If you want to win, stop underestimating others.
Year: 2013
Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.
Either you run the day or the day runs you.
I’d rather be a failure in something that I love than a success in something that I hate.
People always need empathy before advice.
You write your own destiny.
One of my close British friends said I had one of the most naturally ebullient personalities of anyone he ever met. After I looked up the word “ebullient” to make sure he wasn’t insulting me I came to understand that it defines my character better than any other single English word.
Cheerful and full of energy is exactly what I am… It is also exactly what my 4 year old hockey playing, gun shooting, dad wrestling, mom kissing, pumpkin growing, four wheeler driving son is.
He started preschool last month and he gets a color code for the day that describes how his day was. Red is an excellent day, Orange is a good day, Yellow is an OK Day and Green means that he tried to form his own terrorist cell in the classroom and overthrow the school.
Mostly he gets Red days but sometimes like yesterday he slips to Orange (or Yellow).
I don’t like it when he isn’t “perfect” and gets a non-red day. I talk to him about it and threaten to take away McDonalds, or his tablet, or just about anything I can to make him behave in class. The truth is though walking slow and playing when they shouldn’t is what four year old boys with naturally ebullient personalities do.
I have (unreasonably) high expectations for my son to excel in academics, sports, relationships, and life. I just have to remind myself that he can have those things but that he is always going to be like me and talk when he shouldn’t, run when he should walk, be the loudest guy in the room and get wrapped up in playing and not know when to stop.
The hardest part about raising a son is when you realize that he is just like you and that there is nothing wrong with it.
I was lucky enough to spend last week in London attending one of the best organized and friendly conferences I have ever had the pleasure of speaking at. 44CON has the DerbyCon “All in The Family” model of a small intimate conference down with a crew that DefCon would die to have.
I arrived in London on Tuesday morning and spent Tuesday and Wednesday riding the tube and checking out the hottest tourist spots in London:
I even found my families British Coat of Arms (or was ripped off by a tourist trap):
By late Wednesday afternoon when I made it back to the hotel I was tired and had caught a nasty cold that gave me the title of patient zero of 44Con-Flu.
Thursday I rolled out of bed just in time to walk over to the conference center and get into the green room before my talk on “Security Lessons from Dictators” was going to start. I was sure I was going to be the first person to ever throw up on stage at 44CON but Dominic Spill saved me by awesomely running to tesco and getting me a vitamin water and a Lucozade (which is an English miracle drug). I made it through my talk which was very well received and back into bed for a 5 hour nap before I showed back up for the InfoSec vs Technical panel that was extremely fun to be part of.
I was doing a little better by Friday and was able to catch most of the hidden track talks which due to the Chatham House Rule I think I can only tell you were extremely awesome.
Steve and Adrian have a really good thing going on in London and if you have a chance to attend, speak at or sneak into 44con in the near future I would suggest that you do it.
I will be talking part in this Dell Security Think Tank on the 17th of September.
Here is a stack 105 computers we are surplusing at work after 5 years in service.
Before they get sold at auction it is my job to make sure all the data is securely and permanently removed from the drives. For this tedious job I turn to a copy of DBAN to wipe the drive 7 times (also known as the DoD 5220.22-M wipe). It takes about 4 hours per PC so for most of the last 3 weeks I have been babysitting this stack of computers to make sure they finish correctly and without errors.
This is what “real security” work boils down to for most practitioners. As much as I want to pretend that my job is chasing down hackers, adding new firewalls and yelling cheesy movie lines… it is taking care of the little stuff like this that ensures we don’t sell our users data that is one of the most valuable things I do at work.