Category Archives: Work

First Week

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After being at the same company for almost 5 1/2 years and having great success on the Application Engineering team there, I decided to make a change and take on a new opportunity.

And I just finished my first week at my new job. I think I’m really going to like it, but it’s a long walk to the coffee maker.

Old Friends

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Occasionally we run out of hard drive space on our test servers. When the C:> drive has 0 GB available, bad things happen.

So:

  1. look for old database backups I can delete
  2. look for temp files I delete
  3. look in the Users (or Documents and Settings) folder for profiles that I can delete and notice some names of people that haven’t been with the company in almost a year and hey do you remember that one time when we were out to lunch and…

Another good place to find old friends is an office-wide and company-wide distribution lists.

SC.EXE

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This weekend we are doing a conversion for an existing site, migrating their data from their existing EMR into the new platform. One of the tasks I was responsible for was stopping the windows service that runs the lab interface and e-prescribe messaging.

So I created a .bat file with these two lines:

sc stop servicename
sc config servicename start= disabled

I created a scheduled task on the server to run this .bat file at 7:01pm, when the data conversion was expected to begin. The site would be closed by then and the database would have been taken offline as well. And I didn’t have to login and work on a Friday night.

I can’t wait until our new platform is off of Windows 2003 and we move forward to Windows 2008 R2. I’m eager to start using PowerShell.