Personal Brand | On Message

19. October 2011 · 4 comments · Categories: frustration, internet, irritants, rants, struggles, technology, twitter

So many people who I follow on twitter seem to be constantly on message.  What I mean by that is that they constantly post about a singular subject.  It may be IP Networking.  It may be cycling.  It may be the environment.  They are on message.  They have a lot of followers. 

If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time (which only a very few have) you’ll know that I kind of wander from topic to topic.  I’m almost never on message.  I don’t have a lot to say about the industry that I work in.  I don’t have a lot to say about the apocalyptic nature of our relationship to the climate.  I don’t have a lot to say about cycling.

I’ve got a little to say about each of these topics, and many more.

Recently, I noticed a number of my “followers” on twitter abandoned me.  I’m sure it’s because I wasn’t tweeting enough about what they originally followed me for.  Perhaps I pissed someone off with a few to many tweets about politics, the climate, or occupy wall street.

I don’t know.

But I do know this, I’m way more than one-dimensional.  And so are most of the people out there in the Internets.  I wish more people would take the risk of being “off message” once in a while.  They’d been more interesting.

Time of Reckoning?

07. May 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: computing, daily life, frowns, frustration, geek, incongruities, information, internet, irritants, rants, struggles, technology

I’ve been a long time subscriber to SANS news letters.  Most days I have too much to do to really read them, but today as I was wrapping up the day I came across this nugget:

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–

Hash: SHA1

A fascinating battle is taking place today in the struggle between those

who recognize the need to move quickly to continuous security monitoring

(of critical controls) and those who are clinging to the now discredited

practice of preparing out-of-date, paper-based reports about security.

A US Office-of-Management-and-Budget-led initiative to improve the

metrics by which agencies assessed cyber threats was 50% successful and

50% hijacked by the report writers. All the federal CISOs were asked

this morning to help shape the metrics.  We’ll let you know week by week

how the battle goes.  It matters because billions of dollars were thrown

away (according to sworn Congressional testimony) on the discredited

reports. Once the federal government makes the transition to automation,

the defense industrial base, and then the rest of the US critical

infrastructure will shift quickly. And that will radically improve the

job prospects for people who can reduce risk vs. those who just write

about risk.

<snip>

TOP OF THE NEWS

–FISMA 2.0 Advances in the US House of Representatives

A bill that transforms FISMA from encouraging paper-pushing to automated

monitoring of security advanced in the House. The bill also calls for

the jobs of the White House Cyber Czar and Chief Technology Officer to

be permanent and subject to Senate Confirmation.

http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20100505_8690.php?oref=topnews

Oh, how I would love to see the day come when Information Security wasn’t dominated by people who can’t do a damn thing to mitigate risk but do a great job talking the talk and writing the copy about it.  I cannot count how many times I’ve run into a supposed “expert” who couldn’t even begin to pull apart a packet capture or tell me the difference between a Layer2 address and a Layer3 address.  It is, as they say, Frustrating.

What is “Social Networking” anyway?

10. February 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: community, computing, culture, daily life, entertainment, facebook, information, internet, lunacy, noise, slowing down, smiles, social networking, thoughts, twitter

What is social about social networking? That is a question I’ve been asking myself for a while. There is a lot of interaction with the computer and by extension other people who are using their computers but it is far from truly a “social” experience, right?

I don’t really know where I stand on these questions. I have used electronic communications as part of my everyday existence for so long that I really cannot imagine a life unplugged. Much of that communication has been for business but a substantial portion has been with friends and family. That sounds like the very definition of social to me. And yet there is something distinctly unsocial (perhaps even antisocial) about relationships that are purely based on electronic communications — the complete lack of physical face to face human interaction.

When TWTTR first emerged it was an SMS service with the simple idea of enabling friends to let each other know what they were up to. But that was geeky and boring and unprofitable and so now a significant number of tweets have nothing in them about what a person is doing. Most of them have a url and a lot of them are intended to sell something. That is Twitter in 2010. (And yes this blog uses twitter to get traffic too.)

Facebook was fun at first — catching up with people who I’d not talked to in nearly 20 years was cool. Finding some people who I was sure I would never hear from again was awesome. Even the games were fun at first. But then it settled down and the games and apps began to get old. There was a growing sense that the lil green patch couldn’t possibly be doing anything to help the environment. And gradually there was a realization that maybe the reason I’d lost touch with some of those “old friends” was because we really didn’t have all that much to say to each other anymore.

Suddenly I find that most of my facebook time is with people that I do have real relationships with. But that we are no longer calling each other or even emailing each other. Suddenly online social activity is replacing REAL social activities! And that doesn’t seem so social.

And one more thing…I was not a fan of my high school when I was 17 why on earth would I become a fan on Facebook?

Snow Days: Another Legacy Concept

03. February 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: america, Baltimore, daily life, facebook, incongruities, information, internet, lunacy, media, noise, nostalgia, snow, technology, twitter, weather

Most days, I’m firmly in the camp of people who believe that technology makes our lives better.  We have access to information in unprecedented ways in human history.  And make now doubt about it, information is powerful.  It can enrich our lives.  In some cases it saves lives.  Sometimes, I wonder though, whether we are living richer lives in this age of technology.

I really do count myself lucky to live in the age of information, partly because I can remember when information did not flow as freely as it does today.  When I was young, we lived in a small town in the country.  It was easily 12 miles to the nearest town and 15 to a town with a movie theater.  Our town was so small that we didn’t have a local newspaper, there was one that was geared toward the whole county, but not a local paper.  We got most of our news from Baltimore, either in The Evening Sun or on WJZ 13 news.  We had two black and white television sets.  One had a 13 inch screen and one had a 19 inch screen.

If I wanted to learn about something, I went to the library and scoured an archaic set of drawers called a card catalog.  Then I would locate the book on a shelf by the reading a set of codes on the spines of the book which helped me to find that single book in a room full of shelves.  Then I would take the book to a counter, and the librarian would stamp a due date in a card that was kept in a pocket pasted to the inside back cover of the book.

If this sounds like something out of the 1950s, well, it is, but this was also my experience in the early 1980s.  We got a color TV when they laid cable in our neighborhood, in 1986.  When I was in college I did not have an email address.  I graduated in 1994. More »

Can I live with Cloud Computing?

29. December 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: computing, creativity, daily life, geek, good things, internet, media, sidetracks, thoughts, work

Increasingly, I spend most of my time on the computer in a browser.  Okay, almost all of my time is in a browser, and even when it’s not, I usually wish it was.  (I’m saddled with Lotus Notes at the office, and I really would love to just have a good webmail interface in its place.)  Aside from Notes, I use Visio frequently and occasionally Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.  Of course, in my personal computing world, I need iTunes for my iPod.  I also use Picassa for my photos.

Word, Excel and Powerpoint could easily be replaced by google docs.  Easily, except for concerns about corporate security.  Visio, that’s a challenge, and the iTunes/iPod issue could not be replaced – though pandora streamed to the blackberry is an alternative.

I’ve been following the development of Chromium OS/ChromeOS since I first heard about it.  Only a year ago, I was starting to think, I really just need a computer that boots into a browser.  As this becomes a very real possibility, I’m beginning to wonder if I actually could do most of my computing with a browser-based OS?

I’m not sure if I will be able to live with cloud computing, but I’m very interested to see what happens in the space, and how it changes the way we compute.

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