The “Business Scotland” programme on BBC Radio Scotland on a Sunday morning is well worth a listen – it’s an interesting mixture of news about Scottish businesses and business in Scotland. The only snag is it’s broadcast on a Sunday morning and that’s my day off (hah hah) so it’s yet another radio programme I listen to by podcast after the event; they’re available for 30 days after broadcast.

There was a very revealing interview, a few months ago so no longer available for download, with Indian entrepreneur Vijay Mallya when he visited Scotland to talk about his plans for the Whyte & Mackay whisky brand which he owns. He tried to make the case for the high import tariffs which India imposes on our national drink, but I’m afraid his protectionist argument fell apart when he let on that India allows a drink distilled from molasses to be called “whisky” and he wants to be allowed to sell it here under the same name.

We shouldn’t be too hard on the man, I suppose, because he does have our own Paul di Resta from West Lothian driving for his Force India Formula 1 team – whose major sponsor this year is Whyte & Mackay. It must be nice to have one part of your business empire paying for the fun part!

Anyhow, this week’s Business Scotland programme covered cloud computing, a subject all over the business press these days and dear to our heart here at Waverley Lane. Douglas Fraser has recorded three interviews looking at cloud-based services from different points of view; take a listen here before the 3rd of July and see what you think.

 

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…one I hadn’t come across before (and we do like our acronyms in this office).

WFH = Working From Home.

See this article on Silicon.com about how their office staff managed for a day – sounds like a good summing-up of the perils and pitfalls of trying to WFH.

Note that some of the comments about “needing to set up my computer” can obviously be sorted out first, if you give us a little bit of notice. Attention-seeking cats we can’t help with, though.

 

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Just a quick note to advise that our office will be closed on Good Friday (22 April) and Easter Monday (25 April). We will be monitoring emails and phone calls in case of an emergency, but we will not be delivering our guaranteed one-hour callback.

On the other hand, we will NOT be closed on Royal Wedding Day, Friday 29 April. A straw poll of our clients revealed that most were not closing, so we will be here!

We won’t have any further “office closed” days until Christmas and New Year, and we will advise those much closer to the time.

The weather forecast looks good, so have a great weekend!

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Our new website – you’re looking at it…

Welcome to our new-look website – we’re quietly chuffed that it’s turned out so well (in our own opinion, of course).

We wanted to break away from the usual technology company type of website – lots of graphics, a bit loud and shouty, and with incomprehensible sections like “solutions”. (A “solution” is a load of dust dissolved in water, is it not?).

Our approach to our work is friendly, low-key, to-the-point and effective, and we hope the “look and feel” of this new website will put that across to our clients and (of course) to prospective clients.

There’s still a bit of work to do – for all that it’s plain and simple, the website does need some images to lift the design a little and we’ve not completed the section on the services and products we offer – but we’ll get there.

Our new web platform is WordPress which makes it ridiculously easy for us to add and update pages, posts, and articles so any time a random thought strikes us it’s liable to be slapped up here for all to see.

Let us know what you think – your comments are very welcome!

 

We continue to see a number of desktop and laptop computers becoming infected with one type of bogus software. This can become deeply embedded in the computer and can cause serious problems including loss of your data.

The general name for this type of malware infection is “Fake AV” as it starts with an attempt to bluff you into correcting a non-existent problem with your anti-virus software, and then installing malware which will damage the computer and may cause data loss.

This post, therefore, has background information together with notes on how to avoid the problem or reduce the impact. We’ve alerted the IT Management co-ordinator at each of our clients by email, and the full information is here.

 

Key Point: Never click any warning or pop-up for a virus alert, even to try to close it.

If you have a Service Agreement with Waverley Lane call us immediately (0131-476-0000) if you see any warnings or suspicious activity on your computer. Do not try to clean or remove it or you are likely to cause further infection. We can quickly evaluate the severity, remove the malware, and get you working again.

Remember that as a Waverley Lane client you have up-to-date commercial-grade anti-virus software installed and running on your computer, and any pop-up which says you have an anti-virus problem is a false warning. If you are ever unsure about this please contact your IT Support co-ordinator for advice.

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