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.

That ride on November 7th was a great solo ride.  I’d received word of my new job offer on that ride.  It was a glorious day with temps climbing into the mid 60s by the end of the ride.  I expected that I’d be riding the rest of the month and then throughout December.  I’d not counted on sickness and cold weather getting in the way.

The truth is, I probably could have ridden more despite the cold, if it weren’t for the sickness.  For three weeks, breathing was labored just sitting around.  The idea of actually getting the lungs pumping was well, out of the question.  But the real stumbler has been the new job.

I’ve admitted it before: I am a consummate perfectionist. When I started my last job, I stressed so hard over doing a good job that I developed migraines among other aliments that lasted for months. I hoped not to repeat that performance when I started this job, and I’ve been relatively successful, but I’ve put forth a full court press for sure.  There has not been a lot of down time.

So, I find myself here, the day after Christmas, looking out the window of my office at snow starting to softly fall in the cold winter air, and I’m looking forward to April. I’m hoping that I will be back out on the bike, and that I’ll be able to find some coverage of the Tour de Flanders.  That will indicate the kickoff of another great season of cycling.

Once again, I find myself up too early on a day when I do not need to get up early.  There is an unquietness about my mind.  I woke first around 2:30 and really never got back to sleep, at least not to a deep sleep.

Machine-gun thoughts firing off in my head, seemingly at random.

…MPLS….Broken Lens…QoS…P100…Dad…Walking on the beach…G1…Singapore…Garden…Hiking…Mud…D90…Might as well get up.

And so I did, I got up around 5:00 when I don’t need to be up before 6:30.  It’s gonna be a long day, I have a feeling.

Live and let live. So many problems in our world stem out of mindsets that bread breed hostility. Mindsets that require all others to conform to our way of thinking or system of beliefs. Narrow thinking.

Narrow thinking does not allow for the possibility of different explanations. Narrow thinking requires that there is only one answer and only one way that is right. Narrow thinking dominates our political, social and economic worlds.

It is the poison that is slowly killing us all.

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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.

Call me a Curmudgeon.  Go ahead, get it out of your system, cause you’re probably going to disagree with me on this post.

The “Tip Jar” has gotten way out of hand.  Everywhere I go, there seems to be a tip jar on the counter.  From Starbucks, to the local pizza joint, to the freakin coffee shop in my building at work, everyone’s got a tip jar out.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to tip people working in a capacity where tipping is customary and usual.  This is especially true where someone’s base salary is below minimum wage because they are expected to make the difference up in tips.  But come on people, not everything in life deserves or requires a tip, especially if you aren’t doing anything but filling a cup of coffee or putting a slice of pizza on a paper plate for me to take to my table – and subsequently bus – myself.

At the risk of sounding like my grandfather, when I was a teenager working in a sub shop the idea of putting out a tip jar on the counter never even occurred to me, because I wasn’t performing a service that deserved or required a tip – I was making sandwiches, which was in actuality, my entire reason for being behind the counter.  Tipping me for making a sandwich would have been ridiculous.  And even if I had thought of putting a tip jar out, my manager would have summarily dismissed the idea and threatened termination of employment if I’d done it.

This is part of what I call modern society’s “entitlement syndrome.”  Everyone seems to think that they are entitled to something.  Apparently, now everyone is entitled to be paid extra for doing their jobs.

I’m putting a tip jar on my desk.  Feel free to put a five-spot in it the next time I create a VLAN for you.

Main Entry: ³bootstrap

: to promote or develop by initiate and effort with little or no assistance <bootstrapped herself to the top>

Sometimes I feel like I am completely capable of bootstrapping my day.  I get up, get going, and get a lot accomplished.  These days fly by and when they are over, I’m tired but not exhausted.  I’m actually somewhat energized.

Then there are days when it just seems impossible to get things going.  When I’ve got tasks that need to be done, but I just can’t get it together to make them happen.  I can sit for hours in front of the computer and not accomplish a damn thing.  Eight hours can seem like an eternity.  On these days, I’m physically and mentally exhausted at the end even though I’ve not accomplished anything.

Somehow that seems incongruous, but I know it to be true.  And I know why.  When I can’t get started my sense of guilt kicks in.  Nothing good comes from that.

I’ve had two such days this week, and today doesn’t look to be shaping up a whole lot better so far – despite getting out to the gym at 6:00 AM.  Where is my Mojo? Maybe this is a post holiday slump?  Maybe its a sign that 12 years in the same field is enough?  I don’t know.

But I do know I’ve got to break this streak.

If you don’t have a signature on your email, you probably do a lot of other irritating and stupid things like play facebook games.  Please read RFC1855.  Among other things it recommends the following:

Make things easy for the recipient. Many mailers strip header information which includes your return address. In order to ensure that people know who you are, be sure to include a line or two at the end of your message with contact information. You can create this file ahead of time and add it to the end of your messages. (Some mailers do this automatically.) In Internet parlance, this is known as a “.sig” or “signature” file. Your .sig file takes the place of your business card. (And you can have more than one to apply in different circumstances.)

• mindfulness
• kindness
• compassion
• consumption
• limits to growth

Last night at 8:09 PM Eastern, I tweeted:

making applesauce from old apples, mentally transitioning into a week at the office

This morning at 2:44 AM Eastern, Motts began following me on twitter.  I’m fairly certain that nobody at Motts is actually reading my tweets.  I’m also fairly certain that no person at Motts is actually paying enough attention to tweets about apples or applesauce to have made a conscious decision to start following me because of my tweet.

What I suspect is that Motts has some BI type application that is reading one of the many rss feeds that exist for twitter and then following people via the twitter API.

Now, I’ve got no misconceptions about my privacy or lack thereof as a result of my choosing to use twitter or any other service or site, but no matter how you slice it, this is disturbing.  It makes you wonder what other company, government, or organized crime group is reading tweets.

And to think, Motts just thought that maybe I’d follow them so that they could sell me applesauce instead of me making it from scratch.