OK they have swapped out the email for another attempted Trojan attack just like the UPS, FedEx and others. Not sure I get the subject of this one, I guess it made sense to them before they translated it into English. Anyway as is always the case DO NOT OPEN EMAIL ATTACHMENTS!

Was tracking a shipment over the weekend to make sure it would be here on Monday and what I found was FedEx either has a StarGate, Time Machine or Warp Drive as it left Charlotte 30 minutes AFTER it arrived in Winston-Salem:

Back again this year a super discount for Students on Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate!

You must have a valid e-mail address at an educational institution ending with the domain suffix .EDU (ie, leina@contoso.edu) OR have a valid email address at one of the educational institutions listed here.
AND
You must be a student at a U.S. educational institution and must be actively enrolled in at least 0.5 course credit and be able to provide proof of enrollment upon request.

Be aware of another UPS notification type email with a payload. This time it’s an attachment, Georgia.zip, with a subject line of “Journalists shot in Georgia” or variation of. I have seen a dozen alerts of these being blocked from one site alone in the past hour.

After months of pushing and shoving, which obviously lead to Bob McCoy taking a “medical leave”, it appears Ted Kaplan may have his way, sort of. Today the Forsyth County Tourism Development Authority has divided the task of who will be the next Chairman by selecting Two “Chair’Women”. The vote was taken and in due course the only way to get anything done appears to be selecting two people to switch off as chair, each getting six months at bat while the other plays second fiddle as vice “chair’woman”.

Pat Bryan and Vivian Burke will serve six months each with Bryan having first at bat until December when Burke will reverse roles with her. Considering Kaplan has been arguing that the TDA is top heavy and spends to much on administrative costs it will be interesting to hear his take on this. In just the past few months he has tried to slash funding for the TDA only to take part in this compromise appointing two people to share a post for a year instead of maybe looking outside for one person to take the normal two year appointment.

It did appear as though Kaplan has made his point with the approval of nearly $50,000 to go towards several local events such as a Celebrity bowling event in September and robotic dinosaurs at SciWorks both of which actually are tourist drawing events however the “tourist” for either event in my opinion will be relatively local so is anything gained? Then again $50,000 out of a nearly 3 million dollar budget is snack money isn’t it?

Ok so it’s raining a little, and there is a little wind, what could go wrong with flying a kite in a hurricane?

A touch far but if your interested there is a full VOIP session going on over in Durham. Multiple vendors will present a total solution for business including VOIP, Data and of course those Blackberries.

I have been outspoken that Chamber membership has little benefit to the small business owner and that the Chamber as a whole has been more concerned with membership drives than providing a reason for membership. This came to a head a year or so ago when I contacted the Chamber concerning various business events Microsoft has in the Triad area and I thought the Chamber might like to put an announcement in their events calendar or newsletter. To paraphrase the response I received back, “if Microsoft or you would like to become a Chamber member we would be glad to post the information of any Microsoft Business event.” To say the least I just about fell out of my chair to be told that the Chamber expected Microsoft to join just so the Chamber would post an announcement concerning Microsoft holding a business related event in the local area. To be clear the event in question was a Microsoft “Connections” event where Microsoft discusses their latest products and how those products could help your business, sounds like something local businesses might want to hear huh?

Well to get off my horse I gave up on trying to get the Chamber to do anything concerning these events and had a few words with several folks there that I just didn’t agree with their direction and left it at that. Today I got an email from a colleague of mine pointing to a report by Warrillow and Co and found their comments and conclusions mirror exactly my points I made above. Take this comment quoted in the Warrillow report as an example:

“[Chambers] are dying because they are useless, old and do nothing for small and medium businesses. Their board of directors doesn’t understand business owners and they are more focused on membership rates than helping their members succeed.” Andrew Patricio, President of BizLaunch

Are you a Chamber member? Why?