Just when you’re about to question whether humanity would be better off if Florida burned and sunk into the ocean, few good stories make me feel like we aren’t about to fall back into the stone age.

First, the Florida School Board decides that Evolution Must Be Taught. I am sure it was very hard for them (vote of 4 to 3) to decide that for the good of this country young minds need to be taught to reason and base conclusions on overwhelming observable evidence over blind faith in the invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster which created the entire universe after drinking heavily and created humanity by the touch of his noodly appendage. And while the school system will not consider these creationism theories yet, there may be other places to learn about creationism, like maybe one of millions of churches or Olive Garden restaurants (hey, don’t hate on my beliefs!)

But speaking of space, if you live in Central Florida today is a very exciting day. In about an hour you might get to hear the sonic boom of the space shuttle Atlantis coming down. Turn your head southwest:

And to top it all off, at 10:01 PM the total lunar eclipse starts, the last until December 2010!

God bless Florida. Perhaps today will be remembered as an investment in the future of Florida where we will have more kids growing up to be engineers trying to figure out how to solve problems instead of high school dropouts converting abandoned gas stations into churches claiming to have all the answers based on a 2,000 year old book. (Citation: State of Tennessee)

Earlier tonight I was chatting with a friend of mine and we were comparing and contrasting some of the truly ridiculous individuals in our business. Such total outright whores that pretend to be one thing but the money trail reveals them to be nothing other than shills for anyone with a check. On one hand, we have people that have been successful in the business, share what they think will improve their community, but aren’t shy to stick the barcode forward and ask to be compensated for the content that has been thought through, organized, delivered in a consumable way (Karl, Erick, Dana). On the flip side, we have people that pretend to be like that but when you scratch the surface you only get the infomercial. I have made my dislike for those pretty open. My friends advice?

“Forget about them, they don’t matter.”

True. However, when everyone agrees not to say anything, when everyone just turns their back onto the unsuspecting public getting screwed, when everyone is a closet hero that is mad, tired as hell, and not going to take it anymore… okay, well, maybe just a little bit more… okay, well, never mind.. that dear friends is how the people get empowered and allowed to continue until the only thing that is left is them and people to aspire to be like them. 

Now, friends, it doesn’t matter who I’m talking about, it doesn’t matter if it’s in IT, it doesn’t matter if it is happening or not – in order to be right with yourself, your community, your world and be able to sleep at night you need to be able to distance yourself from the herd, think for yourself, and when something bothers you do something about it.

Thats what the blogs, podcasts, video blogs, conferences, group meetings, peer get-togethers, peer chats, 2AM IM sessions on the toilet and being a decent human being are all about. Thats why I encourage people to blog, to speak, to lead. Enough crap has gotten by, IT or otherwise, when the few agreed behind the closed doors not to discuss the problems in hope to save face and the trouble that might ensue if they made their thoughts known.

Remember, you are entitled to nothing and you have everything you deserve. If you strive for more, well, it takes some courage. And it won’t win you a Miss Congeniality award either, but maybe, just maybe, you’ll leave this place a little bit better than you found it.

More on this tomorrow from a very special guest on Vladcast #12.

Over the past two years all the buzz in the SMB has been about conferences, new products, managed services.

This year, not so much. Few folks have covered their intentions to hit the NOLA conference, which would be the only one I would attend this year if I wasn’t expecting to be a daddy that week. Not a heck of a lot of chatter about Vista SP1 which is just around the corner. And the Windows Server 2008 launch that is just about a week away almost doesn’t exist in the minds of the SMB tech world. Ditto about the managed services, for some an afterthought for others a long time way of doing business.

So if the SMB world is not caught up with the new product launches, disafected by the conference sprawl, service packs, beta testing, MSPish stuff… what is everyone up to?

The big thing of 2008 is the apparent consolidation of offerings. Nobody I have talked to in the past two months has even noticed a slowdown, it’s actually the level of growth and adoption of managed infrastructure that is making people not look at the conferences and other out of office activities (though I’m sure the perenial disappointments of SPF Nation and people pouncing on the blood may have something to do with it). New names are showing up as employees of my long time partners, order flow in Feb is yet again the largest it has ever been, people are knocking the door down asking for more.

So what’s up?

Be it through managed services or just geeks becoming better businessmen and women, SMB appears to be consolidating around the things that work and seeking out the more profitable solution over the more flashy and hyped one. People seem to be unplugging more crap, testing less betas, participating less and focusing on their own a little more. Who seems to be winning out? Hard to say, you never know who is telling the truth. However, judging by the growing employee counts and orders it seems the pureplay MSPs are maintaining or stagnating while the people with a wider focus are growing – guys with expertise in security, VoIP specialists, portal designers, financials.. Basically shops that are more than just workstation-server types appear to be getting the most clients.

So to those of you that are wondering about why there seems to be so little happening in the way of Server 2008, Vista SP1, Conferencing, MSP and overall chatter.. successful folks have their mind on their money, money on their mind and all the extracurricular bullshit just doesn’t seem to make more money. About as raw and honest as I can put it.   

I need to adjust my public contact information ahead of some very important releases, both commercial and philanthropic. In a nutshell I want to make myself a little more available and offer a guaranteed response. So here we go:

Public Email: vlad@vladville.com

Public IM: vlad@vladville.com on MSN/Live Messenger, vlad@vladville.com on Google Talkr

I will be answering email as well as chat Monday through Friday, 1 PM through 4 PM EST which is GMT -5. If you do not get a response from me within 24 hours please send the message again.

This is for the Vladville, Shockey Monkey, SMB Buddy, SBS Show, Orlando ITPRO stuff only.

This is not meant for corporate affairs or business-related communication, all such mail will be promptly deleted. If you do want to talk business then please contact me on my business email address and IM which I am at 24/7/365, no farther than 2 feet away from something that receives email, voicemail, phone calls or chat requests. Keep in mind that I am not tech support but if something needs to be brought to my attention, please do so. Again, 24 hour response or resend. If it takes 3 days and you still get no response I have died. Say a prayer for me. Pour a bit out of a 40oz for me homie. If I appear to have died but am still somehow blogging, posting on forums, you hear my voice on the podcasts or video, it’s more likely that I am alive and you happen to be a spammer that can’t make it into my inbox. Pick up the phone, hire the “Jesus Loves You” plane and spray your phone number over downtown Orlando or Disney World, try smoke signals, HAM radio… Hate mail gladly accepted at my PR Agents office, Tim Barrett & Co now serving angry Vladville readers worldwide.

Marketing oneself is a very suttle thing. You don’t need to wear a striped suit with question marks all over it and yell at the TV for people to pay attention to you. You don’t even need to read every Seth Godin book to become someone that people want to get stuff from. Sure, if all else fails you can always wear a hot pink shirt and throw on a purple pimp hat c/o Erick Simpson, but really the life is much simpler than that:

Have something interesting to say.

Make it easy for people to listen to you.

I’ve gone through an interesting week of public criticism over how my company sells software. Everything is a learning experience. But let’s say you’re not selling anything and you don’t need to build a moat around your business. Let’s say you just want people to pay attention. How do you do that? Well, first you put up a blog. But second… you make it easy for the people that read blogs to actually read your blog.

Here are a few blogs I read that you don’t. With the way they hide their feeds you’d almost think they are trying to hide in the crowd. Here are the links to their RSS feeds:

Wayne Small

Andy Goodman

Mark Crall

Get your feed on.

Fired from Yahoo!? Looks like the entire Yahoo Design Team is gone!

If that includes you and you have familiarity with jQuery and ExtJS I’d like to talk to you. Please let me know if you’re looking for a job in UI.

Today is a bittersweet day at Casa de Vlad. On one hand, I am stoked that yet another product of mine is going worldwide as a commercial success. On the other hand, it’s deployment is guided by a political/trade compromise that is very hard for me to take.

I have made my dislike of a certain subcontinent and what its done to the American economy a subject of frequent parodies on this blog. Today, the shoe is on the other foot, and America, the land of the free, is no longer a place trusted by the businesses or citizens outside of USA. Captain’ Chokes on Pretzels and the Patriot Act have made our neighbors to the north hesitate to store data in USA. European Union actually has laws requiring notification when the personally identifiable data is stored on servers in America. Yup, the land of the free is not good enough for the privacy laws. Australia and NZ are trated like distant cousins crashing the family dinner and being asked to pay for their meals - the cost of bandwidth down under is nothing short of unreal (think US cell phone data while roaming).

So today, as the servers are being prepared and shipped to Sydney and London, I do so with a very heavy heart. Not that I am a stranger to the world of global commerce, but this move is not to create a globally redundant network, it is being made to appease the foreign governments and admit (with my money) that we are no longer the #1 most desireable country to host data. Sucky feeling.

Not all bad news, there is a little saving grace in Shockey Monkey’s promise back to the community that helped build it – that it will be hosted in the countries that helped  put it together. At Shockey Monkey 2.0 launch we will have a home in Dallas, Los Angeles, London and Sydney. Worldwide monkey domination

The other day Apple pushed up the 10.5.2 upgrade, which meant another exciting day of hacking around the Mac to figure out how it works. I’ve blogged about building the hackintosh, upgrading it to 10.5.1, and here is how you move to 10.5.2:

1. First download the 10.5.2 dmg from Apple.
2. Open up terminal and su to root: sudo -s
3. Execute the following command and let the process work in the background while you launch the installer: while sleep 1; do rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext; done
4. Proceed with the installation, when its done it will give you an option to reboot the system. Don’t. Go to the terminal and end the process above by hitting CTRL+C.
5. Type: sudo nano /System/InstallAtStartup/scripts/1
6. Replace the text “Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext” with “dsmos.kext” (it is towards the bottom of the file.
7. Reboot and at the boot manager screen press any key and pass -s flag to boot in the single user console mode.
8. Type: /sbin/fsck -fy
9. After it’s done reboot and you’ll be in Mac OS X 10.5.2

If you neglect to do steps 7 and 8 your system will reboot into the grey spinner screen and be stuck at it forever.

Other Notes

Don’t install the Leopard Video Driver Updates, they really break a lot of stuff. Also, Leopard 10.5.2 feels a LOT slower than 10.5.1 at least in my limited use of the PC as a digital picture frame.

I still find MacOS X to be a fairly useless as a platform in general. You can only launch a single instance of an application (not kidding) which means you can only run one copy of Firefox or one copy of terminal. This is incredibly limiting for any actual use beyond hobbyist that works on one thing at a time (or has plenty of time to keep on launching additional windows or from the terminal) - so while it can launch multiple windows, they all still run under the same instance - and when that instance bails, so does everything else.

However, it is SSSOOO pretty! (written with a lisp and a limp wrist flip)

Last Friday I recorded a podcast on motivation and forcing yourself to get stuff done. Unless you’re a totally disaffected screwup, self-motivation is easy. The reality of the situation is that even though it takes only takes you to motivate you, everyone else is working against you trying to throw you off your course.

I was complaining to my wife this morning about not being able to take care of anything yesterday because I spent my time dealing with bs and being completely distracted by crap. Crap can consume you, when your desk is completely clear of crap you actually go out to seek it out. So my dear wife, six months pregnant, was sitting there patiently waiting for me to lean closer to the dashboard so she can slam on the brakes and throw my whiny ass through the windshield.

“What the fuck happened to me?”

I used to be able to watch 16 hours of taped classes the night before a midterm and ace a two hour test in under 30 minutes.

Then I realized that my entire day yesterday broke down into about an hour of actual work and about 5 hours of bull that I should not have gotten myself into to begin with.

Here is what I actually believe in: I have this tremendous mountain of partners, friends, associates, helpers and my 9-5 (well.. 8-1 really) ought to be filled with trying to get them the most out of what they do with us and work on the things they actually need. I’m fortunate to give a crap so people tell me all the time what they can use to be even better. I was talking about all this last night with the bar none most supportive partner I have. I always feel like I owe this guy something, and I outright told him he ought to get paid for what he does. His response was: “I am paid.”

“I am paid… the more resellers that you have the more profits, the more monkeys that you can hire, which makes the product better, and makes my life easier / better / more profitable”

He is not alone in that sentiment, nearly everyone I talk to that is already paying me wants to pay me more. All day, every day, I get people on my doorstep just waiting to give me money for something I can do for them. That’s what keeps me going.

But there is this one thing about me, which I blame my parents for, that at the very core of things I am a nice guy and I hate to see people get screwed. I hate to see people waste their time, get blatantly lied to, mislead, disrespected and not valued for what they do. So I spend my time, which in terms of fiduciary duty I ought to be spending on my business and my clients and my blog and my readers and my podcasts that people not just love but make their livelihood on, banging my head against the things that will never change, helping the people that would love nothing more than to see me fail. Why, why, why?

Truth is, no matter where you are and who you are, people will have no respect for you or your time when they have stuff to get done. They will burst into your office, wardial your phone, email you every 2 minutes in between sending SMS messages to you. Why? Because they have to get stuff done and in some way you stand in the way of it.

So today… I am trying something new. In about a week I’ll update you on my progress and see if I get anything more out of my few hours of work a day.

Ever feel like you’re at the odds with the world and your streak of bad luck just doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to end? Tough day? Feeling bad for yourself?

Well, get over it. No matter how bad your life may be, you’re just a youtube.com click away from finding out just how truly bad it can possibly get. Here is some optimistic advice for you that I motivate my troops with: “Dude, trust me, it gets a LOT worse than this!”

Tends to work. Maybe overly pessimistic, but lets face it, if you’re around long enough you get your share of the shit.. Just ask El Savior Christ:

Let me ask again: Tough day? When they throw you up on the cross, build a statue of you and that statue gets hit by the lightning… then you get to complain.

In the meantime, back to the cage monkey.

Gotta keep stuff in perspective… It’s not easy, but I bet you tons of people would love to be in your shoes and face your problems. Think about how horrible life could truly be. Imagine if you were an OSU fan! There, there, see, life is not *that* horrible.