Personal project: trying to get OP-TEE to work on a rpi3. Seems like there’s some known issues in my way of success. It’s annoying. But once it’s working, I’ve got some experiments I’d like to try out.

I love coffee. I started with a French press, then moved to an areopress, then an espresso machine. I still use all 3, and experiment with what beans are best brewed with the different methods. Very fun hobby.

I love tea as well. But it’s to relax after a stressful day. It’s a different vibe for me. I usually go for tisane or a mild green (sencha).

The act of making coffee, opening the bean package, grinding the beans, preparing the brewing method, brewing, cleaning up, then enjoying the coffee is very zen for me. It’s like practicing mindfulness.

I cannot have coffee after like 1pm without it keeping me awake. And I certainly would be climbing across the ceiling with 5 mugs of coffee.

Got back from vacation yesterday. Today, the Blue Angels are practicing for their show (exhibition? Not really sure what they call it). Super fun to get to watch them play in the sky all day.

Looks great!

I’d really like if this line of work wasn’t completely doom and gloom all the time. I’m burnt out of telling people what seems like extremely dramatic, doomed scenarios of the “state of security” all the time. I feel like I’m always the asshole in the room all the time.

I’m assuming any risk management or actuary job is similar. It can be soul crushing sometimes.

Some of that, yes. I work for a university that’s government adjacent, so we have to get audited pretty often. Part of that is proving that we STIG and conform to other frameworks. But within certain labs, access is remote only, so I’m not sure how they would handle having a PAW, when there’s probably just a few admin accounts that have strict rules and limits applied.

That’s neat. I’m curious about this now. With “normal” search engines that have generally gone to shit, AI chat bots are on trend to give better results. If the robots.txt file is blocked from OpenAI, can I assume it hits other chatbots? And would that extend to Google/bing?

That’s a neat project. Are you looking for trends, or something specific?

Project Management crap. It’s the money season in the government, so I get to ask for lots of money to try to do cool things.

Sounds like a fun assignment! Glad you got some interesting results!

Sounds thrilling!!

I’ll be on vacation for our audit next week. I’m thrilled to miss it.

I work at a place that brags on %30 of applicants are hired, and it’s associated with a higher education system whose ego is larger than it should be for a non-ivy. And of course this trickles down to the people who work there. Lucky for me, non of my coworkers or bosses are like this.

Whoever fucked up, must have really fallen hard. The managers made a spreadsheet to track these items now. We are generally give copious amounts of leeway. Seniors on the team are expected to be thought leaders who work autonomously from leadership.

I will continue to maliciously comply. And track every piece of email on this excel spreadsheet, even if it’s a “understood” or “have a great weekend”.

I laughed when my coworker said it’s demotivating. I said wow, if anything, this will motivate me to produce worthless information to break the system. I get paid regardless of my actual productivity.

Can I complain about work instead? My workplace instituted a “quality review process”. Now anything that is sent external must be reviewed by middle management.

My entire job is external facing. Have fun reviewing every email and document I produce.

Here’s to hoping many others do the same, and totally DoS middle management back into the previous review process.

Preparing for multiple mid year reviews to justify my existence on research projects. Academia is pretty exhausting.

I don’t even have meaningful results yet because I’m so busy giving PowerPoint’s to people explaining my research.

Here’s to hoping they like me enough to give me more money next year.

CompTIA has a cloud cert

I’m back from vacation. Everything sucks already. A contractor literally said, nothing works and we’ve tried nothing. This was for a firewall upgrade, nothing groundbreaking.

Or anyone considered a threat to the state.

We’ve got a threat briefing on all the recent PLA activity. I’m going on vacation, so I’ll miss it which is a bummer.

The hospital my partner works for had a ransomware attack. They haven’t publicly disclosed, so I’m hoping that means they had actual back ups and nothing was compromised.

Personal anecdote: so many things were breached lately. I have an extreme uptick of calls from my “best friend” Scam Likely. I get more calls from Scam Likely than anyone else, hence the “best friend” designation.

My research grant was funded. Now the hard part- executing with the goal of getting year 2 funding.

Also going crazy because everyone wants their risk reports before the holiday. As if they’ll even get read before vacations start.

Like anything else, start slow. Do easy CTF challenges without the write up. Or at least go through the logic of how you’d approach the solving the problem. If you need help using tools, that’s just experience and reading the documentation. Tools come and go (some quicker than others). But the logic and problem solving skills are the foundation. If you always use a crutch/training wheels, you’ll always rely on them.

Like riding a bike, take it slow. Set a timer to problem solve. When the timer goes off, implement what you came up with. If it doesn’t, go back to the write ups and see what they did. Keep doing that for longer cycles until you solve one without write ups.