I’m having an awesome birthday weekend and am in a surprisingly good mood. Later this week I will be unveiling the new Vladville with the additions and changes I’ve been hinting at since WWPC. The new site will leave little room for the kind of myspace content you’ve been accustomed to so I figured I’d get all the inappropriate content out of the way before then. Grab a drink, sit down, this is going to be rude and lewd.

Is that your fiance, SUSANNE?

First of all, thank you all so much for sending in the e-greeting cards and well wishes. I truely appreciate them and am glad to know how many friends this blog has brought to my life. I know I sometimes do not explain every single detail of my life and the last post brought a lot of interesting questions.

Every year my (now) fiance Katie, who refuses to be pictured on this blog for some reason, takes me to the mall to show her what I want for my birthday. Despite knowing me for over 14 years she still doesn’t know that all my gifts come from newegg.com. Malls, in case you have not noticed, are packed with teenagers that dress like what I imagine discount hookers would look like. So I make the best out of it.

Katie: “Honey, what do you want?”

Vlad: Her. And Her. And Her.

Katie: “Be serious.”

Vlad: Ok, all three. At the same time.

And that explains the picture of Ashlee Simpson (thanks for the spelling Chris) on the previous post. But thats not really the funny part. That picture brought in a lot of email and questions. However, the funniest comment came from my buddy Chris who tried to guess the the angle under which Katie’s foot would be approaching my crotch.

Chris: Is that your fiance, SUSANNE?

Vlad: Yes, oh GOD YES!

So far neither Katie nor Susanne have killed me which probably means they are cooking something up together. 

Honey, can I put your picture on my blog?

The rotating backgrounds at the top of my blog are pretty interesting. My best pictures have Katie in them but she does not want to be on my blog. She does not even want to comment on the blog posts. “I don’t want to interfere with your fans.” So as any wonderful boyfriend would do, I cut the pictures and I posted them without her permission. I then proceeded to wake her up at 3AM and ask her for a model signoff. She took out four or five pictures from the set and gave me her blessing.

I will have you know that she just attempted to wrestle with me to get to the keyboard and find my BlogJet screen. Nice try, rookie. I have 28 years of hiding porn with ALT+Tab.

Fine, you can put a picture of me on your blog!

No not that one, its overexposed. Not that one, I look too pouty. Not that one, I look old. Ok, that one looks better.

Oh that one is going on myspace

I’d like to to kiss all the boys…

So Chris is an asshole. But this was the first birthday present I got this year and it really made the day for some UPS guys. This got delivered and as they were typing in the recipient into the system they really enjoyed my nickname. As a matter of fact, our mail folks were quite excited to give me the evenlope.

You’ll never see the present but you can at least admire the effort that went into the evenlope. Gotta love automation!

Second vlog of the day. Can’t wait to see the hand gesture he gives me when he reaches #3.

Vladfire 12 is all about Jeff Middleton, in a surprisingly good mood. He answers all the questions, even the one about the shirt. Jeff really needs no introduction but I will attempt one. Jeff is worshiped in multiple cities for his AD/SBS Migration skills. He is a prolific speaker, writer (huge understatement) and apparently a pool shark.

I could go on but honestly if you’ve never heard of SBS Migration or the Swing Toolkit you probably came to the wrong vlog. Enjoy.

Runtime: 3 minutes, 19 seconds.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (17 Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (6 Mb)

Note: Susanne rules apply while I’m out of town.

Karl really needs no introduction. He is the man. He is also one of the nicest and sharpest people in the IT business. CEO, Author, Blogger, Motivational speaker… I’d recommend you watch this episode more than once.

This was taped at an event earlier this year and was my first ever video interview – I am not sure what happened with the tape but this is the interview in the submarine 10,000 leagues below the sea.

Runtime: 5 minutes, 8 seconds.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (26 Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (9 Mb)

Note: Susanne rules apply, out of town.

So every year I ask for the same thing and never seem to get it. I figured this year I can aim for the other unattainable thing in my life: time off. Just a heads up, we had a huge week and I’m taking a few days off to recalibrate before we shoot Shockey Monkey to the stratosphere.

But don’t despair – I am leaving you with two vlog episodes and a brand spanking new SBS Show to be published on Monday featuring Karl Palachuk.

Have a good one folks!

Out of the sleezy marketing department I have a little tip for you on selling Vista: start giving out crack samples now. Until now Vista has mainly been an ITPro/Developer test which I am very happy to see is being handled rather well. They are now even releasing security patches for the Vista beta 2 so this might be a safer way to give the more suicidal/technical customers a preview of the next OS. We have a ton of clients that have technical people on staff and they have been looking for a chance to get into Vista but could not make it past the survey. Well, Microsoft has started a “quiz” for customers/individuals to get a free copy of Vista. Just answer a few marketing questions and Steve will ship you a free DVD. Raises brand awareness, raises the product above vapor and marketing and gives people a taste for features that they may not want to give up in the future.

You know what to do: I want a new drug..

On the slightly more professional side the Exchange team launched Exchange 2007 wiki. This is a place where we hope to collect a lot of tips and tricks about Exchange 2007 before it hits the streets. There is even an ask a question page where you can get your questions answered. I’m one of the admins so please keep it clean.

Gotta love a team that embraces all the emerging technologies to promote their product, unlike some that are still trying to figure out that email thing.Again, it just boils down to Exchange folks being superior as human beings, if you disagree feel free to email your lead  Yeah, it’s a cheap shot and an inside joke but now that SBS R2 is final I really have nothing to fight about with Susan.

One of the coolest things about Vladfire video blog has been the access to some brilliant and successful people. Everything from one man bands to rich and beautiful. I really believe you can learn something from everyone, be it good or bad, everyone has a lesson they learned. So, I set out to ask people what their definition of success is.

Some talk about business, some talk about personal matters some have the universal destination they are going forward. I really had to think hard before I came up with something myself which pretty much meant that it probably wasn't it or it would be on my mind instantly. Today changed my thinking a little.

Today I signed off on yet another product at Own Web Now Corp that I hope will be a huge hit. So what is the definition of success here? Quite simply, success is:

People are lining up to buy my vapor-ware.

One of my partners called in today and told me he already sold 26 sites of XDWall - I only told him about the product release on Monday!

The first products and services we had involved printing solicitation letters, writing addresses on evenlopes so people would actually open them. How have things changed to define success? Quite simple,  people now have so much trust and faith in what we do that they are out selling stuff before we ever announce them. That is success, we are doing something right.

You should be patching, yeah…What you doin on your back.. aah..

From Bink: After people apply the MS06-042 update, rated “critical” by Microsoft, IE may crash when certain Web sites are viewed, the company said in a notice on its customer support Web site. The problem affects IE 6 with Service Pack 1 on Windows XP and Windows 2000 systems, it said.

For the love of god, when are you going to get it? How many warnings, bad patches, patche re-releases, inconsistencies and inability to use apps are you going to accept before you just say.. enough is enough? But But But Vlad, I can lock it down through group policy and use LUA and my risk tollerance and solar flares and…and shut the f..k up already, please. This is not security. I’m not sure what is but at Casa De Vlad we restrict IE use to Microsoft apps on the Intranet and Microsoft Update. Get caught browsing in IE or worse yet, get caught using IE on clients server – automatic 1 week suspension without pay. I don’t care if you found a site of a burning bush but god used .NET and required you to get the next 10 commandments using IE. At some point (way after you’ve lost your faith in Microsoft to deliver a decent browser) you have to rely on your people not to put you in danger. Yes, limited user rights and group policies get you to a certain point, past that you have to train your people.

If you aren’t going to be sensible please keep an eye on Susan, she seems to be on top of it all as usual.

I’m a diehard BlogJet user and they will have to rip it out of my cold dead hands. Based on Tim’s advice I did give Windows Live Writer a chance, as a matter of fact this post is written in it. Here is my take on it:

The Good

• Open - Microsoft has really had to think differently while abandoning the msn.com mantra of “we know best” in the web 2.0 world. Live.com spaces, truthfully, still look like crap. They are the same boring, owned, old thinking that comes with MSN Messenger - we’ll skin it for you but you just have to live with the layout we provide. Sorry, that does not live in the new world, people choose to write blogs to express themselves, why msn/live.com cannot grasp this concept is beyond me. However, that is where Live Writer departs, these folks get it. The software integrates with a bunch of platforms and actually inherits the look and feel from the blog template it publishes to. For example, I can preview the post in my blog. For someone that revises and resizes things as much as I do this is a godsend.
• Expandable - Live Writer is not a stock editor and this gives it an edge over BlogJet. For example, there are two plugins that allow it to integrate things like Flickr and tagging seamlessly. Those plugins also come with full source code so you can see whats going on.
• SDK - Really just a bonus to the above, they are giving us power to express ourselves and add more features to it. Good job.
• Post Properties - Integrated in the interface are post properties - Are comments allowed? Are trackbacks allowed? You can answer those within the interface before you hit Publish. Way to go.

The Bad

The first time I saw the new “better” way Vista organizes things I just shook my head knowing that people will never be able to find the software they just installed. I was right, it took a while to locate Writer after the installation, I was trying to look for a group, for Live Writer. I found it eventually but could as easilly just have given up on it. Now imagine if this system were a production machine with close to a 100 different programs installed? Never would have found it. Live folks, please consider adding a folder for it.

This is not bad as much as it is anticipation of bad based on Microsoft’s philosophy that more is less. JJ, please do all you can to resist the Microsoft Bloatware development model. The beauty of Writer is that its simple yet powerful. Please try to resist the temptation to pack the sidebar with every live.com service you can possibly integrate into the blog and the need to make this software reflect the look/feel of live.com. I think the beauty of this is it’s simplicity.

Overall though, the positives far overweight the negatives for Live Writer and I give it two thumbs up.

Dell Recalls 4.1 million notebooks at risk of overheating and fire.

And a whole new dimension to the term Vladfire comes about as one of my laptops is on that list. The list includes pretty much every model Dell has sold since April 1, 2004 till July 18 of this year. Ouch.

On a side note, the only thing that went through my mind when I read this announcement was the song where chorus is “feeling hot, hot, hot” – so I figured I’d pull out a line from its lyrics. Apparently I was too young to understand it when it was on the radio, check out the lyrics. Now thats some filthy stuff.

Unlike the last post, this one is quite appropriate. Unfortunately, it is not as pleasing or as funny as the last post. 

If you have to travel for business you will not enjoy your next intercontinental flight. On the heels of last weeks terrorist bust in United Kingdom came more flight restrictions. You will likely have to say hello to the long lines and airport delays of 2001 as the nations cope with the irrational fear that all its citizens are amateur terrorists and bomb builders. I suppose it is easier to panic people into thinking that the end of the world is near, at least then it is possible to use fear and uncertainty to avoid the true discussion of governments inability to provide adequate security. Avoid the discussion of the broken process, focus on the outrage of the result. Why? Because it is easy to show outrage of the event, delayed flights, cancelled travel plans and upset patriotic people. It is easier to spotlight that discussion because that is where people are split and become passionate about their arguments.

Question the incompetence of the government and you’re labeled an unpatriotic commie, Bush basher and a stinkin liberal that would just waltz onto a plane with a nuke. Do the opposite and you’re a stupid redneck that can’t see past the edge of your soy farm where you do your cousins after a big jug of moonshine. See how much fun stereotyping is? Bet one of those pisses you off enough to post a comment and thus a discussion goes down the wrong path

What do you really need to think about?

Now as much fun as the above two paragraps can be to show your affiliation and disregard for everything else, there are things to consider here. Things are are of no entertaining value but critical to your business. Nobody wants to talk about that, where is the fun in that Vlad? Well, here are a few ideas:

If you have an upcoming Atlantic flight and forget to check your laptop your entertainment will be a mix of long cancelled sitcom and a todler crying behind you.

Locked your laptop using a non-TSA approved lock? Congratulations, you just pissed off a dropout making $8 an hour – guess the clothes you were going to wear at the next conference just might not make it there in time. Enjoy wearing vendor swag to that executive roundtable you were going to participate in.

Here are a few places to review before taking your next trip:

San Francisco Chronicle Travel Guide

This article outlines all the contact information for major airlines, new rules to the boarding process, UK flight restrictions, lock recommendations.

UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office

UK is our biggest partner and likely your gateway to the rest of your EU trip. They have a good breakdown of the common sense travel advice that you might want to consider.

What you need to know about the new TSA rules

If you just need a skinny on what changed. For example, starting today (August 15th) the carryon ban expires and you can once again bring your laptop with you.

Old Rules Die Hard

Be prepared. Be prepared for the delay, be prepared to check your personal items. This involves the traditional computer security with the physical consideration. Here is a fun task. Pick up your computer bag, flip it upside down. Did anything fall out? No? Great. Now throw it at a wall. Pick it up and throw it at another. Now step on it. Take the laptop up, does it power on?

Those are travel certainties: stuff will break, stuff will get lost. If you cannot afford to lose things or have them broken then your options are not to travel or pack accordingly. Pick one.