UPS brings me a shiny new touch pro.  mmmm.  as if there was any doubt I was a geek…

VOTED.  proud to be an American.  proud to have taken the time to understand all the propositions.  I voted responsibly – how about you?

New client today.  Good size, good revenue for at least 2 years, good projects too.

Vlad totally changed the way I can work with OWN, super fucking easy and on demand baby.

Booya!  Cant wait to see what Wednesday has in store.

been working on a small deal for almost a month, back and forth, again and again.  client is typical smb, no ethics and needs everything cheap.  what do i mean by no ethics, he took my ENTIRE proposal and sent it out for competitive bids.  lovely.  one ‘consultant’ was acutally stupid enough to call my office looking for the prospect.

so the client shows me a proposal for a nas with a few shitty computers.  comparing my bid that included an sbsbox and customized sharepoint with training and documentation (user and tech) to the hilt.  my deal was 3 times more expensive and rightfully so.

funny things happen when I lose my patience.  rather than explain *again* why my solution is the best while conveying value to the point that I was surprising myself with the bullshit words that comes out of my mouth sometimes, I dared him to go with the other solution as I started packing up.  he asked me to repeat and I said “I dare you to buy this solution and accomplish the goals we’ve set out for ourselves.”

and the deer in headlights picks up a pen and signs on the dotted line. 

…should have added some PITA points.

Susan Bradley somehow picked up my last post, and I respect her for what she’s done for the community and me, but I dont agree with her cloud opinion.  We all use hosted services already.  my first was a netcom shell account and email.  online banking.  online billpay, I havent used a stamp since they were a quarter, sans BoE.  CRITICAL things of mine are hosted and totally outside of my direct control.  be damned if * were dependent on my internet connection, if my lights are out I’ll go to the coffee shop and KEEP WORKING.  try doing that with an on prem box.  We’ve all been using cloud services for years, they just haven’t been called that.  I understand the argument of security, its something that I am fascinated with…but is a hosted app any more or less secure than your own lan?  I mean, if you are truly ‘securing’ the lan, you are spending so much on IT already that saving a few bucks on an sbs box is like putting a bumper sticker on a Ferrari – it just isn’t done.  What I mean by that is, if the only real diff between hosted and on prem is security – I am going hosted, why spend the money?  outsource it.

things will be great out the gate with sbs 2008, but what about 2,3,4 or 5 years from now?  who knows if there will be another release at all to migrate to.  considering the hosted offerings, its making more sense to whip a server 2008 deployment and go hosted with exchange and sharepoint.  not to mention the zimbra and google apps factor, which I am diggin more and more.  and anyone doing the serious with sharepoint is not using wss, they are using office sharepoint server, or whatever they call it now.

so whats the plan?  migrate off the sbs platform, forget all the caveats, wizardry, and nonsense.  leave all that for the amateur.  embrace hosted services, its already here.  straight up windows server 2008 and when user density hits the marks, bring the services like sharepooint and exchange on prem.  and consider, anyone doing anything serious with either isn’t doing it with sbs.

I dont think sbs 2008 makes a difference.  it’ll be ok for the new micro server deployment, but a migration path…not so much.  so dont get caught up in all the hoopla, its just there for your amusement and we aint in line for the carnival.

maybe i am bored, but lately i’ve had a different view of my job and it shows in the way I handle things.  unsafe, maybe under my old terms.  so how bad can it get?  when you’ve got a plan and a predictable outcome, not that bad.  worst it can get is a real time DR drill.

Onsite today, during an hour long client company meeting, I made some minor changes to a network.  basically, we disabled a nic and pulled ISA from an sbs box, replaced a firewall, removed the ISA clients (damn you lingering proxy settings!) and returned the network to an operative state with time to spare.  and if the matter hit the fan, we had the plan, man.  so here’s to planning, for the fact that I’m at home now rather than busting out an afterhours service call.

and what a stinker it is – I had looked forward to this for two reasons – threaded sms and zoom in IE.  threaded sms rocks – i could have sworn my old treo 600 had that… and what a jackass I am celebrating that in 2008.  FSCK YOU MICROSOFT.  double down for zoom IE.  what crap.

and the performance is just atrocious.  thought it was the ‘extras’ loaded by sprint – nav and television and whatnot.  nope.  not it.  I swear this phone is slower on 6.1 than 6.  so reset my phone and skipped the sprint setup (btw, its easy to do, just press the reset button on the phone when the sprint customizer launches and you have vanilla 6.1 – them folks over at sprint set that to run once at first boot, and if it doesn’t, well, it doesn’t) and its still slow.  takes ean easy 3 to 6 seconds to rotate the screen when you slide the keyboard.  but I must be an asshole…complaining about 3 seconds.  not really, I’ve just played with an iphone before.

and if att would get service to my residence, this post would have been about how kickass my new iphone is.  except that it does not know what a task is.  damn hippies.

until today.

i am now on twitter.  and what kicked me over the edge?  my defcon rss feed.  defcon is alot like other conferences in that scheduling and othe info is wrong before the press runs the last sheet.  this year, the organizers will be updating via twitter. E A S Y.

so look me up, armenvv.

@Joshua, maybe now we’ll talk between visits.

I did that for the longest time – I admit it.  I was wrong.  I was trying to be the good guy, “hook me up when things get better” I’d say before driving home on a quarter tank to watch Goodfellas on a 14” CRT.  And a double whammy when you rely on referrals for new business – them bums refer you to their bum friends whose last IT guy told them to pound sand for the same reason you won’t.  And dealing with cash flow issues because of those decisions prevent the growth that is so necessary at this time.  It prevents a lifestyle.  It harms the ego.  Empty bank accounts make intelligent people look at multilevel marketing (from the bottom) like it’s a good idea.

I’ve found the best way to get people to pay is to turn off the services they have not paid for and cut support, just like all the other vendors out there do.  You have more to lose too, a $2k miss hits a lot more in the SMB than the F100.  Get them invoices out and don’t be afraid to cut the client off – as a rule, this is business – not personal.

Armen