Are we worth it?

Posted: 11:27 pm
December 5, 2007
IT Culture
4 Comments

I was in an IT expert chat today with some of the smartest people I know in this business and I had a little epiphany that I want to share with you in a very short and succint way:

When exactly was the precise moment when reading documentation became optional and IT professionals expected things to just work, intuitively, without reading, trial & error and experience? Expecting things to work without knowing how or why they work is becoming the norm, people are losing the art of putting things together. Instead, expectation is that everything should work, preferably without effort.

I’m not talking about things breaking, I am talking about how some cannot even manage to get to that point. Times have changed my friends, as have expectations, and it seems that the break-fix, managed services, technical and business consulting worlds of huge premiums are coming to an end. What’s your exit strategy?

P.S. It’s not doom & gloom, just market reality of IT business moving at a speed of light and the decade long problems are being solved for pennies on the dollar; the business model of the leaders in this space looks questionable and its clear to see they have no profitable direction or value proposition to communicate. I have a very big decision to make in my business, perhaps the biggest one I’ve made since 2003 or so, and this trend thats been creeping up my back is starting to boil to the surface. Frankly, we’re talking to Google.

What do YOU want for Christmas? (comments please)

Posted: 11:38 am
December 5, 2007
Misc
6 Comments

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.

IMG_0573.sized

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)

SMB VARs Guide To Overcoming The Lonely 13 Year Old Girl Syndrome

Posted: 10:47 am
December 5, 2007
IT Business, SMB
8 Comments

I am not going to claim that I am, ever have been or ever will be a lonely 13 year old girl. However, I am rapidly becoming more and more familiar with grown men and women that act like 13 year old girls when it comes to communication. Apparently, many had missed out on that little bit of socialization that comes about in your early teens so here is a refresher course on birds and bees:

“You are turning into an attractive young lady, and with that comes a great deal of responsibility. You have noticed changes to your body and boys are starting to pay more attention to you. Here are some common sense tips on how to behave with dignity, get the happiness you deserve and have fun along the way without missing out….”

Now, here is the one for the VAR’s:

“You are becoming a real business now, not just a person that can fix a computer and with that comes a great deal of responsibility. You have noticed changes to your bottom line and revenues and vendors are starting to pay more attention to you. Here are some common sense tips on how to behave like a business, get the increased revenues and opportunities and not miss out on success you deserve….”

Semantics. Not a heck of a lot of difference between becoming a grownup and becoming a successful business. So, to eliminate the risk of being preachy, I’ll mix the 13 year old lonely girl advice with the SMB VAR advice.

  1. Always keep two phone numbers.  One for the boys you want to talk to and one for the boys you never want to hear from but still want to be polite to. If you have the same number, the boys that you don’t want will constantly call you and the boys you like will never be able to get through.
  2. Always be nice to the boys you like. If the boys you like leave you a message and you don’t call them back, they will not chase you anymore.
  3. Always chain the dog if the boy you like wants to come over to hang with you. If the boys you like can’t get by your SPAM filter they are likely not going to keep on emailing you – add them to the whitelist if you expect them to get back to you!
  4. Always be available to the boy you want to talk to. Boys have a short attention span and if you aren’t around this week they might fall in like with someone else.
  5. Always give a boy your correct address if he is taking you out on a date. If you give the boy a wrong email address, wrong phone number, wrong extension don’t expect him to knock on every door on your street (or extension in the PBX) to find you.
  6. If you are interested in a boy and you really, really like him tell him more than once. Boys are stupid. They can’t read your mind. If you want the boys attention, make him pay attention to you.
  7. Don’t wardial the boys you like. They will think you are a crazy psycho.

“Be nice to the boys you like. Try to be around the boys you like. If you ignore the boys you like and scoff at the boys you don’t like everyone will think you are a mean girl and you will be very lonely. If you become a slut and give your information to everyone, only the desperate boys you don’t like will call you all the time. And never, ever, ever have sex before marriage (never prepay or buy into partner programs) because if the boy really likes you he will wait till marriage.. Oh, and never call boys from the toilet.”

…

So in summary – if you don’t know how to leave a voicemail, you aren’t getting your phone call returned: Name, phone, reason why you are calling and where you are calling from. Sound it out, annunciate. Never leave the voicemail from your convertible while speeding down I-95. If you expect to receive the email response back, add the person you are emailing to your whitelist. If you don’t get a callback or an email response, try again. Be patient, you may not get a callback within 2 minutes or 2 hours.

What is ridiculously ironic about this post is that you’re reading a technobiz blog yet the advice to the 13 year old is more believable than the advice to a VAR. Sadly, 13 year olds have an excuse to be innocent, grown men and women have no excuse for not being able to leave a voicemail.

WM6 for Treo 750 released

Posted: 10:19 pm
December 4, 2007
Mobility
2 Comments

Get your rom flashed, from AT&T:

http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/treo750update/att.html

How come nobody reads my blog?

Posted: 12:59 pm
December 4, 2007
Blogroll
1 Comment

Every now and then I get random strangers asking me why nobody reads their blog. My first question is usually “who are you?” followed by going to their blog. Started in 1996, updated on Jun 3rd 2003, April 5th 2005 and then twice on July 14th, 2007.

Here is the secret to relevance: consistency. If you are going to blog you need to get over your ego – just because you write something doesn’t mean anyone is going to read it. And take my word for it – most people still do not use RSS feeds. The ones that do will likely never show up in your statistics so your numbers will only reflect the actual people that visit your blog using a web browser like Firefox and Internet Explorer. If they like what they see, they will come back later in the day, tomorrow, next week. If every time they hit it they get the same stuff, they will not come back. At least not every-now-and-never.

nobody_2Dcares_2Dabout_2Dyour_2Dblog_small

So that is problem #1, if you aren’t going to blog regularly you might as well not do it at all.

If you do choose to keep the updates regularly (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly) make sure your audience is aware of it and is not constantly downloading the same stuff. When I’ve taken even a few days off (even including weekends) my audience dropped off 30-50% for the following two weeks.

There are also other great ways to shoot yourself in the foot with blogging and alienate your readers:

  1. No easy way to subscribe to RSS feeds
  2. Insulting your readers by pointing out their flaws, regardless of best intentions.
  3. Siding with your audiences enemies; this works both ways though, the Howard Stern syndrome.
  4. Partial RSS feeds – do not make me click on a link to read your post or I will remove you from my RSS reader
  5. Offtopic blog posts; unless your audience knows you they will not want to know about your life.
  6. Impersonal posts – blog posts are about your opinion, we all know you’re not a reporter and we are willing to bet you aren’t breaking the story. So don’t bother reprinting press releases unless there is something truly insightful there that will not be covered by the trade press for months.
  7. Don’t be a fanboy.
  8. Don’t lock the content more than two clicks away. Anything opt-in, password protected, members only, secret handshake, etc is not going to be looked at.

Those are just the general off the top of my head remarks and you can be tremendously successful in spite of all of the above. But if you’re wondering why nobody is reading your blog or how come your audience isn’t growing… review 1-8 and make sure you’re not missing anything obvious.

Failing that, it’s probably just your personality. Here is something to start you off in your blogging success: Pick a new release of a dominant Microsoft product and do a “Top 10 reasons nobody will upgrade to SBS 2008” and submit it to digg.com. Presto, you’ll piss off Susan and she’ll blog about you, bringing the entire SMB population with her to your blog.

Get Some Exchange Guru Time

Posted: 11:36 am
December 4, 2007
Exchange
Comments Off on Get Some Exchange Guru Time

Got Exchange questions that you’d like answered, for free, by some of the biggest names in the Exchange scene (and me)? I’ll be in the Exchange Expert chats tomorrow and next week, if you have SBS / Centro / WHS specific stuff this would be a place to get them answered. We did one of these back in May and people really seemed to like it so hop on…

Q&A With the Exchange MVP Experts
We invite you to attend a Q&A with the Microsoft Exchange Server MVPs. In this chat Exchange MVPs will be on hand to answer your questions about Exchange Server, Outlook and Exchange for Small Business Server. So if you are thinking of upgrading to Exchange Server 2007 or have questions about Exchange Server 2003 we hope you can join us for this informative online chat!

Add to Calendar

December 5, 2007
10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
Additional Time Zones

EnterChatRoom

Q&A With the Exchange Server MVP Experts
We invite you to attend a Q&A with the Microsoft Exchange Server MVPs. In this chat Exchange MVPs will be on hand to answer your questions about Exchange Server, Outlook and Exchange for Small Business Server. So if you are thinking of upgrading to Exchange Server 2007 or have questions about Exchange Server 2003 we hope you can join us for this informative online chat!

Add to Calendar

December 12, 2007
5:00 P.M. Pacific Time
Additional Time Zones

EnterChatRoom

WordPress without WordPress

Posted: 1:47 am
December 4, 2007
WordPress
1 Comment

WordPress is one monster of a platform, and hacking it is probably as much fun as you can have with a web page without writing actual code. Unfortunately, that little convenience tends to bring out a lot of “Bubba the Web Alchemist” people out the woodworks that go buck wild with plugins and extensions to do some very, very simple things.

One of the biggest Bubba tasks is to use WordPress as a content management system but providing static pages for some parts of the content for one reason or another. While there is a plugin in WordPress 2.1+ to set a page as a homepage, there are also legitimate reasons to have pages in the WordPress powered page that are not part of the WordPress content database. That reason generally involves a third party web designer that doesn’t know how to code WordPress themes, inept content manager and more. Some people design an entire site from scratch then try to muscle WordPress into it. Some people go the opposite way, they start with WordPress but then have content sections they want to manage outside of WordPress content database.

But what if your template elements relied on WordPress functions?

Big gotcha. Suppose you had a flat web page that you wanted to use as a part of your online content but all your headers and footers had WordPress functions in them – to generate category printouts, archives or comments. You couldn’t just use a bare php include because PHP would crash when it couldn’t interpret the function you are trying to call. So, for all of you struggling Bubba alchemists out there, here is the simplest WordPress-aware page using content outside of the WordPress content database:

<?
define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, false);
require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’);
get_header();
?>

Bubba the Web Alchemist
<br/>
Global HQ

<?
get_sidebar();
get_footer();
?>

The top section sets up the theme and includes the WordPress functions. get_header() gets the overall site header, and the other functions at the bottom (get_sidebar and get_footer) include the sidebar and footer. This can vary based on your template design but it gets the point across.

The part in the middle is the flat HTML you want displayed in the context of your WordPress theme without giving your webmaster a heart attack. They can go about designing the special pages (forms, surveys, internal/external content and more without bothering you or potentially destroying the WordPress deployment in the process.

See, how easy was that?

Howto: Speeding up AJAX web applications with htaccess and mod_expires

Posted: 12:56 am
December 4, 2007
Mobility, Open Source, Shockey Monkey, Web 2.0
Comments Off on Howto: Speeding up AJAX web applications with htaccess and mod_expires

After the millionth time of watching my mobile phone choking on loading quarter meg of Javascript of Shockey Monkey’s new mobile rich interface I finally remembered the pain while searching for my lost Blackjack earlier this afternoon. Not only did Katie find it (love yooou honey!) but I also sat down to finally put the pesky Javascript static-code reloads to a grave.

Here is an article on how to use Apache’s mod_expires to enforce selective caching of javascript files.

http://www.vladville.com/using-apache-mod_expires-for-faster-ajax-sites

That sounded like a mouthfull. Here is what it means: I telll your browser how long it needs to cache my Javascript code. One day? One month? One year? My call. By telling it which Javascript libraries do not change often I can force it to cache them and not have to download them every single time. Faster load times, less bandwidth, more efficient experience. And hopefully less need for a phone warranty as you watch that GPRS ghettonet connection struggling with the last few K worse than a fat man with the 26th mile of the marathon.

P.S. Yes, of course I am still working on Shockey Monkey! Lack of hype does not translate into lack of development, there are over 4,000 people using, you didn’t think I’d just let that slide did you? Geez.

Windows Mobile 6.1

Posted: 8:36 pm
December 3, 2007
Microsoft, Mobility
Comments Off on Windows Mobile 6.1

Looks like The Boy Genius Report got his hands on Windows Mobile 6.1.

Take a look at the gallery. Too bad Deepfish isn’t ready yet with all the hype heading to the iPhone. Go figure, people want “real” web browsing on their mobile phones.

OSU back in BCS Championship

Posted: 5:52 pm
December 3, 2007
Vladville
3 Comments

OSU backed itself into the championship by the virtue of other decent teams in front of them losing their final game. But as their band noticed, it’s bad news:

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They have to go up against an SEC team. Remember what happened the last time OSU faced real athletes (in football and basketball):

 OhioStateOwnedByTheFloridaGatorsJPG

oh-iown3d_rev2

Tigers by 3 touchdowns.