Diary of a Network Geek

Hmm, another strange, twist of fate.
So, my lawyer’s office calls to update me on the status of my divorce yesterday, right? (We go to court to get everything signed and stamped by the judge on August 12, by the way.) And then the nice law clerk says that my attorney wants to talk to me about the “web stuff”. Right away, I’m confused. I’m thinking she means the potentially libelous and defamatory statements that my almost ex-wife has made and continues to make on her website, but, since she has an incestuous readership of about five, including herself and her new, er, whatever he is, I pretty well discount her tripe as anything I need to concern myself with at all. So, in my confusion, I simply ask “Web stuff”? And the law clerk tells me that my attorney wants to hire me to optimize his website for the search engines and submit him! Is that a hoot, or what? Not only is this guy about the least expensive divorce lawyer in Houston, but now he’s giving me the chance to earn some of that fee back by playing SEO with his website! I love this town!
Ironically, my attorney, Gary Hinchman, is from Indiana, which is one of the reasons I went with him. I knew that if I could trust anyone, it would be a Midwesterner. One damn Yankee carpet-bagger wouldn’t cheat another, right? Actually, all joking aside, his office has been pretty good taking care of me. Sure, they’ve been hard to reach on occasion, but, his flat fee structure has been real nice and easy to use. And, of course, economical, to boot! So, I haven’t decided what I’m going to do there, since I don’t really do consulting anymore, but the chance to make a little money back from my lawyer is almost too good to pass up!

Oh, how sweet is this!?
So, I was looking around the other day for a PERL script that would send me an SMTP mail notification from a Windows 2000 server at a remote location, so that I’d know what their IP address had been changed to after a reboot. (It’s a long story, but it involves a VNC server, a cable-router, and a bad power grid.) And, whenever I search for this kind of thing, I go to my backup/long-term memory archive, Google, and do a search. Guess what I found? A whole set of web pages at Microsoft dedicated to Windows-centric system admin and monitoring PERL scripts. Oh, I think I’m in heaven!
I’ve been looking for this kind of thing for ages and ages. I have no idea why I never found it until now, but, well, here it is! Now, I can develop that massive, PERL-based auditing system that I’ve always dreamed of having! YEA!