With a week off between jobs, I finally got around to finishing the afghan I started crocheting last year. Finished it’s about six feet by four and a half feet. I believe it’s the largest craft project I’ve ever taken on. And it only took 4 months, haha. With a lot of breaks.
Posted on February 26th, 2008 by Uncool John
Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
One of my New Year’s resolutions this year was to travel. I am not a traveller. The last flight I took was to Louisville, Kentucky for work. Before that was about 10 years earlier to Miami for a cruise with my family (great vacation). I went to New York city with my High School band. Other than that I have only been to Chattanooga, TN, Hilton Head, SC, and Gulf Shores Alabama for vacation.
I get the bug to travel every once in a while. I’ll fantasize about just getting in my car and driving, but I’ve never followed through on this craving.
I got an email from AirTran a few days ago offering $25 off any ticket purchase. This sparked my interest to get away again. I happened to have just sent in my tax return as well and was expecting a good size refund. I started to check out hotels in New York City because although I have been there, going on a band trip doesn’t exactly afford freedom to explore. I researched rates, asked friends about areas, looked at attraction prices, planned out a budget.
Last night I booked my flight and hotel. I’m still a little in shock that I’m actually taking a real trip for myself. I’m finally a traveller.
Posted on February 17th, 2008 by Uncool John
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Batch files are a great way to get things done simply. They simplify common tasks a sysadmin may need to do and are easy to create and schedule to run at intervals. Plus they make me feel smart. I’m talking mainly about the Windows side today. I have not ventured into shell scripting for linux or unix yet.
Anyway, it is often necessary to perform jobs on files with names that have yesterday’s date in them. For instance, you may want to zip a bunch of logfiles at the end of the day. Unfortunately there is no simple command to return yesterday’s date from a Windows command prompt.
Enter Yesterday.bat. Yesterday.bat is a script I came across by way of a coworker at an old job. It is a complex batch file that computes yesterday’s date using today’s date and a series of calculations, it even takes into account ends of months, years, and leap years. The batch file parses the dates into variables which you can use within code you add to the batch file. Yesterday.bat has helped me script jobs for many things using a variety of date formats.
If you have any need to write scripts using yesterday’s date, check out yesterday.bat. Thank you, Rob van der Woude for making this great tool available.
Posted on January 31st, 2008 by Uncool John
Filed under: tools of the trade | No Comments »
Oh woot and shirt.woot, you make me stay up just that much later.
Posted on January 20th, 2008 by Uncool John
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
I recognize that I have hobby ADD. It’s a serious condition. It controls my non-working hours. In the past year and a half, I’ve bought a Nintendo Wii, taken up crochet, started to cross stitch, learned grilling techniques from my dad and put them to use (Meat Party ‘07), bought an Xbox 360, and made about 30 batches of cookies. I have an unfinished crochet project, an unfinished cross stitch project, I bought Mario Galaxy for the Wii and haven’t played it more than 2 hours, I’m trying to learn how to make perfect cupcakes from scratch, and I’m reading a few books.
Maybe time management is the problem. I have found myself baking at 2:30 in the morning more than once. My bowling ball (a hobby from 2 years ago) sits in the closet gathering dust.
I think by far my favorite hobby is cooking. I love that I can share what I make (I haven’t really personally eaten a lot of the stuff I have baked). I also love to entertain (although 12 racks of ribs and 4 whole chickens was a bit extreme). I like to make things, and cooking forces a finished product before my mind can wander. So I think this year I will try to focus on cooking. I would like to try many new recipes and maybe even experiment with creating a recipe.
Tonight I made chocolate cupcakes from scratch. I made frosting for them but it sucked (they can’t all be winners). Tomorrow I will be attempting a pot roast as well as yeast rolls.
Posted on January 16th, 2008 by Uncool John
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I have no idea what to put here. Please continue to hold.
Posted on January 7th, 2008 by Uncool John
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’m planning on “Tools of the Trade” being a recurring topic in which I post information about tools I find useful as a systems admin. I make no claim that these are the best tools, they’re just what I use.
Often, a co-worker will come to me with a laptop whose hard drive has become so damaged they can no longer boot into Windows. Usually the drive is making clicking or grinding noises, and I wonder why they didn’t do anything sooner, such as backing up their data. Anyway, they are scared because they think all of their data is lost. Sometimes this is the case, however sometimes the data can be recovered.
Enter SystemRescueCD. SystemRescueCD is a bootable Linux operating system on a CD-ROM. You can probably use another CD or USB drive booting Linux variant, but I like SystemRescueCD. The bootable ISO comes with various useful tools such as GParted, a partition editor, PartImage, a drive-image maker, Shred, a secure file deletion tool, and network tools such as smb. Best of all, it’s free!
The fact that the SystemRescueCD OS runs from the CD and memory, not the hard disk, allows you to boot it when you might not otherwise be able to get into your normal OS which is running on the faulty hard disk. I can boot into the OS, mount a flash drive, external hard drive, or a smb network share, then try to mount the faulty hard drive. If the drive mounts (only read access is needed), I can begin trying to copy files to the media I previously mounted. Often the disk will throw errors during the copy process, but I have had good success getting most or all of a person’s data off of failing drives. I mainly focus on getting their My Documents, Desktop, and Favorites folders but also check the Local Settings/Application Data folder for mail archives.
If you are extremely attached to the data on a failing disk, I would not recommend this. You should keep your computer off and not use the disk to prevent further damage. A professional service such as Drive Savers may be able to save your data. However if you’re not willing to pay hundreds of dollars, and this is your last-ditch effort before replacing the drive, SystemRescueCD may be the tool for you.
I have also used SystemRescueCD to resize partitions on a hard drive to install a second OS or just to make a data partition. Again, this may not be the best tool for these jobs, but it has worked for me and it can work for you.
Posted on November 8th, 2007 by Uncool John
Filed under: tools of the trade | No Comments »
Generally, I do not call Microsoft Support before noon as I will most certainly be on the phone through my normal lunch time and possibly well into the afternoon. This works out well excepting the case where a call is opened on one afternoon and is not resolved before the end of the work day. Such has been the situation the past few days. I opened a ticket with Microsoft about our Exchange Server last week and we have been working to figure out why the server is intermittently unable to contact the Domain Controller, getting MSExchangeDSAccess errors and failing dcdiag tests, while every other computer on our network has no trouble.
Being on the phone with Microsoft Support personnel is painful. We’ll poke around different logs and run some commands for a few hours, and then they’ll decide they need someone from another team. We’ll wait in a queue for someone from the other team to become available and then we’ll resume poking around and running commands. We did this for about 4 hours today with no resolution. They’re going to call back tomorrow.
I don’t mind doing repetitive things for hours. I’m in the process of crocheting a blanket and I will sit for hours doing the same stitch over and over again. But with crochet, there is a definite goal, a point when you are finished and can begin using whatever you just made. Granted there is an end to a Microsoft Support call, but the end usually does not justify the journey to get there. More often than not, it’s a simple change that takes trial and error to find.
I can’t imagine I’m the first SA to ever have this issue. But then, that’s why the call to MS began, poor search results. So I sit and wait and poke and type.
….Maybe I should crochet while I’m on the phone with Microsoft.
Posted on November 6th, 2007 by Uncool John
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Hello, fair web-surfer. You’ve reached my corner of the internets. I’m still working on what’s going here so check back and maybe you’ll find the best thing ever.
And maybe not.
-UJ
Posted on November 5th, 2007 by Uncool John
Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »