It's that time of year again: summer's cooling down, school's starting, and I've set my schedule of ITEC conference appearances for the fall. If you read this column and want to come say hello, I'd love to meet you.

I've had the pleasure of speaking at many of the ITEC conferences starting in the fall of 2006, so I'll get to see some old friends on this fall swing. If you don't know about ITEC, they're regional IT conferences bringing speakers and exhibitors to where you are, rather than making you go to some expensive national convention to meet some of the same people.

My events this fall are in Minneapolis (Sept. 10 & 11), Los Angeles (Sept. 24 & 25), St. Louis (Oct. 1 & 2), Kansas City (Oct. 15 & 16), Chicago (Oct. 22 &23), Washington D.C. (Nov. 5 & 6), Atlanta (Nov. 12 & 13), and Portland (Dec. 10 & 11). If you're in or near one of those locations, please come say hello.

Once again, I get to start the show off with my keynote speech, “Technology Is Broken: How to Fix IT For Your Business.” Same title as last time, but all new material. Well, some of the jokes may be old, but all the technical details are fresh.
The four areas of broken technology I focus on are laptop safety, data safety, network safety, and e-mail.

Laptop (and general mobility) safety gets plenty of play this time around. Besides talking about laptop safety questions during the keynote speeches, I'll be doing my Laptop Safety Seminar as sessions on Thursdays. Copies of the workbook will be available for purchase at the sessions, and inside will be information on securing your physical laptop and your data, as well as some discounts from laptop product vendors. And “laptop” is just a shorthand way of discussing all types of mobile devices, services, and technologies. In fact, if Apple gives me a free iPhone, I promise to hold it up at least once during the speech (hint, hint).

I will expand on my Pirate Backup System, because I've expanded it from ARR (Automatic, Redundant, Restorable) to AARRGH (Automatic, Archive, Redundant, Restorable, Generations, Happiness). I've discovered if you do the first five steps properly, step six really is happiness when you recover the files you or someone else thought were gone for good.

Network safety really means security, because Federal law now mandates every technology speech must scare the audience with some horrific security breach details. Absolutely true, look it up. OK, maybe not, but security remains maybe the hottest topic of all, so I'll talk about some improvements in that area.