum versatility because you can add, reduce, or simply change the connections needed on the plate. They offer the best way to install a variety of today’s wiring and cabling. This is the perfect solution for terminating your in-wall wiring.

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Learning Center Article – Switching Bandwidth and Packet Forwarding Rate Explained

When you’re purchasing switches, you can find a lot of different numbers posted. They all have important meanings, and they all inform your purchase. If you aren’t already deeply familiar with each metric, then it’s worth taking time to learn the essentials.

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• Starbucks opened a new cafe designed to be more accessible and inclusive for customers and employees with disabilities. Changes include tweaks to the stores’ lighting and acoustics, as well as lower counters.
• OpenAI announced Thursday it has expanded beyond text and images to offer video-generation AI for the first time. The new model, called Sora, allows a user to type out a desired scene and turn it into a high-definition video clip.
• Microsoft will release four specified video games on alternative consoles, presumably both the Sony PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch.
• DraftKings posted quarterly results that missed Wall Street estimates on the top and bottom line, but it increased its revenue by 44%.

Happy Friday Eve! We hope you’ve had a great week! Do you have any upcoming weekend plans you’re looking forward to?

In This Issue: Lessons Learned: Don’t Idolize A Solution | Rack Adapter, 23″ to 19″ | Benefits of AOC HDMI Cables | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Lessons Learned: Don’t Idolize A Solution

I have been writing about some of our “lessons learned” over the last several months and today I want to talk about “Don’t Idolize A Solution”.

For a very long time, I have tended to represent concepts with phrases. I have about 18 or so of these phrases now and somewhere along the way, someone called them Craigisms. One of the early Craigisms was “Don’t Idolize A Solution”. It came about when a staff member put off the responsibility for solving a problem that was in front of them by saying, for example:

In the case of a recurring problem with a vendor – “Well, we just need to move to a new vendor for this item”

In the case of a newly stained couch – “Well, we need to replace that piece of furniture anyway”.

It’s EASY to imagine a wholesale change being the answer to the problem at hand while HARD to think about how to solve the problem IN FRONT of you and execute on that solution. And generally the “idolized solution” is WAY harder than just dealing with the actual problem. I am not going to call it laziness because I think we all have the tendency to find a way to avoid doing hard things.

It is much easier to choose to do hard things when you know that you are building something better.

Many people, myself included, avoid hard things if the outcome is not meaningful to them. At my house, I may walk past a piece of trash or a kid’s toy lying in a flower bed 100 times if the mulch is patchy and needs refreshing. “It’s already a degraded situation that needs attention; what does the foreign object really matter? I will deal with it when we refresh the mulch.”

Wait a dang minute! You are telling me that I have to spend thousands of dollars to get rid of a toy lying in the flower bed? Really??

Right this moment I have some rotting boards on my barn doors at home. They are getting worse and worse. I need to hire someone to fix them but do I? Nope. I keep thinking “I really would like to replace those doors with motor-operated garage door style doors …. And I would kinda like to put some porches over those doors so I could park out of the rain … but what do I want that to look like? I need to get an architect to design something … but that’s complicated and expensive.” So I do nothing. Do I have to do all that instead of a few hundred dollar board replacement? Really? No, I don’t. This is idolizing a solution. I can fix the issue in front of me and take the time to decide if I truly want the rest of those changes made.

So, all that being said, when I jumped back into the day-to-day of CK I realized that we had been idolizing a solution for years, and it was impacting our customers and our revenue.

“Let’s switch E-Commerce platforms they said. It will be fun they said.”

No, let’s not and say we did haha.

Since the very beginning of CablesAndKits, we have always leveraged software developers, whether on staff or contract, to build and maintain our website and back-end systems. In addition to always being the way we have done things, it has also always been a personal passion of mine. I am pretty good at seeing the needs of the business and turning them into development tasks to be done and I enjoy doing it. Over time we have built so many features into the website that were not standard on the average website. Things like the ability to ship on your own shipping account, multiple logins for different team members, specialized ways to display certain groups of products, etc. But, we were falling behind in some areas that had become standard features in off-the-shelf platforms. Instead of putting in the work to build those features we somehow decided we should just re-platform. It seemed to make sense so we embarked on a multi-year SEVERAL hundred thousand dollar journey to transition to a new platform – that never happened.

The decision wasn’t necessarily a bad one but we could have resolved the issues in our existing system faster, easier, and cheaper than moving to a new system. It proved to be impossibly difficult for reasons I won’t go into here.

It could have ended well but … it gets worse.

Not only did we idolize a solution by choosing to re-platform rather than fixing the issues in front of us, but we neglected the existing site the entire time we worked on the move to the new system. SEO, broken pages, poor categorization, and even our Google Adwords management to a degree. The list of things we were not working on for that period of time is quite long.

The neglect resulted in much of the revenue decline we experienced in the last half of 2023. It wasn’t the only cause but it was a significant part of it. It is SO easy to “take your eye off the ball”. (See last week’s email about “Don’t expect what you don’t inspect”).

In late September, all e-commerce, product, and marketing folks (plus me) started meeting daily. We DOVE into the current website and just started fixing stuff. We did an SEO audit and were horrified at how bad things were so we got to work on that. Adwords, product pages, categorization, site search, product pages, images, content, and the list goes on. We just SAW WHAT NEEDED TO BE DONE AND DID IT. No idolizing solutions. No excuses. We just plowed through stuff.

And today, almost 5 months later, we are still plowing. We have gotten more meaningful work done in 5 months than we did in perhaps the last 5 years.

“Disciplined people, engaged in disciplined thought, resulting in disciplined action” – Jim Collins

What solutions are you idolizing? Put one foot in front of the other and just get stuff done.

More to come …

Craig

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Product Spotlights & Updates

Rack adapters are used to mount standard 19″ computer and networking equipment into (not so standard) 23″ equipment racks. By attaching these brackets to your 23″ equipment rack you create a 19″ opening which is needed to mount standard 19″ equipment.

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Learning Center Article – Benefits of AOC HDMI Cables

You see all kinds of different technologies used for the widest ranges of communication. Among all of that, the primary way to send audio and video signals is via HDMI.

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• SpaceX has filed to move its incorporation location to Texas from Delaware.
• Shares of TSMC reached an all-time high on after Morgan Stanley lifted the price target on its Nvidia.
• From wasabi to fried chicken, Oreo has always pushed the boundaries of flavor combinations. With new variations popping up every few months and offerings ranging from the outrageous to the OMG. Check out the most interesting and unusual Oreo releases and limited-edition flavors from around the world.
• Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander launched from Florida on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. If fully successful, the IM-1 cargo mission would be the first U.S. lunar landing in more than 50 years.

Happy Wednesday & Happy Valentine’s Day! We hope you have a wonderful day full of love, chocolate, and sweet little valentine’s notes!

In This Issue: Happy Valentine’s Day! | Cisco Meraki Cloud Managed Switch | 4K vs 8K HDMI Cables: A Quick Guide | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Happy Valentine’s Day!

Happy Wednesday & Happy Valentine’s Day!

I hope everyone is having a great week! Since it’s Valentine’s Day – I’ll share a funny story that happened last week…

I often leave my phone laying around and at times I’ll turn away for a moment and when I turn back around my little one is attempting to grab it and chew on it. Well last week, he successfully grabbed it and managed to call my ex-boyfriend. I was mortified!! I heard someone saying “hello? hello?” and when I looked at the phone to see who it was – I almost screamed! I hadn’t talked to this person in YEARS (almost 8 years!) and of course he answered.

I can’t help but cackle about it, but in the moment I was horrified lol. Nothing like a call a week before Valentine’s day to an ex! Has anything like this happened to you before?

Anywho – do you have any Valentine’s day traditions or fun things you do to celebrate?

Have a good rest of your week!

Ashley

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Product Spotlights & Updates

The Meraki MS225-24P is a cloud managed access layer switch that features (24) 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet ports as well as (4) 10G SFP+ uplinks. This switch supports both virtual stacking and physical stacking (compatible with MS210 series switches). Each switch includes dual stacking interfaces with up to 80 Gbps of stacking bandwidth.

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Learning Center Article – 4K vs 8K HDMI Cables: A Quick Guide

Both types of cables are HDMI, and they are used for ultra-high-definition video. 4K is known as HDMI 2.0, and the cables support video at resolutions up to 2150p (3840 X 2160), which comes out to roughly 8 million pixels in an image.

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• Microsoft Aptos is the new font for Outlook and Word. Read more about it here.
• Jeff Bezos has sold roughly $2 billion worth of Amazon stock in recent days.
• U.S. consumers will spend a record $6.4 billion on jewelry around Valentine’s Day this year. A decade ago, about 5% of engagement rings were colored gemstones – now, it’s more than 15%.
• Nvidia has surpassed Amazon in market capitalization. It’s a sign of how strong demand is for chips that can run cutting-edge AI, as well as the investor appetite for the companies that make the semiconductors.