The Surly Admin

Father, husband, IT Pro, cancer survivor

About

Father, Husband, IT Pro, scripter, blogger, cancer survivor

Hello, and thanks for reading my humble blog.  I’m an IT pro with over 20 years of experience having started my life as a Mainframe operator on IBM mainframes.  Eventually I stumbled into PC support spending a number of years going from help desk to IT Administration (even supporting Lotus Notes, forgive me!) and being a consultant for small businesses for about 8 years, to being an IT Manager for a small biotech services company and now a Windows Administrator for Practice Management/EMR company of over 4500 employee’s (and growing fast).

During my entire career I’ve always been interested in automation and using scripting languages to make my life easier.  I have no problem spending many hours working on something beforehand to save my self even more time later down the road.  As they say, a true engineer (scripter?) will expend any amount of effort to avoid work.  Started out doing batch scripting, a little Visual Basic back on version 6 and eventually landed in vbScript land where I spent a lot of time making scripts to make my life easier.  Especially as a consultant I found this useful as I was often doing things over and over again at different clients.

Then Microsoft came out with PowerShell, and like many IT Pro’s I completely ignored it.  I mean, have you seen the syntax?  $_, ?, %, what the hell is all this stuff?  But there came a time when I just couldn’t ignore it any longer as it was clear this was Microsoft’s new direction and I had to join in.

And that’s what this blog is really all about.  It’s me learning about PowerShell and writing about it here, the act of writing about what I’m doing is forcing me to really learn what it is I’m saying and make sure I–mostly–get it right.  And maybe I can help you along the way, too.

Why The Surly Admin?

Not a very appealing name, is it?  The reason I picked that name was to play off the idea that IT Pro’s are curmudgeonly trolls sitting in their offices grumbling at anyone who comes into their domains.  And to be honest there are a quite a few of those out there, but most IT Pro’s are just people who want to help others.  And besides, the domain was available so I grabbed it and moved on!