I swear, if I look back and count the times I’ve said “I need to write more”, I’d run out of fingers and toes to count on! Turns out, that might be selling myself short… I am writing, its just in a million different places. I have been working on a few different projects (never one to just chill out, of course), the most notable of which is my new site, Scale HyperCore User Group. My biggest trepidation in choosing Scale Computing for my infrastructure refresh at work last year was simply that NO ONE online was talking about it. The company itself is 17 years old… How is it possible that they have less of an online footprint than I do? Regardless, I learned a lot and collected a few scars, so now I’ve been over there, writing on that site.

What do you do when you’re mad that something doesn’t exist? Build it yourself. Peptides are all the rage, and in case you’re coming from behind on this, there are a bunch of chemicals that are effectively (but not technically) medications that you can inject or otherwise administer that do… things. The FDA has not approved these for use in humans and wherever you buy them, they are “for research purposes only”. Sketchy, right? Well, there are a few fairly popular ones that you may have heard of… Ozempic, wegovy, mounjaro, rybellsys? These have taken the world by storm.

I ordered a Dance Dance Revolution pad from China, on a whim. I saw a lot of people discussing the thing online, and very few credible sources actually critiquing in a way that I felt comfortable with. I place a lot of importance on tool selection, so when I come across a video where the person talking doesn’t understand the tools they are using, and cannot seem to grasp what “value engineering” is, I immediately discount their opinion. Probably more than I should; not sure if I should work on that or not. I received this pad from China, and its fine. I made a video review of it!

Yikes, I broke this blog on github and forgot to continue writing. I’ve mentioned that I write a lot, but I haven’t mentioned that most of it isn’t even useful. I’m trying to stay creative and relevant, and in the process, flipped my github repo for this site to “private” and nuked all the automation that builds it. Oooof.

I was on the internet the other day, and saw a short video of a man who peddles health for people over 40 talking about weight gain. It immediately struck a chord with me because I’m not sure that people who do not struggle with their weight truly understand the nature of overweight and obese. The man, misguided as I believe he was, started with a common saying “Eat less, move more” and went on to explain how that is simply all there is to weight loss.

In February 2023, Laura and I had a very busy long weekend trip, where we flew into Miami on Wednesday night, and drove to Key West and back before flying back to Baltimore on Monday. On Sunday, we rode the Yankee Freedom to the Dry Tortugas National Park, and it was a revelatory experience. Kindled my love for our national parks and I bought a book about the railroad to Key West, called “Last Railroad to Paraise”

There are a great many reasons why “Multiple plans for attack” is the right way to think in almost all arenas of life, and Powershell and workstation management with MS Intune consistently reward those who are… More able to handle adversity. Yeah, we will describe it like that. In many cases, a tradition .NET call to the .Uninstall() class is the fast, easy way to uninstall things with Powershell. If you’re like me, and live in a “constrained-mode” world, sometimes you can’t use classes like that.

I will go on record as saying that there is no finer remote access support tool than BeyondTrust Remote Support (née Bomgar). It does everything that you’re supposed to be able to do in a remote support client, and does it with reasonable security. I have used SmartCards, done remote registry work, copied files, all of it, and BT is amazing. Its expensive, but its “the right tool for the job”.

Creating scheduled tasks with the MMC snap-in is slow and horrible! Here is a quick powershell script to accomplist the task. Here’s the gist!

There have been a few (ok, many) occasions where API data has scared me away from building something. I finally had to figure it out on Friday, and made a nice little code chunk so I can throw this in anywhere. Here’s the gist!