Finishing the big series from last years World Wide Partner Conference, almost a year to date is Julian Sharp of Vigence.com. Vigence won an award for Microsoft Partner of the Year at Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference in 2006 for their CRM work – find out what made Julian so successful.
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As I mentioned earlier, I will be in Los Angeles this week and in Denver next week. I’m going to have enough downtime in both places and would like to meet some of our partners, so if you’re in the neighborhood let me know.
Los Angeles
The best time for LA would be on Wednesday or Thursday night, 7/4 or 7/5, drop me an email directly if you’re going to be in the Beverly Hills area. Dinner/drinks are on me, I am thinking about going either to the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica or in Overland (between Wilshire and Santa Monica east of 405). I just know I need to get out of West Hollywood because I’ve misplaced my Erick Simpson VIP party pass
Denver
Ok, this is going to sound weird but I assure you its no joke.
Is there any way to get a tour of the Denver Aiport. It is supposedly one of the creepiest places on earth, from art to design to history.
The Denver Airport is easilly the most expensive and overbudgeted airport ever built. Nothing new there. The interesting part is that, for what is essentially a big tent, the project was not only ridiculously overpaid for but was built when a perfectly normal airport was already in the area. And this new one was built 30 miles out of the city. And, the local government that went so far into the red, ended up in high profile positions within the Clinton administration. Not spooked enough?
Here are some murals you can see at the Denver airport:
That is a gestapo deamon with a sword and an automatic weapon crusading through the burning city with the souls of children and women trailing behind him.
Gestapo officer apparently dead surrounded by children that are olding on to the sword – and wrapping more in their country flags.
And the dedication plate… New World Order.
And for the cake topper – the runway layout of the airport.. why, it’s a swastika.
Break out your conspiracy tapes and Art Bell recordings. The big conspiracy theory behind the Denver Airport is that the top of the giant underground base. As with any other conspiracy, there are many coincidences that are easilly used to support even the wildest theories, but one thing I think you will agree from these pictures is that this place is hella creepy.
So the natural question is…. how does one get a tour? 
You know you’re becoming a spectacular weasel when you try to make a joke and end up closing a sale in the process. True conversation with a large Australian firm:
Vlad: <list of unlikely technical possibilities to get the job done>…. or we could always just ____.
Customer: You could?
Vlad: < ??? > What would it be worth to you?
I liked the answer. I am not going to let you in on the details of what the customer said but the conversation ended with me saying “we’ll have a beta ready for you by the morning”;
I wonder if Duke Nukem: Forever needs another program manager… Vaporware, who is yo daddy?
VladCast 7, after a pretty bad flu, is finally on the air. I checked my stats, got almost 2,000 regular listeners (RSS) so I’m pretty happy with how its growing – talk about loving the voice! So what’s in store this week, 10 minutes of Vlad Audio Goodness:
Play VladCast: [audio:http://www.vladville.com/media/Vladcast7.mp3]
Add feed to iTunes / File Attachment: Vladcast7.mp3 (3829 KB)
Interesting question from a fan of Vladville: How many blogs should I subscribe to and how often should I read them? Though the answer can vary slightly depending on who you are, how much spare time you have and how informed you really need to be the answer is pretty simple: you should subscribe to as few blogs as possible.
If you’re busy…
If you’re busy, blogs are a great way to cut through the marketing bs and get straight to the point. Best example of this is Microsoft which until recently even had a division named Microsoft BS (where BS actually stood for Business Solutions but their output more resembled of what you first thought of). Let’s look at Microsoft in the SMB sector specifically. You have at least a dozen product web sites, each associated with about 1-2 bloggers. You also have a Partner Program page, which has traditionally been the place to spend an afternoon looking for stuff. Both of the above put out an unbelievable number of webcasts, podcasts, conference calls and roadshows, all of which is great.
But if you only had a few minutes a day to keep your hand on the pulse of whats going on, you don’t really have to subscribe to anything other than mssmallbiz blog and the official sbs blog.
Why? Those will cover the really important things that are expanded on in product literature, release notes, mailing list posts, webcasts, podcasts, roadshows, etc. In terms of time savings, its easy to just look at two feeds than 50. Likewise, the odds are better that you’d actually read the 2 posts they made than just scrolling through 200 headlines not reading any one of them.
If you’re a hobbyist or professional…
Where hobbyist is defined by someone who does not make immediate commercial gain from reading the 400 blog posts a day. Where a professional is someone that cannot miss the details and experience that could down the road help avoid an all nighter to solve a problem known only to the one support member on the Exchange CSS team.
If you’re a hobbyist, the more is better. Throw all the feeds in the same category, then pull out the ones you actually read completely into a different one. I subscribe to a few hundred feeds but I only read maybe 20-30 of them a daily basis. The rest I skim through. I don’t pretend to be an expert at Virtual Server, but I’ve made a lot from the tips from their blogs over the time.
If you’re a professional, get in the habit of flagging interesting posts for further review. Let’s face it, if its important and a good tip to have you ought to give it a second look – perhaps even try it out. But you likely won’t do it on the spot if you’re just reading the RSS feeds on your way to work or in the line at Disney World
The trick with blog reading for fun and profit is that you need to adequately trim and organize your blog reading.
For everyone else..
Blogging is more about conversation than the news. It’s about finding out what other people are doing, posting your own opinion or blogging it for yourself. I manage this blog (Vladville) for all my partners that like to know what I’m up to, what I’m thinking and (by proxy) where OWN is heading. Susan’s blog is her personal filing system, she knows someone will eventually ask her about something so she sticks it into her blog. Some people blog about blogging. Some blog about their hobbies.
The trick to being successful with organizing your feeds is understanding why you are interested in particular subjects. I have a lot of my professional knowledge invested in the IW space, so I look at all the Exchange, VoIP, Mobility blogs. I also happen to do a little coding on the side so I have a lot of AJAX and .NET blogs though I frankly don’t look at them on even weekly basis. I also happen to subscribe to Engadget, with 50-100 posts a day. Guess how fast I hit page down on that one.
Blogs both save time and help you expand your knowledge. The secret to both is effectively filing your subscriptions and not giving everything the same attention and priority.
I’m by no means a newbie when it comes to parsing email but for the past few days I’ve been looking at the application contents of email messages and really wishing there was a standard, or perhaps a standard most people would adhere to.
The big idea: Parse all incoming messages and handle support requests in one way, system alerts, notifications and application events in another.
If you are using Shockey Monkey I really hope you can open up either a trouble or development ticket with a sample copy of the type of message you receive from the remote appliance, monitoring service, helpdesk, etc. The goal of course is to parse these dumb reports and apply some intelligence to them. For example, the alert you just got – is it just a notification you can’t do squat about (“Exchange is allocating more ram than usual”) or is it perhaps something you’d want to look at immediately (“Exchange mail store process has stopped.”); Thats just one of the examples but there are many different types of alerts and notifications that could be imported and managed in the system.
I did get pretty creative with my parser security today. Checking if the user exists. If the user doesn’t exist, check if the message is coming from a host listed on a major RBL and if it is, don’t shoot back an automatic notification to help them sign up. If you just received a known notification don’t send back the reponse, just silently open one up in the Shockey Monkey portal. Copy X headers from the previous notification into the new one and simulate a reply instead of generating a whole new message. Track back and throttle senders. Control for possibility of infinite loops and temporarily graylist senders….
You know, the fun stuff on a beautiful summer day
I’ve got to say, I am impressed with the way Shockey Monkey has been handling over the last few months. The load on the system has been growing exponentially but the resources seem to be very much in check. Wonder what happens when I introduce the AJAX patchset. I have to say that I love it on our portal but I’m also the one that designed it so…. huge grain of salt along with that one.
Majority of the Internet has spent the last few weeks, and to a remarkable degree, the last few days overhyping the release of the iPhone. The usual Apple marketing at its finest, gullible fanboys in lines, lack of shaving and hygene on display, what’s not to hate? Well, It’s not every day that I admit that I am wrong – I love the iPhone.
No, Apple didn’t sue me, Cingular didn’t send me a free device, I didn’t go drinking in West Hollywood to wake up with a whole new lifestle.. We were at the mall today and I need to get a cheap Mac for Shockey Monkey development so I figured we’d stop by the Apple store and fight the teenagers to find out the difference between the cheapest Mac and one thats not so cheap. So I figured, what the hell, let me play with it.
All the video’s and online demonstrations do not do it justice. The Internet access on this device fllies, the Safari browser is where Deepfish hopes it can be one day, the device overall speed smokes the performance of every PocketPC I have ever touched including the ones costing 2–3x as much like T-Mobile Ameo and HTC Universal and the display is just beautiful. Typing on this device is very easy, the autocorrection seems to work about as reliably as the Microsoft one, the web browser seems to be very advanced, every bit as promising as the online demos seem to make it and with AT&T stepping up the speed of their Edge network it just makes a huge difference.
Now, in all fairness, I don’t see myself spending $499 or $599 for an Apple device due to its ridiculous reliance on iTunes, and the culture of Apple fanatics. I’ve paid far more for Windows Mobile devices and about the worst thing about the iPhone is its size. Far, far too big. I am not sure where one would put that brick. Lastly, as cool as this device is, it doesn’t fit my business or really anything but the fancy smartphone market with no business application. Email app seems weak, scheduling too. But would I replace my personal RAZR cell with this? You bet, if it were only half the size. So…. iPhone Nano?
I usually keep this kind of filth off Vladville but I figured since its a slow weekend this might break the iPod monotony:
Ten reasons why your SMB shouldn’t blog
1. Nobody is going to read your blog.
2. Nobody is going to read your blog.
3. Nobody is going to read your blog.
4. Nobody is going to read your blog.
5. Nobody is going to read your blog.
6. You’re barely literate enough for email, do not embarrass yourself by doing something you can’t lie about having “written on my PocketPC”
8. You probably can’t count either.
9. The only blog post of yours I’d ever read is on “how to unsubscribe from your crappy pseudo-SPAM mailing list, you annoying, incessant overpriced too-old-for-geek-squad goof”
10. Blogging, twittering, facebooking is most popular with the teens and middle-aged perverts chasing that tail. Which group does your business fall in?
-Vlad
Please send all complaints and angry mail to my PR Firms Barrett & Barrett Associates for USA, Susanne Dansey for EMEA.
Really looking forward to the WWPC. While the main reason for attending is the business aspect, there is also an interesting social aspect of partying that virtually everyone has had to sign an NDA on and take to their grave: The Microsoft UK Party.
So this year I’ll be bringing some American pride to that party, namely our appreciation for geograhpy and other nations. My shirt is below:
This being my last field trip for some time to come, I’m also getting this shirt for my next visit to Microsoft PSS; really looking forward to that one!
The tshirts above are from a company called BUSTEDTEES and they are currently running 4th of July sale. While Katie supported the Greece tshirt, her comment to me getting the sweatshop tshirt was not quite as glowing: “Deep down inside, you are a horrible, horrible person.”
I wonder if they’ll give me a bulk discount and ship em directly to Infomart Here’s your performance review!
We recently switched our Asterisk (now Trixbox) setup from POTS to SIP (and a backup IAX) providers and the first thing we did was to spoof the caller ID. By spoofing our phone number to that one assigned to the POTS on each outgoing call the remote caller sees “OWNWEBNOW CORPORATION” <4074656800> even though that may not be the outbound route our call took?
Enter Paris Hilton (yes, THAT Paris): This is why I never blog about politics.
Now prank calling and checking your friends voicemail aside, are there any of you that have not protected your voicemail with a password? When a “Corporation XYZ” calls in do you not refuse to hand over the credit card information, refuse to answer surveys (that always turn into getting competitive info out of you), refuse to deal with phone solicitors no matter how great their offer is? Just like SPAM, the reason why these things flourish and persist is because people continue to support them by playing into them!
This is why I never blog about politics. Do we really need a discussion on why almost 80% of the American public disapproves of the performance of both the president and the congress? Do we really need the law to protect stupid blondes that is going to screw up the legitimate business need of having a reliable and identifiable phone service?
For more technical information on caller ID, the CNAM database, etc.
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