Ten years ago this week I found myself in Las Vegas, not to enjoy its infamous nightlife or try my luck at the casinos, but to face what I would rank as one of the most challenging achievements of my life — maybe second only to earning my Master’s degree. I was in Vegas attending a grueling boot camp crash course to earn my Microsoft MCSE certification (server engineer). My mission? To conquer not one, not two, but seven MCSE exams in the span of just two weeks. Our schedule was brutal. We spent up to 10 hours a day… (read more)

Not all stories are mine to tell, and some are told better over a beer than through a blog, but roughly six months after she applied for early retirement based on a disability, Susan received a phone call Tuesday afternoon informing her that Wednesday would be her last day of work with the FAA. I’ve been to plenty of retirement parties over the past few decades. In fact, just last year Susan and I attended a retirement dinner for a coworker of ours. Roughly forty people came together at a local restaurant to eat, share stories, and toast a guy… (read more)

In President Biden’s most recent State of the Union address, the president called for the “vast majority” of federal employees to begin transitioning back to the office, citing “significant progress fighting the COVID-19 pandemic has made it safer to do so.” While Biden’s motivation and the current state of COVID may be debatable, what is not debatable is that I fall into the category of “vast majority of federal employees.” Last Wednesday I returned to the office for the first time in approximately two years. Here are a few random pictures and thoughts I had while returning to the office.… (read more)

Through what can only be called a comedy of errors, “we” (not me) managed to brick nearly 1,000 laptops at work. The details aren’t particularly important (nor am I in a position to discuss them), but let’s just say that a unique combination of outdated operating systems, older third party disk encryption solutions, and Microsoft’s latest patches combined to create the perfect storm for these specific machines. All of these things came together in a way that left the machines in a non-bootable state, effectively turning them into “bricks.” A quick response was needed, so management requested that those machines… (read more)

Last Tuesday Susan and I were able to have dinner with Susan Wood-Butorac, a person who directly changed the course of both of our lives. In the winter of 1995 I was twenty-two years old. I had been working as a contractor at the FAA for eight months, and had only been married to Susan for four. Beginning that fall, I started travelling all over the country, performing hardware upgrades on workstations and servers. If you really want to date this story, the objective of those trips was to make sure every 386 computer met a “minimum baseline” of 8MB… (read more)