Modern Day Warrior

I went out to pick up dinner last night, because eating at home is so passe.  (Actually, there wasn't much in the larder, and it was time to re-stock.)

As I turned onto the main road to head to Taco Cabana, the drum and bass riff came out of the radio. I was immediately transported back to 1987.  I rolled the windows down, turned the volume up to 11 and turned the AC off.  The synthesizer kicked in, and the singer began singing: 

A modern day warrior

Mean, mean stride

Today's Tom Sawyer

Mean, mean pride

Of course, the song is Tom Sawyer by the Canadian phenomenon Rush, from 1987.

I just find it amazing how less than 10 seconds of a song can emotionally and psychologically transport me to a time over 20 years in the past.  It made me painfully aware of myself, and I didn't really even care.  Yeah, I'm a 47 year old nerd, driving in a Chevy truck, but for those few seconds, I was 20 years old, and cruising down Ocean Drive in Corpus Christi, at it was 1am on a Friday night / Saturday morning.

It was a very nostalgic moment, that was over the second I was in the line to order dinner, because I don't want anybody to hear me blasting my old-man music.

Eureka!

I have a blog! I do? I think so, maybe.

I'm not making any empty promises of actually blogging. I "tweet" about once every 3 months. I "Facebook" maybe once a month - mostly because I hate talking politics which is what everybody is bringing up. I do spend a lot of time on Reddit.

Oh yeah, we have a lovely boy named Benjamin, who when paired with my lovely boy Travis gives me, uh, two sons! I'm so very proud of both of them in so many ways.   That happened since I last posted an entry.

Content! I should monetize this blog and maybe clear about as much as the checking account does in interest annually. I actually saw a WHOLE PENNY in interest the other day. Wow. Time to splurge.

I'm thinking about blogging at work - for work. I know it's hard enough for me to keep up with this one - and yes, this is turning into a self-referential posting about blogging already. Wow, that didn't take long. 

Anyway, I digress. Work blogging, about information security. About risk reduction, about awareness and doing what is right, what is secure and what is ethical. It may happen. I should run it past the bosses. They may like it or not, and I may end up with an editor that will red line and change much of my prose.

Making some red beans and rice right now with andouille sausage. YUM. Thank you for reading. You may now return the stewardess to her original, upright position.

Cats

I went back and reviewed my post, and ended up scrolling down and reading older stuff. I don't know that anybody reads this thing anyway, but I should close up some loose ends.

Cookie cat, my little ball of love and fuzz isn't with us any more. She got very sickly, and we had to have her euthanized on February 8, 2011. It was a VERY sad day for me. I still get choked up when I think about her. That cat was such a good girl.

In July of 2010, we started fostering 4 feral cats. They are now our cats. There is Howard & Leonard (Boys) and Sheldon and Penny (Girls). Yes, we have a girl cat named Sheldon. Sue me. They are all very good. The boys weigh at least 15 lbs each, whereas Penny is teeny like Cookiehead. She's not quite the same, but has eyes that can make me say "OHHHH!" and do whatever it is she wants me to. (Give her turkey, treats, ice, a drink etc...)

That's all. I'm sad now from thinking about Cookiehead. We have her ashes at home in an urn.

Hot...so very hot

Wow... this summer may set some records, at least in my book it does. It's been over 100 degrees 31 days so far this year. Not in a row, but still... Yesterday I walked into the kitchen about 6pm, and saw that the outside patio was 108 degrees! Arizona isn't even that hot right now. Texas has a high pressure system that has moved in like all of the hipsters in Austin, and won't leave. Shit... Makes me long for a hurricane.

The baby is coming along nicely. Mandie is getting all of her required accessories and stuff, like a pillow and other things. She's really beautiful, and is putting up with being pregnant in the heat pretty well. I love her, and this is a great time for both of us, and Travis is even very excited.

Well, that's about all for today.

Announcements

My plan is to begin posting on a regular basis - to lay down a historical record of what's going on in Kentville. I'm sure my ADD will lay waste to that plan, but it's a plan, and maybe I can stick to it.

First and foremost: I'm going to be a father again! Mandie and I are due in January of 2012, and it's a very awesome thing!

Emotions I'm feeling: excitement, giddiness, wonder, amazement. Upcoming will be all of the things we need to do to get ready. We've had 2 sonograms, and seen the baby, which I'm told is now the size of a prune at 11 weeks. I keep asking why all of the size references are to food - where food varies so much. I said "Tell me what sporting ball it's close in size to, a golf ball, tennis ball etc..."

Tis a good time to be alive!

End of Another Year...

It is nearly time to bid adieu to 2010, and greetings and salutations to 2011.

I hope to find more time to read, and perhaps to begin writing. There is a pent up novel buried inside of me, and I need to find a way of extracting it.

I hope for a good 2011 for my close and extended family and friends.

Minions!

I want a huge crew of my own minions! Only if they are the 1 and 2 eyed variants as seen on the movie "Despicable Me" which opened in theaters last weekend. What a good movie! It had plenty of good stuff in it for the kids and the not so kids who paid for the tickets, popcorn, drinks, games and the gas to get to the theater.

Go see it!!

Time flies...

Well, I guess maybe it's true, time flies when you're having fun. I've been having fun, and looked and haven't posted in a LONG time.

Let's see, what to talk about, I guess a status update is in order:

• Family: wonderful! Awesome! Great!
• Job: uh, I'm getting redundant. Job is fine. I like what I do. I'm the CISO - and have 5 great people working with me.
• Little League board: I either quit or was fired. Not sure which one. Doesn't matter, as I switched Trav to another league that was AWESOME. He played on an 8 & under team - the Rice Owls, who won 1 tournament, placed 2nd in another, and placed second in their division.
• Cat: Cookie is still doing well. We also have 2 semi-feral cats outside that we feed and try to take care of.

I have a nutty friend named Tricia that started blogging yesterday, so I thought that maybe I should flex my writing muscles a bit and post to my blog. Once or twice a year isn't too much to ask I don't think. I still need to clear out the cobwebs and write my novel. No idea what to write about, but I want to write. I like to write. I do it a lot for work, mostly security policy or guidance, but I need to write some prose.

Perhaps I'll get a pseudonym and spend some time flowing words onto a virtual page. I think it might do my mind a bunch of good.

Signing off for now,

K

Long time no post.

Much has been afoot recently.

Let's run it down since July of 2008.

• My boss retired
• I was made acting
• I took a very stressful class
• My common law wife and I separated
• I hired a lawyer
  
• I filed for divorce
  
• I met the love of my life
• I was made the boss of my unit
• Fired my first lawyer
• My brother moved to Austin
• Hired a good lawyer
• My mom moved to Pflugerville

Just a few things going on. Nothing too much.

Looking forward to the divorce being finalized, then everything else will begin falling into place.

I really need to get things in order in my life. I look forward to the future for the first time in years!

Big Kahuna

Well, it's only been 4 months since I posted, but I *JUST* got my desktop PC back up and running, and what was the first thing I do? Post in my blog? No. Start applying Microsoft patches. Sheesh. SP3 is downloading right now.

My big kahuna reference is to the fact that I was elected to the board of the little league that my son plays on. Yay me!

I get to go next week and find out what my needed skillset will be - but I think it's going to be keeping the website updated. OOOPS. Hope they don't see my blog. :)

Holy Crap

It's been a LONG time since I've posted in here. I guess I should remedy that sometime.

Have a Good Jump Mr. Knievel!

It's a sad day for a boy who grew up watching Evel Knievel jump over buses, fountains, and and an attempt at a gorge in the 70's and 80's.

Mr. Knievel was 69, and was as much a rock star as a superhero to me. He was a true bad ass, and my eyes are a bit misty just remembering the old days. Godspeed Evel!

I'm certifiable

I spent the bigger part of the week in a class learning about security methodologies. I'm now NSA IAM/IEM certified, which means that I've learned a good methodology for undertaking INFOSEC assessments and evaluations.

It was one of the better classes that I've taken for the INFOSEC part of my career.

On another tact, wii got a Wii recently. My arm is sore from playing baseball with the little guy, and it's a lot of fun. Can't wait for some new games for Christmas.

RSVP, Dumbass

Planning a party is sometimes fun. (Even for a 5 year old's birthday.)

Presents are picked, a location is (finally) settled on, and invitations are sent. An email address and an omni-present cell phone number are included - with a request to RSVP.

What's the etymology of the acronym R.S.V.P.? Well, Wiktionary has this to say:

From French, Répondez s'il vous plaît In France.

Simply translated to English, even Texan, it means "Hey dumbass, tell me if you're bringing your spawn to the freaking party or not, or I might not give them or your gimlet ass anything to eat or drink if you show up without letting me know. Oh yeah, don't call me 30 minutes before the party, asking if you can bring three siblings of your little darling - as their father can't watch them because the big game is on and you know, he likes him some beers."

Somehow, I doubt that my definition will make into any "Miss Manners" type books.

The main reason for the RSVP request is so I can forecast the amount of pizza to buy. I don't want to have 6 pies standing by, getting cold to have 3 kids and 3 adults show up. I loves me some pizza, but the fridge won't hold 5 pies.

I'm sure it's going to either be feast or famine. 4 kids will show, or 17. I'm booked for 10. So probably more will show up and I'll end up coughing up $10 per head additional to get them admitted to the place, and will run out of food in 5 minutes.

I just hope the little guy has fun.

Tis the season

Allergy season, that is. Ragweed is rampant in the Central Texas area, and everybody in the family is feeling it one way or another except for the cat.

I spent the day getting ready for tomorrow. What's happening tomorrow you might ask? Go ahead... ask.

Not much. Taking kidlet to a birthday party and an expo put on by the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department. I had to do a lot in prep however. About 2 weeks ago, crossing a railroad track on Duval street near Mopac, I somehow destroyed the right front tire on my Batmobile. Knowing that those tires are as hard to come by as a virgin at UT, I was expecting to have to shell out about a buck fifty each for new front shoes. Ended up that Tire Rack had them online, for $79 each. I got 2. Had one mounted last week, for $28 at a place that a friend guaranteed me wouldn't charge more than $7.

NTB does it for anybody for $11.50. *Shrug*

I got my tires done, oil changed, car aligned - after NTB said that my car wasn't "alignable" I drove a block to Sears who did it.

I'm going to be getting up now in 7 hours to go out in the sun, wearing my Austin Bass Fishing T-shirt, to see what kind of outdoorsy mischief I can find... Then take mini-me to the bday party at the mini-golf place. Yay. I hope they serve beer there.

Mmmmmm... beeeeeeer.

More Old Skool

I remember when Doom came out -- wow. I got the demo - that allowed a user to play one level, and was hooked. My buddy Ed and I would both play almost all night long, then talk about the game after classes at Del Mar College.

I'd been playing it for about a month - mostly all late nights, when I realized that the game was affecting my brain. I was walking down the hallway at the Del Mar Business Building - where 90% of my classes were taught. I came to a corner, and rather than just casually negotiating the turn, and continuing on to whatever mundane location I was going to, I stopped, leaned my head out and checked for monsters. I was shocked. It's like the sort of realization one might have if they found themselves on a blustery afternoon, and realize they are standing in the bedroom wearing women's underwear. (Unless you are actually of the womanly persuasion. That's probably not as funny as it seemed in my head a second ago.)

Finally, Ed and I were eating lunch one day and I came clean. (Not about transvestitism!) I told him about checking for monsters around the corners and he was shocked! He was doing the same thing!!! Ah, symbiosis. I didn't feel quite so bad or abnormal any more. (Not like either one of us was or is so normal.)

I don't play many games these days. The rigors of work, home life and a nearly 5 year old make it impractical. I don't really miss it - hell, I'm sleepy at 9pm. The pressure of getting up and going to work are a bit different from the choice I made of never having a class before 10am. When I do play, it's usually a benign strategy game, like something from the Command and Conquer genre, or my latest, jigsaw puzzles online. How boring. Nothing like a giant monster coming screaming at you through the CRT, blood dripping from its fangs, making a sound through the headphones that makes you want to scream and run and causes you to pee a little.

Ah, good times.

Old School Nerds

I was reminiscing the other day - the way that old men do... (I turned 40 in July) My nostalgia trip took me to computers. Remembering my first computer - a Franklin PC compatible thing with dual 360K floppy drives and a CGA "color" monitor. No mouse, no modem, no Ethernet NIC... No Internet. How boring. It was an 8088, with 512K of RAM. I learned to use DOS 3.3, and could make that OS sing.

Eventually, I BOUGHT a new computer -- a 386sx with a VGA monitor, and the upgrading began.

I used to read a magazine called Computer Shopper, which I don't think exists any more. It was the ultimate computer magazine for hobbyists. It was about 2" thick, and was about 40 pages of articles and about 400 pages of ads from computer companies that sold either complete systems or parts. Oh, what parts!

It was like being a kid with the Sears Wish Book - I recall poring over the newsprint pages, dog-earing the pages of companies where I could get something for $4 less than some other place. It was crazy - ordering parts from 7 different companies and then (before being able to track shipments online) trying to be patient whilst waiting for the packages to arrive.

You could tell what was going on if I was walking down the hall with "Shopper" tucked under my arm. Somebody'd better light a match.

I remember buying used a 1200 baud modem to get online on BBS's. Paid probably $100 for it. Nothing like the screech of the modem as you connected up at a blazing 12oo baud. Eventually, I ended up running a BBS called "The Circuit Board" in Corpus Christi, Tx. Max speed 14.4kbps, running on a Practical Peripherals modem. Ah, good times. I learned to program a bit in C, got the source code and modded the board to meet my needs. I had fun with it for a few years, until it turned into a job, at which point, I stopped doing it. Most of my users ended up being little 15 year old anarchists and people looking to leech porn pics, which I didn't offer up on the BBS.

The hobbyist in me began to die out, and I wanted to actually use my computer without having to wait for a BBS user to hang up. There was that wonderful F9 key that simulated line noise and dropped the connection.

Eventually, when I was attending classes at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, (or it may have been Corpus Christi State University at the time) I was given a shell account on a DEC Alpha, and the ability to get on the internet. Oh. My. God. What a cornucopia of access that presented to me. I learned to use Lynx to "surf" the web. All in Text. I thought that was so ultimately cool.

I would someday like to present Lynx to a "power" user here at work and see what they can do with it. I was really intrigued by this new "net" thingy. I guess this is before I knew it was the intarwebs.

Not sure what the first time I encountered a true graphical web browser was, but it was at work - using Netscape, and Chameleon TCP/IP on probably a Windows For Workgroups machine. How fun. It took 2 of us to get it to work. We didn't know ANYTHING about TCP/IP - being a Novell shop. If it were IPX or SPX, it would have taken me 4 minutes. We had a fractional T-1 running at 56K. It was SO FAST. When I left we had a 10 meg pipe.

-more later-

Me from Springfield.

Sad / Happy

One of my nephews, Brian is moving with his wife, Taylor to Chicago. Home of da Cubs and da Bears.

Even though I only see them a couple of times a year, it has always been comforting that they lived here in town. I'm going to miss them. They are a very bohemian pair, and I really respect that they are their own people. They had a very cool wedding - the first one that I ever took photos of - at the French Legation in Austin. I've enjoyed seeing them at various venues where Brian's band played.

I wish upon them maximum happiness, and hope that they can find the place they need to be. It's with sadness that they are going, but I admire their spirit, and it makes me happy that they are willing to embark on an adventure.

So to Brian and Taylor - I salute you and wish you a great adventure!

Yay

I finally got to go fishing yesterday. I got maybe 10 minutes of fishing between 2 different lakes. Frapping rain.