One of the readers emailed (vlad@vladville.com btw) to ask what it’s really like to be Vlad Mazek. Surely the post about working long hours can’t be real because nobody would believe that someone in my role would work that hard.

Believe it.

Look at any successful (and legal) company and you’ll find it is built on hard work in particular off the backs of the people on the very top of the org chart. I’m not talking about charlatans who sell fraudulent dietary supplements over the web and write books to inspire others to be worthless scammers in just 4 hours a week. I mean real companies, that have been around for years, with track record of building millionaires up and down the management chains.

Those folks work hard.

After giving my son a bath and rocking him to sleep around 9PM I hung out with my wife and watched Venture Bros for a little while. So after the whole day of out and about and working on the monkey, I took an hour or so to relax. Then at 11:15 PM I went to the airport to pick up Erick Simpson from Intelligent Enterprise, a highly respected MSP organization and a training firm and author and the list of credentials goes on. Four beers, two diet cokes and two bags of pretzels later, Erick and I compared notes on trends we see in the SMB space. Trends, business model changes, competitive landscape, opportunities, threats. We wrapped up at 3:18 AM.

In three hours I will be waking up to meet over breakfast with Stuart and Frank from SecureMyCompany, global leader in hosted Kaseya deployments.

After which I will go through the usual 9-5 day running the company that provides thousands of you with the services that make it possible to do your job.

Yup, that’s what a Sunday night to Monday morning, on three hours of sleep, looks like if you want to be successful.

Is this gratuitous self-promotion? You bet. But who do you think the customers pick and trust to run their IT? Companies that work hard, care and improve their offerings every day, or slackers that despite their lack of motivation and insurmountable demand for technical services managed to remain unemployed and employeeless but took a dozen vacations? 

Ask yourself what you are really spending your life doing and who you are serving. When you have some perspective then you can define your goals, your process and pave the way to the destination. Hint: It ain’t getting done in 4 hours a week.

It is no longer a surprise that iPhone absolutely destroyed Windows Mobile in nearly all categories, or that Blackberry has reincarnated from their lawsuit to become the most demanded business communications solution around. It is far less surprising to those of us that actually use, or rather put up with, the dinosaur that is Windows Mobile 6. I recently got two of the latest Windows Mobile 6 phones from AT&T and just how pathetic they are for some of what I would consider the most basic of mobile functions. No messenger, no ability to customize start menus, no ability to even set a homepage. No, I am not joking. And yes, a year from now when Windows Mobile 6.1 becomes commonplace, Microsoft will claim innovation and huge leaps in the software usability (in stealing the Cardfile UI that has been provided by Samsung for over a year on i600).  So frustrating.

However, this week is the MVP Summit and I’m always asked about how this and that gets done on the WM device so here are top three tricks to WM6 Standard:

Changing the homepage

If you didn’t purchase your phone directly from the manufacturer or Expansys, it was likely riddled with garbage links your carrier has put in to make Pocket Internet Explorer even more useless. I always change my homepage to Google not just because the search is terrific, but because Google will make browsing on your PocketPC a little more tollerable. You know that Cached feature where they will show you the latest cached page even if the server is down? Well, Google for Windows Mobile has a way of stripping out extra content and presenting easilly readable text on the Windows Mobile device.

Problem: You cannot change your homepage on WM6.

Solution: First, download this registry editor. Navigate to “HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs” and change the value of the home registry key to the URL you want your Pocket Internet Explorer to start with.

Customizing the start menu

If your carrier is anything like mine, useful WM6 applications are buried three levels deep while all the garbage you will never use is front page. If you attempt to delete it from the Start menu, you will receive a note that the file manager could not delete or move the files.

Problem: When you attempt to delete or move programs on the devices start menu your access is denied. Your phone is Application Locked.

Solution: First, you need to application unlock your WM6 device. You will need to download this software. Copy SDA_ApplicationUnlock.exe to your Windows Mobile phone and execute it. After the unlock you will be prompted to reboot your phone and will now be able to nuke carrier trash apps.

You also might want to snag Total Commander, which helps get to the areas the built in file explorer just does not seem to want to go into like \Windows\Start Menu

Messenger

Aside from the basic $3 phone functionality, the only useful thing on a Windows Mobile device is Pocket Outlook. Virtually every carrier has stripped Windows Mobile 6 of the Messenger application and they all try to push you through their broken IM implementations or sell you Goodlink (which is the exact opposite of the title, neither a link nor good).

Problem: Give me Windows Live Messenger!!!!

Solution: Thank you for reading Vladville, here you go.

The overall problem

Microsoft doesn’t now, nor does it appear in the forseeable future, have a way of getting a reliable Windows Mobile experience into the hands of the potential Windows Mobile users. I have been using Windows Mobile since WindowsCE 2.1 and Cassiopedia A20. In all this time, Windows Mobile 6 is by far, uncontested, worst release of Windows Mobile ever. Although technologically superior to WindowsCE 2.1, the carrier neutering of the phone and flood of junk applications, multiple device/app/system locks, lack of software upgrades (did you know your Windows Mobile device has a Windows Update application on it?) and obvious lack of innovation by all indications make Windows Mobile.. well, neither.

I hope that the links and tips provided here make your WM experience a little less painful and you can count on me to express the above sentiment which I have been getting from many of you at the Microsoft MVP Summit next week.

I mean Right NOW, we’re having a sale at SMBBooks.com and GreatLittleBook.com.

You have to start with this link:

I KNOW VLAD

If your purchase totals $25 or more, you will receive a $25 discount.

Right now.

All products.

Limited to the first 1,000 people who click on that link.

Everyone’s eligible. But you gotta start with that link.

Offer ends in seven hours.

One of my goals in 2008 is to realize when I’m being retarded and not cut out for this gig. So instead of banging my head against the desk for the next hour, I’m going to throw a little Vladville game that should be easy enough to answer for anyone with mrtg skills:

I want to use mrtg to plot two integer values on the same graph. I have a shell script that returns two integer values already, and I want mrtg to paint them on the same graph.

First person to post the answer in the blog comments gets a free copy of Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 R2 retail box with 5 CALs (retail ~$600).

Thanks for your help!

Earlier today, bCentral / MSN / Live and whatever Microsoft’s Googlekiller is called today, decided to take a break. It woke up a little bit later, dazed and confused, and asked if Yahoo was there yet. Alas, no. Ok, all joke aside, another major network went down. Joining Blackberry which seems to do it every other month, Twitter which does it every few days and Amazon’s S3 which went down for the first time ever.

The media freaked out. Users started burning their computers, throwing them at children that are passing by, killing kittens.. and these are IT people? Really? Reaaaaaly? Reaaaaaaaaaaaaaly? I’d love to live in the IT neverland in which people are surprised when a server (or network or networks) go down. Meanwhile in reality, it took Dell 3 days to fix a problem on a DOA (dead on arrival) system for something that was bought with a 4 hour support contract.

What are we learning here? Or rather, what should we be learning:

1. When the service goes down, who is available to help?
2. When the service goes down, how long does it take for the support/info request to be acknowledged?
3. When the service goes down, do you know exactly where to go to confirm the issue?
4. When the service goes down, do you get an ETA of the repair?
5. When the service goes down, do you get a refund?
6. When the service goes down, does the company offer a plausible excuse for the outage or does it just shrug its shoulders?
7. When the service goes down, are you alerted about its recovery when it comes back up?

If you can’t easily answer those questions, you do not have a business solution. You have a best effort solution.

What’s the difference between a business solution and best effort? Well, your business is. Take a look at Sarah Perez’s account when she got locked out of her Gmail and realized there was 0 recourse for her. Woops.

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)

Today is the second day ever that I am ashamed to be a Floridian.

Back in August of 2005, Florida got scraped by a little hurricane called Katrina. It proceeded to go around the panhandle and absolutely decimate Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Then part of Florida’s finest Highway Patrol got dispatched to the disaster zone to help with the crisis management, driving 10+ hours to the affected areas, just to immediately turn back and go home. These scumbags, supposedly sworn to protect us, drove across the state, tagged in, and because in the middle of the catastrophe their assignment wasn’t available immediately, they decided to turn back and go home - right away.

Today, we have yet again solidified our position as the most ignorant state in the union. We collectively decided to ignore the infrastructure, education and support problems that the state faces, and decided to give ourselves a well deserved property tax break. After all, who makes better financial decisions than the poor and lower middle class families that are not just taxed the most but hit with the highest insurance premiums and second most regressive tax system.. We elected to give a giant middle finger up to the education, debt payback, insurance reforms, infrastructure investments that would actually drive businesses into the State… and chose to get ourselves a little cash back that will just go to pay for fast food and a new iPod.

I am sad, ashamed and disappointed in this turn of events. We want to live in paradise, we just don’t want to pay for it. We want to have affordable education, we just don’t want to pay for it. We want to live on an acre of land, we just don’t feel like its our duty to pay for the road, power, utilities, police, fire departments and amenities required for us actually to live there. We want to drive businesses to the State, but we don’t want to train our population to work in the kinds of jobs that still make America competitive with the rest of the open WTO world.

It is called sacrifice folks, money does not grow on trees and we cannot pound the ATM window and cry every time we need more. This is the very basic fundamental truth of fiscal responsibility that seems to be lost from the highest levels of our government to the very lowest income families that today cemented our future for a quick and meaningless rebate. 

Gotta love Global Warming, Dallas is 64 at 6 am and expected high of 83 in December.

I wanted to share something exciting with you as this marks the second time I stepped back from the fire, put down the napalm and the rocket launcher and restrained myself. You see, the other day I said the naughty 5 letter G word and the floodgates opened - partners, press, competitors, Microsoft… why Vlad? why not Office Live? what, why, how.. So I figured, let me sit down, explain myself, detail the 5 year plan and our statistics and KPI and..

.. and then I thought: who would this benefit? My competitors, who are at best three years behind us, guys with fiber and static IP in their garage with an eBay server in the colo, disaffected Microsoft partners who are too lazy to put up their own blog?

And as I sat there trying to tone down my post to the point that there still may be one Microsoft employee willing to talk to me, I looked at my constituency above. Then I looked at my feeds, who else is talking about this? And as I sat there puzzled on whether I a just a brilliant visionary who is seeing how all this will play out or just the dumbest guy to speak on behalf of those who choose not to speak out.

Then St. Bradley herself popped up, and St Dansey and reminded me of my post about the SMB needing a new messiah.

So I did nothing.

Welcome to the grownup world where opinions and guidance matter. I happen to run a company driven on feedback and my partners and customers tell us every time we make a mistake. I do not know how Microsoft disaffected you and frankly I dont care. If you say nothing, do nothing then nothing happens and you get exactly what you deserve - nothing.

But you are too busy to blog, right? Good news on that front. The world is changing, fast, and if you arent talking about it, you just might find yourself with a whole lot more time on your hands than you used to.

Remember, Microsoft people arent evil (except Dave Overton, who kills kittens and makes USB thumb drive holders out of their tails) but without the custmer guidance in the open they will continue down the path set by someone far up, or far out of touch. Just how do you think that company works? Do you really think some entry level person at Microsoft you talk to is going to march into their bosses boss and bitchslap them and tell them they got it all wrong and they should listen to some lamer that cant even figure out a blogger account but thinks he can dictate the direction of multibillion dollar product line?

Come on.

Yes, come on. You dont matter. But if you cant stand up for yourself you never will. Nobody else is gonna do it for you.

Lot’s of people want to keep track of what I am up to but do not have the time to read every word, every day. I also get plenty of items that people would like to bring attention to, but not the full scale Vladville storm of traffic. Things like beta products and free conference passes, swag, Microsoft surveys and other benefits that are in the small supply and can’t be blasted over the front page.

So for all of you looking for a more exclusive, focused Vlad, here is a newsletter.

Click here to sign up. It’s free! I will even spell check it.

Little bit of business, little bit of tech, lot’s of SMB insight and hair..

Pardon the bucket, just testing.

info@owndemo.com

mapstiab@owndemo.com

postmaster@owndemo.com

Rock on.