I was approached by one of my clients, and being a "career focus" magazine, they wanted to do an interview with me on being an e-Nerd. This article will feature in their 2010 1Q edition, and the scan will surely be posted ASAP. The interview follows:

Hi Justen

Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. Remember, the more detailed your answers, the better!

• Title of your job?

I am a Technology Specialist & Consultant, or what we would call an e-Nerd. J

• Tell us more about what you do?

My job, or I’d rather say my life, as I don’t like referring to it as a job, is to help people. I help people with computers, cellphones, networks, servers, and any other gadget you can think of, to maximise the usage of the technological tool. I don’t service technology or computers, I help people with technology and computers.

• How did you get into this career?

I’m a Nerd by heart, and I’ve always loved working and playing with gadgets, but I’m also a very people orientated person and wanted to do something where I can feel as if I make a difference. So bringing these factors into consideration, helping people with technology is exactly what I love to do.

• What are the physical working conditions? E.g. dirty? Hot? Fun? Stressful? Outdoors? Working intensely with people?

The nature of this career puts one in many weird and wonderful conditions, I’ve spend days sitting in the CEO’s luxurious air-conditioned office, and I’ve spend days sitting on the hot roof of an office block. I’ve been inside roofs, under desks, anywhere you can think of. The advantage of our team however, is that everyone has a speciality, and if your not the roof climbing, axe swinging kind of person, there will most certainly be someone eager to do it!

• What are the recommended / necessary skills and training needed for this career?

Firstly, being technically inclined AND having great people skills are a must. The more experience and the more training one has in a specific area of expertise, the better. A good starting point is advanced computer courses such as A+ and N+, but at Nerds on Site we have the University of Nerdology, where subjects ranging from application development, web design and server management to basic backup methods and security regulations are taught. We also seek entrepreneurial qualities in a candidate, as the business model is specifically designed for entrepreneurs.

• Personality type for the career or personality least suited for the career?

Although technically inclined persons normally have what it takes to become a Nerd, people skills and communication skills are vital in the day to day environment you’ll find yourself in.

• What is an average day like and your average working hours?

Specifically, the Nerds on Site business model allow you to work when and how you want. We have certain rules that we abide by, just like any civilization needs rules, but you are in fact working for yourself, under the Nerds on Site banner. The thing is however, that we usually end up working many more hours and strange hours than people having a “carved in stone” working hour routine. It all depends on you, your goals, and the speed at which you are building your business, and leaving a path of happiness behind.

• What is the most rewarding / satisfying aspect about your job?

Effectively helping people, and although this may sound corny, there’s no reward like the emotional reward when you helped someone with an issue they struggled with for years, and seeing someone being empowered and enabled, is a feeling more powerful than any material thing can give.

• How and why did you decide on this job?

I never really decided “Hey, I’m going to become a Nerd!”. I landed in this position after stumbling upon this amazing group of people on the web, realizing that this is something I’d like to try, and from there, I haven’t looked back.

• How do you find working for a franchise as opposed to working for yourself?

We don’t refer to our business model as a franchise, as we all work individually AND as a team, we have the freedom to expand our businesses in the way we want, we don’t report to a head office per se, but we are supported by a POD leader who gives technical, entrepreneurial and emotional backing, support and motivation. Personally, having had my own business for a couple of years, I love the Nerds on Site business model, as it provides you with all the tools to build and run your business, you are backed by an international team and you still have the freedom to guide your business in the direction you want, albeit with the Nerds on Site guidance buffers.

• Have you experienced any great / interesting moments in your career?

Oh most definitely. Something small as setting up a video call for one of my elder clients, and seeing her communicate with family overseas that she hasn’t seen for many years, and helping a SME client save a lot of money per month on technology spending, allowing them to expand their operations!

• Most memorable moment and why?

Every day is memorable, things never turn out the same, you always meet new and interesting people. And you get to influence the lives of so many people, in a unique positive way!

• Most awkward moment and why?

Sitting on top of a 4 story office building, installing wireless kit in my corporate wear when it started to rain. I thought to myself, if I ever get out of this one, I’ll really really appreciate the wonder of 108mbps transfers over 5km. (See, I get all nerdy after a while.)

• What advice would you give the youth of today?

Whatever you do today, not only affects, but creates your tomorrow. At Nerds on Site, through leveraging technology, and creating tomorrow’s technology, we’re creating our future.

• Is this your “Dream” job? If not what is?

To me, a dream job is doing something that I love and enjoy doing every day and being able to make a good living out of it. Being an e-nerd definitely fulfils this.

• What does the future hold in this career?

You never know! Technological advances being what it is, and new uses being found for technology every day, it just stays exciting, always! Nerds on Site is working to make itself a more enjoyable and effective partner of choice for traditional and emerging technology. We're in constant and passionate pursuit of more pleasurable, productive and profitable ways to fully leverage technology.
We will become the PowerBrand of choice...  and have fun doing it!

Quick fire questions

Working hours:

Exactly what you make of it, what you put in is what you get out.

Possible places of employment:

Anywhere people need help leveraging and using their technological tools.

Average Salary:

R0 – R∞, There’s no minimum guaranteed income, but also no limit! Again, what you put in is what you get out.

Qualifications:

Technically AND socially inclined personalities, training and experience in various IT and ICT fields are recommended but our in-house University of Nerdology provides training in all fields.

Anything else you would like to add, just fire away!

Anyone interested in becoming a Nerd can go to www.iwanttobeanerd.com and follow the steps. We are always looking for anyone with entrepreneurial skills, technically inclined and with good social skills to become a part of our team!. Thx Liezl!

Once again, thanks for taking the time!

No thank you!

Justen van Eck in Gauteng, SA

February 11, 2010

We had a new host today and a very interesting time.

Dennis Houseknecht

• Wonder where all that spam comes from? Here are the top 10 botnets spewing spam across the globe

• Adobe finally addresses some serious issues with flash. If you have a Power PC-bases Mac, though, your flash-viewing days are numbered

• Dell is introducing a respectable, but ittt-bitty PC. This is a little smaller than the “nettops”, but has an integrated psu and can run on a dual-core Pentium cpu (rather than an Atom processor).

• Web security is important in the cloud, too

• Even Ubuntu is not totally immune to Malware

• The sophistication of bank fraud Malware is frightening, but the entry points are old-school techniques, such as sql injection

Patrick Browne

• - Government pushes forward with internet filtering

• - Government 2.0 taskforce announces winners of MashupAustralia

• - Brains overloaded daily with more info than a laptop can handle

• - Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's personal picture gaffe

Arthur Wiebe

• - "Moxie Marlinspike, a security researcher well known for his SSL/TLS attacks, today launched a cloud-based WPA cracking service, where for $34 you can test the security of your WPA password. The WPA Cracker Web site states: 'WPA-PSK networks are vulnerable to dictionary attacks, but running a respectable-sized dictionary over a WPA network handshake can take days or weeks. WPA Cracker gives you access to a 400CPU cluster that will run your network capture against a 135 million word dictionary created specifically for WPA passwords. While this job would take over 5 days on a contemporary dual-core PC, on our cluster it takes an average of 20 minutes.'"

• - Google Chrome for the holidays: Mac, Linux and extensions in beta

This NerdCast was a very thoughtful and fun podcast for all of us that took part of it.

Host

• Arthur Wiebe

Guests

• Nathan Wiebe
• Dennis Houseknecht
• Andy Larin

Good News:

• Andy Larin - working with a new nerd
• Nathan Wiebe - to busy doing Athurs work
• Dennis Houseknecht - working on the data centre

News and Discussion:

• Dennis Houseknecht

• Food for thought - when workers leave, they often take more than a few pens with them

• Meta data in PDF files can leak data via Google searches

• Some excellent tips on how to have your identity stolen

• 48 cores on one die - a cloud on a chip

• hackers are exploiting swine flu concerns

• Bruce Schneier make an important point about VSS and secure erasure of documents

• Blackberry users should patch to avoid .pdf exploit

• Who'da thunk? Using balloons to get internet access to the rural masses??

• Andy Larin

• Cisco unveils small biz spy phone

• Restaurants Sue Vendor for Unsecured Card Processor

• Fring Brings Free Video Calling To The iPhone, Nokia Smartphones

Another great day for Nerds worldwide. We had some interesting articles to talk about and some great guys to talk about them.

Joining us today was our host David Redekop, Producers Arthur and Nathan Wiebe, Rob Wolf and Patrick Browne.

Host

• David Redekop

Guests

• Rob Wolf
• Nathan Wiebe
• Arthur Wiebe
• Patrick Browne

Good News:

• David Redekop - Had a fantastic week ,planning a trip to South Africa in January.
• Patrick Browne - Great week on the Dale Carnegie Course
• Arthur Wiebe - learning freenas native zfs
• Nathan Wiebe - in a few weeks will have their nerdmobile
• Rob Wolf - Spending time with customers

News and Discussion:

• This may be a reason to make sure everyone using IE is on version 8 which does not seem to be affected by this newest zero-day vulnerability. Microsoft is scrambling to fix it before a reliable exploit is published. Exploits have been released, but they tend to be quite unreliable.
• Here is a possible glimpse into the future of green storage It uses standard hard drives and spins down drives when not in use. This is not new – but there is the problem of the time it takes to spin the drive back up and the resulting delay I access. This system used an SSD on the front end to compensate with some sort o caching scheme. This is still experimental, but it shows that there are greener alternatives to the present technologies.
• I thought this was an interesting legal issue.What is the level of responsibility of media providers like Google? Can they be held liable for inappropriate content? What are the limits? What if someone uploaded video of a horrific crime? Animal abuse? Murder? Services like youtube present the possibility that this will happen. Who regulates this stuff?
• A story from Oz that had nothing to do with tech, but struck me as interesting Thought it might bring out some comments form our Aussie Nerds. I had no idea there even were camels in Austrailia!!
• Online shoppers trust word of mouth
• Christmas sale surge cripples eBay
• Smiling in a bikini on Facebook costs Canadian woman her insurance
• Harvey Norman on the attack as Microsoft forces Aussies to pay more for Windows 7
• Apple Fans Flood Microsoft Window Display With “Get A Mac” Tweets
• Exercise to beat stress
• Lifehacker 61 Free Apps

Nerdcast was awesome this week. We had great guests including Daryl Siemen, Dennis Houseknecht, Patrick Browne, Arthur Wiebe, Nathan Wiebe and David Redecop.

We had some great things to talk about like Firefox Security Addons, FamilyFriendlyNet, and the Great Canadian Mentoring Challenge.....

Host

• David Redekop

Guests

• Dennis Houseknecht
• Nathan Wiebe
• Arthur Wiebe
• Patrick Browne
• Daryl Siemens

Good News:

• David Redekop - participate in Mentor Challenge
• Dennis Houseknecht - Great to work with Level Platforms
• Nathan Wiebe - are 3 months to be part of nerd on site
• Arthur Wiebe - setup a client on Open DNS and clean viruses
• Patrick Browne - Happy to be part of the Dale Carnegie Course
• Daryl Siemens - New nerd in Winnipeg

News and Discussion:

• is a handy tool for checking web browsers for known vulnerabilities

• One year after the plug was pulled at McColo in California, it seems that this may be an effective way of fighting back against botnets and spammers

• Firefox is still my preferred browser, but it had the highest percentage of vulnerabilities in a recent study.

• Here is some godd information about preventing identity theft. This document also contains links to more useful information.

• Read Kindle Books on Your Computer, Get the best reading experience available on your PC. No Kindle required

This Nerdcast was a little quieter than usual but Arthur Wiebe and Dennis Houseknecht did a great job on bringing across some great articles.

We talked about the Kindle coming to Canada and to the PC, the Droid Phone, Security fixes and more...

Host

• Arthur Wiebe

Guests

• Dennis Houseknecht

Good News:

• Dennis Houseknecht - one new client thanks to his nerdmobile.
• Arthur Wiebe - was in mexico for a mission trip.

News and Discussion:

• Handy tool for checking web browsers for known vulnerabilities

• One year after the plug was pulled at McColo in California, it seems that this may be an effective way of fighting back against botnets and spammers

• Firefox is still my preferred browser, but it had the highest percentage of vulnerabilities in a recent study.

• Here is some godd information about preventing identity theft. This document also contains links to more useful information.

We had a great Nerdcast this week with David as our host. Arthur was gone this week but we still had Dennis, Patrick, and Nathan and some great articles to talk about.

We talked about new SSL security breaks, Windows 7 UAC, New Google Maps Navigation....and more!!

Host

• David Redekop

Guests

• Dennis Houseknecht
• Nathan Wiebe
• Patrick Browne

Good News:

• David Redekop - spoke on a college about Business.
• Dennis Houseknecht - working on the data centre.
• Nathan Wiebe - doing Arthur's fun job
• Patrick Browne - He was meeting with Charlie (NOS CEO) and another Australia nerds

News and Discussion

• Book Review– VirginBlue Inflight Magazine, online. Great stories on Pg 38 – Branson’s Business School, Pg 78 – How to Survive you first 100 days in Business, Pg 80-81 various short  stories, Pg 92 – Ben & Gerry’s Ice-cream
• Nerds On Site in the Media - A “Feed The Beetle Feed the People” made the local newspaper.
• Interesting Links - iPhone app eliminates fear of flying
• Open Source - Mandriva 2010 - Smart (Semantic) Desktop
• Social / Safety Technology - Hi Tech Solutions to Driver Distraction
• Google - Google Maps GPS Turn by Turn for Free!