Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

This came courtesy of a partner from Jacksonville and was just so good I had to share, enjoy:  

While waiting on a client outside of Starbucks today, I was right in the middle of listening to you talk about  the Outlook 2007 Performance Patch when a guy who apparently was in the field stopped and asked who I was listening to. The conversation went something like this:

Stranger: Excuse me, but who is that you are listening to?

Michael: It is an acquaintance of mine name Vlad Maz…

Before I finished the sentence…

Stranger: That guy’s an asshole! He has a webcast now?

Michael: (laughing) Oh so you know him? He is not that bad…

Stranger: Whatever man… Really he is a jerk. And he is a friend of yours?

Michael: I said he was an acquaintance. And how do you know that I am not an asshole too?

Stranger: (Stuttering now) Well, I don’t but you look alright. So he is broadcasting now? What’s it called again?

Michael: It is a VladCast. He is giving his time to share back with the community that…

Cut off again…

Stranger: I don’t know man. The guy is just vain. Vlad this, Vlad that. More like VladCrap.

Michael: I will suggest that to him.

Stranger proceeds to uncomfortably end the conversation and move on…

So to honor this person that you apparently touched so much, I think you should rename your cast to VladCrap.

Perhaps Michael should have reached out to the unemployed IT consultant hanging out at Starbucks listening to other people’s podcasts and showed him the fancy new “Delete” key we now have on keyboards. New thing, makes things you don’t like to see/hear disappear!

anonymous Microsoft manager says:

you know you’re getting famous when people you’ve never met hate you

Wow, that was quick. Even my own code ported over really fast. I did find one significant change, which I wrote about last year. Coma-separating the categories. Previously categories were treated as special lists which had separate functions applied to them along with an entire file dedicated to category management. Not the case with WordPress 2.1, categories are managed in same way as all other list objects, with just a few lines to determine parent/child relationship between classes. This is now managed through wp-includes/classes.php

All in all, went very smooth. On to the construction.

The whole move took only about 15 minutes, straight file copy with a database upgrade. Gotta hand it to WordPress, the documentation was solid and kind of shows why they are the #1 blogging platform out there. I have friends with Community Server and man is this a night and day compared to that.

Anyhow, been chatting with Susan about my community posts as of late. What brought it on, whats wrong with me this week, etc. I’m not really burned out or anything, I just had a week off from work (by my standards) trying to deal with the cold and what I saw around just made me feel like a total jackass for doing all that I do. I think we both agreed that one thing we are not doing enough of is nurturing leaders….

Pardon the dust over the next 2–3 hours, I’m upgrading WordPress on Vladville to the 2.1 release. It’s likely going to take only a few minutes to upgrade but I have a lot of custom code running this stuff so backporting it might take a little while, not to mention all the stuff that I’m adding.

What am I adding? Well, I’m going to start talking a lot more about what I actually do – sysadmin, infosec, development. What’s going out? Community related bs. For the longest time I really held myself back from posting about my stuff because I didn’t want to appear to be constantly selling stuff. But, it is what I do and most of you have asked for more of that so it’s coming. As for the community and business related stuff going out.. well, thats really your fault. You see, I’ve tried to project the needs of the SMB community and give it a voice. But when that voice says “Hey, I need XYZ to justify what I’m saying…” and the community says “<insert sound of crickets>” then you make me (and Susan and everyone else that stands to represent your interests) look like a fool. You can’t demand action/change and sit on your hands at the same time, that makes you a whining bitch. So in the future when you complain that everyone wants $$$ for information you’ll have nobody but yourself to blame because you did nothing to contribute to the community when leaders did. There is nothing more dangerous to a commercial enterprise than a free and independant alternative. However, when nobody contributes to the free and independant exchange of information it ends up stagnating and dying. Thus the SBS Show, Vladville, smallbizserver.net, sbsfaq.net and eventually perhaps even Susan Bradley, Incorporated.  

Don’t like the sound of that? Tough. Start a blog, a user group, a bulletin board, or anything else to share what you know.

Another slight moment of community-clearing stuff. I’m unfortunately going to have to cancel all the speaking engagements after June 2007 and will only be attending Microsoft TechNet and Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference.

The last year has been filled with phenomenal opportunities to speak, network and really meet all of my peers and partners. I have learned a lot on the road and it has given me an insight into what the true possibilities for me and my company are. So in that spirit, I will dedicate more time at home to make all those come to life. Who knows, come 2008 I might have a lot more exciting stuff to discuss, hoping I get it all done.

Now back to bidniss, hopefully you’ll start seeing the fruits of my new labor as soon as this weekend.