Vlad Mazek

Yesterday I woke up very angry.

I started training for the marathon season last week and have not really been pushing myself to do too much too quickly. Over the next three months my primary goal is just not to look like Homerball (from the Simpsons game, if you haven’t played it you are missing out)

I didn’t let anyone in on it either. I managed to make it through the morning meeting cycle very chipper, join in on a chat and a overseas conference call in a good and positive mood, wrote a fair amount of code, managed to take my wife and son out to dinner. It was a good day.

Yet, throughout the day I just could not help myself but wanting to punch every single person and thing I encountered in my way. I think I’ve gone so far in the "business sociopath" track that I am able to control my emotions and provide a very consistent interaction with people, face to face or virtually, and not let in on at all about whats going on.

But man, last night the Wii boxing paid for it big time. Also added more than 2 miles on the ‘mill running and feeling great today.

I guess marathon training is starting to wash out the bitter out of Vlad…

Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! X-Files movie is back? July 25th.

I can’t wait!!! I grew up on X-Files and I can’t wait to see it. I had no idea this was even in production, I guess over the years we have become far more accepting of paranormal fiction genre.

Earlier tonight, while trying to burn an unusually heavy day of eating out, I found a new source of motivation for the physical conditioning. Apparently, it’s all about MMA, UFC specifically.

Apparently, nothing keeps you running forward like watching someone getting the daylight beaten out of them. Kind of hard to give up because of a little muscle burn when you see a guy covered in his own blood being beaten around a ring.

I think I’ve found my new vlog for running

-Vlad

The list of crap I don’t want to see in my back yard ever again keeps on growing. Adding to the pool of gators, rattlesnakes, FSU fans, category 3 hurricanes, deer, armadillos, racoons, badgers…. welcome wildfire with a news chopper flying over.

Damn you nature!

Today has been a big cleanup day at Casa de Vlad, I have basically tried to scrub, vacum, scrape and move around every inch of our place. Thankfully, I have plenty of friends to take digital potshots at me and my impending fatherhood. This one made me laugh out loud, from my mentor Albert Churba:

"You will now be blamed for anything you have ever done."

To which I responded:

"Dude, I have been an ISP for longer than you have. Do you have any doubt in my ability to deal and apologize for shit that is not my fault?

To be honest, I have been getting a lot of "oh man, it is so different" from my business world friends. I put up with crying, whining, guilt trips, conspiracy theories and the like all day long. What is the kid going to throw at me that the monkeys haven’t? Poop? Been there.

From BoingBoing.

Read the comments.

Is it just me or is the parade of geezers getting a little too old for NFL?

It’s not really a halftime show anymore…

It’s a halftime tribute to people that have managed to survive despite their dependance on heroin. Consider the past four years: Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Prince and Tom Petty.

These are the headlines over the past four years, not the first four years of 1980’s.

NFL seems to be stuck 20 years in the past, and frankly, as marketers, they are fucking up. They are showcasing geezers that have faded in popularity before most of the todays lucrative advertising age group has even been born.

There is a time and place for people like this, and it’s called Las Vegas. Stick them somewhere in the back of a casino where the elderly can blow their retirement money on something other than slot machines.

For the rest, for the love of god, pick someone that had a hit record THIS CENTURY!

Y..M..C…A……

Good news.

I recently decided to kick caffeine. Surprisingly, it has not killed me, though the first week of it was rough. I had a migraine and a near constant headache around the clock. But by the midpoint of last week it tapered off and I haven’t had a headache since. Interestingly enough, I was also able to kick the addiction to Tylenol which kind of went hand in hand with the caffeine induced headaches. So far, so good. I wouldn’t recommend doing it, it was a hell of a lot more painful than marathon running but I have not spent $ on Coke or Starbucks.

Now if I could just kick my addiction to sex and Internet, I might be considered normal! Unfortunately that would lead to castration and unemployment so don’t hold your breath on that one.

This post was too dirty for Vladville…

From the mailbag (which due to the overload of everything I participate in nowadays with Facebook/Twitter/Newsgroups/Blah I have committed to only checking once a day):

If money can’t be made on infrastructure sales or support, where would you make it if you were me?

Interestingly enough, I spoke about this very thing with my wife yesterday. She’s pretty aware of what I do and how, so I explained my ten year plan to her:

"I’m going to be 30 this year. I intend to work to death over the next 10 years and at that point I’m done. I’m getting a new car and a new wife and I haven’t come up with the rest yet."

Then I put my hand on her tummy and said: "Kick if you’re with me!"

If you deal with reality and face your problems head on you start to find humor in your doom. No sense getting all down about things if they are bad, if you’re depressed how can you find your way out of it. I know what is in my plans but damn if I’m about to spill it here. What I think the reader asked was: "What would you do if you were me?"

If I were in the IT field, running a small business and made most my revenues from the product lines that are rapidly approaching zero (hardware commissions, SOHO tech support, smallbiz technology advising, desktop software support, hardware monitoring… basically everything that is either currently or soon will be done by someone for $0.85 an hour in India or $0.25 in China) I would sacrifice next few months of gravy train sales and pitches for a retraining in development of business solutions software. Actual training on development, not some bootcamp that teaches you how to add webparts to a SharePoint page or another regurgitation of Idiots Guide To ____.

Small businesses are getting, and rightfully expecting, more and more crap for free. And in that process of taking advantage of the lower cost of technology, they still have a huge overhead of monkeys running around like McDonalds employees around a fryer. Even a minimum wage earner is still a $20,000 hit to the payroll, so would you get a sit if your marketing read: "Are you really using the technology you bought? Give us an hour, we’ll save you $20,000"

Now I have an advantage because I already know how to develop software and I know a ton of people - but say you didn’t. Your first goal would be to find out who the regional MicrosoftBS rep is (I think they went away from MicrosoftBS because the name gave it away, I think its now Microsoft Dynamics). Track that person down and in your best reenactment of a cheesy porn movie go to their office and say the following: "I run a successful, profitable company and I want to be the biggest private sector whore for your products in this market."; One thing MicrosoftBS division has been able to do, as the name implies, is get a ton of marketing money for anyone that will promote their solutions. Remember the posts about "Sold you a dream" - MicrosoftBS is that! They have sold the upper management the dream that MicrosoftBS can be the next SAP/Oracle, they just need money. They already sold three Biztalks, with a few billion they might could sell the fourth. Go into the meeting with the same premise - "I AM the fourth Biztalk sale!" Sell that dream, baby!

Now you’ve got the cash, free training, Microsoft contact person.. time to look at what Microsoft Dynamics actually sells. Shit, nothing you can sell to the SMB. Ok, ok, new plan. We figure out how to make the crap these people already bought work better. Ok. I need a minimum wage monkey to function like a pedometer. Just tag one of the office workers and follow them for a week and find out wtf they do. Take notes. Here’s $100 if you try to get them in English. Woop.

Week later you got a $200 portfolio of savings you can produce by tuning their Office apps to move data along so they can process 5,000 widgets a week instead of 800. On the way out spill coke as you leave the office, let the business owner see his staff hanging around cleaning up the floor and dreaming about 5,000 widgets getting done on their own.

Keep on dreaming… all the way to the bank.