Responsibility

“Responsibility” was the operative word at the Association for Procurement Technical Assistance Centers (APTAC) Spring Membership and Training Conference. The 300 PTAC counselors, staff and managers gathered to attend the conference attended numerous presentations emphasizing responsibility– responsibility to their clients, to the federal procurement process, and to the public’s dollar. Although a variety of topicsRead… Read more »

Small Business Impossible

Cities, counties, and states should adopt a Restaurant Impossible model to transform their small businesses. Restaurant Impossible is a popular show on the Food Network where Chef Robert Irvine renovates failing restaurants in two days on a budget of $10,000. These restaurants are deep into debt, have lost most of their customers, and are oftenRead… Read more »

TSP Talk – Jobs and Earnings

The stock market became tentative before Friday’s jobs report, and with good reason. For the TSP, the C-fund lost 0.67% last week, the S-fund lost 1.06%, the I-fund dropped 2.79%, while the F-fund (bonds) gained 0.09% and the G-fund was up 0.02%. The S&P 500 has been testing and so far holding the 20-day EMA,Read… Read more »

Perils of The Open Mike – Bill Connor’s April 5 Column From Fortune.com

Just as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow in the east, politicians and business types will continue to forget the presence of a live microphone at precisely the wrong times. Consider President Obama talking sotto voce with Dmitry Medvedev after a joint appearance a couple of weeks ago, confiding to the Russian President thatRead… Read more »

FOIA, I hardly know ya! (Yearly Report Card on Federal Government’s efforts to track and manage Freedom of Information Act requests)

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are a critical element of business development and capture. This is how you learn about a pursuit’s history and your competition. The problem is – FOIA requests are tricky: They take forever to obtain – so someone needs to carefully track them and follow up relentlessly to getRead… Read more »

CTO Security Report

600,000+ Mac Computers Infected While this kind of activity wouldn’t rouse much attention from those esconced in WinTel (Windows and Intel) architechures, it is much less common for Mac users to be impacted by infections on this scale so quickly. The infection, called Flashback, is installed via a Java vulnerability (CVE 2012-0507) which was patchedRead… Read more »