Getting Excuses Automatically

Tired of inventing lame excuses yourself? Then here's a script that gets you a new excuse any time you call Get-Excuse! All you need is Internet access:

function Get-Excuse
{
  $url = 'http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl'
  $ProgressPreference = 'SilentlyContinue'
  $page = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $url -UseBasicParsing
  $pattern = '<br><font size = "\+2">(.+)'

  if ($page.Content -match $pattern)
  {
    $matches[1]
  }
} 

If your Internet access goes through a proxy or needs authentication, then look at the parameters of Invoke-WebRequest inside the function. You can submit proxy information as well as credentials.

ReTweet this Tip!