Thanks to all of our loyal customers giving us their business and support, we at Hardlines have outgrown our current office space. At the end of March we will be moving into a larger office, which will allow us to work more efficiently and better manage and maintain our servers. The new office is only half a mile or so away from our previous space, so we will still maintain a convenient downtown locale.Be sure to note our new address for any correspondence you may have with us. The move will be in effect April 1st, 2007.
HARDLINES COMPANY
510 Carolina Street
Bellingham, WA 98225
Thank you for all your continued business and support!

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Greetings from Geneva. We’re over here doing the first webcast of the Magic The Gathering ProTour 2007 Season - for Wizards of the Coast. We’ll be webcasting five events this season, finishing up with Worlds in New York this December.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/events/protour

Yesterday we set up a large LAN for the Wizards staff, with wireless access points as well as an extensive cabled network. Event IT has turned out to be one of the more interesting aspects of working with Wizards. One has to work fast and be creative to work around the various restrictions placed on us by the venue and the show floor layout. Some venues are single large halls with pipe and drape “rooms” for staff - others, like this one, have rooms on multiple floors, so connecting everybody together is quite challenging.  The days are long, typically 12-14hrs, but the work is rewarding and interesting.
The main reason I’m here however, is for the webcast - on Sunday. It’ll begin at 2am Sunday morning (Pacific Standard Time) or 11am here in Geneva. It typically goes for 5-7hrs - so it may still be going when you get up Sunday morning. If you’d like to catch the finals - check it out then!

http://www.magicthegathering.com/webcast

- Aaron Booker

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We’ve had a number of clients come to us recently asking if they should respond to a letter they’ve gotten in the mail regarding the renewal of their domain(s). Be careful! There are quite a few companies out there, Liberty Names of America and Domain Registry of America being just a couple, who are attempting to run a scam. They often send out very legitimate-looking letters to the primary contact of the domain telling them that they’re domain name will expire soon, and giving them instructions on how to make a payment to renew it. However, the money rarely makes its way to a legitimate registrar, and often you get signed up for a recurring fee which does you no good.

If you are one of our clients, we will notify you when your domain is nearing its expiration, and we will renew it for you if you like. We will never have a third-party company notify you of impending expiration. If you’ve received something either via snail-mail or e-mail and you are unsure whether it is legit, Google it! If you Google “Liberty Names of America”, for instance, you will see right off the bat that it is a scam.

If you have received an e-mail or letter that you believe to have been a scam, please feel free to contact the Federal Trade Commission with the information, and help put a stop to it.

Domain Renewal Scams Jump

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We have been receiving quite a few phone calls regarding the volume of spam that is getting through to mailboxes. The cause of this seems to be the fact that the overall volume of spam being sent internet wide has been rising exponentially. At Hardlines, we are taking aggressive steps to relieve our customers of this inbox filling garbage. In Q1 2007, Hardlines will be launching a new spam filtration process that will significantly reduce the name of message that reach your mailbox. Keep your eyes on this blog for more news on our developments. In the meantime, please read the latest articles we have come across that discuss the recent increase in spam volume.

Spam Volume Jumps 35% In November

What’s with all this spam?

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Greetings from Paris. You may not realize this, but Hardlines does webcasting of live video across the internet! This work takes us all over the world for clients. This Sunday is the largest webcast of the year for one of our clients - Wizards of The Coast. They have a card game called “Magic, The Gathering” that has a huge international audience, and their Premeire Event is called simply, “Worlds.”

If you’d like to see what we’re doing with Webcasts and Podcasts for Wizards - please see http://www.magicthegathering.com/webcast

This event will begin at 9am GMT+1 (midnight, as Sunday begins, in Bellingham). It’s quite a long event, so if you’re not up this late normally, check it out when you get up on Sunday morning, if you’d like… If you have an event, concert, athletic contest, or business announcement you’d like to webcast, please contact us for a free assessment.

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Western Washington, and Bellingham was blanketed with many inches of snow, 14 inches in some places. Bellingham’s Mayor Tim Douglas asked that all non essential personnel stay home. With the beauty of Microsoft Small Business Server, your employees can easily stay home, watch the kids, and work. Hardlines received many excited emails from employees of businesses where Hardlines had installed SBS that hadn’t yet realized the power of Remote Web Workplace. All of Hardlines’ employees were also able to effectively work from home and avoid the icy roads. It’s the perfect tool for snow days.

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Microsoft has accepted Hardlines Company as one of the few Microsoft Certified Partners in Whatcom County. Microsoft explains this special designation best, so here is a snip of test from their website.

• Microsoft Certified Partners have demonstrated expertise. Each Microsoft Certified Partner must employ a minimum number of Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCPs) who have a demonstrated level of technical expertise and the proven ability to deliver solutions featuring Microsoft products. MCPs must pass certification exams developed by Microsoft.
• Microsoft Certified Partners have a broad-range of experience. Microsoft Certified Partners typically offer several areas of technical expertise including infrastructure, networking, office automation, e-commerce, collaboration, business intelligence, and other leading edge disciplines. Microsoft Certified Partner services include consulting, training, implementation, maintenance/support, and hosting services.
• Microsoft Certified Partners have direct support from Microsoft. Microsoft Certified Partners have access to 24 x 7 x 365 support for your project whenever they need additional support from Microsoft.
• Microsoft Certified Partners offer a real world perspective to your technology strategies. Microsoft Certified Partners have been in the business, on average, for more than 5 years. They bring experience to your projects gained through conducting similar projects over many years of service.

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Hardlines is proud to announce that we are 100% carbon neutral. This means that we offset our carbon dioxide emissions by contributing to renewable energy, energy efficiency, and reforestation projects. The typical American is responsible for 10 tons of CO₂ emissions annually through their direct energy use of home, cars and air travel, and about 23 tons of CO₂ including their purchases, activities and the other services we all share throughout the economy. These emissions are a caused the burning of fossil fuels: oil, coal and natural gas. Hardlines has calculated the carbon dioxide emissions we are responsible for, and has offset these emissions by contributing to CarbonFund, and organization dedicated to reducing America’s total carbon dioxide emissions.

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As a continuing effort to reduce out impact on the local and world environment, Hardlines Company has become one of the first companies in the state to use 100% Green Energy. The energy types used are Solar, Wind, Biomass, Tidal, Geothermal, and Hydrogen/Fuel Cell. As customer’s are aware, Hardlines is committed to evironmental preservation. Among the other ways we are reducing our impact on our plant are: Offering paperless billing, using energy efficient servers, purchasing credits to make our company carbon neutral, printing on recycled paper, recycling our office paper/plastic/aluminum/batteries/computers, offering bus passes and car pool incentives to employees and more.

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Kenny Brown from The Bellingham Business Journal sat down with Aaron Booker of Hardlines Company when he need to speak with an expert on Domain Names. Aaron Booker was cited many times in the article, and provided some expert knowledge for many consumers and businesses to help avoid domain name expiration, and other problems associated with registering domain names from fly-by-night web hosting companies, loss-leaders. The article can be read online at The Bellingham Business Journal.

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We are pleased to announce that Nik Dahl has become a Microsoft Certified Professional. Nik passed his exam on Friday June 23rd. Out of all of Hardlines staff, now fifty percent are Microsoft Certified. When doing business with Hardlines Company, you can be assured that our staff has all the knowledge necessary to provide the right solution for your business.

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We are pleased to announce that the server upgrade was a success. The server should be noticably snappier with the upgrades that were done. Enjoy!

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In order to provide the most reliable and highest performance for our customers, we will be upgrading our primary web server with additional memory. The upgrade will take place between 5pm and 6pm PST on Wednesday, June 7th.This upgrade is expected to cause an outage of all web and email services during the upgrade process for all customers hosted on this server. Email messages sent to addresses hosted on this server during this period will be met with an automatic response stating that messages could not be delivered, but all messages will be sent through properly once the server resumes normal operation. The total time for the upgrade to take place is not expected to exceed 15 minutes. Previous to this upgrade, the primary web server has had an outstanding uptime of over two years, demonstrating Hardlines commitment to providing the highest quality webhosting for our clients.

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The latest feature for our customers is our new site builder tool called SiteZen. This tools allows to you create your website using a simple What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get interface through your web browser. A demo of the software is available through SiteMagix, the creator of the tool [Demo]. For more information on how to set this tools up for use on your website, contact support@hardlines.com.

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Hardlines is pleased to announce our acceptance into the Microsoft Small Business Specialist program. We are well qualified to consult, and deploy a Microsoft small to medium business network including Microsoft Small Business Server 2003.

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