Taking Control of Yourself

This post is not directly related to the topic of this blog. It’s about taking control of yourself, so that you can do what you love in your career.

With that being said I have been working extremely hard through the pandemic at keeping the changing landscape of IT in a school district up to date and fluid. What I have found is that has come at a neglect to myself and my well-being. This as we all know interferes with our work at some point.

Understanding that is what got me to the Endocrinologist to help me get my diabetes numbers under control. My eating at my desk, not knowing when I would eat, meetings, fires to put out all led to me grabbing something unhealthy and grazing all day long at my desk. These habits led to not getting my insulin on time or at all, not eating when I got home for the evening, and almost completely zero exercise.

The Doctor and I spoke for almost a full hour. We discussed everything I just mentioned, talked about solutions and a small bit of “you need to make the effort” from her. When I left we had a plan for the next two weeks. The biggest thing was a change to my insulin dosage and a CGM to monitor my glucose levels all the time and see where my blood sugar level was.

I’ve come to really like the CGM because it opens your eyes to how much your glucose levels fluctuate and why. You can tell by why you eat, when you eat, what you do after you eat, how much insulin you give yourself and when. Real statistical data in front of your face to see, look at, and analyze.

From the feedback for one week, here is what I see:

• My weight has increased by 5-7 lbs because I am giving myself the right insulin at the right time.
• My exercise routine doesn’t cover what I am eating.
• What I eat truly affects how my glucose goes up, or down even with insulin.
• That time of day also affects my glucose levels.

What I’ve learned about what I eat:

• Don’t eat carb like Snacks i.e. Cheez-It’s.
• Don’t eat whole grain bread that is above 12 grams of carbs.
• Don’t eat Pizza.
• Don’t eat seconds.
• Don’t pile on the first helping.

Now, please do not comment about all the “Don’t” above. When I say don’t it’s really an eat “in moderation”. As an example, if you are eating Pizza, it’s not 4-6 pieces because that is what you always have been eating. It’s 2 slices, with a salad, and a lite dressing. When you put food on your plate for a meal you need to portion control. It’s not 5 big spoonfuls and everything heaping all over the plate. If you want to heap something it should be the vegetables, or beans.

If you need a second helping make it vegetables and/or fruits, or more salad. If you are having fish as a protein then have a small portion of that too. Just don’t make it a second full meal.

Drinking caffeine is bad for insulin too. It inhibits the body from using the insulin. This is all caffeinated beverages, sodas, teas, coffees etc. Water is much better, or a non-sugar drink. A protein drink that you make, or one you purchase would be filling too. Just check the label to see if it has any caffeine in it. This doesn’t mean cut out the coffee or you favorite beverages altogether, it just means limit them to one a day if you feel you really want them.

As for exercise, 150 minutes a week is recommended which is just over 20 minutes a day. Do it when you can, and don’t say you don’t have time because you do. You sleep 8 hours, you work 8 hours, 2 hours of drive time, 2 hours of eating as a high end time for everything is 22 hours used, leaving 2 free hours which is 120 minutes. 20 minutes of 120 is 17% of the remaining free time, leaves you with 100 minutes for whatever you want to do.

Now, truthfully no one sleeps a full 8 hours, nor do you eat for 2 full hours. I sleep 6 hours on a good night, and three meals a day take an hour at most if I’ve prepared correctly on my days off for the rest of the work week. All of this gives you 2-4 hours of “free” time on a work day. Weekends or days off gives you on the high end 10 extra hours of time.

So, find the time, watch what and how you eat. Exercise and drink a lot of water. Take care of yourself and it will take care of the rest. I know that is what I plan on doing.

Really Be the Master and Pass it Forward

We had a young Network Administrator that just left to join a new company. He started as a school based technology support professional working his way up to a Systems Security Administrator and finally a Network Administrator.

When he left he passed out thank you notes. I was fortunate to receive one, and humbled by his words thanking me for letting him look over my shoulder and giving him tips to help him in his career. I will miss him because he was always looking for things to learn, but was more importantly a humble young man. Below is my last interaction with him after receiving the note

Thanks for the card!

It was a pleasure working with you and I wish you the best as you move forward on your career. I want to leave you with something that I learned from reading a book called “Be the Master” by Don Jones. We are all at one time an apprentice, like in the Middle Ages where they had a blacksmith in a town and the apprentice who worked with the Master learning the craft. At some point the apprentice has to become the master, but when? That is a decision the apprentice has to make, and we are all masters at some point after learning a skill. As you move along in your career, remember a job is not your career, try to pass along what you have learned and have mastered to someone else trying to learn. You don’t have to know it all, just what you know you have mastered and what you know helps get the job or task done.

A quick example is the Remote student computers set up last year year in March. I created what I was asked to do, which was create a method and a working step by step script to set up the computers for the remote learners so that even a person uneducated in the technology would be able to follow the steps.

It was a script that did every step, and I mean every step. It wasn’t a script written for a person that knows what to do like a sysadmin, so to a sysadmin there were steps that could be removed and skipped, or the script could have been streamlined as the techie’s in our department found out. The important thing was that it worked for everyone, and I wrote it for everyone. As an apprentice the techies should have seen a better way, and that is fine and that is what should be done. Give the apprentice the full, all out way to do it and let them learn the shortcuts, let them tell you what they find in your way so at some point they can understand the long way and how you make it better.

Remember that we are always an apprentice, because to forget that is to die on the vine and rot. You are now a Master, pass it forward to another apprentice!

Automating PRTG To Add Devices And More With PowerShell

We use PRTG to monitor a variety of things within our district. It is a good program, but it has been tedious to work with to add and modify devices, groups and sensors manually or using the custom template Auto Discovery in the GUI because Paessler has not officially supported Powershell. Disclaimer 1: I did not write this module, I am just writing about it. In this post I am just going to go over getting the module, what it has in it, and some caveats to using it. In my next post I am going to go over a situation we had that I needed to recreate over 40 devices and sensors in a limited amount of time.

A blog post on the Paessler site from January 2019 has the following disclaimer about the PrtgAPI module for PRTG on the site:

Disclaimer: PrtgAPI is developed by an independent PRTG user. As the solution described in this post is not part of PRTG itself, it is not officially supported by Paessler or PRTG Technical Support.

Reading the post that this came from I am learning the Powershell commands in the PrtgAPI module. You can read more about the module and get it in the PowerShell Gallery.

• PrtgAPI at PS Gallery
• PrtgAPI at Github
• How to Add Hundreds of Devices or Groups to PRTG Programmatically

You can install it through Powershell by using the following command

• Install-Module -Name PrtgAPI

Once you have the module installed there is one caveat that I found while using it with my normal Powershell profile. That caveat is that you cannot use Exchange or Office365 modules at the same time because when the PrtgAPI was written in 2015 the author did not use an unique verb-noun structure. That means that cmdlets like Get-Group overlap with Exchange cmdlets. What I do is comment out my profile that loads all my other modules when I want to work on PRTG. Not the most elegant solution, but it works.

Here are the commands within the module by using the Get-Command cmdlet. Below is just a small sample.

PS C:\Powershell> get-command -Module PrtgAPI

Command Type	Name
Alias	Acknowledge-Sensor
Alias	Add-Trigger
Alias	New-Trigger
Function	New-Credential
Cmdlet	Add-Device
Cmdlet	Add-Group
Cmdlet	Add-Sensor
Cmdlet	Approve-Probe
Cmdlet	Connect-PrtgServer
Cmdlet	Copy-Object
Cmdlet	Disconnect-PrtgServer
Cmdlet	Get-Device
Cmdlet	Get-Object
Cmdlet	Get-Probe
Cmdlet	Get-PrtgStatus
Cmdlet	Get-PrtgTree
Cmdlet	Get-Sensor

Go ahead and install the module, then give it a quick test drive to see what each cmdlet can do by using Get-Help for some of the cmdlets. In the next post I will go over adding a Group and the adding devices, and sensor. Cya then, and don’t forget to like this post!