I’ve heard different bits of how business owners handle a local, small town store.

I got some insight from a local couple who have been in the local hardware, and lawn machine repair for probably going on 20+ years now. This totally contrasts advice that I received from the minority, and makes some food for thought.

This couple owns a hardware store that is so ‘not corporate’ it’s crazy. They live above their store, and did so when they had a stark idea that they were the business, not always just the parts they sold.

They’ve managed to outlive the Kmart, Hecks, Ames, Walmart and Thomas Do-it center for years. I’m sure varied ideas exist about why they survived all these giants coming into their market place, but they sure know why.

There has been two trains of thought I’ve heard through the years:

1. You leave your work at work.
2. Your work is what feeds you, if it follows you home, lead it back to work.

So, this couple decided early on that it was crazy to have a home separate from the store, since, even at very early hours in the morning, customers would call them! They apparently did for a short period of time resist the idea of this ‘local big corporation’ that is off the radar after hours.
After all, they have families, dogs, cats, homes to clean and personal lives.

Now, many years later, they gladly open their doors, when so many other small stores have closed them forever because they didn’t realize business can happen at anytime, and that’s how you build loyalty.

I’ve found that most doctors in my hometown will gladly see anyone, if they are good patients, at their office during odd hours. (It’s not even a policy to do that.)

I’ve seen that even though the hours of operation of a heating and cooling company is 9-5, and they don’t mention they man the phones, it rings to their homes. I’ve asked electricians why they forward their phones as well, and service is just that… service.

Boyd Pickens, rest his soul,  answered that question for me a long time ago, and that’s why, Heaven Forbid, when a customer knocked on my parent’s front door at 1pm on a Sunday and needed a lawn raked, I never complained. He taught me that if a customer comes to see you, you had better do the job, they went out of their way to find you.

I’m always soliciting for feedback, lately, my google rank has became so good that I do get it. If a Wendy’s manager says that he’d never open his doors, that’s fine. It’s a service to do food, but you can buy a loaf of bread and deli meat 24 hours a day. When your electric, computer, water, heating, cooling, or truck breaks down you can’t just buy a load of bread and beat the engine until it works: you need a professional.

That’s a good question, and even seasoned webmasters from way back in the early 90’s think the easiest way to fix the issue is to simply remove the page. Why remove the page? It’s just as easy to type a question in Google, and get a response back, have the page removed.

You have several options in this case, since you have a page that you don’t want in Google.

1. Use a robots.txt
2. Use Google’s EXCELLENT webmaster tool
You are not a webmaster if you don’t use this tool, don’t even use the title of webmaster if you don’t.
3. Delete the page (The easy excuse way of dealing with it)
4. Rename the page (See above thought, although not so bonehead)
5. Password protect it (Which can be defeated in some ways)

Password protect is the best option there is, since in most cases I believe Google won’t index a page that pops up a standard auth windows. (The really smart way to do it, and it only take less than 10 seconds to do in Unix and Windows.) This option is immediate, while not perfect.

Using robots.txt is a great option, however there is a caveat. Some people think that since Google doesn’t spider often, they are at no worries they’ll find the new URL of the page they moved it to. This is the flat out, ignoring advice thing to assume. Even in the light of being told that Google can, and does spider sites very quickly, is adding new datacenters and refreshing the index much more often. Hell, it may even break and ignore what you type into robots.txt.

If your webmaster assumes this, run and don’t look back. They lack understanding to put anything online because they refuse to understand what information leaks are, and the dangers of saying they don’t have enough time to write a 10 second robots.txt. This is all conjecture, due to that fact that for some sites, Google has a really slow crawl scheduled. Meaning: they don’t update content, or it’s unimportant so Google doesn’t care.

Using robots.txt in this case, without knowing how long it is that Google hits your robots.txt could mean that the page affected will remain for over months. Google won’t even attempt to remove it in the next index refresh until they see that robots.txt.

The best option is to simply do what the other webmasters of the world do: Use the webmaster tool that Google provides, take the 5 minutes to see what it does, and be what you claim to provide. Request the url to be removed using the webmaster tool and you will find that quickly it’s gone.

When you are faced with a computer being turned off ‘dirty’, which means simply that you didn’t shut it down properly, you could be surprised what simple fix may lay ahead for you.

The situation is simple, you were at the computer playing XYZ Part II and the computer locked up, with the only fix being to turn it off by holding in the power button. After the horror of that happening, you turn the computer back on, hoping to kill more bad guys, when you find that the computer doesn’t get past the Windows XP logo, or if it does, it just goes to a black screen.

Most people are panicked at this point, and I even know techs that never even think of running the standard chkdsk with Windows XP, since even Safe Mode can be borked as well. The simple fix to remember is to get out your Official Windows XP CDROM. If you have a dell, it’s going to be a Blue or a Purple disk that says “Operating system”.

There is however a few things to remember:

1. If anything tells you that you are going to format your drive STOP.
2. If you are told you will loose data, STOP.

So the general idea here is that the rotating metal platter in your computer has a problem, and you need to replace it with a spinning plastic disc, called a CD. Your computer can boot (or start) off of a CD, and that CD can provide you with the tools you need to get the computer started back up again to your lovely Jessica Alba background.

Now, back to the task at hand.

If you have your XP operating system disc in your hand, put it in your top CD-ROM and restart your computer. All that matters really here is that the CD is in the computer from the time you turn on the computer, and I know that means you must put the disc in, just power off and on to ensure it’s in the computer from the start.

Once that has occurred, most computers are setup to BOOT off the CD first, then the Hard Drive which is not usefull at this point. If you have a Windows XP Operating System disc in the CDROM one of two things will occur if the computer is trying or did successfully boot off the CD:

1. You will see a “Press any cd to boot from CD” (Press any key now)
2. You will see a nice blue screen that talks about loading in all sorts of files
If you don’t see either one of those things, then you should try one of these tips:

1. If you have a Dell, press F12 when the Dell logo shows up after you press your power button.
2. If you don’t have a Dell, try pressing F8,F11 one after the other right after you turn computer on.
3. If those don’t work try pressing ‘Esc’

If those tips work, you should be presented with a screen that asks about “Boot Selection”. In any case, you should see something about a DVD/CD/CDRW drive, so select the first one and press Enter. (This is why we put the CD in the first CD/DVD Drive)

Now, you have a nice blue screen that after several minutes shows up at a prompt asking you what you want to do. The important task here is that you press ‘R’ for recovery console. After a few more minutes it will ask you to type a number that corresponds to which Windows installation you wish to repair.

If you were a tech pro, you’d have more than one windows installed. Since you need help, I’d say the #1 option is best, and it should say: 1. C:\Windows. Press 1 and Enter if it says to.
Any other questions about layout of keyboards, etc should be ignored in most cases. It will probably after this ask you for your Administrator password. Most users can just press Enter at this prompt!
When you get to the point finally that you are looking at a black screen with a blinking prompt (or not), you can type in: chkdsk /p (that’s a space between the k and the /). Sit back and wait for a while, and eventually it will tell you if you had errors, and fix them. It may take 20-30 minutes depending on the problems, and the size of your hard drive.

After you deduce it’s finished, you can type exit (then enter), and the computer will restart. Take the CD out of your drive as quickly that you can and see if your windows now boots.

I’ve found that taking these steps will solve at least 1/2 of the computer problems out there, and if this tutorial gets popular, I will add screen shots.

Let’s say you have a sheet called “Budget” and you have a sheet called “April07″, and you want to include a value from Budget into April07. I didn’t know how and I had to ask someone in a group about how to get the value on there.

I should have just tried this solution, but it ended up being this simple:

=Budget!A37

Now, if I wasn’t afraid of spaces anyway from being a programmer, I would have put a space in April 07. If you did have a space, then you can just put in: =’April 07′!A69

I hope this helps anyone else that wants to include a value from any sheet in another.