The IT Trench Warfare Blog ...Tips, Tricks, & References to Simplify your life in the IT Trenches

My students are always asking me about my thumb and are amazed at what I can do with it. I am, of course, talking about my 8GB thumb drive. With every utility, tool, documents, slides, etc. that I could ever need and most of them run directly from the drive and never need installing, I am finally going to reveal my secrets. I am a huge fan of John Haller and PortableApps.com. John just recently added another must have tool to the portable lineup. WinWGet Portable is a very smooth download manager and having it portable on my thumb is perfect. If you are looking at building a portable tool chest, start at John's site and then make your way to SysInternals. Mark Russinovich is so knowledgeable and most importantly, willing to share. Last stop for great tools is The Network Toolkit by Cace Technologies, another source of brilliance in the form of Gerald Combs and company. Those are the building blocks of what you need and will get you started thinking about the possibilities.

Until next time....Good Day, Good News and Goodnight!

The more things change the more they stay the same. That's how the saying goes, and it is dead on when it comes to Microsoft Operating Systems. When I was but a little IT guru, I remember a fabulous OS that was quite fast and dependable. No one ever spoke ill of its security features, and best of all, if one program crashed it didn't even affect your other running apps. Of course there were no security features and MS-DOS only ran one app at a time, but that's just nitpicking. Then along came a mouse and he jumped through a window and the rest is history. Now we've come full circle and I sit here prepping a Powershell class and Windows has a cool new operating system install option that is just a nice clean command line. We've come so far and yet find ourselves back at the beginning again. So the story goes in this field.

Until next time....Good Day, Good News, and Goodnight!

Welcome to my new blog. I hope that you will find some of my musings informative, funny, and perhaps just a tad ironic. I will endeavor to keep up my end of this communicado by trying at least once or twice a week to put something of consequence here for your entertainment and approval.

Until next time....Good Day, Good News, and Goodnight!