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Chef (1)

Minor PowerShell DSC Fail

February 27, 2015

(Notice I didn’t say “fail”?  Fail is a freakin’ verb.)

Fitness (1)

Treadmill and Weights

March 4, 2015

Did something today I haven’t done in years.   I ran 3 miles on the treadmill and then used the weights at a real gym.   The treadmill was boring as hell, bu...

Food (1)

Sausage

March 3, 2015

If you eat breakfast sausage, you should try this.   You’ll never buy it in a roll again.   I did use less salt and fresh sage, since I had it, but this is a...

GSD (1)

Old Software Habits

April 26, 2016

I think I’m a pretty good experimenter in terms of trying out different technologies. I posted a few weeks ago about my attempt to use Ubuntu as my desktop....

Powershell (2)

MS Antimalware on Azure

March 5, 2015

Microsoft has made System Center Endpoint Protection a free extension for all Azure virtual machines.   This is great news for folks who just need basic AV p...

Minor PowerShell DSC Fail

February 27, 2015

(Notice I didn’t say “fail”?  Fail is a freakin’ verb.)

Productivity (1)

Old Software Habits

April 26, 2016

I think I’m a pretty good experimenter in terms of trying out different technologies. I posted a few weeks ago about my attempt to use Ubuntu as my desktop....

Sports (1)

Reds Hall of Fame

April 27, 2017

I got to accompany my youngest kid to the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame Museum and to a tour of Great American Ballpark today. Aside from the weather, it was...

Technical (2)

MS Antimalware on Azure

March 5, 2015

Microsoft has made System Center Endpoint Protection a free extension for all Azure virtual machines.   This is great news for folks who just need basic AV p...

Minor PowerShell DSC Fail

February 27, 2015

(Notice I didn’t say “fail”?  Fail is a freakin’ verb.)

Uncategorized (49)

Almost time!

May 2, 2015

Leaving tomorrow for my Chicago trip for MS Ignite.   Can’t wait to see what Microsoft has in store for us this year.   I have a very full schedule of semina...

Azure Automation PITA and InlineScript{}

July 20, 2015

I have found Azure Automation Runbooks to be a total pain in the ass.   First, I do all of my script work in a text editor or in the Powershell ISE, yet for ...

Azure Load Balancing and RDGW

March 30, 2015

I’m trying to get Remote Desktop Gateway (RDGW) working on Windows 2012 with some load balancing provided by either Azure Load Balancing or Traffic Manager. ...

Azure Security Center

December 17, 2015

Microsoft now has released to Public Preview the Azure Security Center service, and, man, am I impressed.    I love the potential in the product and am just ...

Azure VM DSC Extension

August 26, 2015

What a discovery!   I’ve been trying for weeks to get an automated SQL Server deployment working in Azure, and every time I’ve gotten close, but never exactl...

Back in Waterloo

June 5, 2015

Back in Waterloo for the 2015 edition of the Trek 100.   Going for 100 miles this year on the Domane tomorrow, so this should be a fun experience.   Right no...

Back to work

May 11, 2015

Ignite 2015 is over and it’s time to get back to work.   From the conference, as with any conference or show I attend, I’ve come home with a pretty decent li...

Brain Changes

February 5, 2016

I’ve always heard that as you get older, you start to learn in different ways.   I know that when I was a kid, I could pretty much pick up a book or listen t...

Chocolatey and OneGet are AWESOME

March 20, 2015

There’s a sweet application called Chocolatey (http://chocolatey.org) that allows you to run a single command to install other applications.   On the Chocola...

Cleanup Unneeded Files in Windows 2012

April 29, 2015

Back in the day, I used to copy the i386 directory from the CD to any computer I stood up.   This allowed me to use these files to install new features, such...

DB Indexes and the Card Catalog

February 10, 2016

To start, I’m going to say “indexes” instead of “indices”, even though that drives me crazy.    I’ve read “indexes” in too many books now and I guess it’s ri...

DSC Adventure

August 20, 2015

Man, this PowerShell DSC stuff is such a new way to do things…..for a guy coming into the industry, it has to be intimidating.  It is to me, and I’ve been at...

<a href="http://chlsmith.github.io/devops-a-revolution-really/" title="DevOps - A "Revolution"? (Really??)">DevOps - A "Revolution"? (Really??)

May 21, 2015

</a>

I ventured to a MeetUp with several other DevOps nerds last night.   Since it was one of our first MeetUps, the topic was “What is DevOps?” and was run by a ...

Digital Signatures

April 14, 2015

A few things about digital signatures:

Dr. Oz

April 23, 2015

So the doctors at Columbia got together and sent a big letter trying to get the school to dump Dr. Oz from the staff because he talked about stuff on TV that...

FTP FTP FTP

May 15, 2015

I had no idea we were so dependent upon FTP anymore.   I’m running 3 FTP servers: one for production use, one for our staging, and one for our devs to have a...

FTP as a Service

December 30, 2015

How can FTP as a Service be so hard to find and so damn expensive when I find it?   All I need is a cloud-based storage solution that support FTP with SSL en...

Formatting Disks After Deployment

January 8, 2016

I don’t usually post code snippets or whatever, but I think it’s time for me to do so.   I have some sweet little ones here and there, and I might as well pu...

Gotta get back

August 12, 2015

I gotta get back to posting on here regularly.   It’s really nice to have a place to come back to for information on stuff I’ve figured out.   So much with t...

I've Drunk the Kool-Aid

December 18, 2015

OK.   I admit it.   I doubted that enterprises would really move to “the cloud” as much, if not more, than the next systems guy.   No matter how the numbers ...

Jumping and Gifts

February 8, 2016

Here’s a video I’ve seen on Facebook a few times featuring Steve Harvey, talking about how you need to “jump” to make your life better.    This should be req...

Lack of Marketing

March 18, 2015

Jenny and I dumped cable about 2 years ago.   I bought and installed a small antenna on the roof, ran the coax from it down to our existing cabling, and plug...

Logon Scripts Not Running

November 24, 2015

Just posting to pass this along.    Strange default setting…..logon scripts are pretty darn important in a lot of enterprises.

Moneyball with Microsoft

June 26, 2015

Just got back from the best “geek event” of my career.   Went to Redmond to meet with the Microsoft Windows team as a representative of “DevOps”.    It was l...

More Fun with ARM Templates

January 25, 2016

All this time, all I’ve wanted to do with an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template was create a bunch of identical computers.   The biggest roadblock I’ve fa...

Moving Azure Scheduler Jobs

October 14, 2015

Due to some poor prior planning, my company has a bunch of different Azure subscriptions used for different things, and billing is kinda tough.  Months ago, ...

Network Security Groups

January 8, 2016

Two posts in a day?   Yes….because I’m afraid if I wait until Monday, I’ll forget this stuff.

New Helmet Mirror

March 25, 2015

I got myself a new helmet mirror last week.   I just ordered it off of Amazon for about $18, because I was in a hurry to get it and didn’t really feel like g...

New Things

March 17, 2015

I like to think of myself as being open minded and willing to try new things.   As I’ve gotten older, though, I have become pretty set in my ways.   There ar...

Packer and Vagrant

September 15, 2015

I waslooking to find a way to make my Chef and DSC testing easier, so I asked Steve Murawski for some help.   His suggestion was to use test-kitchen, which I...

Personal Email

March 10, 2015

I cannot fathom that someone in any job setting would think that it’s okay to use personal email for business.   Every company I’ve ever worked for has had e...

RDGW with Traffic Manager is working!

March 31, 2015

Looks like I have RDGW load balancing working now.   I simply had to create two separate VMs on their own cloud services, then enable endpoints on each for p...

Ready to Run

June 15, 2015

It’s been a few weeks, well, months, since I really have trained for a running race.   My last actual race was the Thanksgiving Day race in Cincinnati last y...

Running in the Cloud

February 26, 2015

I’m starting myself a little public blog.   I’ve been doing some blogging on my company’s (Trek Bicycle) internal blog system for about a year and, while I d...

Saving the day

March 2, 2015

It’s hard to be a hero.   The girls were watching TV in the basement a few minutes ago and ran up screaming that they saw a lizard go into the bathroom.   We...

SmartWatches

April 8, 2015

I just read a pretty decent review of the Apple Watch at http://recode.net/2015/04/08/a-week-on-the-wrist-the-apple-watch-review/ and the watch looks pretty ...

So Long Old VMs

November 30, 2015

Strangely, I’ve always loved the moment when I can kill off a server that I’ve been taking care of.   Particularly if it means that I’ve since moved the serv...

Sway for MS Ignite

April 30, 2015

Microsoft is having a little contest to get people using their new Office application, Sway.   It’s a pretty slick little app that I think has a pretty good ...

Taking Telecommuting to the Next Level

April 2, 2015

Another day in taking telecommuting to the next level.  I’m in Indiana for the next couple of days visiting Jenny’s mom and sister, so I’m working from her s...

The Problems with IT Support

February 16, 2016

It goes without question that the biggest headache most knowledge workers deal with is the IT department.   Getting basic stuff done, like setting permission...

Tom Brady

July 29, 2015

Tom Brady, according to the NFL, “tampered” and “obstructed”.   Pretty grim words for something as stupid as a GAME!!   I can’t stand the Patriots, but he’s ...

Tons of Learning

July 28, 2015

The last couple of weeks have been a crash course on SQL Server in Azure IaaS.   We moved our North America Multistore database over to Azure and it wasn’t t...

Trying Out Live Writer

December 9, 2015

Microsoft released this to opensource today.   I’ve never used anything other than the regular Wordpress site to post anything to the blog, so I fi...

Who Cares?

July 12, 2015

I’ve now realized that it’s the time in my life to stop giving so much of a damn about stupid stuff.    I’m buying myself a fanny pack, I’m wearing socks wit...

Why I still use Chef.

November 5, 2015

Chef has been a pretty good tool for me to use to configure computers in Azure.  I use Hosted Chef, which keeps me from having to run anything inside my envi...

Windows 10 First Impressions

March 9, 2015

Folks, I just don’t get it.   I don’t understand what has been so wrong with Windows 8 since it came out.   The only thing I ever found with it was that the ...

Windows 10 for Fun and Profit

March 6, 2015

I’d been having a random issue with my computer for at least the past month.   A couple times per day, a rundll.exe process would spin up and eat about 25% o...

Windows Update with DSC

June 30, 2015

Funny thing with the DSC resource kits, provided by Microsoft.   There isn’t a resource to configure Automatic Updates on a machine.   There’s an update reso...

Zwift

April 6, 2015

Tried out my new Zwift.com account today.  Got my account last week through their beta invite program…I guess I have the gear they want to test with.   I sim...

azure (1)

Azure V2 Thoughts

April 20, 2016

I’ve been working in Azureland for about 18 solid months now, having starting with the “Classic” Azure Service Manager system and migrating over to Azure Res...

beer (1)

Beer Choices

April 19, 2019

Holy crap it’s almost been a year since I posted anything new! Why am I posting now? I don’t know…I just had the urge.

blog (1)

Why has the Blog Moved?

February 26, 2016

It’s time to step up my game and have a “real” blog. I would never expect to ever get paid for what I write, but I’ve done a little blog for a couple of yea...

busybusy (1)

Crazy Month

May 2, 2016

When you have kids, May is the busiest month of all. Every extracurricular activity has some kind of end-of-year program to deal with. School is full of te...

cloud (3)

Azure DevTest Labs

March 11, 2016

Raise your hand if you’ve ever decided to take a bunch of old computers and repurpose them as a test lab. Not your mousing hand, fool, the other one. Okay…...

Changing Cloud Storage Providers

March 9, 2016

Just over two years ago, I got my first Windows phone. It was nice and I used it until it broke. It came with OneDrive as the default location to back up an...

Too Many Brands

March 21, 2016

I’ve been doing a lot of shopping at Aldi lately and it’s helped me realize something: the world has too many options. If you’ve never been to Aldi before, i...

community (1)

Sharing with the Community vs. Keeping a Job

February 23, 2016

Microsoft has done a whole lot to open source their tools to the IT professional community and this is awesome.   Some of the stuff that I’m using pretty reg...

docker (2)

Docker First Impressions

May 20, 2016

I’ve been spreading my technical wings a bit this week, as I’m working on a new Crucible server. I’m trying to get this spun up on a Linux server and runnin...

Docker Second Impressions

May 23, 2016

Not too shabby. I now have my first ever docker image all working and have it uploaded to Docker Hub for safe keeping and reuse down the road. I have a Do...

fitness (1)

Treadmill and Weights

March 4, 2015

Did something today I haven’t done in years.   I ran 3 miles on the treadmill and then used the weights at a real gym.   The treadmill was boring as hell, bu...

holiday (1)

Git Yerself Sum Fun

March 27, 2016

Man, is Git confusing to a newbie. So far, I have had the opportunity to redo my blog posts a couple times and I’ve lost some of the work I’d put into some ...

linux (4)

Docker First Impressions

May 20, 2016

I’ve been spreading my technical wings a bit this week, as I’m working on a new Crucible server. I’m trying to get this spun up on a Linux server and runnin...

Docker Second Impressions

May 23, 2016

Not too shabby. I now have my first ever docker image all working and have it uploaded to Docker Hub for safe keeping and reuse down the road. I have a Do...

Linux Desktop Part 2

April 6, 2016

A quick report on my two-week-old Linux desktop experiment.

Linux as My Desktop

March 29, 2016

Last week, for some reason, I decided to install Linux on my laptop and use Windows within a VirtualBox VM. I have had VirtualBox on Windows and had an Ubun...

microsoft (1)

Sharing with the Community vs. Keeping a Job

February 23, 2016

Microsoft has done a whole lot to open source their tools to the IT professional community and this is awesome.   Some of the stuff that I’m using pretty reg...

onenote (1)

Using OneNote for Work

June 8, 2016

Back in April, I wrote about going back to OneNote as my “planner” of choice. Shockingly, a couple of people read the post and I’ve been asked to provide mo...

opinion (44)

Agile Thoughts

December 7, 2017

I mentioned the book Drive: The Surprising Trube About What Motivates Us last time. I got that book from a reading list from Allen Holub, who I suppose is ...

Apps I Like

October 18, 2017

Wow. It’s been over 2 months since I posted anything. Well, that’s okay…not like I make money on this thing!

Beer Choices

April 19, 2019

Holy crap it’s almost been a year since I posted anything new! Why am I posting now? I don’t know…I just had the urge.

Camera Thoughts

July 29, 2016

I won’t lie. I don’t have an opinion on cameras. I’m not a photographer at all. I do take a lot of pictures, though. I also just get a new cell phone, an...

Certification Achieved!

June 14, 2017

In the early days of my career, I was on a help desk when I was in the office, and would travel to set up small doctor’s offices with PCs and networking. I ...

ChefConf Next Week

July 5, 2016

Next week is ChefConf and I am getting pretty stoked about it. Get to spend a few days around fellow geeks and hopefully come back with a boatload of new kn...

ChefConf Thoughts

July 15, 2016

ChefConf 2016 has now come and gone. Here are my day after thoughts, in no particular order. Probably going to have a lot more thoughts than I realize.

Choosing a College

March 28, 2018

Having my college days long past and not having to really worry about college for my kids for another decade, I don’t know why I’m thinking about college cho...

Cloud Storage and Relics

March 24, 2016

I was just kinda thinking last night and realized that there is one embarrassment that kids today will probably never have to face. Having their boyfriend/g...

College Sports

December 5, 2019

I cannot get into college sports unless I went to the college in question. I just do not understand getting wrapped up with a college team if you haven’t gon...

Decentralize the Junk

September 8, 2016

I’ve been thinking about how infrastructure teams can get more from their employees. There are all kinds of things you can assign people to take care of: ba...

Doing Crazy Stuff

July 1, 2017

I’ve done some things that I believe are crazy. I’ve run marathons, I’ve ridden a century, I’ve jumped off of a cliff into a lake, I’ve kayaked, and so on. ...

Doing Things Right in the Cloud

August 5, 2016

The cloud exposes a lot of laziness and cheapness on the part of IT teams. When you no longer have control of underlying hardware, you can no longer work ar...

Drive

December 14, 2017

Just finished Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, so it’s time for a quick spewing of my thoughts.

Fitness Thinking

June 4, 2017

Over the past decade, I’ve done a lot of physically challenging things. I’ve biked a “century”, which is 100 miles in a day. I’ve done a “metric century”,...

Hard Knocks

August 25, 2016

I’ve been watching HBO’s Hard Knocks this year, covering the Los Angeles Rams training camp. If you are a sports fan, particularly a football fan, you shoul...

Hit Refresh

November 1, 2017

I just finished reading Hit Refresh by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, so I might as well share some views of it with the 3 people who may actually read this bl...

Iceland

March 31, 2017

This one might get long….I’m still in Iceland at the moment. it’s about 10pm on Thursday. We leave at 8:30am tomorrow morning, which means we need to be ...

Imaging a Computer

October 25, 2017

Something I’ve probably ranted about before, but I’m doing it again. One thing that every IT department I’ve ever been around has done is manage PC “images”...

Joy on Demand

January 17, 2018

Here again, it’s time to reflect on a book that I’m working through. I swear this blog isn’t supposed to be a book review blog, but it certainly feels like...

Learning Math Facts

April 13, 2016

i’m sitting here listening to my kid work on her 7 and 8 multiplication table facts and I just realized that it’s pretty hard. I obviously know them from 7x...

Linux Desktop Part 2

April 6, 2016

A quick report on my two-week-old Linux desktop experiment.

Midwestern Living

April 25, 2016

You know, when I was a 20-something and believed myself to be “cool”, living in Cincinnati was kinda lame. I didn’t go clubbing, I didn’t spend a ton of mon...

My Experience with Being a Self-Taught Engineer

March 23, 2016

Engineer. It sounds like a title to me. Like Knight. A title you have to be trained to earn and have another engineer bestow it upon you with a graphing calc...

Not a Cyclist

November 1, 2019

It’s official: after years of trying and training for and riding in long bike rides, I’m just simply NOT a cyclist. I don’t know why, but I have more mechan...

Old Software Habits

April 26, 2016

I think I’m a pretty good experimenter in terms of trying out different technologies. I posted a few weeks ago about my attempt to use Ubuntu as my desktop....

Olympic Sports

August 15, 2016

I’ve been watching a lot of the Olympics during the afternoons this past week and have found many of the sports to be awesome viewing. Team Handball is pre...

Open Source for Profit?

September 15, 2016

I’ve never been an open source guy. I’ve used open source applications, but I’ve never been a contributor. Why? I’m not really a “professional” program...

Personal Assistants

June 22, 2016

All the new talk I see online is about how Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple are spending money on artificial intelligence to make “personal assistant” so...

Reading List

November 27, 2017

I’m not really sure why, but my reading list gets bigger and bigger every day. Lots of good stuff.

Rebooting Sucks

July 19, 2016

There is one thing that every person in the world knows to do when their computer is acting up: reboot. Examples:

Shipping Jobs Overseas

June 21, 2017

I just read an interesting article in the NY Times today. Turns out that the Ford factory Trump claims to have saved from moving to Mexico is now shipping ...

Soccer

May 29, 2018

Man, I really cannot stand soccer. Maybe it’s fun to play, but it’s God-awful to watch. I’ve given it so many attempts, between World Cup matches and Olym...

The Future of Microsoft

April 3, 2018

Talk about visions of grandeur and meaningless blathering….I’m going to opine about the recent changes at Microsoft. I’m nothing to nobody, so take this co...

This I Believe

July 6, 2016

This isn’t for the NPR show. This is just a list of life things I believe in, in no particular order and as they come to me. Some political, some social,...

Thoughts on Schwinn Book

February 8, 2017

Just finished reading “No Hands, The Rise and Fall of the Schwinn Bicycle Company, an American Institution.” First, it’s out-of-print and I had to get it at...

Time to Change My Media Consumption

November 9, 2016

The election is over, and I’m tired. I keep too up-to-date. I read the news via Huffington Post or a news aggregator like Google News or MSN News all the t...

Today's Workout

March 23, 2017

I’ve been going to the Boot Camp workout at the Y for about 9 months now. Tuesday and Thursday mornings, lots of reps with either light weights or body wei...

Too Many Brands

March 21, 2016

I’ve been doing a lot of shopping at Aldi lately and it’s helped me realize something: the world has too many options. If you’ve never been to Aldi before, i...

Tough to Be a Newbie

September 23, 2016

It just kind of hit me a few minutes ago….it would be REALLY TOUGH to be new in IT these days. Back when I started, you could go get your A+ certification a...

Vocational School? Really?

March 20, 2017

I follow Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy, on Facebook. He’s gotten himself quite the following by arguing that vocational training is critical to the future o...

Where Have You Been?

January 31, 2017

My last post was the day after election day. I guess I’ve been drowning in my sorrows since then. A lot of stuff has changed in the world, but not much ha...

Windows Mail

September 29, 2019

I like simple apps that do their job. This is really lame, but my favorite app is officially the Windows 10 Mail app. It is just so simple. It lets me connec...

Wishes

August 13, 2019

A Few Wishes: I wish I liked eggs. The look great, are cheap, quick, and pretty healthy. I just don’t like ‘em unless they are loaded with other goodies ...

parenting (1)

Let Your Kids Do Their Homework

March 18, 2016

I have a crying, quite upset and embarrassed daughter this week over a class project she turned in. She’s 7 years old, and her class project was to make a r...

personal (1)

Changing Cloud Storage Providers

March 9, 2016

Just over two years ago, I got my first Windows phone. It was nice and I used it until it broke. It came with OneDrive as the default location to back up an...

powerbi (1)

Using PowerBI for a Neat Network Diagram

June 7, 2016

I don’t know about anyone else, but I cannot stand looking at Visio diagrams, much less making them myself. It has always felt so darn manual, and the momen...

powershell (1)

Simple Discovery

May 10, 2016

Powershell can be picky. I discovered this the other day, when I was trying to run some DSC resources that I had on a computer. I kept getting an error th...

random (4)

Cloud Storage and Relics

March 24, 2016

I was just kinda thinking last night and realized that there is one embarrassment that kids today will probably never have to face. Having their boyfriend/g...

Game Shows

June 1, 2016

Judging from the commercials showed during game shows, I’m probably the youngest person who enjoys them. I like the ones that are really just built on luck ...

Learning Math Facts

April 13, 2016

i’m sitting here listening to my kid work on her 7 and 8 multiplication table facts and I just realized that it’s pretty hard. I obviously know them from 7x...

St. Louis Trip

April 3, 2016

Took a little long weekend vacation with the family last week. We drove over to St. Louis to spend a couple days doing The Arch and other things. Of everyt...

recipes (1)

Sausage

March 3, 2015

If you eat breakfast sausage, you should try this.   You’ll never buy it in a roll again.   I did use less salt and fresh sage, since I had it, but this is a...

running (1)

New Running Route

March 1, 2016

As I just moved about two months ago, I have been figuring out my standard running routes. I think I found the ideal little 4 miler today. A few little rol...

sports (1)

Hard Knocks

August 25, 2016

I’ve been watching HBO’s Hard Knocks this year, covering the Los Angeles Rams training camp. If you are a sports fan, particularly a football fan, you shoul...

tech (15)

Camera Thoughts

July 29, 2016

I won’t lie. I don’t have an opinion on cameras. I’m not a photographer at all. I do take a lot of pictures, though. I also just get a new cell phone, an...

Certification Achieved!

June 14, 2017

In the early days of my career, I was on a help desk when I was in the office, and would travel to set up small doctor’s offices with PCs and networking. I ...

ChefConf Thoughts

July 15, 2016

ChefConf 2016 has now come and gone. Here are my day after thoughts, in no particular order. Probably going to have a lot more thoughts than I realize.

Decentralize the Junk

September 8, 2016

I’ve been thinking about how infrastructure teams can get more from their employees. There are all kinds of things you can assign people to take care of: ba...

Docker on WSL

January 3, 2020

I just setup possibly the strangest thing I’ve ever set up on my computer: Docker Desktop with Windows 10 WSL integration. Thoughts of something like this a...

Doing Things Right in the Cloud

August 5, 2016

The cloud exposes a lot of laziness and cheapness on the part of IT teams. When you no longer have control of underlying hardware, you can no longer work ar...

Fundamentals

March 7, 2018

One of the main tenets of the DevOps movement is that automation is key to replacing much of IT operations work. Things like setting up new servers (particu...

Hit Refresh

November 1, 2017

I just finished reading Hit Refresh by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, so I might as well share some views of it with the 3 people who may actually read this bl...

Imaging a Computer

October 25, 2017

Something I’ve probably ranted about before, but I’m doing it again. One thing that every IT department I’ve ever been around has done is manage PC “images”...

Open Source for Profit?

September 15, 2016

I’ve never been an open source guy. I’ve used open source applications, but I’ve never been a contributor. Why? I’m not really a “professional” program...

Personal Assistants

June 22, 2016

All the new talk I see online is about how Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple are spending money on artificial intelligence to make “personal assistant” so...

Rebooting Sucks

July 19, 2016

There is one thing that every person in the world knows to do when their computer is acting up: reboot. Examples:

Shipping Jobs Overseas

June 21, 2017

I just read an interesting article in the NY Times today. Turns out that the Ford factory Trump claims to have saved from moving to Mexico is now shipping ...

Time to Change My Media Consumption

November 9, 2016

The election is over, and I’m tired. I keep too up-to-date. I read the news via Huffington Post or a news aggregator like Google News or MSN News all the t...

Tough to Be a Newbie

September 23, 2016

It just kind of hit me a few minutes ago….it would be REALLY TOUGH to be new in IT these days. Back when I started, you could go get your A+ certification a...

todo (1)

Reading List

November 27, 2017

I’m not really sure why, but my reading list gets bigger and bigger every day. Lots of good stuff.

training (2)

Git Yerself Sum Fun

March 27, 2016

Man, is Git confusing to a newbie. So far, I have had the opportunity to redo my blog posts a couple times and I’ve lost some of the work I’d put into some ...

My Experience with Being a Self-Taught Engineer

March 23, 2016

Engineer. It sounds like a title to me. Like Knight. A title you have to be trained to earn and have another engineer bestow it upon you with a graphing calc...

windows (1)

Windows Server 2016 First Thoughts

June 6, 2016

I just finished reading the new “Introducing Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview” book, and while I haven’t really played with Win2016 much, the book has m...

work (13)

A Shade of turquoise

August 2, 2019

During a conversation with one of my coworkers, I brought up something about doing a blue/green cutover for one of our apps when we go to production. He re...

Getting Stoked

May 14, 2016

WARNING: This post is probably going to be rambly. I don’t plan to really check much and am just going to let things go onto the page.

Learn The Basics

June 4, 2016

As mentioned in my previous post, it’s time to talk about how to learn SQL, PowerShell, and Bash, which I think are the most foundational skills all infrastr...

Managed Service Accounts Stink

June 21, 2016

With Windows 2008, Microsoft debuted a pretty cool new user account type: the Managed Service Account. “Service Accounts” are user accounts that are used to...

More App Fun

May 16, 2016

Now for more on my continuing saga of trying out new apps for my to-do list. I switched back to OneNote about 2 weeks ago and got right back into my old hab...

Moving On

April 26, 2019

It took me a long time to finally bite the bullet, but I’m finally moving on from Trek. I’m off to Fusion Alliance to be a consulting DevOps Engineer! My f...

My Day

July 30, 2019

Suppose you hire a contractor to paint the exterior of your house. Now suppose the company has a specialist who goes around initially to do all the cut-in a...

Restrictions

June 19, 2019

Having recently changed jobs, I’ve run into something that I haven’t had to deal with in my entire career: network restrictions. The new network policy has e...

The Basics

June 2, 2016

Having damn near 20 years of IT experience under my belt (damn I’m getting old for this job), I think I can say a few things about what it takes to be good i...

The Hard Way is the Only Way

March 4, 2016

I hate to admit it, but sometimes the only way to get something done is to do it the hard way. Last week, I had an issue where I need to roll out a change to...

Using OneNote for Work

June 8, 2016

Back in April, I wrote about going back to OneNote as my “planner” of choice. Shockingly, a couple of people read the post and I’ve been asked to provide mo...

Using PowerBI for a Neat Network Diagram

June 7, 2016

I don’t know about anyone else, but I cannot stand looking at Visio diagrams, much less making them myself. It has always felt so darn manual, and the momen...

Windows Server 2016 First Thoughts

June 6, 2016

I just finished reading the new “Introducing Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview” book, and while I haven’t really played with Win2016 much, the book has m...