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.

So the other night Tim and I were hanging out watching the NBA playoffs and bringing Lucy Exchange online and my wife walked in on the following scene:

So, is the addiction to pornography a genetically dominant trait? It would appear so.

I’ve got 29 years on the kid and I’ve only progressed as far as getting rid of the diaper. It’s not as if that is some huge plus to begin with.

The look on my wifes face when she realized we’ve made another copy of me…. priceless.

So what kind of a Vlad am I?

The person with the most original comment/answer wins an iPod! Multiple answers allowed, contest not open to OWN employees/friends/family, ends Wednesday, March 19th.

Note to journalism majors: If you’re going to be a smartass with your titles, at least run them by Google to see if they have any double meanings. If you like your job, don’t do this at work. If you don’t, here is the first hit.

Poor Marissa..

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)

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.

I’ve been up since roughly 9 PM last night working on the Shockey Monkey service desk enhancements and so far the evening has been quite productive. I’d venture to guess that my output tonight has been greater than it has been over the past few days combined.

The secret to it is that practically nothing happens overnight. Nobody needs to talk to me urgently, no fires need to be put out, nobody needs to have a manual read out to them over the phone or over trouble tickets, there are no issues, nobody needs a quick minute or a quick meeting or a presentation or tickets to an event…

It’s just me and Benz, and an occasionally frightening episode of Coast to Coast to keep me awake.

Obviously, allnighters become exceedingly difficult the further you get away from college and to be honest, I’d rather take a 2 hour nap in the afternoon and trade it off for the 2 hours at the crack of dawn where I can actually focus and get stuff done.

This goes for any do not disturb task, it is nearly impossible to focus during the day with all the distractions and while I do have a sofa in my office I tend to sleep on it as I imagine I would on a bet of nails and broken glass - the moment my back touches it I jump back up - be it for the phone, forgetting to mute the sound and an IM coming through, not flagging the phone and Office Communicator in the DND mode… you name it.

So I have one question that I hope someone out there has figured out (come on Pablo!) - how do you effectively trade daytime nap hours for the midnight work hours? Is there a way to establish a long term sleep pattern that involves two sleep sessions in the 24 hour span? If so, whats your trick?