Post by Date

2020

January 2020

    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...

2019

</ul>

December 2019

    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...

November 2019

    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...

September 2019

    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...

August 2019

    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 ...

    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...

July 2019

    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...

June 2019

    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...

April 2019

    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...

    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.

2018

</ul>

May 2018

    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...

April 2018

    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...

March 2018

    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...

    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...

January 2018

    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...

2017

</ul>

December 2017

    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.

    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 ...

November 2017

    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.

    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...

October 2017

    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”...

    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!

July 2017

    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. ...

June 2017

    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 ...

    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 ...

    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”,...

April 2017

    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...

March 2017

    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 ...

    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...

    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...

February 2017

    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...

January 2017

    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...

2016

</ul>

November 2016

September 2016

    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...

    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...

    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...

August 2016

    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...

    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...

    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...

July 2016

    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...

    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:

    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.

    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,...

    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...

June 2016

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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 ...

May 2016

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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.

    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...

    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...

April 2016

    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....

    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...

    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...

    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.

    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...

March 2016

    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...

    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 ...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

February 2016

January 2016

2015

</ul>

December 2015

    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...

    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 ...

    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 ...

    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...

November 2015

    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...

    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.

    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...

October 2015

September 2015

    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...

August 2015

    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...

    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...

    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...

July 2015

    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...

    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 ...

    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...

June 2015

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

May 2015

    <a href="/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 ...

    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...

    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...

    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...

April 2015

    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 ...

    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...

    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...

    Digital Signatures

    April 14, 2015

    A few things about digital signatures:

    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 ...

    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...

    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...

March 2015

    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...

    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. ...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

    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...

February 2015