Sideswept Clergy

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight part 1

2010-06-22T17:17:00.000-07:00

I found something on my hard drive, something from long ago. It terrible, terrible in such a way that it may have transcended the good-bad spectrum and become awesome. It's possible that it hasn't, I don't trust myself to judge. Chances are me enthusiasm has been renewed enough to continue it one was or the other, and certainly have been renewed enough to subject the internet to it. What follows is the first third or so of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as told be me using only stick figures and leetspeak. Just pretend the numbers are the letters they look like and sound things out if you have to.

And read the actual poem. They'll either enhance or ruin each other. Either way there will be an effect.

If you ever wonder if your hard drive is dirty

2010-06-18T16:13:00.000-07:00

As an Administrator of Several Systems, I am occasionally called upon to script solutions to various issues of the day. Every so often end up with one that seems crazy difficult, but the solution ends up being simple. Like it's just what the language (in this case Powershell) was designed to do. Even though it's a problem so obscure that no one but me, in no environment but the one in which I work, would ever bother solving it.

That said, the issue in question is simple: in order to keep our not-so-hot PCs running at optimal speed at all times we have a weekly scheduled task that defrag's every hard drive in the domain. On some PCs it was failing. Closer inspection showed that the hard drives of these PCs were flagged as "dirty" - a checkdisk was scheduled to run at next reboot, so they couldn't be defragged. But reboot after reboot they would never run that check. It turned out we had a rash of corrupted autochk.exe's, which was simple enough to fix. But we had no way of knowing what PCs had the problem until users reported slowness. Any good Administrator of Several Systems will tell you that being proactive beats the crap out of being reactive. So we had to fix them all in one fell swoop. But how?

Enter Powershell.

I won't introduce Powershell in any sort of detail. If you're not familiar with it you should go do some reading. It's a Windows Admin's best friend. Everything you could want to do is easier with Powershell. Everything. What follows is a compact, 16-line script that runs through every client PC in the domain and returns a list of every PC, every single drive, that is flagged as dirty. Accomplishing the same task with VBScript would take (me) at least 100 lines, and it wouldn't look nearly as pretty.

$objDomain = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry

$objSearcher = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher
$objSearcher.SearchRoot = $objDomain
$objSearcher.Filter = ("(&(objectCategory=computer)(sAMAccountName=*)(operatingSystemVersion=5.1\282600\29))")
$objSearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("name")

$colResults = $objSearcher.FindAll()
out-file .\DirtyDrives.txt -NoClobber -append -inputobject "Scanning..."

foreach($objResult in $colResults) {
$objComputer = $objResult.Properties

$colDrives = Get-WMIObject -computer $objComputer.name Win32_LogicalDisk -filter "DriveType=3"
foreach($drive in $colDrives) {
if ($drive.volumedirty -eq $True) {
$toWrite "Dirty drive: ", $drive.Name
out-file .\DirtyDrives.txt -NoClobber -append -inputobject $objComputer.name
out-file .\DirtyDrives.txt -NoClobber -append -inputobject $toWrite } } } }

out-file .\DirtyDrives -NoClobber -append -inputobject "Scan complete."

Tada. You end up with DirtyDrives.txt in the same directory as the script you just ran, and possibly a bunch of computers to work on. In case you were bored.

Melody. Gloucester. Pegasus.

2010-06-11T03:23:00.000-07:00

Let me start with an anecdote, the same way I'll finish. The night was September the 15th, 2003, and the New York Giants were facing the Dallas Cowboys. It was the 4th quarter, and the Giants had just capped off a 15 point come back to take a 3 point lead on a 30 yard Matt Bryant field goal. There were 14 seconds left in the game. Yound and excitable as I was, I got up, walked into the hallway of my dorm, and did a short "victory dance" as the game went to commercial. It was only on the walk back to the couch that I realized that I had just made a grave error in judgement. My roomates, Adam and Mark, knew as well, and they were looking at me with anger in their eyes.

The ensuing kickoff went out of bounds, giving Dallas the ball on the 40 yard line and taking 0 seconds off the clock. Quincy Carter completed a single pass, the only one he threw, for 26 yards, taking 10 seconds off the clock and leading Dallas to take their final timeout. Billy Cundiff, a notoriously unreliable field goal kicker, nailed a 52 yarder between the uprights. The kick was so perfect it would have been good from 62 yards, and the game went to overtime. NY failed to score and Dallas marched down the field, setting up the game winning 25 yard field goal, again by Billy Cundiff.

There is a kind of magic that governs the sports world, a series of interwoven strings that are largely invisible until you accidentally pull one. Like Mary Katherine Blackwood when the book she nailed to the tree fell down, I knew that the Giants were doomed right after the deed was done, and there was nothing I could do about it. Countless other sports fans, and the players themselves, have experience the same phenemenon over the last century and change. Unlike Mary Katherine, most of us don't presume to know what actions are and are not "magic" ahead of time. We cannot choose 3 power words (Melody, Gloucester, Pegasus) to protect a lead going in to the 9th inning. To do so would be futile, and in all likelihood make things worse.

Garrett Wittels, the college baseball player, has just taken the second longest hit streak in NCAA history into the offseason, hoping to resume it next year. He hasn't cut his hair since the streak began, he fashioned a Jobu (a la Major League) doll for his locker and has countless pregame rituals, including getting a pack of gum from his sister, in order to keep the streak going. One of his rituals is working for him. Because he doesn't know which one, and won't know until the day he fails to do it and thus fails to continue the streak, he has to do everything that might pull that magic string before every single game lest he jinx himself. Similar behaviors have been seen throughout sports history. The only thing harder that controlling the magic is predicting its effects.

Take, for example, the final game of the 2007 NFL Season: The New England Patriots trying to go 16-0, with only the New York Giants, a vastly inferior team, standing in their way. For 2 and a half quarters of play the Giants ran that game, doing with the Patriots whatever they saw fit. Then my wife, who was falling asleep, got up off the couch she had been on for the entire game to that point and moved to the other side of the room. I was dumb struck. How could she have possibly have treated the fate of the first pefect season since 1972 so flippantly? The game started to unravel, and the Giants eventually fell to the superior team.

But the magic is unpredictable. That loss sparked something in the New York Football Giants, something deep down inside. Something that let them walk all over Tampa Bay, that gave them the power to overcome Dallas (who had smacked them around twice that very season), and made them immune to the cold and the mystique of the frozen tundra of Lambeau field in order to march on in to the Super Bowl and face the New-the-hell-Englad Patriots. That same magic made a statue of a quarterback more slippery than Michael Vick, and gave a number 5 reciever the best hands in football history for one magic play. That magic, that seemingly meaningless move from one couch to another six weeks earlier, won the Giants the Super Bowl.

OH HAI

2010-06-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Sam. I write stories. This is my web log. I don't care if "blog" is considered an actual part of the English language or if it is the name of the website on which I am web logging, it is not a word. That word is part of the reason why the Internet and I are at odds. The other reasons are largely work related and probably classified, so I won't get in to them. Suffice it to say I have my reasons for wanting to kick the legs out from under the Internet and you should respect them even if you don't know them.

Anyways.

I am write stories, fix computers, father children, husband wives (maybe it's just one wife and one child but that doesn't really fit the flow of the sentence. Husband and father are still verbs, though.) and other measurements as well. If you get that reference you are too into Eddie Izzard and need to devote your time to something else instead. I'd like to recommend my web log, sparse as it contents may be, for your consideration. There may be pictures of bunnies in the future. Bunnies or kittens, whichever is cuter.

And if cuteness doesn't win your favor, I'll put up pictures of machine guns or engines or something. Maybe bunnies wielding machine guns and shooting engines, only to have the bullets bounce off the sheer horsepower-driven manliness of said engines. That might offend the cuteness crowd, but honestly, if you're offended by bunnies failing to shoot holes in engines then I really don't need your traffic.

But please read my web log anyways.

There once was a blog.

2010-04-30T18:02:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I was too cryptic in my first post. I'm new at this blogging (what an awful word) thing, and I figured I'd break the ice with something random. but I realized something: the Internet is nothing to be trifled with, and being chased down by the Internet is very serious business. If you see the Internet coming after you be sure to hit it with a rock. It won't hold it off for long, but at least you'll get a head start.

Then you can pretend to round the next corner, only to take your shoes off so it can't hear your steps, and lie in wait for it as it rounds the corner, ready to descend upon you. From there you have to seize your advantage - you only get one chance to fool the Internet - and kick it's legs out from under if like in the movie Brick, because the Internet hasn't seen Brick. It'll hit the ground hard, the Internet is very heavy, but you can't stop there. It's got backup servers, it'll come right back after you if you start running again. You've got to kick it a few times and yell some the most intimidating things you can think of at it. You've got to show the Internet that, though you are but one person, you are not to be trifled with. If you had the presence of mind to hold onto that rock this would be the perfect time to utilize it. You can't kill the Internet, though, so don't get carried away. Your victory will be psychological.

It doesn't matter if no one sees you take down the Internet. It'll remember it forever, and so will you. That's where you get the real power.

Hit it with a rock.

2010-04-29T03:04:00.000-07:00

The internet is coming.