Out-of-Band Post

The ever Evolving Career of IT – Reflecting on the last Decade

By / June 12, 2014 / Out-of-Band Post

I’ve been working professionally in IT for 6 years, and I have been working with computers for over 10. I quickly realized that if I continued down this path for my life, I would be in a constant learning curve. This was something that interested me as I always enjoy learning new things and playing with new technologies.

My initial interest was in web development up until I reached college. I took two part time jobs, one doing web development, another doing help desk support. Initially I was very excited to do the development job, I started digging in, expanding my knowledge and trying to advance all of my skills. I quickly realized that I enjoyed the help desk support much more. My favorite part of help desk support was that I was able to help people every day. I would leave a faculty members office and they would be very satisfied that they received assistance. I had no previous customer service experience, but was exhilarated with the interactions I had on a daily basis.

As the years progressed I continued down the IT Pro path, and started moving into server administration prior to graduating college. I had loved the customer service, but I felt there was a greater good I could provide by managing the back end systems. I wouldn’t get as much recognition as I had previously, but I would have many more challenges and still be helping.

I started at Apparatus 1 year prior to graduating college and I have just wrapped up my 3rd year here recently. In those 3 years I have gone from part time employee, to full time entry level management. In the last 6 months I’ve done a lot of reflecting on where I want my career to go. I’ve been saying that I had no idea I would be where I am last year, lets see where this year will take me.

I currently am in an internal battle with myself on if I’d like to pursue my IT career further or if I’d like to jump over to management; while trying to keep my IT skills as fresh as possible. I still have yet to make a decision, and I am considering my options on a daily basis. I do love the management by getting to help co-workers develop their skills and become greater at their job. I like to help them pursue their dreams while working in IT and I love getting hands on dirty with the work.

As of today I am Matt Griffin, Technical Team Lead at Apparatus. Tomorrow… who knows what I will be.

Building The New Battle Station

By / June 7, 2014 / Out-of-Band Post

For the last 5 years, I’ve owned the same desktop computer that I do most of my work from at home. The computer was solid, a Dell XPS 630i. It still was performing like a champ with an occasional blue screen, I believed caused by the SLI video cards. I don’t have much time for video games so I figured there was no point in replacing it for the longest time.

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Before monitor replacement

After two random blue screens in the same evening I decided it was time to bite the bullet and replace the system. I had no interest in spending hours troubleshooting the issues when I knew I wanted a new computer anyway. Now was the time to decide if I was going to purchase a new system or build my own. I did quite a bit of research and I wanted to buy a fairly solid gaming rig that will last me at least another 5 years. Looking at the options out there and comparing the cost associated I decided to build my own machine.

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New Year New Changes

By / January 29, 2014 / Out-of-Band Post

It’s been quite a bit of time since I’ve made a true blog post. Things have been very exciting in my life lately and I’ve been chugging along to keep up with it.

The first thing I’d like to talk about is the first thing that happened this year. Starting January 1st 2014 I became a Technical Team Lead at Apparatus. I oversee 5 technical resources while maintaining myself as a technical resource also. It is a new challenge and one I am very eager to execute on. This position has given me the ability not only to expand my technical knowledge across multiple technologies but also to gain experience in management. I am one of the first 7 people in this role at Apparatus and I get to be part of the formation of this new level of management and it is a fantastic opportunity for me to grow.

The next thing that happened this year is the first time I’ve taught a Microsoft Official Course (MOC) which was the 20410, Installing and Configuring Windows Server 2012. It was a lot of work to prepare for this course; however it was well worth every minute of prep work as this was an extremely exciting course to teach. I had 12 people in attendance and I received lots of positive feedback on my teaching technique. The best part of that week was not the experience, or how much fun it was to present. It was the fact that one of the students in the course decided to sketch a picture of me while I was talking about IPv4 Sub-netting which I’ve included below.

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PowerShell Pranks – Making Work Fun with Creepy Voices!

By / June 1, 2020 / Microsoft, Out-of-Band Post

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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The road to become an MCT

By / June 1, 2020 / Microsoft, Out-of-Band Post

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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