Yesterday ExchangeDefender posted the biggest month both on revenue and profits. ExchangeDefender is booming thanks to Essentials ($0.50/user/month), the cloud is taking off with our premium offering that will include Lync (launch in May) and to be honest I’d love nothing more than to sit at home, stay on my diet and train for my Ironman. But instead (woe is me) I have to wake up at 3AM to go on a business trip.

This is somewhat a matter of perspective. Yes, I’d love to sleep in. But…

I am going on a one-day trip to Las Vegas. I will be back home in time for dinner tomorrow.

Over the next few hours I get to hang out with a bunch of our partners and figure out what we can do better. I don’t have to work. I don’t have to put up a booth or stand in it for hours.

I’m going to hang out with my Aussie friends that also do a ton of business with us. We’re going out to eat at a place that I hope looks like my garage in a few years. Then we’re going to see “O” at Bellagio. And somewhere along that way we get to figure out how to perfect our business down under.

This is my life.

Whatever the f I’ve done to deserve this.. I wish I knew it so I could do it all the time and never go to sleep.

Whatever it is that causes any of you reading this message to do business with us, thank you. We’re continuing to build kickass products and services and take them to the next level around the world.

Every day is a little bit better than the previous one. Every day I’m glad to open my eyes and go to work. 3AM or 9AM or noon.

I know we don’t say thank you often enough… so whatever it is that I do that you like and follow.. from ExchangeDefender to Shockey Monkey to Looks Cloudy to my Facebook or Twitter… Thank you.

Recently I wrote a blog post detailing some gear we use for large scale data backups (“How do you backup a ton of stuff?”)

So here is what I’m looking at: Giant RAM drive.

The workstation-class system with 24 GB RAM is under a grand.

Solid server-grade stuff from Dell with 32 GB RAM is $1683. Double the RAM and the price nearly quadruples. But that’s Dell.

The idea of running a primary database or an entire system virtualized on a ramdisk has a huge appeal. We run a lot of stuff in a ramdisk to make a more responsive experience and with the replication to more reliable stuff it makes for an awesome solution.

So what do you think, have you had to build something beefy? I know the easy way is to just go to SSD but the performance is really not the same.

Not really related to anything in the technology field, but just how often do the little things get to you? To me – very often. Mostly because my entire job is on the polar opposites – I set the company direction for years in advance and I also get to deal with the littlest of details because that’s what sets us apart and makes sure we’re not “just like everyone else out there.”

Living an actual (non-professional) life with those qualities is tough.

Stuff that would not even be noticed by a normal person just.. gets.. to you.

Earlier today, I got back home to find that our trash hasn’t been picked up.

We pay a @#% in taxes to a village (I don’t live in “Orlando”) that does relatively little.

Compared to real cities with mass transit, etc this place is pathetic.

So when we pay such a premium, is it unreasonable to expect the city to pick up the trash and not leave half of it in the trash can? I think so.

But it’s all in how you handle it.

My first thought was to take the remaining trash and go huck it at the city hall. Pro: brief moment of satisfaction. Con: I’d have to drive with trash in my car, throw it at a place when it’s closed.

My second thought was to take the trash to the actual department that handles this, leave it there and ask if it’s too much to expect to have it picked up every week or if I should just keep on bringing it back to the counter and leaving it there? Pro: brief moment of satisfaction and abuse. Con: trespassing, littering, court time, more penalties, etc.

My final thought that I actually went with: Close the garbage lid and thank god I’m not a garbage man. Pro: I walk into my house. Con: Da man wastes my tax money.

For the most part, many things you do will not affect you a lot a year from now. Losing your temper/patience (or taking calls from people that will do so) is worth deferring and ignoring. My buddy Karl says you shouldn’t work with people you don’t like. My buddy Andy Goodman only works with his friends. Both make a very good point: Life is a lot nicer when you can be thankful for being better off than the people that try to screw you.

This is only going to be funny / amusing if you’re a nerd. You’ve been warned.

We recently built in a web filtering solution as a part of ExchangeDefender. It’s agent based, free and has over 80 categories that you can selectively drop connectivity to as a matter of corporate policy. Well, Hank was playing with it today and blocked all the “Ad” sites which would redirect all the requests to ad content to our nasty-grammed web site. Take a look at what that did to the Instant Messenger window.

Instant branding baby

P.S. If you’re wondering what’s new here, we’re hard at work at adding OTP / two factor authentication to ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey. If you’d like to test it, open a support request and ask to be put in the dev queue for OTP. You have to either have an RSA SecurID token, an AuthAnvil token or for our free OTP/2FA an iPhone/iPod Touch 3 with access to iTunes.

There has been a lot of conversation about the FCC regulations as of late and since now my Inbox is piling in with questions and comment requests I guess I’ll address it in public.

I feel the FCC established these guidelines to help the general public (idiots) and discourage the business models that have been built online to deceive the public. There are endless blogs that are nothing more than paid third party infomercials for products that the manufacturers paid for. That’s like me writing a check to all of my IT community buddies and asking them to write an independent review of ExchangeDefender in exchange for $500.

To me, it seems pretty simple. If you’re taking money or discounts or $ under the table and promoting the heck out of them, disclose the sponsorship and move on.

As for the long arm of the law overreaching again, the government turning into a dictatorship that’s clamping down on free speech, Obama trying to censor the Internet, etc, please see the following site for instructions.

Disclosure: Reynolds Wrap and Alcoa are not sponsors of Vladville. I however fully endorse their product.

One of the favorite staff catchlines around OWN offices is: “Call now, because we can’t do this all day” patented by that annoying guy from ShamWow! infomercials.

You can’t make this stuff up. In a story titled “ShamWow Pitchman Beats Hooker to the Punch” TMZ explains how the ShamWow! guy beat the hooker up because she was biting his tongue and would not let go:

“Shlomi began kissing the hooker when she allegedly “bit his tongue and would not let go.”

“According to cops, Shlomi then punched the prostitute several times until she released his tongue. Both the prostitute and Shlomi were arrested for felony aggravated battery.”

And of course, it happened in Miami.  Here is some more stuff data.

As one of the guys noted, upon review of the page above, the price seems steep. $1000 for that? Who comes up with hooker valuation models? In the event that the service delivery does not go as expected, what is the proper protocol for remediation of john-hooker disputes? Assuming that the pimp is the agent of the hooker he can’t be trusted to deliver a fair verdict, so is that disclosed during the sales process as one party waives it’s rights? So many questions. Another employee noted that hookers carry diseases so you need to make sure they don’t create any open wounds. I learn something new every day.

This is why I work in an executive office far, far away from you people

Why is it that we like to bitch and complain about the way things are but are completely unwilling to change our circumstances? If that’s not bad enough, why is it that so many people expect someone else to swoop in and solve all their problems?

It doesn’t work like that. Unless you are really, really stupid, have no memory and are willing to believe everything you hear. Note to self: Start a presidential campaign donation box with Paypal. This need to believe that it’s someone else’s fault, that someone else needs to fix things… it’s so ridiculously powerful. Eight years ago this country had a surplus and we elected a guy who promised change, end to partisanship and had jack worth of experience. But this time around it’s going to be all different, because the dude is black, cause that makes a difference you know. That’s the change we can believe in! And we’re back to getting exactly what we deserve, case and point:

I’m waiting in the line at McDonalds and watching CNN cover the “War on the middle class: Driving down the wages” and they spotlight breaking news from two months ago about Nielsen firing 7% of their Florida workforce. Here is the funny part: Not only are these geniuses losing their jobs to 2-bit Indian script readers, but in order to receive their severance pay and benefits they have to train the previously mentioned Indians to do their job!

Talk about your daily dose of humility. Not only are you losing your job, but you get to train your replacement – in another country! Nielsen, who ironically enough is not an American-owned company to begin with but part of a Dutch conglomerate, is saying that it is making the move in order to remain competitive in the global commerce environment. Business is business, bitches, but what do the pundits say?

“This is a part of the large scale agenda to eliminate the middle class and drive down the wages in America to the point that everyone is poor. They (Microsoft and Google leading the list) are begging for more H1-B VISA applications which have gone to the low-wage labor instead of highly technical competent labor, in a large effort to – you’ve guessed it, drive down the wages. We are being systematically reduced to lower and lower paying jobs while more and more of our labor goes overseas and more immigrants are invited in to commoditize middle-class areas of professional services like technology but also legal, finance and media!” To the gaypile!

Phew. Thank god. Just in time too, now I don’t have to study for my Windows 2008 technical certifications because some damn Injun is going to go stand in the line and take it before I do. You’ve guessed it, I am blaming Vijay for coming to America on July 5th and thats why I am not going to be training or taking the test. Phew, that saved me a lot of time. Pass the Cheetos.

Excuse me sonny..

Now that I’m done with my brief moment of insanity – go to the article please. What kind of rocket science were these 400+ now former Nielsen employees doing that the big evil company fired them? You’ve guessed it, they were conducting annoying interviews!!!!! They probably got replaced by a Celeron-powered Trixbox! Among the sob stories: 85 year old Rae Elliott, 79 year old Rose Schulz, 71 year old Bill Georgius.

When asked “If I look for a job, will you give me a reference?” the company responded with “Number of years worked and your position” – which only shows just how long its been since both the person and the reporter thought that bit was relevant – legally an employer is not allowed to say anything else!!!

The kicker? While some roles are being outsourced, most of the job cuts are because the company has figured out a way to be more efficient. They shocked the monkey!

Damn Vijay

There is a prevailing thought in this country not just that it’s someone elses fault that we’ve become complacent, uneducated and outdated, but that jobs are going to uneducated third world countries to fight a war on American middle class. As soon as the wages are low enough, those jobs are going to come right back to the good ol’ US o A.

Umm, no, not likely.

You see, while waiting at McDonalds for the future outsourcing victim of global economy to get me my wifes double cheeseburger I noticed that the menu nearly quadrupled since the last time I looked at it and there is the same amount of people behind the cash register. They somehow managed to get a bistro and a Starbucks into a McDonalds without doubling the braindead drones?

You remember when they used to put a cup on the soda machine and select small, medium, large and supersized button and it would automatically cut off when the cup was filled up? Guess what Jimbo? They did er in! There is no more selection tray with ice underneath – it’s now done by a robot on a rotary mechanism that takes the order from the cash register, drops down the correct size cup into the rotating cylinder underneath which automatically dispenses the ordered beverage and ice option.

That’s right, demotivator comes true: If a pretty picture and a cute saying is all that takes to motivate you, you likely have a very easy job. The kind that robots will be doing soon!

So, we want cheap Japanese cars. We want cheap goods at Walmart. We don’t mind cheap services rendered by kids that should be learning Calculus instead of pulling a double shift at Best Buy. We treat business as a business.

But when that same behavior bites us in the ass we want to blame someone else. Personally, I blame Vijay. But I’m not a fool, I am not resting on just blaming Vijay and waiting for Obama to come rescue me. I am working on products and services like Shockey Monkey that eliminate the need for the people to do the automated tasks to begin with.

Is it a war on middle class? No, it’s a war on stupidity and mediocrity and just because you benefit from things being broken it doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there trying to fix the problem and put you out of work. The message being: evolve or die trying.

A very tough message for the IT industry to learn – your occupation may not be eliminated because of some personal gripe – it just might be that your occupation exists solely due to a shortcoming in the technology which is about to get fixed.

Stay on the edge or… well, seems like even flipping burgers is not going to be much of an option.

I thought long and hard whether to post this or not. It’s not for the faint of heart, even compared to the usual fun and gun quality of 3rd grade abomination of the English language you find on Vladville. Proceed with caution..

I should learn not to talk smack about people when I live in Florida. I think even Chris Rue can make fun of Florida over this one. Not really a surprise that Florida doesn’t outlaw beastiality, considering how many people Mickey Mouse has grabbed by the ears and rode them like a $3 ho on the corner of Main St. all the way to the empty wallet

Come to Florida and go to Disney World. Meet Mickey Mouse!!!

Oh, don’t creep up behind Goofy or Pluto, they are still a little sore.

Classy, eh? Now to the fun that FSU people have in Tallahassee:

The Sunshine Beastiality State

A blind Tallahassee man has been accused of having sex with his guide dog. Florida, like many other states, has no bestiality statute – that is, a law specifically prohibiting sexual contact between humans and animals.

Alan Yoder, 29, originally was charged with felony animal cruelty, but court records show that charge was dropped on July 8 and replaced with a misdemeanor – disorderly conduct.

Yoder now is charged with a “breach of the peace, by engaging in sexual activity with a guide dog,” according to a court document.

Assistant State Attorney Stephanie Usina, said she could not answer specific questions, including explaining why the charge was lowered to a misdemeanor.

James D. Varnado, Yoder’s attorney, said he has filed a not-guilty plea on his client’s behalf but declined to discuss details of the case.

“However lurid the allegations may be, we should resist a rush to judgment,” he said.

Here’s what happened, according to Tallahassee police reports:

Yoder, who lives in a local apartment complex, in June asked a female acquaintance to join him in a sex act with the dog, a male yellow Labrador named “Lucky.”

She demurred, but later told a friend about it. That person called a social worker, who called police.

Investigators spoke to Yoder on June 16, who admitted performing certain sex acts with the dog, even going into detail with them, but denied doing others. He was arrested and booked June 22, charged with animal cruelty.

An animal-control officer took the dog to Dr. Sondra Brown, a veterinarian at Northwood Animal Hospital, who could not determine whether the dog had been sexually abused.

—

Florida prosecutors have increased the charges against a blind man who is accused of raping his own guide dog. The change from misdemeanor to felony status came after animal welfare groups urged state officials to use a more serious rule, even though the Sunshine State has no law prohibiting sex with animals.

Alan Yoder, 29, was originally charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct, specifically a “breach of the peace, by engaging in sexual activity with a guide dog.”

But Assistant State Attorney Phil Smith said new witnesses have come forward, justifying felony charges of animal cruelty and injuring a guide dog, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.

“Enhancing the charges does not change the fact that Mr. Yoder is innocent,” James Varnado, Yoder’s attorney, told the paper.

Tallahassee police report Yoder admitted to performing sex acts on the animal and willingly gave up the animal before charges were adjudicated

This week, I will be eating lunch alone at Annies down the street. I intend to sit there by myself with a little paper notebook and brainstorm all the ways in which we suck as far as our organization is concerned. Basically, I want to try to take myself out of the OWN space and see what would piss me off about working with OWN.

Then I intend to take those items back, meet at 4PM and find a way to fix them before Jul 1. We’re coming up to a major rebranding (marketing) point and I want to make sure not to leave any stone unturned. We’ve received a ton of feedback since September of last year, we have stepped up the documentation and communication efforts which have been very well received, we’ve fixed tech support by getting rid of the top offenders and have been seriously working on addressing the issues with billing, portal, software and even licensing.

The key point being totally disconnected from it and forcing myself to lay it out without ability to actually do anything about it. No laptop, no cell, no PDA, just pen paper and some grilled chicken. The frequent downside to “fixing” things is that you focus on the solution and not the 18,000 other problems that are going to be caused by the change you’re about to make.

As always, will keep you up with how it changes / evolves.

P.S. On a flip side, another killer month on the books. We’re seeing a pickup of people going out of business and we’re seeing a tremendous pickup on the side of the people that have been reselling services across the board – Exchange, mail, web hosting, ExchangeDefender, offsite backup… While I will never wish any ill will towards anyone that disagrees with me, I have to say I find it rather amusing that the people that argued with me over the years over not wanting to resell hosting services as a part of a business model and instead focused on MSP & hours and projects and are now closing doors. “Vlad, what’s a few bucks here and there going to do for my bottom line? Nothing!!!!” Turns out people will stop funding projects, drop patching managed services but they won’t swallow thousands of messages piling up in their inbox or getting rid of their email or backups, who would have figured there would be a sustainable business model behind that. Keep on fighting the future and saying “My clients would never go for that”..

One of the personality faults I am still trying to work out of my engineering brain is that not all problems need a solution. Making a transition from a purely technical problem-solving personality to a CEO and someone that motivates the organization to get things done and remain agile is challenging, even more so as the number of cooks in the kitchen grows and number of problems to deal with grows exponentially.

Today I was calling in to place an order, a generic good that I can get anywhere. I struggled through the accent with someone that must have washed up on the coast of California yesterday and I wanted to pay with an Amex. They only took Visa and MasterCard.

Now, a few years ago I might have let that bother me, I might have asked if there was an alternate form of payment, if they had a discount if I gave them a less “consumer-friendly” card, etc. Today, I just politely thanked her and went to the next number on the list.

The beauty of choice, commodity and global markets is that you have a lot of choices. You have the right to have a preference, as much as they have a right to say “No, we will not do business with you under those circumstances” and you can either make things easy and capture every possible sale or draw a line in the sand and only do the kind do of business that you want to do.

In the end, I didn’t get upset, I got exactly what I wanted under the terms that I wanted and it didn’t distract me from the mission I set for myself today.

Hakuna Matata.