The sign that you ought to look for a new career always comes up around the holidays when people get a minute to step back from the stress of their job. Stress — no doubt caused by the information overload, uncertainty about the future, dealing with difficult team members and customers, neverending disappointment over deadlines that were not met and projects that were not won and the customers that were not swayed enough to stay with you instead of switching to the competition…

Those are normal, those are natural and they are a reflection of more and more weight being placed on our shoulders as the IT profession evolves rapidly.

But when I see messages like “Will be out till Jan 2nd with no access to email or voicemail” aired by IT people on December 18th, I realize I am not dealing with a geek or even an IT person per-se. You see, IT people are the kind that are at all times about 6’ away from some communication device, dependant on the Internet for the news, entertainment and finance. There is the real world, and then there is a digital world. And if someone can take pride in not being in that digital world for weeks, and completely severed from it, they perhaps don’t deserve to work in it either.

I am not saying breaks are bad, or that you need a Blackberry/Cell glued to your wrist, but if you hate this business to the extent that the thing you enjoy the most is getting as far away from it as possible…. it may be a good time to look for a new career. If you’re not passionate about what you do, you’re not going to be any good at it and just might implode under the weight of your cynicism for it. Life is short, might as well be happy!

Henry Craven, SBS-MVP, talks about the small IT shops in Australia. Check it out!

Download: Album Art, Windows Movie (45 Mb), Quicktime (47 Mb).

Are you ever surprised by how difficult it is to spend money, even when you want to give it away? In this “web 2.0” world that we’re in with friends and workers continents apart, I’m surprised how difficult it is to send someone something as simple as a gift card.

In my humble opinion, we (own) are copying the wrong company and we have a lot of companies many magnitudes larger than ours making the same mistake: too much bureocracy. We’re all copying the wrong people – remember the famed video where Microsoft Marketing team did a parody of iPod packaging and explained what it would look like if Microsoft designed it? Same concept. Glengerry quote: “People are waiting to give you their money! Are you going to take it? Are you man enough to take it?” – I wonder how many people we outright turn off from doing business with us just because there is no flashing buy now button.

So if you’re looking for a global gift, Amazon is your friend:

Thats all it takes, five fields to give a gift of a few DRM-free MP3’s to enjoy around the holidays… Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. You want to know what the Starbucks gift certificate purchasing process looks like:

That’s right, buy-a-gift-card in 852 simple click steps and more places to enter data than a home mortgage application. All you need is a minor in computer science with specialization area of UI design and an uncle that hunts next to you so you can hit the right options as they slide around at 500px/sec. Geeez. Worst giftcard site, ever! Check it out.

P.S. If you’re on my blogroll and have updated your blog twice over the last month look for an email from Gift Certificates Redeemable at Amazon.com [mailto:gc-orders@acigiftcards.amazon.com] in your Inbox or junk.

It is quite a masterful act to take one’s foot out of his mouth and his head out of his …

But Windows Home Server is going to make me do just that; Something fairly severe has come up on the radar, something that I’m afraid makes Windows Home Server quite useless. Microsoft has identified a number of circumstances under which files on the home server may become corrupt, something that is pretty much unforgivable given the product primary function and promise being data integrity and protection.

In light of this issue, and in the light of there being no immediate fix, I recommend you unplug your WHS now. I have unplugged mine. Sorry, data integrity is paramount when it comes to protecting your family’s digital memories.

Vladfire first aired Andy Goodman in August of 2006, doing his finest impression of Mr Roboto. This time Andy Comes back in full stereo sound, 16:9 widescreen and Youtube-style player to talk about downsizing an IT practice. Check it out!

Download: Album Art, Windows Movie (25 Mb), Quicktime (25 Mb).

I spent most of last week and will likely spend the rest of 2007 on the dark side.

Google

If you are looking to chat with me and don’t do business with OwnWebNow, you can find me on Google Talk. My address is vlad@vladville.com, which consequently is also my community-related email address. Please do not send indirect/junk/newsletters to that address, thats what v@vladville.com is for. Likewise, don’t send personal (or email that needs my immediate attention) to v@vladville.com because I am unlikely to see it.

The new company will run on completely open and free technologies. Considering that OWN almost exclusively operates and sells closed/Microsoft technology I feel this gives me a more balanced experience… and to that end:

Mac OS X 10.5

I have been trying to use it for the last few days and I must admit I am hating it. On the other hand, I am not nearly as disappointed with it as I imagined I would be. What I believe I am saying is that if you need a serious business collaboration platform, Vista is the way to go. But if you need something to do the basic computer stuff quickly (check mail, burn a DVD, browse the web and play videos) Mac is your tool.

I am half/switching to the Mac for 2007. I say I am half switching simply because the tools I rely on to do my business do not exist on the Mac and I can’t justify switching to the platform completely just so I could virtualize the production platform on top of it.

The biggest leg up Mac has on Vista is the elegance factor. Case and point, Katie came down to my Office yesterday to help me do some last minute things before skipping town. She sat at my table, I turned on the Mac, she turned on the PC. I remembered that I had completely powered things down so I cycled the router. The Mac immediately got the connection and started. The Windows, not so much. So, dig through four menus to get to the network connection properties. Disable adapter. UAC prompt. Enable adapter. UAC prompt. Nothing. Open properties, set static IP. UAC prompt.

The other day I went through the Vladfire interviews in search of something to showcase for the holidays. In the end, I decided on picking out two gentlemen that looked most like Santa. The message (recorded in April 2007) is also of great importance, especially now that the times are tough and a number of people are going out of the IT business.. Andy talks about the process of downsizing the IT practice, Henry talks about the process of approaching the business as a complement of an association. I hope you give them a look, airing on Christmas eve and Christmas day.

I will also be trying something new, Vladfire episodes will now stream directly from the page via flash-embedded player, youtube.com style, in the native 16:9 widescreen format. I will still offer these two as wmv and mov downloads but future streams will only come in as flv. It cuts more than an hour from the production time and looks a hell of a lot better. I wonder if flv is playable on an Xbox, Apple TV, Zune or iPod, if you do please post a comment.

P.S. In case I have horribly offended you by mentioning Christmas, one of the two santas is a Jew.

I wanted to offer a little update on Shockey Monkey considering that I haven’t kept you up to speed on all the developments and have missed the November deadline with the hopes of going commercial on Jan 1. Unfortunately, I will be bumping that later deadline to February 1st, 2008 or roughly a month from now for the launch of Shockey Monkey 2.0.

I want to say that I truely appreciate the amount of support and input I have received through the whole process. There are now three of us working on Shockey Monkey and the delay was related to a number of reasons, most of them centered on supportability - both of the code/platform and of the people using it. It turns out that SM is generally the first helpdesk for most users and most people have questions about how to implement it, how to customize it, etc. This required a lot of documentation, which later got scrapped for video, which later got scrapped for something I never thought I’d ever do.

The product has grown fundamentally and gotten a facelift to accomodate the message I’ve been sending for over a year – that its all about customer service, not making sure that as little of it gets done as humanly possible. This required quite a bit of code, I had to bring people on, clean up a lot of items, etc.

There are a little over 3,000 active users of Shockey Monkey. Over the past three months there has been a slight percentage dip (about 400 or so fell off the face of the earth) which means they either changed their mind, ran out of business, switched to a different helpdesk solution.. best of luck to them. We feel this is a very long term investment for all of our clients and our partners clients and have been working very hard on bringing the 2.0 to market.

I decided to call it 2.0 because it brings a lot of concepts that I explained on the road to fruition, it is not just a CRM rip. It’s more of a system.

But more on that in January.

P.S. I still aim to offer this as hosted (our server) or downloadable virtual server / vmware image (your server); The product will remain free through February, by the time all the bug fixes are completed in February we will look at a commercial route. Also, starting with February, the product will be fully supported by OWN.

So I finally get to show you why I stepped back from the road… Say hello to the new (brewing) baby boy:

Oh, yes.. It’s exactly what you think it is. Or as I so (in)appropriately yelled out at the OBGYN: “Yeah boyeee, way to beat the cursor! Smack that arrow.”

Estimated release date, May 18.

Just a brief update on the progress as I’ve made some changes to the original hardware in my Building my Hackintosh blog post due to some unforseen compatibility issues. The major change is to the motherboard, I got a Gigabyte GA-945GCMX-S2 and it works flawlessly. The original Asrock motherboard worked perfectly fine as well but the kernel driver that was written for it did not support line in or mic, and the sound itself was shaky.. so $50 down the shute.

Few other notes:

• Nearly all motherboards need to be flashed back. Asrock ConRoe 1333 needed a BIOS of less than 1.50 in order to support Leopard.
• The vanilla rollout (default) needs to be tweaked to work with the standard PC AMI or Phoenix BIOS, so when you create the partition make sure you use MBR instead of the other options.
• The “hack” post-install scripts are nothing more than dd and bootloader provisioning, for some reason the setup doesn’t set the partition as active or bootable.
• While getting the boot loader to work can be challenging, you can just boot into the OS by using the boot loader that spins up on the DVD. Same basic process used on Linux, BSD, etc, go to the boot loader options and let it know where to load the kernel from. If you have a single hard drive and single partition this will do it: rd=/disk0s1
• Make sure your hard drive is on the first or second SATA port, if your board has more you’ll run into issues (or at least I did)
• There is a huge scene / community around OS X, perhaps its finest quality. One forum I spent a lot of time on was http://forum.insanelymac.com
• There is also an IRC channel, though as with all IRC channels, stupidity is not welcome and they won’t hug your dumb away like most other places tend to. So if you haven’t read every topic on the problem you’re having at Insanely Mac, don’t bother. The server is at irc.osx86.hu and channel is #leopard
• I was not aware that the beast works with AMD chips; Apparently, it does, there are a few cooked DVDs that will work.
• The basic requirement is SSE 2 / SSE 3 instruction set, so technically anything from a $35 Celeron on up will work. For home browsing purposes I don’t see much of a reason to go beyond it.
• The ICH7 chipset I picked worked out of the box, sans sound. The Realtek 888 chipset on the Asrock did not have the kext to make it work, but Azelia (880) does and requies just a slight patch. Video, network, USB and other fun stuff worked out the box without tweaking of any kind.

Overall, works as advertised. I am not particularly impressed with the operating system, way too cartoonish and simplistic, yet practically useless (something so simple as expanding zip files stacks them on top of one another, doesn’t expand the window as more files are populated, makes it impossible to tell what came from which archive); for the life of me I can’t figure out why people like this garbage but hack accomplished.

P.S. I can’t say enough good stuff about Arctic Silver, I love that stuff. I used the retail kit for the processor/heatsink/fan assembly and its provided thermal compound had the unit smoking at 46 on the average in BIOS (80% load); When I moved the processor and assembly to the new motherboard Katie cleaned off the stock termal compound and I applied AS5 – haven’t gone above 26 degrees. Can’t beat that.

HTH, Vlad.