Who would have thought that humping a gorilla would be the red button?

Let’s review the illustrious career of the Vladville blog offending the audiences worldwide:

• The SBS Show thong..
• Creating a gaypile category dedicated to the partner community struggling with common sense..
• Ending 20+ podcast shows with Andrew Dice Clay..
• Ending 2+ podcast shows with a lewd remark..
• Tampering with private property at the airport..
• Dozen's of posts reflecting how Microsoft QC is pounding our business into the ground – Microsoft never even sent me a single Cease & Desist letter!
• Hijacking the index page of our corporate site to congratulate a college football team for winning a national championship.

And those were ALL fine! But the straw that broke the camels back was apparently a guy humping a stuffed gorilla. Not like I was in the running for Ms. Congeniality award with this blog but come on, THAT couldn’t have been the most offensive post I’ve made!

So today, at the advice of my counsel, I'm moving my personal posts over to my personal site www.vlad.net. What was brought up, and what I agree to an extent, is that Vladville draws a much bigger audience than just my IT friends and people that don't get the inside jokes or that have never met me might be severely offended by what they read / hear / view here and since I as the CEO represent OWN there was a feeling that there is not a thick enough border between Vlad ™ and Own Web Now Corp. I disagree with that one but lawyers are there for a reason – to keep you out the court room so I'll take the advice  and move over. In a way this is a bit of a triumph, that I've been able to go out and meet so many people and consider them friends enough to let them in on all that goes on here. Not that it will change, I'll just put more questionable posts over on vlad.net from now on.

This won't be followed by 500 one-line posts nagging you to sign up for junk so you can watch me talk to myself; It's merely note on whats going on and why as I've always been completely honest about what I do. So if you're my friend, hop on to vlad.net. If you aren't, this place will suddenly look a lot more professional LOL, you likely made a typo.

Close to 7 months after the official launch of Shockey Monkey, I have caught up with all the deployments. There are just a few dozen people left that I’ll be working on through the weekend (and god help you if you email me to ask if that includes you – I will delete you on the spot) and I’m writing some data transformation functions to port over the people that originally signed up for the beta and actually used it in production. I love you folks. I really do. But, as with any large data-driven project the db schema changes so I’m doing all I can to get your data migrated into it with the minimal amount of pain. The project design, platform, interface and even the underlying codebase have all changed since the original beta was published all thanks to the feedback of people that took the chance to use SM.

I’ve been forced to crawl into a little hole in terms of talking about Shockey Monkey for months now as I felt the onslaught of new signups every time I said those magic words out loud. But now that nearly everyone is turned up – and EVERYONE will be turned up by Tuesday – I can actually publish the knowledge base, videos, guides, best practices and the updated roadmap.

So next week will be all about Shockey Monkey and perhaps the first project build 100% by the SBS community and over 2,000 SMB consultants around the world. Stay tuned, you will get a chance to pick the new name of Shockey Monkey along with some announcements next week that are about as anti-Vlad as possible.

Picture courtesy of my good friend Steve Mesina.

Now I’m not in a habbit of discussing political stuff on this blog but this totally freaked me out today. As you may know, I’ve been playing Crackdown for the past three weeks. I think I’ve sinked well over 40 hours in this game, most of that time I was sick trying to kill time. Either way, the game premise is that you’re a special agent tasked with cleaning up the gang-dominated Paradise City. The local government / law enforcement body is “The Agency” which uses high end weapons, genetically engineered (read: disposable) Army all in order to stop the three gangs: Los Muertos (Hispanic), Volk (Russians / Eastern Europeans) and Shai-Gen (mix). The gangs survive and flourish by exploiting “the workers” to create weapons and manage other lines of business such as oil. Your job is to clense the city of these gangs. Disturbing enough, right? But here is the kicker (warning: end of game spoiler) – when you eliminate all three gangs and practically win the game you get to hear the following:

Congratulations Agent, Paradise City is finally free. All the gangs are eliminated and life is back to normal.

Now who do you think supplied the weapons to the Los Muertos? Who turned the blind eye to the illegal activities of the Volk? Who let the Shai-Gen establish a foothold? (the visual displays hint that it’s “The Agency” ie the government)

Why? Citizens had to experience total anarchy before they would tollerate complete control. (the visual displays hint at the military state)

With the things like Patriot Act and US diplomatic policy taking hints from Vladville customer service tips… makes you think..

VladCast 3, weekly view of SMB ITPRO world; who cares about Web 2.0?

- Mark Stanfill covers SP2 on SBS2003
- Karl Palachuk publishes Relax Focus Succeed
- Book a room for Jeff’s ITPRO conference by May 4
- WWPC Small Business Symposium is on July 9
- SilverLight vs. Flash – Ocras vs. Flex
- Microsoft in Web Services
- Microsoft releases Longhorn Beta 3

Play VladCast:

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Add feed to iTunes  / File Attachment: VladCast3.mp3 (1944 KB)

Because too many hobbyists discussing politics are misrepresenting themselves as IT professionals and Linux evangelists. Nearly every IT Pro I know has used Linux or currently uses Linux – whether they like it or not is not up to discussion but there is a way to influence people and then there is a way to look like a total basketcase. Case and point, courtesy of a poster on Orlando LUG:

“Remember, Microsoft IS a multiple convicted Felon pirate thief
monopolist con-artist, on several continents, and is under indictment by
governments, as is stated in the press, in several nations, at this
moment.  Japan, Australia, the EU, all have serious problems with Felon
Microsoft.

One method of dealing with convicted felons is to NOT negotiate, but, to
enforce the laws against them, especially when they are still on probation!
What is wrong with people, that they continuously choose failure?”

You want to play “software evangelist” – this makes me want to use Linux…. how? Even if it were completely true, would you not try to find a way to walk away from someone like this as fast as possible?

Honestly, it would be Mix 07. I’ve been saving $$$ and hoping PDC (Microsoft Developers Conference) comes to life again but the web development is just too hot to ignore and I wish I had at least gone to this one. Which in a small part is why I’ve decided to sack my conference attendance / speaking schedule over the next year or so; to focus on the work and implementation of ideas I’ve picked up over the past 2 years of conference hopping. Sadly, this is the one I wish I had not missed but I’m sure that the really important stuff will make it to TechEd.

There is also a fair amount of back and forth recently among bloggers debating conference value, costs, content, etc. Basically, conferences are important but being selective is more important than the attendance record. Budget and time permitting, you should attend two conferences a year. One heavilly focused on your craft, one with general content but phenomenal networking opportunities. Conferences are starting to be a harder ticket to sell over the last 2–3 years because of the rise of blogging, podcasting, video blogs and screencasts.  What used to be content only found in big presentations and books is now being offered online, for free, by a community of people that love to share what they figured out because according to Google, nobody else has!

Point is, the rapid rise in podcasting, blogging and video blogs is erroding the overall value conferences present to their attendees because content exclusivity is no longer there. 

Tip #2: Do not ridicule your customers right to complain by an outpour of sympathy and promises both of you know the organization cannot live up to.

Case and point, one of our larger companies decided to put their eggs in two baskets and share the hosting load between OWN and another huge data center provider. For the sake of the argument, let’s call them “fanatical” – fanantical’s portion of the web server load balanced pool kept on flapping. The CTO at the customer’s site felt the run-around and asked me to call and see if we can get to the bottom of it.

Vlad: Hi, we’re having a problem and we believe it’s the load balancer you’re managing as we can confirm all the servers are responding properly.

Fanatical: Oh, that couldn’t be, we manage it! But I would be delighted to assist you.

Vlad: Ok, well, all servers are up and you’re dropping 30% of the connections.

Fanatical: Oh, that can’t be, we have the biggest network. We take great care of our customers so I am going to escalate this to the engineer more capable of helping you.

More Fanatical: Hello Vlad, hi I am here to help you.

… Fast forward through over 2 hours of fanatical bs to get the load balancer power cycled and configuration troubleshooted to the point where the fanatical support ought to have had it in the first place because they promised a managed environment.

I say this to my staff and myself all the damn time – politeness is not a substitute for competence. I don’t care if you’re the biggest jerk on the face of the earth, we run a network here not a Ms. Congeniality award committe. Every time you are tasked with resolving a problem for a customer and you step out of that problem solving mindset to sympathize, lecture on our process and quality control, share your war stories, etc you’re wasting your time that should be used to troubleshoot issues, you’re ridiculing our customer when we both know you’re staring at your watch, all while the customer is still down. Wanna be fanatical – go to a college football game and paint your chest fired because thats where this conversation is heading. (reminder: customer service tips, not HR tips)

While every customer should be treated with respect and dignity, they are calling us because we aren’t doing our job. It is not your job to apologize, thats my job. Your job is not to hug the user. Not to read our process guides out loud. Not to explain the company policy. Not to be fanatical. Your job is to fix it, as fast as possible and look like a competent engineer not a flower girl.

Previous customer service tip.

Today has been a strange, strange Monday. I’ve been swamped over the past week working on Shockey Monkey now that the major work on ExchangeDefender v3 has been completed. And not to hit Microsoft again but god it’s great working on my own software instead of mitigating mistakes made by someone else. Organizationally, we’re about 90% done with all the service packs and upgrades and things are finally running as expected.

So what does an IT service provider do when everything is running smoothly? Try to break it of course! So today I spent most of the day planning this weekends global maintenance window for OWN. In a nutshell, we will crash the entire network, including the NOC, including monitoring, including failsafes, including redundancy, including backbone links. We’ll go down for about 5 minutes, removing OWN and every system in it for about 5 minutes. Why? Well, for one nearly all backend management systems have changed. And as much faith as we have in our systems ability to recover from single or even multiple failures we do not have a guarantee or anything other than our blind faith. And since we’re not a church but an ISP, blind fiath ain’t what the customers pay for. Cross fingers, plan twice, pull plug once

Other than that – more fanmail about VladCast. I get it, you like it!

I’m often surprised that people can guess my mood by reading my emails and blog posts (hint: they are nearly always wrong) but today has been interesting. I’ve been swamped as of late and because I haven’t blogged for a few days people emailed to ask if I’ve taken a ghost writing gig over at Susan’s blog. There are a few Angry Vlad posts on her blog, and no, neither influenced by me. Heh. Three bad nights on a single web/sql server and she gets a case of Vlad’s… wuss    

As for what I’m up to – lot’s of coding and planning. Today I’ve been porting over the new interface upgrade for Shockey Monkey, opening up the mobility API for the mobile agent and just planning the flights for World Wide Partner Conference and New Orleans. This weekend Katie and I are off to Dallas to watch our little empire burn down to the ashes and hopefully emerge as a beautiful phoenix. Go ahead, try to sell that one to your wife:

Vlad: Great news. We’re going to Dallas to watch the network go down and autorecover. And I’ll take you to Six Flags!

Katie: Cool.

Vlad: Really?

Note: If you’re one of our customers and would like to watch please let me know by Wednesday (security reasons), at Dallas Infomart from 3:10 – 3:30 AM (thats EST time, this Sunday).

Wow, what a response. Thank you, thank you, thank you. As of 1:00 PM EST the VladCast #2 has been downloaded 10,372 times, nearly 1/5 the audience of the SBS Show. However, the feedback loop has been through the roof, the VladCast folder has 519 messages in the folder, granted a number of them back and forth between me and the audience thanking for feedback, etc. Care to see the feedback?

The Good

“Loved it – your voice energizes people and its great to hear your passion for all this again”

“I heard the first one and thought “Great, more complaining” but the second one knocked my socks off. I forwarded it to my staff and will make this a SharePoint link”

“Awesome Vladcast Vlad    – should have you streamed with my breakfast news before the weather and after the traffic.”

The Bad

These comments don’t deserve to be quoted, if you’re too stupid to hit stop when something does not interest you and you have enough time to waste my time by complaining about something you willingly both downloaded and listened for five minutes there is nothing I can do for you. As Jay-Z says “If you don’t like my lyrics you can press fast foward“

I did however get a decent amount of bad feedback that I will try to work on and improve:
- Not in iTunes yet
- Flash player sucks
- Slow down I can hardly understand you
- Board / wiki to disuss the show
- Mailing list to announce new shows
- Way to contribute / sponsor the show
- Needs intro music / datestamp
- Want to promote it, give me a logo
- Needs guests

Boards/forums suck because they close content, if you wish to discuss you’re welcome to post a comment. Guests are not what the show is about. 

The Funny

“That was perhaps the best podcast I ever heard. The first five minutes sucked but the last 5 seconds saved the genre”

“Exciting. Exilirating. Your voice was so fast.. like you weren’t breathing at all.. I was hoping a heart attack was coming so I wouldn’t have to hear your hateful dribble ever again. I hope you die next week.” (funny because it was written by a friend)

“You suck – at any length of the show.”

I’d be putting it lightly if I said that I was more than surprised with the success of the podcast considering it hasn’t been blogged or linked or marketed anywhere else. It confirms my suspicion though, that when content is awesome people share and forward on the links and thats why so many people tune in. The feedback and message counts are surprising as well, far more than I ever got with the SBS Show.

So if you heard #1 and thought screw #2 I hope you give it another chance. #1 was just to clear the air and announce it, there was no content in it at all. #2, I hope it proves differently.

So what are you REALLY doing?

This has come up more often than any other question. What’s really behind the scenes, whats the master plan, etc. Well, as you know from my many, many, many posts the contributions in the SMB community and even larger ITPRO sense have been down. In any given forum or board or group or setting less than 1% of the audience actually participates. Whats worse is that probably half of that 1% is not really contributing anything of value but just distracting and flooding the channel with a sales message.

I’ve talked to people over the last 2 years and I got two messages:

– I just don’t have the time (ok, great, see ya)

– I just don’t know how to contribute and I’m not a good writer like you.

For a moment lets ignore the scary notion in which people equate my writing with something more than a drunken chimp on a laptop. What these people are actually saying is that they have something they want to share, they have things on their mind, they know that others would benefit from their experience, opinion, expertise…. yet they don’t want to compete with me or Susan. Again, let’s for a moment ignore the solid gold mansions that Susan and I have built from our enormous proceeds we get from community paying for all of this content.

Last year I was presenting at the blogging conference and I wanted to share the podium with a fellow video blogger. And as he closed down his presentation he sent a very clear message:

I love doing this. This is fun. If you don’t know how to video Blog, my name is John, I will teach you how to video blog!

So.. I can’t teach you how to write. It’s clear that I can’t do it either. But what I will do is create a system and throw some exposure to the people that are willing to podcast and video blog. Everyone has something they want to share. I know you do. I’ve talked to thousands and thousands of people, all of em remarkable in some way. But none of them do this. Why?

I’ll tell you why. The SBS Show took 2 people, 5 hours a week and an hour here or there to organize, setup, record, edit, distribute, market, etc.

The VladCast took less than 10 minutes. Start to finish. So we’re not nurturing leaders and sharing – well, I’m gonna change that.

Want to try out Exchange 2007 for free but don’t want to install it or play sysadmin? Well, I have good news, Microsoft and Unisys have teamed up to offer a free trial account. Fill out a form with three fields and you’re in.

Brings a serious question to mind to a lot of people – Is Microsoft going to go into hosting? Absolutely, they already do so with Office Live and as more people ditch their impossible-to-budget IT departments for outsourced hosted services Microsoft will really have no alternative but to go that route.

So check out Exchange 2007, bet you’ll love it, everyone does. And when you’re done with the demo, I know someone that can hook you up for $10 a month