Vladfire 8: Beatrice Mulzer Success Profile

Posted: 2:27 pm
August 10, 2006
Vladfire
Comments Off on Vladfire 8: Beatrice Mulzer Success Profile

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First of the SMB Nation batch and first of the SMB IT Success Profiles. Basically, these are the people that are at the top of their game, be it business, technology, community or otherwise. I will be disabling comments/feedback on these because unlike everything else you see on Vladville that is written to simulate interest, thought and feedback… these videos are there for you to listen. No, not talk back. Listen.. watch.. listen.. absorb.. learn.

First up is Beatrice Muzler, VP of SMB Nation, author, instructor, magazine editor, consultant, biker, runner and a permanent member of my friends list because she sent me a 5lb container of cookies from Germany.

Vladfire8

Runtime: 6 minutes, 3 seconds.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (31 Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (10 Mb)

Note: “Susanne rules” apply here. Don’t email me with rude comments, her cell phone requests, questions about her relationship to me, to anyone else, address, location, age, url of her fan site, requests for an autographed 8×10, etc.

Note 2: Yes, I am building this site on top of smart women with attractive accents. Yes, I realized I am alienating my core audience Chris. Dedicated to the memory my friend Tim’s vlog’s second episode. Looks and sounds good in a room with light, doesn't it?

Week of SMB Nation

Posted: 10:12 am
August 10, 2006
Vladville
2 Comments

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Phew, the patch Tuesday is done! Now on to the cool new stuff. Over the next four days I'm going to show you what an SMB Nation event is really like and who is behind it. I have three video's by SMB Nation's principals and will finish it off with the SBS Show #21 where Susanne Dansey chased people down at SMB Nation Amsterdam and interviewed them. If you are coming to SMB Nation (or if this is your first time or first time in a while) you'll really want to tune in for these shows:

Vladfire : Beatrice Mulzer

Vladfire : Nancy Williams

Vladfire : Harry Brelsford

SBS Show #21: SMB Nation East & Amsterdam

Look for the first episode today.

Sleep, Courtesy & Other Things Foreign

Posted: 3:07 am
August 10, 2006
Misc
13 Comments

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2:40 AM EST, 08/10/2006 Microsoft Tuesday Patchday comes to a close on a Thursday morning. It was fun.

As noted in my previous post oh… 18 or so hours ago… many things become funny through sleep deprivation. I was chatting with one of my friends/developers about the extent of our slavery and as you may imagine I had a few choice words for him as he told me he was about to go to sleep. Anyhow, he pasted the following back in the IM window:

richwalkup said: oh wait – definition link

richwalkup said: now that you know what it is – i'm gonna get me some (sleep that is)

richwalkup said: shockey 

Clicked on the link just to humor him for a second, usually it is something very gross that we point each other to just to stay awake, I found a big body of text. Started reading… Interesting theory on this "sleep" thing. But then I come upon this definition of it: 

Sleep is the fundamental anabolic process common to all life forms, plant and animal. In animals, the sleeping state is characterized by an absolute minimal degree of consciousness and decreased responsiveness to the surrounding world.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep

Perhaps its the lack sleep talking but "state is characterized by an absolute minimal degree of consciousness and decreased responsiveness to the surrounding world" is the very definition of technical support, isn't it? Somewhere north of Dallas someone just lost their coffee to their monitor.

The case is still open, still working on it. We've restored service to 100% of our customer base but have imaged a few to a standby server for further testing to isolate the case with Dell and Microsoft. The solution set was mentioned in the previous post and we spent the better part of the day dealing with it. For what its worth, we used a scaled down version of Knoppix to automate the process via USB thumbdrives. Still doing post-cleanup work and trying to get the backups in sync with the recent change. That however is just a part of the process. 

On Courtesy

There is such a thing as Karma folks. I was out on Tuesday evening, drove down to West Palm Beach to do a presentation for the Palm Beach IT sbs group and then trekked back to Orlando. While I was down there I brought a stack of things from WWPC along with an excellent book that Karl recently published. Personally, this is one of the best books for the SMB consultants out there. The title is quite misleading so let me sum it up instead: This book is about how you run your IT business and CYA as a SMB consultant.

Now Karl didn't know I was doing this, although on an occasion I did mention to him that I really enjoyed his book. Earlier tonight I find that Karl nominated me for the SBSer of the year. Nice guy, huh? Whats even nicer is that he wrote a piece on his blog about how to attend conferences in response to my earlier articles on how to follow up with people after conferences. I sometimes look at my colleagues in the IT world and am quite disappointed to see how shallow the pool is. This is why when people like Susanne and Chris show up I am shocked and cannot stop raving about what professionals they are. Ditto for Karl, check out the blog post and read it a few times . 

Microsoft, Dell: Please stand closer together (OWN Alert)

Posted: 1:07 pm
August 9, 2006
Security
1 Comment

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Dear partners, please stand closer together so I can get you all in the same shot. No, thats not the camera I'm holding.

Just wanted to alert you to a few things that have been going on at Casa de Vlad in our 11 data centers. We're having issues over a large portion of our Dell server base that has SCSI/PERC4 controllers installed and/or USB 2.0 drives installed. The behavior is as follows:

  1. System powers on and allows OS selection. Windows 2003 Server splash screen comes up, few seconds later black screen or reboot.
  2. When booted up using Safe Mode the system hangs on loading acpitabl.dat

There are dozens of solutions of which we have identified the following so far:

  1. Unplug the USB 2.0 drive. This worked on just a few systems and allowed the boot to proceed. On reboot it powered on as well. Will test again later.
  2. Clear SCSI controller card configuration and rescan the bus. This worked on a few as well.
  3. Power system down and perform a full fs check. Windows PE is your friend.
  4. At this moment we have over 200 systems that are going through a manual repair using Windows Recovery Console. Hope you set one up. The process of doing so is to replace update.sys file with the one from Windows 2003 RTM media. Generally located in %systemroot%\system32\drivers 

We are seeing the above on Dell PowerEdge 800, 1800, 1425 systems only running the Standard version of Microsoft Windows 2003 SP1. Identical systems running Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition, Web Edition, Small Business Server and R2 editions of Standard & Enterprise do not seem to be affected. Will update as we go along. Working closely with Microsoft and Dell to recover, sorry for the inconvenience.

Comments closed, pings allowed. Believe me, I know what you're going to say "Micro$oft security blows, switch to Linux, switch to Mac, switch to Amiga, Ballmer is evil, this wouldn't have happened on an HP…" There, I saved you 20 minutes.

Future of Microsoft SMB Consultant at Palm Beach IT

Posted: 1:55 pm
August 7, 2006
Events
4 Comments

Logo1I’m presenting tomorrow night (Tuesday, August 8th) at the Palm Beach IT Association in Palm Beach, FL. Just wanted to save some of you a trip if you weren’t interested in what I’m going to be talking about:

  • Who I am and what I do for living and why I really do all the podcasting, blogging, vlogging..
  • What Own Web Now does and is working on (and how)
  • SMB Community potential beyond “technical support chatter
  • Preparing for the next wave (look at Exchange 2007, SharePoint 2007 Beta 2 demo)

I intend to spend most of the evening on that last bullet point, kind of offering some insight on the things going on at Microsoft and beyond in terms of how they view our space, how you can anticipate/respond/profit on top of what they are doing. Also a look at some other interesting events that are going to drive our sector and how they are changing just what we are able to offer our clients.

It will be a business presentation. Hope to see you out there, please RSVP.

Vladfire 7: Community & Your Business with Mark Taylor

Posted: 4:04 pm
August 6, 2006
Vladfire
22 Comments

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Last but not least is the “community value” presentation by Mark Taylor. You’ve heard Susanne talk about the general success of the community-based initiatives and their value to Readycrest. You’ve heard Tom talk about the importance of networking to a one man band. Now it’s Mark’s turn.

Mark is a partner/owner of Chorus IT, Microsoft Certified Partner in UK. Mark talked about the value that the community has for a larger partner. His business is growing past $1M in revenues and he also found a way to both contribute and benefit from the SMB community. He also recently started a CRM blog so go check that out once you’re done watching the episode.

All in all, very nice and successful guy. I interviewed him for one of the future episodes for Vladfire community profiles and the interview pretty much kicked off with him talking about how he has been successful with CRM deployments. It will really be one episode to watch as many people talk about CRM, few are actually successful (reference revenue number above) with it. Well worth 10 minutes of your time if you ask me.

Vladfire7

Runtime: 10 minutes, 6 seconds.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (53 Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (17 Mb)

Note: Last of the WWPC Small Business Symposium UK presentation. I can tell from the previous 3 episodes that you really liked it so take a second to thank Susanne, Mark and Tom for putting this together.

Erick Simpson in Orlando

Posted: 2:05 am
August 5, 2006
Friends, IT Business
12 Comments

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Earlier tonight Katie and I had the pleasure of Erick's company. Even though we've been at the same two conferences already this was the first time we got to sit down and chat about IT, management, business, American history, perfect women and plasma or LCD television. It is very gratifying to be able to sit down, bounce random ideas and get the fresh perspective from people that are on your own level. I always encourage newbies to find someone in similar circumstances and just.. talk. Here is the case for that: even if you think you are brilliant and you have the most proven concept in your head it helps to bounce it off someone and see how it resonates. Ask them to repeat what they just heard from your proposal because I guarantee you it will not be the same thing that just came out of your mouth. In strategizing, evaluating, designing and perfecting whatever you do you have the end goal in mind so you wrap your thinking around it. Getting the other person to see it the same way without understanding the end goal is the biggest part of the challenge.

It's getting harder and harder for me to find people that are at the same level I'm at professionally so I was really glad Erick got a chance to say over an extra day for this. Erick is a partner at Intelligent Enterprise and works on designing, presenting and facilitating training on managed services. So if you're looking to become an MSP you will be seeing and hearing a lot from Erick over the next few months. We shot a quick "deer-in-headlights" interview for Vladfire and we'll have Erick on the SBS Show (which by the way is not dead, we're on the summer vacation).

Just for the alibi above is a pic of us. Can't mistake Florida with all its natural beauty and snowed in frosted carolers.. in 100% humidity and 92 degree temperature in the middle of August. Almost don't feel bad anymore for blowing off Scoble and Amanda for Montana off-grid. That Chris storm spinning in the Caribbean isn't being very helpful either.

DaSBS Code Video

Posted: 3:23 pm
August 4, 2006
Microsoft
6 Comments

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So video is suddenly all the rage. Steven Van Roekel has posted the new SBS R2 movie on his blog and.. well, you just have to see it to believe it. Steven Ballmer as Mona Lisa and Bill Gates as Vitruvian Man. Someone must really have locked down on their MSFT options early on 🙂

View the movie here. 

Enjoy! Thanks to Kevin Lisota for the pointer.

Good intro to MySQL

Posted: 11:53 pm
August 3, 2006
Linux, Open Source
6 Comments

Needed to get some air and clear my head.. so I went to the local Linux User Group (www.golug.org) mostly because its one of the few places I can go to without looking like a human being. No shaving, no haircut, no problem – dirty jeans and “I read your email shirt” and I’m out the door.

Kevin Korb presented a very nice introduction to MySQL and SQL in general. He has a writeup here. Take a look at it, the paper is a pretty comprehensive description of the basics to get you started. MySQL is a powerful SQL server and yes, it runs on Windows too. Check it out.

When bloggers judge Vista

Posted: 11:10 am
August 2, 2006
Microsoft
14 Comments

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Today I stumbled upon an interesting summary over at Cnet covering blogger comments on Vista "readiness" as is. Their general argument is that people would rather see the next OS done right even if it meant further delays. For what its worth I do agree with taking time as opposed to "crunching" it and before I say what I am about to say I think it's rather foolish to accept comments from "bloggers" as an indication when the release should happen. The only guys that should/could comment on that are the actual Vista developers. You will not hear from them though, they are in a bunker writing code trying to ship the product.  So those are my disclaimers before I say what I am about to say.

As an IT Pro I see little value in Vista over XP. My customers having seen it on my laptop percieve even less. The common question is: "But we do not have to upgrade to it, right?" That is not a pretty question you want to answer if your business relies on people constantly upgrading their computers. For the first time in.. well, ever, what we have just may be good enough and dare I say it "time tested and proven"; XP SP2 is a solid beast, I go weeks without rebooting my main workstation and even then its just for patches.

So will Microsoft take the blogger advice? Sincerely doubt that because they seem to be getting squeezed from all sides. Macintosh is taking back share, now at over 10%. Linux Desktop seems to be gaining ground, not just hot air, and people are actually installing it. Google is becoming a near defacto leader for the web applications but live.com is closing the gap. Make no mistake, Microsoft makes money on Windows, Servers and Office. All the other money-losing ventures are there to diversify the company and allow it to lead in other segments. It is a big, long term bet.

Will Microsoft ever catch up to Google? Can Microsoft compete in media applications with iTunes/Ipod? Will live.com be anything more than failed bcentral.com? Will Vista at its most basic be more compelling than Free/OSS? Will, or rather, when will people open up their pockets for a service instead of software?

The faster Vista can come out, the faster Microsoft will have an answer to the questions above.