The rest of this message is highly inappropriate… for anybody. But I am who I am and I cannot apologize for that, you’ve been warned so here we go.

On Attitude

Chris and I sat down to record the SBS Show with Karl Palachuk yesterday. It has been several months since Chris had his surgery and there was a lot of pent up inappropriate behavior that just needed to get flushed. We got into a discussion on the importance of having a plan, taking advantage of your personality traits, understanding and embracing your strengths. Have a listen, but whatever you do please turn down the speakers if you are at work.

SBS Show Raw & Uncut – So long as you have a plan

Runtime: 1 minute, 11 seconds.

On Language

Now a little while ago someone in the comments suggested that Susanne should be accompanied by subtitles. English is widely accepted as the default global language of business so if you have a need to learn a language start with English. I chat with a good friend in UK on daily basis and I am constantly pasting her into Google to figure out what she is talking about. Well, no more. Say hello to urbandictionary.com:

bollocks crisps bovered and you can’t forget the Ausies: Fosters

Welcome to the world of global business.. and thanks for the shirt, punk.

Vladfire #10, now in double digits. Appropriately enough, we’ve got the big cheese of SMB IT, Harry Brelsford talking about the changing landscape of SMB IT in USA, status of SBS and SBSers worldwide and a few tips about global business. Enjoy.

Runtime: 6 minutes, 57 seconds.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (36 Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (12 Mb)

Note: Susanne rules apply.

Little tribute to my buddy Ze.. Anyhow, here is something from the comments that I thought deserved to be posted widely – See, every time I don’t keep it real I get emails like this one:

To whom it may concern…

As the inventor of the fabulous term “Vladfire”, I must complain when the term is used for interviewing old German babes who give you cookies.

The highest and best use for the term is when you’re popping off, like “Microsoft and Dell, Please stand closer together.” Now *that’s* classic Vladfire.

See ya buddy.

Brian

By the way, Brian writes emailbattles.com, check it out.

Ok, not an IT person but she is a friend of mine so.. suck it. Besides, if you don't think you can learn something from people in fields different that your own you're dumber than you think.

Nancy Williams worked for SMB Nation as a sales manager, meaning she edited, organized, managed and did all things SMB Nation. She also managed relationships with vendors, SBSers, writers and just about everyone. She talks about the upcoming SMB Nation 2006 in Redmond and what she likes about working with us.

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. Enjoy the advice on what to do at SMB Nation.

Dear Mr. Stanfill,

I am writing this email to you to inquire about the opportunity you have at Microsoft PSS SBS Team in Balgladesh. I understand that the role of SBS Escalation Engineer requires little functional knowledge of English and that Indian labor laws allow for “time off” concept that I am not very familiar with. 

Please forward further details on this role. I am an Exchange MVP and an MCSE but can run at a wall hard enough to forget most of what I know in order to meet the job description. As you can tell by the bags under my eyes I am stupid enough, ready for the challenge and have no fear of patching.

My resume is attached in the OpenDocument format. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.

-Vlad

First of the SMB Nation batch and first of the SMB IT Success Profiles. Basically, these are the people that are at the top of their game, be it business, technology, community or otherwise. I will be disabling comments/feedback on these because unlike everything else you see on Vladville that is written to simulate interest, thought and feedback… these videos are there for you to listen. No, not talk back. Listen.. watch.. listen.. absorb.. learn.

First up is Beatrice Muzler, VP of SMB Nation, author, instructor, magazine editor, consultant, biker, runner and a permanent member of my friends list because she sent me a 5lb container of cookies from Germany.

Runtime: 6 minutes, 3 seconds.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (31 Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (10 Mb)

Note: “Susanne rules” apply here. Don’t email me with rude comments, her cell phone requests, questions about her relationship to me, to anyone else, address, location, age, url of her fan site, requests for an autographed 8×10, etc.

Note 2: Yes, I am building this site on top of smart women with attractive accents. Yes, I realized I am alienating my core audience Chris. Dedicated to the memory my friend Tim’s vlog’s second episode. Looks and sounds good in a room with light, doesn't it?

Phew, the patch Tuesday is done! Now on to the cool new stuff. Over the next four days I'm going to show you what an SMB Nation event is really like and who is behind it. I have three video's by SMB Nation's principals and will finish it off with the SBS Show #21 where Susanne Dansey chased people down at SMB Nation Amsterdam and interviewed them. If you are coming to SMB Nation (or if this is your first time or first time in a while) you'll really want to tune in for these shows:

Vladfire : Beatrice Mulzer

Vladfire : Nancy Williams

Vladfire : Harry Brelsford

SBS Show #21: SMB Nation East & Amsterdam

Look for the first episode today.

2:40 AM EST, 08/10/2006 Microsoft Tuesday Patchday comes to a close on a Thursday morning. It was fun.

As noted in my previous post oh… 18 or so hours ago… many things become funny through sleep deprivation. I was chatting with one of my friends/developers about the extent of our slavery and as you may imagine I had a few choice words for him as he told me he was about to go to sleep. Anyhow, he pasted the following back in the IM window:

richwalkup said: oh wait – definition link

richwalkup said: now that you know what it is – i'm gonna get me some (sleep that is)

richwalkup said: shockey 

Clicked on the link just to humor him for a second, usually it is something very gross that we point each other to just to stay awake, I found a big body of text. Started reading… Interesting theory on this "sleep" thing. But then I come upon this definition of it: 

Sleep is the fundamental anabolic process common to all life forms, plant and animal. In animals, the sleeping state is characterized by an absolute minimal degree of consciousness and decreased responsiveness to the surrounding world.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep

Perhaps its the lack sleep talking but "state is characterized by an absolute minimal degree of consciousness and decreased responsiveness to the surrounding world" is the very definition of technical support, isn't it? Somewhere north of Dallas someone just lost their coffee to their monitor.

The case is still open, still working on it. We've restored service to 100% of our customer base but have imaged a few to a standby server for further testing to isolate the case with Dell and Microsoft. The solution set was mentioned in the previous post and we spent the better part of the day dealing with it. For what its worth, we used a scaled down version of Knoppix to automate the process via USB thumbdrives. Still doing post-cleanup work and trying to get the backups in sync with the recent change. That however is just a part of the process. 

On Courtesy

There is such a thing as Karma folks. I was out on Tuesday evening, drove down to West Palm Beach to do a presentation for the Palm Beach IT sbs group and then trekked back to Orlando. While I was down there I brought a stack of things from WWPC along with an excellent book that Karl recently published. Personally, this is one of the best books for the SMB consultants out there. The title is quite misleading so let me sum it up instead: This book is about how you run your IT business and CYA as a SMB consultant.

Now Karl didn't know I was doing this, although on an occasion I did mention to him that I really enjoyed his book. Earlier tonight I find that Karl nominated me for the SBSer of the year. Nice guy, huh? Whats even nicer is that he wrote a piece on his blog about how to attend conferences in response to my earlier articles on how to follow up with people after conferences. I sometimes look at my colleagues in the IT world and am quite disappointed to see how shallow the pool is. This is why when people like Susanne and Chris show up I am shocked and cannot stop raving about what professionals they are. Ditto for Karl, check out the blog post and read it a few times . 

Dear partners, please stand closer together so I can get you all in the same shot. No, thats not the camera I'm holding.

Just wanted to alert you to a few things that have been going on at Casa de Vlad in our 11 data centers. We're having issues over a large portion of our Dell server base that has SCSI/PERC4 controllers installed and/or USB 2.0 drives installed. The behavior is as follows:

1. System powers on and allows OS selection. Windows 2003 Server splash screen comes up, few seconds later black screen or reboot.
2. When booted up using Safe Mode the system hangs on loading acpitabl.dat

There are dozens of solutions of which we have identified the following so far:

1. Unplug the USB 2.0 drive. This worked on just a few systems and allowed the boot to proceed. On reboot it powered on as well. Will test again later.
2. Clear SCSI controller card configuration and rescan the bus. This worked on a few as well.
3. Power system down and perform a full fs check. Windows PE is your friend.
4. At this moment we have over 200 systems that are going through a manual repair using Windows Recovery Console. Hope you set one up. The process of doing so is to replace update.sys file with the one from Windows 2003 RTM media. Generally located in %systemroot%\system32\drivers 

We are seeing the above on Dell PowerEdge 800, 1800, 1425 systems only running the Standard version of Microsoft Windows 2003 SP1. Identical systems running Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition, Web Edition, Small Business Server and R2 editions of Standard & Enterprise do not seem to be affected. Will update as we go along. Working closely with Microsoft and Dell to recover, sorry for the inconvenience.

Comments closed, pings allowed. Believe me, I know what you're going to say "Micro$oft security blows, switch to Linux, switch to Mac, switch to Amiga, Ballmer is evil, this wouldn't have happened on an HP…" There, I saved you 20 minutes.

I’m presenting tomorrow night (Tuesday, August 8th) at the Palm Beach IT Association in Palm Beach, FL. Just wanted to save some of you a trip if you weren’t interested in what I’m going to be talking about:

• Who I am and what I do for living and why I really do all the podcasting, blogging, vlogging..
• What Own Web Now does and is working on (and how)
• SMB Community potential beyond “technical support chatter
• Preparing for the next wave (look at Exchange 2007, SharePoint 2007 Beta 2 demo)

I intend to spend most of the evening on that last bullet point, kind of offering some insight on the things going on at Microsoft and beyond in terms of how they view our space, how you can anticipate/respond/profit on top of what they are doing. Also a look at some other interesting events that are going to drive our sector and how they are changing just what we are able to offer our clients.

It will be a business presentation. Hope to see you out there, please RSVP.