Tag Archives: linkedin

In memory of Mustafa ‘John’ Ilhan

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Image copied from crazyjohns.com

John Ilhan was a late Australian entrepreneur. He was born in Turkey in 1965 and passed away on 23 October 2007. In his 42 years of living  he left his city [Melbourne] and community in a better state than which he found it.

What he was most known for were his mobile phone stores – that made the once luxury item, accessible to the wider public. His desire was for everybody to one day own a mobile phone. He had to take on many rivals, obstacles and giants – to achieve this – but in the end he prevailed at playing the game his way and always  achieving a win-win for the customer and his business.

This article expresses the impact John Ilhan has had on me, a young person and a son of migrants to Australia. I also hope to educate my friends and any readers of who John Ilhan was and why his life is important for all Australians to learn from.

I first heard the news of John Ilhan’s death while working at a desk job when the radio announced the event at around lunch time. At that time, I wasn’t very aware of who he was however, it made me feel for his family to lose this man at such a young age. I live in Canberra so Crazy John’s was more famous from the advertising at sporting events than his local stores (there are only two in Canberra). I remember telling the news to a co-worker who knew more about him as she had seen an interview about him on the programme ‘compass’ on the ABC. I felt eager to find out more and went on the internet to get a view of him on google images. I had recognized the face from a show about businessmen and entrepreneurs (it was Catalyst on ABC). It was at that point that I started to discover more about this ‘crazy John’. Continue reading →

Selling Disaster Recovery Planning and Information Security to Managers

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One of the most difficult aspects for IT professionals is gaining support for IT spending. Executives are skeptical about IT solutions and are very reluctant to release any funds.

This article will focus on the difficulty encountered when trying to sell information security projects and Disaster Recovery Plan projects to business managers or financial officers.

Why is it that so many managers view IT as an additional component of their business operations?

I can suggest a few possible reasons:

  • Bad experiences in the past
  • IT is viewed as a liability instead of an asset
  • Lack of knowledge, complexity, technical language, all intimidate people from becoming IT fluent and aware
  • Inability to perceive the Return On Investment  of any IT-related project
  • Misconceptions about the reality of their current IT situation and state of the organisation
  • Lack of planning. No IT strategy, No roadmap
  • Business plan does not factor in any IT elements or spending

The reality is this. There are two ways to spend money on IT.

  1. You can undertake planned spending OR
  2. You can undertake un-planned spending.

Do you want to allocate $0 to an IT budget forecast and pay as you go along?

Sure, make inaccurate predictions for the next fiscal year that look impressive and then bleed funds from the company’s bank account during the year as incident behind incident occurs.

At the start of the year, your predictions look healthy. The balance sheet is in your favour and you have the extra money to buy more assets. During the year, IT costs go from $0 to $10 000 – sometimes overnight – to cater for your unprecedented incidents or minor disruptions. At the end of the year, 5 disruptions later and $20 000 afterward…you’ve moved from point A to? Continue reading →

People Networking

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You always hear about the importance of networking as if it were a must do task in order to find success in your professional career. This idea can seem as intimidating as blind dating but it’s not too hard to do.

The other day I realised that out of the seven jobs I have attained in my life only one of them was achieved without networking. I don’t think this reflects badly on nepotism but demonstrates the relevance of networking and establishing relationships with people from all walks of life.

Not all networking needs to be related to careers and ambitious people. You can establish meaningful relationships with people without ever calculating the benefit you can obtain. The jobs I have done in the past came through people I knew directly but every person was known through a different aspect of my life. Continue reading →

Uni students’ lack of Linux Interest

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I have spent some time studying an IT related degree and I am surprised about the lack of adoption or conversation about the GNU Linux operating system. Even friends from the Bachelor of IT or software engineering degrees are reluctant to experiment with Open Source applications.

As university degrees attempt to become more workforce oriented and practical there is an enourmous bias towards the Windows operating system and all of its applications.

At our faculty there were around 4 windows computer labs to 1 linux lab. I did have some Linux interaction in a operating systems unit but the tasks were centered around process scheduling, forks and threads.

In another unit I was lucky to make a presentation about Linux as a desktop system . Most of the class listened with amazement as if I were introducing mircrowaves for the first time. My teacher knew more than the rest about Linux however, I got the impression that his knowledge had come more from magazines than first hand experience. Continue reading →

Laptop stolen: What I should have done

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Acer 5735, 3GB RAM, 320GB storage, 2GHZ intel duo core.

When it comes to laptops, there are many incidents that can occur ranging from coffee being spilled, laptop being stolen, laptop falling onto the ground and breaking or worse, laptop falling into a pool.

Initially, I didn’t want to include non-positive events in my blog but facts are facts. My laptop got stolen from my home and I lost all the data that was on it. The article below will provide information on how to prepare for incidents that result in the loss of your laptop and more importantly, the loss of data. Continue reading →