I’ve temporarily removed blog comment restrictions, it’s a free-for-all.

I figure the next thing I post here will prompt a lot of you to say something so I’m making it easy. Stand by…

Those lies would make me a great spiritual leader or politician. Mostly because for those roles, the preconceived assumption or fact (depending on who you ask) is that things are now the same way they have always been and always will be. Thus, they are tied to your character, your morals and your values. Flip-flopping there makes you a man (or woman) of no virtue or character.

But the same thing that makes you a horrible politician or fatwa writer makes you an excellent business manager. It is your job as a business(wo)man to recognize the new opportunities, changes in the market, changes in the consumer behavior, changes in your staff attitude/motivation/compensation-expectations and use every advantage available to do more with your business, maximizing the profits and effectiveness within the bounds of the law.

Moreso, your job is to cause change. Change stimulates activity, activity stimulates involvement and involvement hopefully translates into revenues. If you just sit on your hands and sing que sera sera, there is no hope for you in business. You can’t just sit on your hands and run that VCR repair business if people no longer have or use VCRs! You’ll end up on the street and starve to death.

At the same time, you are leading a business, so you better believe whatever you are doing. “Get more.”, “The Nations #1 Network.”, “Moving at the speed of light.”. You have to have conviction, you have to communicate your message and you have to exude confidence. Otherwise, why shouldn’t your customers move to the solution that is best for them?

So in business, you say I will never, ever, ever do that. And if you’re any good, you will evaluate the circumstances as they change, develop your plan, try to serve your customers in a better way and in the end.. well… you will. You will do that. Whatever “that” is. Shit changes, either flow with it or drown in it.

I wrote this post for some of my associates that like to read this blog and see it as the word from the above. It’s not. Business (successful one that is) changes, adapts and makes money. We live and work in the here and now, and here and now the best solution is X. And given those facts 5 years from now, I will do X again. However, I am virtually guaranteed that 5 years from now all the circumstances and facts will change and I will make a different decision that is in the best interest of me and my clients. That does not show poor form, lack of character, bad values or void of morals - it shows a sense of responsibility. And let’s face it, when you’ve lost your argument on the business basis of facts and evidence and all you have to left on are your personal ethics and morals, which are hopefully never going to change, you’ve not only lost the argument, you’ve moved to another one that you have no chance of losing. But in business, you don’t have that luxury - in business you have to change your mind when the facts warrant it or you will not have that business much longer.

On the drive to work today, things were quickly approaching zero. My laptop battery, Florida temperature and of course Katie’s gasoline bar.  Time to make a quick call: be stuck on the side of I4 for over an hour during rush hour traffic with an empty laptop, or go through the neighborhood ripped straight out of Grand Theft Auto looking for a gas station. Suffice to say, we choose poorly.

Rolling down the OBT,
looking for a pump,
nothing but hookers and thugs,
laid back, with my laptop on my lap and dying battery on my mind

And then we officially reached stereotype city. Cokeheads sprawled on the sidewalk at the Citgo, bars on the doors and windows. Welcome to Orlando, the city beautiful. And as Katie pumped gas a very energetic guy started jumping around the gas station. At 7 am, in 40 degree weather, which by Florida’s standards is like swimming in the arctic. And what was this.. entrepreneur.. bouncing around for?

“Do you smoke? Do you smoke? I got weed.”
“Heigh ho, reefer.. Heigh ho reefer..”
“I’ve got reefer..”

It’s times like this that you realize that less than half a tank is probably enough to get out of this jolly predicament you’ve found yourself in. “What was he saying?” asks the wife, “It doesn’t matter, he was selling dear.”

And as I’m sure she probably thought, “Thanks for the case load and keeping the tox lab in business”, I had something else on my mind. How does someone that enthusiastic and energetic wake up before the crack of dawn in the freezing weather just to push some weed? Then I remembered that I probably woke up much earlier than he did and was on the road longer just so I can move some Exchange mailboxes around the world.

Not a day goes by that I am not thankful for what I have, what I have built and what it does for people around the world. I get dozens of notes from people whose businesses have been saved by LiveArchive, a freebie addon product that we just launched a few months ago is keeping people with thousands in servers and infrastructure working from home while their office is snowed in and without power. That is where I find the energy to do what I do.

I solve people’s problems. As does the weed guy. In a weird way, my peer from OBT gave me enough energy to get it through the day. As I do for a lot of people with this very blog. Happy Monday folks, and happy holidays.

Motivational tips from hustlers and movers.. Gotta love it.

As I continue to tweak Vladville to fit in better with the upcoming Thieving Weasel framework, I decided to put in a little bit of work to make Vladville easier to navigate on Windows Mobile devices. Pulling up Vladville on a Windows Mobile (PocketPC or Smartphone) will now only display the content, sans the Javascript, AJAX, sidebar, slidey stuff or other blog gunk that you see in the full featured web page because.. well.. it’s what I do. Pull it up and see, hopefully this makes Vladville a little more pleasant in the pocket. It took all my might not to call it PocketVlad, for what its worth.

It’s a very quick Wordpress loop hack that excludes certain form elements from the display when the browser is Windows CE based:

if(!strpos(”$_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT]“,”Windows CE”))

{ display regular content to IE, FF, Opera.. }

Wordpress checks the UserAgent sever variable for presence of Windows CE and if it doesn’t find it, it prints the regular blog content. However, if it finds out that you are on Windows CE it does not send the particular content to it.

So for example, let’s say your template code includes a like like <?php get_sidebar(); ?> and your sidebar has all that gunk useless to a mobile viewer? Just wrap it and it will not be displayed to the Windows Mobile browser:

if(!strpos(”$_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT]“,”Windows CE”)) { get_sidebar(); }

What if you had some HTML markup like things you copied and pasted from the web site to include a comic, calendar or 8,285 buttons and ways to subscribe or share your posts?

<div id=’blah’>Blah blah blah</div>

Same thing, but a little different:

<? if(!strpos(”$_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT]“,”Windows CE”)) { ?>
   <div id=’blah’>Blah blah blah</div>
<? } ?>

Gotta love the simplicity of PHP. Just put line #1 above the content you want to block from Windows Mobile and below. Now, naturally, you have to have the markup elements match up because if you cut your table or div elements in half your layout will fall apart.

Still, pretty easy to make Wordpress friendly with Windows Mobile…

I have a little Microsoft Partner fable I’d like to share with you:

In a Microsoft TS2 event one summer’s day a grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing to its heart’s content at the free soda line chatting up his big company. An ant passed by, bearing along with great toil a stack of business cards, books and conference brochures he was taking to the office, begging people to come to his user group.

“Why not come and work with my busy company,” said the grasshopper, “instead of traveling the country from conference to conference, user group meeting to networking event?”

“I am helping grow my company into different verticals and different markets,” said the ant, “you should come to our user group meeting and meet some great people.”

“Share my knowledge with the competitors, are you mad?” said the grasshopper, “I am so busy and I have no time for the groups and conferences.” But the Ant went on its way and continued to WWPC, continued to network locally, continued to build relationships through the blog.

When the winter came and the Orlando housing market fell apart, the real estate agents and their supporting law firms, mortgage brokers, builders, financiers and decorators left the town. The grasshopper had no leads, bankrupt clients on his MSP plan, aging infrastructure and no plan for Server 2008, while it saw the ants looking for new hires, spending on training and growing their project work from the relationships and leads they had collected in the summer.

Then the grasshopper went out of business.

In my years of leading Orlando ITPRO I have heard every reason under the sun why people couldn’t and wouldn’t come to the meetings. Too busy. Too exhausted. Not sharing with their competitors. Not convenient enough to go. No time to go to the conference. No patience to read a book. No time to read a blog. No use for the forums and groups. Nobody told them about the SBSC quarterly confcall. No need for Jessica Emmons. No value in JJ Antequino, nothing to learn from Rene Alamo or James Cuomo. Nothing but spam from Eric Ligman. And groups, facebooks, mailing lists – are you kidding me?

And then… the winter came. Then the economy went south. Now they want the leads. Now they want to try out the services and get into the partner program. Now they can’t get enough time in the webcasts and forums. Now they want to meet the ants they ridiculed so in the summer.

Here is the little thing about the world of networking, ants and grasshoppers. Ants are always sacrificing during the summer to network, to grow, to plan and to strategize. Grasshoppers roll with the flow, are too busy, too swamped, and see no value in hanging out with the ants. Then when the winter comes, they need those ants to survive but guess what – the ants have moved their game to the next level and are not looking back. Particularly not at the people that blew them off when they asked for the time and attention.

When times are good, attendance and memberships in IT communities declines. You’re gainfully employed, who cares about the relationships, connections and knowledge, you alreay know a ton of people. All likely in your own company or segment. And in the winter, when that segment loses interest, funding and eventually clients and salary cap you end up on the street, looking for that user group to find a new job, looking for those partners that circled the globe for some help and insight, looking..

Except now those ants that build solid businessess, relationships and connections have little to no incentive to deal with your defunct grasshopper …

When you look at the world and relationships through the ROI eyes they come back to bite you in the butt at the most inopportune time. Thankfully, you’re neither an ant nor a grasshopper, but you do have a choice of one to model your business and your work ethic around.

Now that most of the home data is sitting safely on the Windows Home Server it’s time to think backup strategy. It’s called a strategy for a reason – disaster is not something you want to experience but it’s an absolute certainty that it will happen so you plan.

Our truely precious family data (mostly financials, documents and pictures) are stored on Own Web Now’s enterprise storage network, that thing is never going to disappear. Until now I also used MozyHome backup service, although highly amateur and frankly substandard form of offsite backup by any measure, you cannot beat backing up a few TB of raw video and mp3’s for $55 a year. Worked fine on the workstations.

However, we’re in file server land now at Casa De Vlad, and that means backing up the server. So I tried Mozy. Woops:

Mozy doesn’t support Windows Home Server. It does not even support file shares (presumably for this very reason) so no way of running it off a workstation to backup Windows Home Server file shares. Now MozyPro supposedly does the file server backup but at $0.50 / GB, I’m more inclined to trust OWN for twice the cost. So Mozy, bye, bye.

But I figured I’d try out something in the meantime. There is already a Jungle Disk Online Backup add-in for Windows Home Server which uses Amazon S3 for the storage backend. Fair enough, giving that a shot right now. It is horribly slow but…

…. but I live in Florida and I need a backup I don’t have to maintain. No tapes, no USB drives, no burning CD’s. I just want it to pick my important data and let me have access to it when Florida sinks into the ocean or gets blown over into Mexico as a result of the latest hurricane. If I wake up in the middle of the night and the house is on fire I am not running to the Home Server, I’m sacking the dog, water bowl and getting the hell out of here. And as my place is burning to the foundation, or waterfront propery on the Gulf of Mexico, or someone robbed the house, or it just turns out to be my unlucky day in the lightning capitol of the world that is under tornado warning as I write this blog post…. Lucy better be hanging out with my stuff. (If you get the Lucy reference you are way too old. So old Susan Bradley is pulling up the bands of her era from a dusty encyclopedia talking about the British Invasion)

Life with the Windows Home Server is pretty sweet. Today we spent the afternoon streaming Die Hard 4.0 from Windows Home Server to the Xbox in the living room. Katie spent the morning listening to the MP3 streams from the same.

P.S. I also owe Katie an apology for the blog earlier this week when I implied she only uses the Xbox to stream MP3’s. She reminded me that she also has two blogs, that she remained married to me even after I installed Office 2007 on her PC, that she emailed Karl while driving around the other day and I added “and you text around on your Blackjack all the time” to which she replied: “I don’t text, I email! SMS? What am I, some sort of an animal?”

Many of you wrote in (vlad@vladville.com) with questions about the home server hardware I chose after my last Windows Home Server post. Terry Walsh also discussed moving his home server around and the Windows Home Server Blog recently talked about the new OEMs working on WHS solutions so I figured I might as well share what went into mine. Now keep in mind that this is what I went with, the options are there for your consideration and guidance but your choice should ultimately fit your lifestyle and your desired use of this server.

First of all, let me say that you buy computer hardware when its a good deal, not when you need it. Mega warehouses like NewEgg, Tiger Direct and others have blockbuster deals when they are expiring models or just have a few items in stock and you can get gear ridiculously cheap. But that doesn’t help you much, what if you wanted Windows Home Server under the Christmas tree and wanted something affordable and scalable? Get ready to bleed, tight cases ahead:

The Case

Don’t be fooled, Windows Home Server is all about the case. Moreso, it is about the right case for you! Is this server going to sit in your living room? In your home office? Above the washer & dryer? Garage? This is a lifestyle choice, one that can go horribly wrong if you choose to get a PowerEdge 2950 rackmount server cooled by an airplane jet engine and stick it under your TV. Likewise, there will be a temptation to get an HTPC case, so it can blend in with your entertainment gear, good choice until you realize most those cases come with two hard drive slots at best and will make a complete eyesore of your living room once you start daisy chaining external storage devices.

My Windows Home Server will be living under my TV next to my Xbox. So for my intents and purposes I chose a small form factor mini-tower barebones from ASUS. There are several really important reasons for this:

BIOS Fan Control - ASUS BIOS comes with intelligent and configurable fan control, meaning I can set the server to run as quietly as humanly possible to fit into my living room. Likewise, if I were ever to do any maintenance I could speed the fan up and work at 100% without fear that my system would melt.

Front expansion slots - This server has enough room to hold two 3.5″ hard drives and two 5.25 slots. So if you need four drives in your system you can get 3.5″ mounting brackets for $2.

PCI expansion slots - Most small format cases are very deceptive about the expansion slots that are built in. For example, some will mention multiple slots like 2x PCI and 1x PCI-e but what they don’t mention is that they tend to overlap. I needed at least two slots, one for the wireless network controller and one for the storage controller.

My choice: ASUS V3-P5V900 Intel Socket T(LGA775) Intel Core 2 Duo / Pentium D / Pentium 4 VIA P4M900 2 x 240Pin VIA Chrome9 Barebone currently retailing for $124. This system includes the case and the motherboard with integrated video, audio, gigabit ethernet and a somewhat lousy storage controller. Whenever possible you should avoid built in / integrated SATA controllers, especially when they are SATA-1 (150). Basically, for $124 you’re just left looking for processor, ram and hard drive, all of which are very subjective.  This case is just over 14 inches high 7 inches wide so make sure you measure your entertainment center if thats where it is going. I chose a mini-tower / small form factor PC because I figured the storage demands would grow and the easiest way to expand the storage capacity is to attach those external RAID enclosures with their own power supply. They are roughly the same size as this case. Also, the CPU fan exhaust is on the left so make sure there is ample room there for hot air to be blown out. (feng shui tip: if you nail this against wall/wood/metal/glass on the left it will pack the heat back over the CPU and subject your system to overheating and fire, or in feng shui: super very extra bad!) Cost: $124.

The Processor, The Memory, The Hard Drive

You can be as cheap or as fancy as you want here. This system comes with two DDR2 slots and socket 755 which can hold anything from a low end Celeron that can be obtained for less than $50 in a retail package with fan & heatsink all the way up to multicore Core 2 Duo processors. Memory runs at 667 MHz and can hold two slots for total of 4GB.

I went with a rather conservative setup. For the processor I picked Intel Pentium E2160 Allendale 1.8GHz 1MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor because it was the cheapest dual core processor. Cost: $82. For the memory I went with just 1GB DDR2 module WINTEC AMPO 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Desktop Memory Model 3AMD2667-1G2-R, again cheapest possible match on the clock and comes with the heat spreader. Cost: $19. Finally, the hard drive: Western Digital Caviar SE WD5000AAJS 500GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive. Cost: $99.

The storage issue is the biggest swinging point. Do you go with 1 TB or two 500GB? Do you assume this will be the sole storage point of all your precious digital media (in which case you’re buying double for redundancy) or is this simply a backup point (in which case the bigger the better)? How many people and at what frequency will the data be accessed (buffer size, storage architecture, etc). The choice is yours.

The Storage Controller

This is probably more important than all of the above: storage controller. This is the piece that assures your data integrity, storage scalability and the storage selection to begin with. The case I chose came with 1 IDE and 2x SATA1 (150) ports. Aside from CD/DVD drive, I would not rely on those ports for storage. Onboard controllers have a staggeringly high failure rate and once that fails you may as well throw the entire system away.

I chose the SYBA SD-SATA2-2E2I PCI-X SATA II Controller Card controller for a few reasons: price, convenience, expansion. For under $40, this is hardly a gamble when it comes to storage. Second, it comes with two SATA-2 (3 GB/Sec) ports so my data will fly. Second, and most important, this gives you two eSATA ports. I can use this in the future if I need to provide additional storage or if I want more highly redundant storage - RAID 10 anyone? I am not a fan of USB hard drives, so for me this was a must. Cost: $40.

Accessories & Extras

I would not consider these to be essential but I wanted to give you an idea of what else went into it. I was not sure if this server would live in the living room, home office, or somewhere without Ethernet connectivity. So I got a wireless controller GIGABYTE GN-WP01GS IEEE 802.11b/g PCI Wireless. Cost: $16. Even though my retail processor came in with thermal compound of its own, I always replace it with something more appropriate for Florida weather: Arctic Silver. Cost $6. Finally, a copy of Windows Home Server software.

Conclusion

For a little less than the HP MediaSmart server (on sale for $599) I got a heck of a lot more for the grand total of $559, with more RAM, faster processor, expandable storage and components that I can swap as I please. Extra storage of 500GB would have cost $99, 1TB for $270. Extra memory would be $19 for 1GB, $36 for 2GB extra sticks. Total cost: $559. Not bad!

Sometimes it takes me a while to figure out the value in certain things. I’m so inundated with stuff that I almost subscribe to the mantra that everything is crap until it proves otherwise. I remember that, after giving Twitter a brief look I proclaimed it to be:

“Twitter: Your lack of social skills, documented.”

I stand by that remark, it was made in the context of the majority of the subscribers which happen to belong to and/or first adopted by the MySpace generation. Really, I don’t care where you’re having lunch today, where you found a Wii, how long the line at Fantasmic is, or that you just saw someone wipe out on I-4. Really, I don’t.

On the other hand, Twitter has some relatively cool features that have caused me to take a second look, particularly given the nagging. First, it can be updated from anywhere, using anything (well, apparently except T-Mobile) including SMS, Vista Sidebar gadget, web, etc. It is lightweight, realtime, and allows for private updates – that is, my lack of life is not broadcast to the Internet at large, just the people that subscribe to my feed.

So how could this potentially ever be useful you may ask? I work with about 200–300 people on a daily basis, give or take. Quick look at what they are doing is very important (and valuable) to me. For example, is anyone cool coming to Orlando that I can take to dinner? Anyone working on something that I need? What is everyone up to internally, are any fires burning that they are talking about but not letting us know? Did the earthquake knock out our data center?

I generally just skim the Messenger taglines and see what folks are up to, but Messenger just shows the latest update and it is hard to update, it is only updated by people when they are at their desk instead of at the client, at the back of the data center, landing at LAX.. Here is what I am using:

I have a Twadget Vista gadget for the sidebar installed at work and on the laptop. I have my feed integrated into Vladville for my fans (pull up www.vladville.com look on the right hand side right under the SBS Show) using Alex King’s Twitter Tools slightly modified. And of course my Twitter is at http://twitter.com/vladmazek

So, I’m giving Twitter a second shot.. If you’ve got a Twitter account and you’re on my Messenger list drop it to me please…

Got this one in the email today:

Hi Vlad,

Love your blog! I don’t believe in the community stuff but you always brighten up my day and I would appreciate your advice. I started a blog for my business but my customers are not reading it. How did you get your customers to read yours?

Love that you don’t believe in the community but have no problem contacting me for free advice. That notwithstanding, it’s a good question. I don’t know that I am a good person to answer it, considering that I have not even been able to motivate my clients to read product documentation. Blogwise, it has allowed us to eliminate the advertising budget. So, here goes nothing:

There are a few harsh, ugly pieces of reality you have to come to terms with before you can get yourself in a frame of mind where your can make the kind of a blog that your clients will read much less agree to: You are not interesting. Given an option, your clients would replace you with a robot at best or Microsoft clippy at worst. Nothing about you is authorative or expert, you just fit into the economic tradeoff window between them doing it on their own or outsourcing it to indianinabucket themselves. Given the option of watching you struggle through the third-grader level writing skills or climbing onto their desk in high heels to sweep the dirt collected on their office fan, they would probably choose the latter.

Now that we’ve obliterated any sense of supposed literary expertise and industry insight you’ve deluded yourself into thinking you posses, let’s get back to the basics. Why did the clients hire you in the first place? If you don’t know, ask them. It could be that:
1. I was the cheapest
2. I was the most qualified for their niche / vertical
3. I seemed to address the problems they were having

Now, ask why they are still your clients, could it be that:
1. We rely on you to cut through the clutter of technical jargon
2. You are the most familiar person with our network, one of the family
3. Still the cheapest, and we don’t have to learn how to speak dot

It may seem like I threw in the “cheap” options just to insult you. No way. The amount of businesses that do not consider technology to be the vital core of their business far outnumbers the number of businesses that are willing to spend the immense amount of money required to get it right. In other words, there is a ton of money to be made trying to save people money than to take their money to build a castle they don’t need. Their money is still green, so why be ashamed of that? Why not be proud of the fact that you can make miracles happen on a tight technology budget?

That is called defining your key competence. Once you find your key competence, write about it. Remember that you are not an expert, you are just talking about what you do. It’s all common sense after all, but the lightbulb only goes off once someone shares that common sense with the person that is having a problem and not seeing the common sense solution to it.

Now you have this library of stories on a particular topic, now you are in Google, now you’re starting to establish yourself as someone that has spent more than 2 minutes thinking about what they do. Now you can claim to be an expert. It still doesn’t make you an expert but who is the judge of that? The tons of people that come to your blog and look at your insight of restating the obvious.

Now you’ve got a following. Now even the people that are not your customers are interested in working with you. Now you have your customers following your blog because you didn’t have to force them to come to it, they came to you because of your blog. Keep it up.

What about the ones that don’t want to read your blog? Make them. There are many creative, sneaky or outright weaselish through incompetence ways of doing it: I started posting documentation and tips on my blog because I lost the password to our web site and didn’t want to admit it. When people asked for some info, I sent them to our blog. They read, they subscribed, now they cannot get enough of it.

The overall success comes from balance. Balance of fact and opinion. Of freebies and commercial messages. It takes discipline, it takes time and the results are anything but immediate - but wow, are the results spectacular.

Last weekend we rolled out Office Communications server to go along with our existing Exchange 2007 and SharePoint infrastructure. What an awesome, awesome product. Unfortunately, bringing in IM on a wide-scale like this to the entire company calls for some rules and I need to play ball as well which means pruning a few hundred contacts out of my MSN contact list and keeping it business only.

I hope I don’t offend many of my friends and associates with this move, it’s not that talking to you is a giant waste of time, I just need to limit my corporate exposure to our clients only in much the same way that I wouldn’t take a personal cell phone and chitchat while people expected me to be working.

Anyhow, I hope you don’t take it personal. I will still read your email if you need to get in touch with me throughout the day!

P.S. If you’re paying us, you’re staying on the list. If we are paying you, you’re staying on the list. If you’re not paying us and we’re not paying you, you’re off the list. Update: If you are paying us and you don’t have any of us on your contact list but use MSN or AIM.. contact me and I’ll make sure we get you on.