Year: 2013

Summarizing The Microsoft TechEd Experience 2013

Two weeks ago I was lucky enough to be sent to Microsoft TechEd by the company I work at. It was such a busy week and another week of catching up with real life I am just now getting around to blogging about TechEd.

Warning: Long blog post!

Welcome_TechEdThis summarization of TechEd does not do a justice to how fantastic the experience is and how much you learn while there. …

Now that #IAMKREWE, how the hell do I meet you?

As I sit here reflecting on my last 2 years being with #TheKrewe I was thinking. There are quite a few new people this year and the majority of you are probably like me when I joined and have NO IDEA how you are going to meet new people. So I’ve decided it would be good to share some helpful tips on socializing with other members of #TheKrewe

matt_springboard

The Basics:

  • Get on Twitter use hash tag #TheKrewe and #IAMKREWE
  • Join IAMKREWE.org
  • Join the Facebook Group
  • Attend evening events (Ex: #TheKrewe Sunday Meet ‘N Greet, #TheKrewe Monday Mixer, etc)

Breaking Out of Shell:

Now this is where I have a horrible time and I am lucky enough to have already started meeting people online, once I’ve met someone online it makes it much easier for me to talk to them in person. You may be different and may be more outgoing than me and if that is the case you will be golden!

  • When attending evening events
    • Introduce yourself to other groups (Super hard for me to do)
    • Start talking about work
    • Find other people from same State/Country as you (I met 3 people from my State last year I didn’t know before!)
    • Share your charging station, good chance to talk when you are waiting for a phone/tablet to charge!

Lets get Advanced:

  • Find common interest, meet up other nights of TechEd
  • See someone hiding in corner all quite? Go engage with them, make a friend even though they may not be the most social they are out at night so they want to meet people!
  • Stay in touch after TechEd, never know when you need that Lync admin you met at TechEd
  • Stay active on Twitter/IAMKREWE.org/Facebook group, these are friends for life now!

I know a lot of this is very general, but I can’t give you a set instruction on how to meet people, that is why I am so horrible at it! However if you are willing to help people, they are willing to help you. If you want to make new friends, so does everyone else at these evening events. If they didn’t they would stay hidden in hotel room playing with the new tech they learned that day.

 

Arris TG862G/CT from Xfinity Port Forwarding – Signature Support Sham

Recently I received a letter in the mail that Xfinity had increased the speed of the internet in my area… SWEET! However I needed to upgrade my modem as it cannot handle the increased speed, sounds reasonable they will send me a new one. This is where the sage begins with my discovery of xfinity’s Signature Support Sham and their horrible support and customer service.

xfinity_sham

The Story

I received the package fairly promptly and it is a brand new Arris TG862G/CT. I hooked it up with little issue aside from having to switch all my devices to a new wireless AP.

The next day I continued my efforts in configuring my network which included simply setting up a port forward so I can RDP into my desktop at home from work. As a Technology Specialist at a local IT Consulting and Managed Services company I felt I was more than qualified to implement such a minor change. After having performed the configuration and it not working I felt like an idiot. I continued trouble shooting and decided to disable the firewall on the new gateway. After having performed that change I still  could not RDP into my system. I verified RDP was working within my internal network and decided to go above and beyond and even though it made no sense for this change to work I decided to try Port Triggering. Still no luck, so I resorted to calling the xfinity support. …

Starting My Journey through #90Days2MCSA

Hello Everyone! I apologize for my months disappearance from blogging, it’s been a busy March and will continue to be busy throughout TechEd! That is not a bad thing, and I will strive to increase my blogging. One thing that is going to help me in the interim is my Journey to my Server 2012 MCSA!

Michael Bender along with MS Learning has made a push for people to obtain their MCSA with the #90Days2MCSA Challenge, this is a fantastic idea is a great way as a community for everyone to improve their skills.

I’d like to start off by saying I may be a featured certification success story on the 90Days2MCSA site; however I do not have my Server 2012 MCSA yet and that means I get to participate! I’ve been hiding in the shadows and doing some studying with the official Microsoft Press 70-417 Upgrading Your Skills to MCSA Windows Server 2012.

Perform Survey’s and Randomly Selecting Users – Using Office Web Apps

Next week we have the first Indianapolis PowerShell User Group meeting and I was tasked with getting the survey for our meetings setup. I did not want to follow the standard here is a piece of paper please fill out and turn back in. So I decided to use the “cloud” way of passing out surveys.

The nice thing about SkyDrive is the Office Web Apps. These web apps include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. With Excel you are able to create Survey’s and provide anyone the link. These surveys are saved in an Excel document and synced with any computer that you have SkyDrive running on. These documents are being saved to my local machine gives me the ability to execute a PowerShell script on them which will throw out winners from the list of people who submitted the survey.

Excel_Survey_WebApp

Lets start…