Stick shifts and safety belts

One of my favorite Cake songs is "Stick shifts and Safety Belts." I love cars and songs about cars from one of my favorite bands, well it's a recipe for a hit in my book. Today during church (I am a Christian of the LDS faith, or Mormon as most people know us), I was thinking about how the Spirit of God works with us much as a car that is tuned up. When the Spirit is communicating with us, we are humming a long and in tune with God. But, just as an old carburated car, after time, our timing gets a little off. I have taken the distributor cap in my hand on a running car (my old 1975 Chevy Nova - which was my first car) and rotated it a little clockwise listening to the sound of the engine. There is a sweet spot where it would run really well. Turn it too far one way, and it would start to miss, or run rough. Turn it too far the other way, it would do the same thing. This is how you adjust the timing on a car. You loosen the distributor and rotate it slightly. The right way to do it is not by ear, though that is how most people did it, but with a timing gun. Now it's been a long time since I've done this, but from memory, you have a notch on the main pulley on the crank shaft and one on block. You mark it so it's easy to see. Then with the timing gun pointed at it, it freezes the image like a strobe light would freeze me dancing to Depeche Mode back at the Ritz dance club in Salt Lake in 1986. (Wow! That was random!) And then you adjust clockwise or counterclockwise the distributor to get the timing correct. Again, you'll hear it as well. The timing gun is connected to the battery and has a clamp that goes around spark plug #1. As you know, I didn't continue my career as a mechanic, so my knowledge is really basic, but you get the idea. So over time, cars need to adjust the timing. New cars do this through on board computers. We, like these great cars, need to be fine tuned very often or our timing gets off and we find it hard to be in tune with the Spirit of the Lord.

What we do to get in tune withe the Spirit is a little different than what we do to get the car in tune. We need daily personal prayer with our Heavenly Father. We need to feast upon the words of Christ by reading in the scriptures. (by scriptures I believe in both the Bible and Book of Mormon.) We need to repent of our sins and follow Christ. This is a constant process because on a daily basis the world draws our thoughts and actions away from the Lord. We get our minds filled with junk, some good, but just not important, and some things that are just bad. If we don't tune ourselves often, we lose the Spirit, and God finds it hard to communicate with us. When doing a tune up on my own car back at Hillcrest High School, in auto shop, I took out the six spark plugs in my 1975 Nova, (straight six) and saw a lot of carbon build up on each plug. My teacher showed me how to clean and gap each spark plug. The carbon build up was just what happened while driving the car. The car would not run properly with all the build up because the spark plug could not spark properly - the whole idea behind the internal combustion engine. Again, things change. 1. Nobody wastes time cleaning and gapping spark plugs now days. You just buy new ones. 2. If you are like me, you just have the dealer or your trusted mechanic do it, because the cars are complicated computer driven machines now and you don't want to mess anything up.

Well, this has been a more spiritual post, but as this blog is not endorsed by my company, this is purely Jason Bringhurst speaking here. And after all, my religion is part of who I am and does make up some of the basic philosophies of our company culture. We strive to be an honest good company, which in turn makes both our suppliers and customers want to do business with us. They like doing business with us because we are fair, understanding and honest. There ain't nothing wrong with that. It's just good business practice. In the words of Joseph Smith, "We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul—We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things."

Until next time -
Jason Bringhurst
The Cable Guy
http://www.professionalcable.com/

Fiber Optics - The coming of light speed

Fiber optic cables have been around for a long time now. However, we recently have seen a big increase in sales.

Fiber cables use glass or fibers designed to carry light down the cable rather than copper used in traditional cables, that carry electrical pulses (0 1 0 1 0 0 1, binary codes sent in electrical signals). Information travels at the speed of light, literally, on fiber optic wires. Fiber optic wire is better suited for long distance data transmission because the speed is greater and the signal loss is a lot less than copper wire. Copper wire's enemy is EMI or electromagnetic interference. When you are sending light down fibers, you don't have any issues with EMI. The light is actually sent down the core or middle of the wire for optimal transmission. MMF is multi-mode fiber optics where SMF is single-mode fiber optics. You'll see multi-mode used in shorter distance fiber patch cords. Single mode is often used on longer length cables, but can be used in short lengths also.

Our fiber optic cables at Professional Cable are manufactured with Corning wire. They are known in the industry as having the best fiber optic wire. Through our experience, we've found the Corning fiber wire to be the most reliable.

Here are some facts about Corning Fiber Optic Wire:

1. Corning invented the first low-loss optical fiber
2. Corning invented vapor deposition process for fiber manufacturing
3. 20 new fibers and 20+ fiber enhancements in less than 20 years
4. More fiber deployed than any other fiber manufacturer
5. World-class research and development for telecommunications
6. World's first optical fiber test facility
7. More than 125 U.S. optical fiber patents in the last 3 years
8. ISO 9000:2000 and TL 9000 certified

These are just a few of the reason's that Professional Cable has partnered with Corning as our fiber optic wire supplier.

So why the huge increase over the past few years in fiber optic cables? Well, one reason is that copper prices keep skyrocketing. it is becoming more expensive to manufacture copper cables, while price is decreasing in manufacturing fiber optic cables because they are becoming more common. The old supply and demand of Economics 101 is taking effect here, and more and more OEM engineers and manufacturers are looking at Fiber Optics as a viable replacement for the old copper-based systems.

When fiber optic cables first started showing up in the market place, they were extremely expensive, and because they required special tools and equipment to manufacture, most cable companies were not equipped and trained to make these cables. Now as they are becoming more mainstream, and components and tools are more readily available in the marketplace, smaller custom-cable houses can do in-house production of multi-mode and single-mode fiber optic patch cords. Professional Cable has domestic manufacturing of Fiber Optic cables, and we have the ability to manufacture most variations of Fiber cables.

Until next time -

The Cable Guy

Orem, Utah

http://www.professionalcable.com/

Guitar Hero III

So I'm a victim of Guitar Hero III. My kids have been begging us to get it after playing it at their cousin's house (why must their cousin's always introduce them to the latest expensive gadgets? Why can't they introduce them to collecting rocks, or finding potato bugs, or even better, raking up leaves, or sweeping the sidewalk?) But if the truth be told, I've been jonesing for Guitar Hero III myself. I must say that I dig it. I've already passed the "easy" level, and I had a ton of fun doing it. This is much more than a video game. I'm really not into video games a lot. We have a Wii (thanks again to my kids discovering the Wii at their cousin's place), and I enjoy the sports games because you get to do actions with the game e.g. boxing you punch in the air and the player on the TV gets knocked out. How cool is that? So we get the Guitar Hero III for the kids ;-) and I stay up late every night acting like a rock-star. There is something very cool about jamming to one of your favorite songs, and it seemingly sounding awesome because you are hitting the right notes (green, red, yellow, blue, and orange) Yeah, I do it standing up and hit the whammy bar, shredding like a rock-n-roll mega-star. It's the coolest thing a 37 year old married guy with four children can do on a week night.

In work news, this has been an interesting week. We've been adding customers and new products every week. We've recently added a lot of new wall plates. We have a wall plate for DVI, VGA, HDMI, RCA, CAT6 and CAT5e Keystone Jacks. We've been custom fabricating some networking / AV wall-plates for one of our clients that is doing some projector installations. This particular face plate has one VGA Female pass-through connector (basically a gender changer) and an RCA pass through connector (also a female gender changer) and we mount both to the wall plate. So the customer gets the wallplate pre-loaded with the connectors and they are ready to install. Yeah, we're a pretty great company.

Until next time -
The Cable Guy
Orem, Utah
www.professionalcable.com

Collective Soul - Thanks Novell!

So I went to the Engery Solutions Arena (could we find a longer name?) in Salt Lake City, UT last night (I still think that I went to the Delta Center, but nobody would agree with me) I saw Collective Soul live in concert. Wow! Do they know how to put on a show! It was a private show. Novell, a software mega-company in Provo, Utah hired them for Brainshare - their annual show where they bring in their partners to talk about code and the evils of Microsoft. (I know very little about software, so you'll have to excuse me. I'm sure they do more than that... right?). It's the type of show that really smart people enjoy. They are probably all blogging about how cool Linux is and how tricked out their geek sleds are. Me, I'm still thinking about Collective Soul and how deep down, I really would like to be on stage jamming on an electric guitar with them while the crowd cheers, "Yeah, Jason! Yeah!!!!" But alas, it was not I on the stage. (Please excuse the previous ADD moment... the official blog does not endorse ADD moments that come on throughout the blog for no apparent reason.)

Like I was saying, these guys really rocked. I was a little concerned that they would come in, and just sing a few token songs, collect their check, and check out. But that was not the case. They rocked and rocked much to the delight of this 37 year old who was fondly remembering teenage days of going to see Oingo Boingo and Depeche Mode in concert. I'm not quite as hip now. Nobody pulled out a lighter. There were just a lot of cell phones busily snapping photos. Boy things have changed. A girl in front of me was texting thousands of friends with one hand giving them an update on how cool the concert was... of course I doubt she saw much of it. And how do they text so fast with one hand? Man, I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous... But I digress.

So I was sitting watching Collective Soul perform, and I thought how cool it would be some day to have Professional Cable entertaining thousands of customers by bringing in some hip band to play. I then wondered if it would still be fun if my company were that big. Right now, I love my company. I know exactly what is going on with everything. I know what big accounts we are trying to land. I know what customers are behind on payments. I know the name of our UPS driver. It's a good size company. Not too big. Not to little. Big enough to take care of many very large accounts - many international. Yet small enough to service the local market. In my opinion it's the ideal size.

I enjoy sales. Because of the size of my company, I still get out in the field and see customers. I am not in a board room with shareholders. I'm out getting a feel for the market, talking to customers, and working with reps. I get a lot of ideas from customers. I take these ideas back back to the office, and then I implement the good ones.

So while Collective Soul was really unforgettable. I don't see Professional Cable bringing in a famous rock band any time soon. (All of our customers will be sad to read this) The good news is we will still have that local feel and great service that our customers expect from us. (I know that there is at least one customer out there saying "I'd give up a little of that great service for tickets to Collective Soul." To you I say... "Sorry!"... "Maybe we can get together and play Guitar Hero III instead." :)

Until next time -
Jason Bringhurst - The Cable Guy

The Local Advantage

Almost every week I hear from one of my customers that it is such a huge benefit to have my warehouse located locally where they can send someone by to pick up some urgent cables. We have offered this will call service to all local accounts, and every day we get resellers, installers, and even distributors coming by to pick up product that is needed immediately. Professional Cable carries a large inventory of the most common items that they need - bulk CAT6 wire, HDMI cables, SVGA cables, CAT5e cables, etc. In addition to these common items, we carry the harder to find things, like PCMCIA to Express card adapters, gender changers, DVI to HDMI converters, etc. We offer good prices, but I don't think any service we provide can compare to the benefit of being local.

I used to work for System Connection in Provo. At the time they were one of the largest cable manufactures in the USA. Even larger than Belkin for some time. Rick McCloskey the president had a philosophy that I still think is great. He wanted to become the first world-wide local cable company. Unfortunately this never came to pass. But his idea was genius. I can't compete with a company in Ohio, say Cables To Go, when it comes to selling to resellers in Ohio. I'm not there. My pricing might be better (and it is). My products might be equally good or better (which they are) and my service might be superior (which it is). However, when that value-added reseller needs 20 patch cables today for an installation and they did not bring in the cables in advance, who do you think will get the order? That's right. The local cable company.

I'm fortunate to live in a hot-bed of technology companies. Novell is 10 minutes to the south. Iomega is 45 minutes to the north. Omniture, Altirus, and countless other smaller technology companies are all close by. And who do you think they are going to turn to every time they need a cable? That's right. Good old Professional Cable. They know that whatever it is they need, we'll have it. We are the Wal-Mart of cables & adapters. You know when you need a light bulb, some laundry detergent, some cereal, and a pair of socks, that you can go to Wal-Mart and get it all in one stop.

For our customers in Utah, we are only a day away via UPS. An account in St. George, Logan, or Sandy knows that if they order a USB hub today, it will be in their store tomorrow. The further away from the target area, the harder it is to compete.

Now we have many many customers on the east coast. Luckily for us, these customers find that the pricing, quality, and service are worth the wait. But I'm sure that for the urgent needs, I probably lose out to some small local company. I can't compete with same day delivery or will call. That is what Rick McCloskey knew. He needed to take his company to the large cities where lots of resellers and VAR partners would be located. Put stock there in satellite warehouse, and sales reps in the field. It's a good idea. I know that Belkin has opened other warehouses in other cities. It's hard to compete with Chicago-based Tripp Lite if you are located in Compton, CA. So Belkin took the company to the customers.

I've mentioned a lot of other cable companies. I know my competition well. We are adding new customers every day because we are a little different than the competition. Our products are priced well for the savvy VARs who know that you pay way too much for the big names. Our customers know that we offer a life-time warranty on our cables and that our quality is equal or superior to our competitors' products. But what I hear more than anything is that our service cannot be matched. We're smaller than most of these mega-companies, and our customers really appreciate the support that we give them and they don't sacrifice anything.

If you'd like to add a little more margin to your invoices and deal directly with experts in the cable industry who care about your business, please call Professional Cable 801-928-8844. We'll pick up the phone and help you like no other cable company in the world. Professional Cable.

Copper is king

Yesterday I was on a sales call and the would-be customer was looking over the price list that I had given to him. He then commented on how extremely over-priced the bulk CAT5e wire was. I was surprised because I knew that we were practicaly giving the stuff away. As it turns out, he was still thinking of the prices of bulk wire 5 years ago. I had to think for a minute. Yeah, compared to the prices of 5 years ago, this was high!

As you might know, copper prices have sky rocketted over the past few years - as have other precious metals. Now bulk wire consists of mainly copper and PVC (plastic). Unfortuneately plastics and fuels have also gone up. What's more is fuel prices have gone through the roof, and 1,000 feet of wire is very heavy - adding more cost to the box of wire as it costs a fortune to tranport. Lastly as if all of these things weren't enough, the wire is made where? China. And what has happened to the US dollar? It's value has gone down - thus making goods purchased in China more expensive. So, YES! The wire is a lot more expensive than it was 5 years ago. And it doesn't show any signs of getting better. In fact right now, those who have stock have huge advantages over those who are getting a fresh supply in, because the stock in the warehouse was probably purchased at last year's costs. That new fresh stock was bought with all the new higher costs that I've just outlined. The point of this ranting is that your bulk wire costs are just going to keep going up for now.

If you are looking for a good price on bulk CAT6 wire, either plenum or PVC, you might want to contact Professional Cable in Orem, Utah. They have a large inventory of wire and a lot of it was purchased at last year's costs, so the full impact of the next round of price increases has not been felt. Professional Cable stocks solid core and stranded core wire as well as ready-made fully-molded patch cords in Red, Blue, Yellow, Grey... or is it Gray? Green, Pink, Purple, White, and Orange. See www.professionalcable.com

Now as you probably know, I am the president of Professional Cable, and therefore I am a little biased. But, I know the market, and I know that all of us cable manufacturers are feeling the pressures of the falling dollar, the high fuel costs (UPS keeps adding fuel surcharges that quietly erode already slim margins), and the ever-rising raw copper costs. Companies like us don't have the margins to shoulder the increases, so distributors, OEMs, and resellers feel the pain along with us. Eventually it makes its way down to the consumer and like every thing else that costs more money, the cables on the shelf cost more. The overall effect on the economy? Things are costing us more and more.

Well, that's the story on copper, and the problem that the factories are facing in China is that there just isn't enough supply. Who knew that back in my Econ class at BYU that I would actually have a painful realization one day of what that guy Adam Smith was talking about. Supply and demand. Hmmm. Seems like he was on to something. I think that he was so popular because he had an invisible hand or something.

To get a current bid on bulk wire, contact Professional Cable http://www.professionalcable.com/wire/bulkwire.html Go on! "Wire" you waiting? Find out if they can save you some money!

Until next time -

The Cable Guy

HDMI Splitters vs. Switches

I hear a lot of questions about HDMI splitters and switches now days. Now that you have your fancy HD TV and DVD player, you actually want to use it. However a lot of these great big massive TVs that have incredible screens, only have one itty bitty HDMI connection on the back. Genius! So, there has arisen a need for HDMI switches, which allow you to connect multiple devices to that lovely TV.

For example. If I have a cool gaming system, such as an X-Box or Wii, and I want it connected to my ginormous TV to play Guitar Hero III, I have to unplug my HD DVD player and plug in the HDMI cable from the game station.... How cool is that? Not very. So companies like WhataCable! in Orem, Utah sell HDMI switches, which increase the number of ports from one to four or five! This allows multiple cool devices to be connected to that one mega-TV. They even come with a remote control to easily switch between your favorite season of "The Office" to Wii Sports without you getting up out of your comfy laz-y-boy chair.... (if this all seems too real, well what can I say? I've been there). Here is the link to the 4-Port HDMI switch that will make your life better. http://www.whatacable.com/hdmi4-wayautoswitch.aspx For about $69 you will save the wear and tear on your big investments and on the HDMI cables.

Now to the splitters. This is also a hot little item, but for different reasons. In this case, you really dig your new HDMI device.... let's say it's a DVD player. And you are going to a trade show and thought that it would be fun to run a DVD at your booth. But, you only want to run one DVD player, and have that same image broadcast out to several TVs (monitors) at the same time. So, you need a???? Splitter! Yes. Very good. Now for a simple set up with two TVs (displays) and cords that are not going more than 6 feet each, there is an economical solution from WhataCable!. Their item # HDMI-SPLIT takes the device output (DVD player) and splits the signal into two HDMI signals. You simply then connect two HDMI cables to the splitter, run them to your TVs and voila! you have simultaneous broadcast of the DVD on both TVs. BUT... If you are running longer length cables, or if you need it split out to more than just two TVs, you will need a POWERED HDMI SPLITTER. And Yes, WhataCable! will "hook you up" with them too. (sorry, cable guys just love to say "hook you up".) I will provide links to each:

2-way HDMI Splitter Cable
http://www.whatacable.com/hdmisplitter.aspx
This will set you back about $15

2-way powered HDMI Splitter
http://www.whatacable.com/hdmi_splitter_box_1_in_2_out_with_power.aspx
This will set you back about $129

4-way powered HDMI Splitter http://www.whatacable.com/hdmi_splitter_box_1_in_4_out_with_power.aspx
This will set you back about $139

8-way powered HDMI Splitter http://www.whatacable.com/hdmi_splitter_box_1_in_8_out_with_power-1.aspx
This will set you back about $250

Until next time,

The Cable Guy

The HDMI Craze

So life in the cable world is good. There are tons of people looking for HDMI cables online because of the ridiculous cost at the retail stores. You can pay a hundred and change for a 10 feet HDMI cable and the cashier gladly takes your money. I guess that is why stores like www.whatacable.com are flourishing. They sell directly to consumers at reasonable price, usually ship the same day as the order is placed, and accept all the major credit cards. (Visa, AMEX, MasterCard)

WhataCable! based in Orem, Utah, just south of Salt Lake City and North of Provo City, has extra long HDMI cables as well, which are hard to find at retail stores. If you're setting up a sweet home theater, you might not get by with just a 6 feet or 10 feet cable. You might need a 25, 50, or even 100 feet HDMI cable.

I think that with CompUSA going out of business, consumers are letting the retailers know that we aren't going to keep lining up to pay crazy prices with crappy service. Hat's off to companies like www.whatacable.com who provide great service, reliable products, and fair prices.

That's my opinion.

The Cable Guy