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?

One thing that I find impressive about Las Vegas is that every time I go back it seems to be a different city. The expansion and buildout is just incredible.

People change too. A few years ago you would walk down the strip and bump into Mexicans handing out stripper callcards just a foot or two away from an evangelical Christian throwing profanities at people passing by in short skirts, warning about the end of time, cause thats what Jesus would have done. The crazy Jesus guy has been replaced by the Ron Paulbots, which appear more mindless, antagonizing, insane and confrontational than even the Jesus guy ever was. The stripper mexicans are still there but they are looking more appropriate than ever.

But here are a few funny things. This was a convention going on at Mandalay Bay – PPAI. Promotional Products Association. This is a conference about SWAG! Huge too!

Then there was that other conference…

And finally, there was CES, perhaps the least impressive of the three. However, there was some funny stuff at the CES, courtesy of Microsoft:

This is a little childrens book that was given away as SWAG at Microsoft’s CES podium. As someone in our group mentioned, “Better get two, cause Windows Home Server won’t be around for long”, so I did. The book is just hilarious and I had to share the scans from it. “Big people have a server at the ‘office’. The ofice is a boring place where big people go and do boring things. Offices  are why big people get grumpy, and say bad words.” – Couldn’t have put it better myself, way to go WHS!

As a Microsoft fan, I have to admit, I was really downed by the whole experience. The Microsoft Zune section, which was huge, was damn near empty. The most exciting technology that people were gawking over was a table, at which a brilliant marketing person (yes, it is a double negative and it roughly translates to “moron”) pitched the table with the following feature of Microsoft Surface:

“So thats how you can learn more about the food and wine thats on your table.

But what if you wanted to be social? Here you can pull up your friends onli..”

Err, what about just talking to the people at your table? I guess thats in Surface 2.0. Talk about a divorcemaker. Can you imagine heading to a restaurant with your wife and in the middle of her story you start checking your email and the pr0n spam pops up at the same time as the 16 year old is putting food on your table? Now you’re being sued for alimony, sexual harrassment… Maybe Surface 2.0 could have a quick LawyerFinder hotspot, so you can immediately get representation from someone familiar with MS Surface.

Overall, the CES was very underwhelming. Frankly, major sections of it looked like Computer Pro shows that travel the country and sell offbrand broken/stolen second hand equipment to unsuspecting audiences at county fairs and third rate venues. CES did have better lighting tho. It also had about 200 booths selling carrying cases and stickers for your cell phone and iPod. The big crown of the event was the 150” Plasma TV. This thing was large, obscenely large, yet beautiful. The rest of the TVs… meh… They made them bigger and thinner. It was about as unpredictable as Steve Jobs wardrobe.

There was only one thing that really caught my eye for the most obscene, most useless invention ever that I just have to have it. They riced out a Corvette and put Saturn logos on it – four screens, one seat. Thats right, they destroyed a likely $60,000 car and put in a bunch of electronics but yanked the passenger seat.

Yay for progress!

The upcoming weekend, in no particular order:

• Organize the Microsoft UM/UC event in Orlando
• Bug hunt the bug fix release of ExchangeDefender
• Tape the buildout of the Hackintosh
• Post the Exchange 2007 SP1 screenshots and the new Activesync policy pushed to the device as a result; talk about new limits
• Draft the damn support portal code of conduct, internal or external.
• Hook up Xbox 360 to the Home Server
• Flash Katie’s phone
• Get a bigger grill

Now I realize there is going to be a bit of skepticism as I say this, given that its being posted at 1AM, but how organized is your life? In the long long ago, I would get my few hours of sleep and as soon as I got a chance to relax and close my eyes another idea would pop into my head. I’d run back to the office to try it just for a minute, and three hours later I was back in bed. Repeat.

I mentioned this bit of insanity/insomnia to Karl and he asked if I ever thought about keeping a notebook next to my bed to just write things down and then attack them in the morning.

That little bit of “why are you an idiot, Vlad?” has saved me a few years of life, a little bit of sanity and then some. And now I’m passing it on to you. Enjoy.

Go

Gators

It’s that time of the year… my wife (pictured below) goes on an excruciating month long journey of trying to find a present for me that I haven’t already bought.

So please comment… what would you like for Christmas? What are the geek essentials this year? (assume nothing from Apple because I don’t roll that way)