A computer nerd from early childhood. My first computer had two 5.25” floppy drives and needed AA batteries for… something, I don’t even know. It could have been the BBC Micro. That was in Scotland, earlier than 1989. That’s the year we moved to the U.S. I grew up using Prodigy for “internet”, playing Ikari Warriors, and every 3D first person shooter that came out during the 90’s (Wolfenstein 32, Doom, Hexxen, Heritic, Quake, Blood, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Star Wars: Dark Forces) and most games by LucasArts. I’ll always fondly remember Full Throttle and The Dig.

I learned about computers from my father. We upgraded modems together on his 286, from the external 300 bps to an internal 14.4k and almost everything inbetween, and adding an IDE controller (which we didn’t need for anything, not sure why he bought it). My brother bought one of the Packard-Bell Pentiums when they were released. We eventually took that from 66MHz to 300Mhz with the AMD K6, added a Voodoo graphics card, and eventually a 56k modem! We could play ANYTHING! and do homework…

That thing got me into IRC, using mIRC, and learning how to write scripts in it. After high school I joined the US Marines, fixed helicopters, and was still known as the computer nerd. Bought my very own PC from Dell. It had a Pentium 4, and 128MB of RDIMM memory. That stuff was expensive! I managed to double it, and got that PC upgraded from Windows ME to Windows XP.

Post military, I landed a job as a computer repair tech, then on to building gaming PCs and supporting small businesses (Windows Server 2000-2003 and SBS), and another MSP supporting more servers and our own infrastructure hosting MS Exchange 2003 which I migrated to Exchange 2007, then up to a Systems Administrator supporting physicians groups, working with Hyper-V, HP Blade servers, and eventually giving in and learning PowerShell. I earned a Bachelors degree during all that too.

Which leads to today. I’m a Systems Engineer III at a large health system, in support of thousands of virtual servers on VMWare, using products like SCOM, InfluxDB and Telegraf, and Grafana, managing Windows Server 2008-2019, Linux (Ubuntu & RHEL), supporting mailbox migration from on premise Exchange 2010 to O365, Azure adoption, and writing tons of PowerShell along the way.

I’m at a point where I really want to write and document things that I’ve learned and figured out to help others. I might not do this very often due to lack of dedicated time and interruptions. But I’ll give it another go, and Github ages seems like a good place to put it.

Thanks for reading!

-Kevin