October 2013

PowerShell Pranks – Making Work Fun with Creepy Voices!

In every IT office I have worked in, pulling pranks co-workers has been a standard. They tend to be low-tech; co-workers leave their computers unlocked, change their background, and maybe change their Windows sound effects. They tend to be small and easy to revert.

We had an intern program over the summer in our office and a specific intern who wasn’t very wise when it came to locking his computer. We got him probably 10-15 times with a picture of David Hasselhoff in a thong. We also installed some fun Google Chrome add-ons that would change every image on the page to something else.

These got boring, which is very unusual when making someone have a sexy background. However, because we became so bored with it, we decided to take it a step further. We thought, wouldn’t it be cool to automate this with PowerShell? So our initial idea was changing the background to a random image. Looking through the ways of doing that was semi-complicated, and I was feeling lazy. So we ditched the idea, and it was on the back burner for a long time.

One evening I came home from work and stumbled upon this fantastic post on the PowerShell Sub-Reddit “A fun script for Friday – make your friend’s computer start talking to him/her.” To sum it up, it’ll use Text to Speech to have the computer talk. In the example posted, it used PowerShell Remoting. Using PowerShell Remoting for such a malicious intent may cross a line, depends on who the target is and how much you abuse it. In my case, the computers were not domain joined, and so I couldn’t use that as easily. So I decided to take my Friday night and make it quite a bit more “portable.”

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Having fun around the office with PowerShell Pranks – PowerPoint

Last week I presented to the Indianapolis PowerShell User Group about PowerShell Pranks. I will be doing a much more in depth blog post about it in the near future. I wanted to first provide the PowerPoint slide that I used, please note that there is a serious line you shouldn’t cross; where you draw that line is at your discretion and it may be a lot closer than my line is.

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The road to become an MCT

I have had a goal over the last two years to become a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT). I was already half way there by holding an MCITP certificate in Windows 7 and Server 2008; however I still had to finalize the last requirement of either obtaining my CompTIA CTT+ or attending a Train The Trainer course. Earlier this summer I had started the path to obtain my CTT+ by purchasing and began reading the book to prep me for the exam. About a month later the details for the MCT Summit along with the Train The Trainer course was posted. I spoke with my manager about the positives and negatives of the Train the Trainer path and we decided that was best.

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2013 MCT Summit Baby MCT’s with their trainers

Last month the on September 16th and 17th I spent my entire day in a room with 25 other people wanting to become MCT’s. A few weeks prior to this I had received a few emails with pre-course work that needed to be completed. Nothing too major just an evaluation asking what I was hoping to learn, a assessment quiz to gauge where I was with the CTT+, and a document I had to fill out, outlining what my presentation would be on.

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