Vladfire first aired Andy Goodman in August of 2006, doing his finest impression of Mr Roboto. This time Andy Comes back in full stereo sound, 16:9 widescreen and Youtube-style player to talk about downsizing an IT practice. Check it out!
Download: Album Art, Windows Movie (25 Mb), Quicktime (25 Mb).
I spent most of last week and will likely spend the rest of 2007 on the dark side.
If you are looking to chat with me and don’t do business with OwnWebNow, you can find me on Google Talk. My address is vlad@vladville.com, which consequently is also my community-related email address. Please do not send indirect/junk/newsletters to that address, thats what v@vladville.com is for. Likewise, don’t send personal (or email that needs my immediate attention) to v@vladville.com because I am unlikely to see it.
The new company will run on completely open and free technologies. Considering that OWN almost exclusively operates and sells closed/Microsoft technology I feel this gives me a more balanced experience… and to that end:
Mac OS X 10.5
I have been trying to use it for the last few days and I must admit I am hating it. On the other hand, I am not nearly as disappointed with it as I imagined I would be. What I believe I am saying is that if you need a serious business collaboration platform, Vista is the way to go. But if you need something to do the basic computer stuff quickly (check mail, burn a DVD, browse the web and play videos) Mac is your tool.
I am half/switching to the Mac for 2007. I say I am half switching simply because the tools I rely on to do my business do not exist on the Mac and I can’t justify switching to the platform completely just so I could virtualize the production platform on top of it.
The biggest leg up Mac has on Vista is the elegance factor. Case and point, Katie came down to my Office yesterday to help me do some last minute things before skipping town. She sat at my table, I turned on the Mac, she turned on the PC. I remembered that I had completely powered things down so I cycled the router. The Mac immediately got the connection and started. The Windows, not so much. So, dig through four menus to get to the network connection properties. Disable adapter. UAC prompt. Enable adapter. UAC prompt. Nothing. Open properties, set static IP. UAC prompt.
The other day I went through the Vladfire interviews in search of something to showcase for the holidays. In the end, I decided on picking out two gentlemen that looked most like Santa. The message (recorded in April 2007) is also of great importance, especially now that the times are tough and a number of people are going out of the IT business.. Andy talks about the process of downsizing the IT practice, Henry talks about the process of approaching the business as a complement of an association. I hope you give them a look, airing on Christmas eve and Christmas day.
I will also be trying something new, Vladfire episodes will now stream directly from the page via flash-embedded player, youtube.com style, in the native 16:9 widescreen format. I will still offer these two as wmv and mov downloads but future streams will only come in as flv. It cuts more than an hour from the production time and looks a hell of a lot better. I wonder if flv is playable on an Xbox, Apple TV, Zune or iPod, if you do please post a comment.
P.S. In case I have horribly offended you by mentioning Christmas, one of the two santas is a Jew.
I wanted to offer a little update on Shockey Monkey considering that I haven’t kept you up to speed on all the developments and have missed the November deadline with the hopes of going commercial on Jan 1. Unfortunately, I will be bumping that later deadline to February 1st, 2008 or roughly a month from now for the launch of Shockey Monkey 2.0.
I want to say that I truely appreciate the amount of support and input I have received through the whole process. There are now three of us working on Shockey Monkey and the delay was related to a number of reasons, most of them centered on supportability – both of the code/platform and of the people using it. It turns out that SM is generally the first helpdesk for most users and most people have questions about how to implement it, how to customize it, etc. This required a lot of documentation, which later got scrapped for video, which later got scrapped for something I never thought I’d ever do.
The product has grown fundamentally and gotten a facelift to accomodate the message I’ve been sending for over a year – that its all about customer service, not making sure that as little of it gets done as humanly possible. This required quite a bit of code, I had to bring people on, clean up a lot of items, etc.
There are a little over 3,000 active users of Shockey Monkey. Over the past three months there has been a slight percentage dip (about 400 or so fell off the face of the earth) which means they either changed their mind, ran out of business, switched to a different helpdesk solution.. best of luck to them. We feel this is a very long term investment for all of our clients and our partners clients and have been working very hard on bringing the 2.0 to market.
I decided to call it 2.0 because it brings a lot of concepts that I explained on the road to fruition, it is not just a CRM rip. It’s more of a system.
But more on that in January.
P.S. I still aim to offer this as hosted (our server) or downloadable virtual server / vmware image (your server); The product will remain free through February, by the time all the bug fixes are completed in February we will look at a commercial route. Also, starting with February, the product will be fully supported by OWN.
So I finally get to show you why I stepped back from the road… Say hello to the new (brewing) baby boy:
Oh, yes.. It’s exactly what you think it is. Or as I so (in)appropriately yelled out at the OBGYN: “Yeah boyeee, way to beat the cursor! Smack that arrow.”
Estimated release date, May 18.
Just a brief update on the progress as I’ve made some changes to the original hardware in my Building my Hackintosh blog post due to some unforseen compatibility issues. The major change is to the motherboard, I got a Gigabyte GA-945GCMX-S2 and it works flawlessly. The original Asrock motherboard worked perfectly fine as well but the kernel driver that was written for it did not support line in or mic, and the sound itself was shaky.. so $50 down the shute.
Few other notes:
Overall, works as advertised. I am not particularly impressed with the operating system, way too cartoonish and simplistic, yet practically useless (something so simple as expanding zip files stacks them on top of one another, doesn’t expand the window as more files are populated, makes it impossible to tell what came from which archive); for the life of me I can’t figure out why people like this garbage but hack accomplished.
P.S. I can’t say enough good stuff about Arctic Silver, I love that stuff. I used the retail kit for the processor/heatsink/fan assembly and its provided thermal compound had the unit smoking at 46 on the average in BIOS (80% load); When I moved the processor and assembly to the new motherboard Katie cleaned off the stock termal compound and I applied AS5 – haven’t gone above 26 degrees. Can’t beat that.
HTH, Vlad.
I’ve temporarily removed blog comment restrictions, it’s a free-for-all.
I figure the next thing I post here will prompt a lot of you to say something so I’m making it easy. Stand by…
Those lies would make me a great spiritual leader or politician. Mostly because for those roles, the preconceived assumption or fact (depending on who you ask) is that things are now the same way they have always been and always will be. Thus, they are tied to your character, your morals and your values. Flip-flopping there makes you a man (or woman) of no virtue or character.
But the same thing that makes you a horrible politician or fatwa writer makes you an excellent business manager. It is your job as a business(wo)man to recognize the new opportunities, changes in the market, changes in the consumer behavior, changes in your staff attitude/motivation/compensation-expectations and use every advantage available to do more with your business, maximizing the profits and effectiveness within the bounds of the law.
Moreso, your job is to cause change. Change stimulates activity, activity stimulates involvement and involvement hopefully translates into revenues. If you just sit on your hands and sing que sera sera, there is no hope for you in business. You can’t just sit on your hands and run that VCR repair business if people no longer have or use VCRs! You’ll end up on the street and starve to death.
At the same time, you are leading a business, so you better believe whatever you are doing. “Get more.”, “The Nations #1 Network.”, “Moving at the speed of light.”. You have to have conviction, you have to communicate your message and you have to exude confidence. Otherwise, why shouldn’t your customers move to the solution that is best for them?
So in business, you say I will never, ever, ever do that. And if you’re any good, you will evaluate the circumstances as they change, develop your plan, try to serve your customers in a better way and in the end.. well… you will. You will do that. Whatever “that” is. Shit changes, either flow with it or drown in it.
I wrote this post for some of my associates that like to read this blog and see it as the word from the above. It’s not. Business (successful one that is) changes, adapts and makes money. We live and work in the here and now, and here and now the best solution is X. And given those facts 5 years from now, I will do X again. However, I am virtually guaranteed that 5 years from now all the circumstances and facts will change and I will make a different decision that is in the best interest of me and my clients. That does not show poor form, lack of character, bad values or void of morals – it shows a sense of responsibility. And let’s face it, when you’ve lost your argument on the business basis of facts and evidence and all you have to left on are your personal ethics and morals, which are hopefully never going to change, you’ve not only lost the argument, you’ve moved to another one that you have no chance of losing. But in business, you don’t have that luxury – in business you have to change your mind when the facts warrant it or you will not have that business much longer.
On the drive to work today, things were quickly approaching zero. My laptop battery, Florida temperature and of course Katie’s gasoline bar. Time to make a quick call: be stuck on the side of I4 for over an hour during rush hour traffic with an empty laptop, or go through the neighborhood ripped straight out of Grand Theft Auto looking for a gas station. Suffice to say, we choose poorly.
Rolling down the OBT,
looking for a pump,
nothing but hookers and thugs,
laid back, with my laptop on my lap and dying battery on my mind
And then we officially reached stereotype city. Cokeheads sprawled on the sidewalk at the Citgo, bars on the doors and windows. Welcome to Orlando, the city beautiful. And as Katie pumped gas a very energetic guy started jumping around the gas station. At 7 am, in 40 degree weather, which by Florida’s standards is like swimming in the arctic. And what was this.. entrepreneur.. bouncing around for?
“Do you smoke? Do you smoke? I got weed.”
“Heigh ho, reefer.. Heigh ho reefer..”
“I’ve got reefer..”
It’s times like this that you realize that less than half a tank is probably enough to get out of this jolly predicament you’ve found yourself in. “What was he saying?” asks the wife, “It doesn’t matter, he was selling dear.”
And as I’m sure she probably thought, “Thanks for the case load and keeping the tox lab in business”, I had something else on my mind. How does someone that enthusiastic and energetic wake up before the crack of dawn in the freezing weather just to push some weed? Then I remembered that I probably woke up much earlier than he did and was on the road longer just so I can move some Exchange mailboxes around the world.
Not a day goes by that I am not thankful for what I have, what I have built and what it does for people around the world. I get dozens of notes from people whose businesses have been saved by LiveArchive, a freebie addon product that we just launched a few months ago is keeping people with thousands in servers and infrastructure working from home while their office is snowed in and without power. That is where I find the energy to do what I do.
I solve people’s problems. As does the weed guy. In a weird way, my peer from OBT gave me enough energy to get it through the day. As I do for a lot of people with this very blog. Happy Monday folks, and happy holidays.
Motivational tips from hustlers and movers.. Gotta love it.
As I continue to tweak Vladville to fit in better with the upcoming Thieving Weasel framework, I decided to put in a little bit of work to make Vladville easier to navigate on Windows Mobile devices. Pulling up Vladville on a Windows Mobile (PocketPC or Smartphone) will now only display the content, sans the Javascript, AJAX, sidebar, slidey stuff or other blog gunk that you see in the full featured web page because.. well.. it’s what I do. Pull it up and see, hopefully this makes Vladville a little more pleasant in the pocket. It took all my might not to call it PocketVlad, for what its worth.
It’s a very quick WordPress loop hack that excludes certain form elements from the display when the browser is Windows CE based:
if(!strpos(“$_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT]”,”Windows CE”))
{ display regular content to IE, FF, Opera.. }
WordPress checks the UserAgent sever variable for presence of Windows CE and if it doesn’t find it, it prints the regular blog content. However, if it finds out that you are on Windows CE it does not send the particular content to it.
So for example, let’s say your template code includes a like like <?php get_sidebar(); ?> and your sidebar has all that gunk useless to a mobile viewer? Just wrap it and it will not be displayed to the Windows Mobile browser:
if(!strpos(“$_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT]”,”Windows CE”)) { get_sidebar(); }
What if you had some HTML markup like things you copied and pasted from the web site to include a comic, calendar or 8,285 buttons and ways to subscribe or share your posts?
<div id=’blah’>Blah blah blah</div>
Same thing, but a little different:
<? if(!strpos(“$_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT]”,”Windows CE”)) { ?>
<div id=’blah’>Blah blah blah</div>
<? } ?>
Gotta love the simplicity of PHP. Just put line #1 above the content you want to block from Windows Mobile and below. Now, naturally, you have to have the markup elements match up because if you cut your table or div elements in half your layout will fall apart.
Still, pretty easy to make WordPress friendly with Windows Mobile…
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Content is provided AS-IS without warranty of any kind.
