Good-bye Bear Cat, My Friend.

We lost Bear this morning. He was a good cat. He had a good life. We will miss him. Some people say that animals don't have souls. I don't think this is true. I believe that animals act on instinct over reason, are incapable of making the choices that lead to sin, and are therefore innocent and have a place in heaven. So rest in peace, Bear. You were a very much loved part of our family, and you will be missed.

33

Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 33. There's nothing particularly spectacular about that age. Nothing important happens. I took the day off yesterday any way, and I did some thinking. I've actually been doing a lot of thinking lately anyway, but I've come to some conclusions, and I'm going to throw them out here to organize and validate them.

1. I don't care about money. I have to have money to survive, (right now,) and it makes life easier, but it is not how I measure success, and it will not make me happy. Toys are nice, but they are just that. I can live without them. I did the corporate money driven thing, and I hated every minute of it. I refuse to go back to it.

2. What does make me happy is making a difference. I want to make my community, my country and my world a better place. I thoroughly enjoy teaching. I like the concept of helping others help themselves. There's something else here I haven't quite worked out, something about the well being of the society. I'm not quite there.

3. I need to be a better steward of the things I have been given. This is a simple statement for a complex set of issues. I need to take better care of my self, physically, mentally, and spiritually. These are things I've been working on, with varying success. I need to provide for my family. For me what this means is I need to be a good husband. I'm pretty sure sometimes I miss the mark. I get so wrapped up in taking care of me that ignore my wife's needs until it's too late. I need to manage my property better. Part of this is maintaining the physical things I have better. I have a plan, and it's getting better, but it's still not where I want to be. The other part is managing money better. This appears to be in conflict with part one, above, but it's not. If I had no debt, money would become less of an issue, and would hold less sway over my life. To this end, I'm trying to live with a budget. It's hard to stay on track. The unexpected rears its head and I keep having to adjust. It's painful, but it appears to be life.

The question is where do I go from here. This little bit is a lot to balance. I have a short term goal, but how do I derive long-term goals from here? It's there already but it's very broad and very vague. I have more thinking to do.

Update Ramble.

Hello Everyone. Consider this an update and forgive me if I ramble on in random directions. It's been five months since I posted here, which makes me about as consistent as I always have been. I have been writing fast and furiously most of the summer, and most of it has been posted to a blog, just not here. It was almost all team writing, and I'm not excited about what the team produced, so I didn't link to it. If you know me well enough, and weren't bored stiff by the content, you've read it any way.

I'm officially half way through my masters coursework, and have been encouraged to speed up my plan of study, so I'm shooting for a spring graduation. It hasn't gotten any easier, and in fact, it's getting harder. I've given up all of my regular gaming groups and have forgone most things that aren't connected directly to school or survival. Maybe that's a bit over-dramatic, but sometimes it feels that way. Part of the reason I'm writing this is to get back in the swing.

This process has been made painfully more difficult by the untimely demise of my Macbook Pro. This whole episode should probably be a post by it's self, but long story short: AppleCare doesn't. I'm pretty certain they didn't even diagnose the problem. I think they looked at the woefully inaccurate level one tech support notes, opened the box, saw my dented case and made a decision. My plan is to take it to the Apple store in the next week or two and make a Mac Genius troubleshoot it. I'm totally unimpressed with the way this process has gone, and I'm disillusioned with Apple's customer service.

In the meantime I'm getting along with a department loaner that weighs about three tons, but is still a fairly capable machine despite its age. I do miss Mac OS though. I'd forgotten how frustrating XP can be. I would have loaded Linux but I don't have time to mess around with drivers and such. I have seen bits and pieces of Windows 7, and it looks promising, so I might have another go. Maybe if it's good enough I can load it on Criss' laptop, and she can get the full potential out of the hardware.

It's time to replace the Neon. It has too many problems that I've fought with for too long. I've been looking around at inexpensive cars, (getting harder to do, because the government is gobbling them up in an effort to encourage people to buy things they can't afford,) and I've found that I have an attraction to all things Jeep. It's become a bit of an obsession lately, as I scour the Internet for the perfect deal. I'm looking for a Cherokee or YJ, TJ, or maybe JK that is in decent shape and won't cost me a fortune. I figure I can use it as a daily driver for a year or two and slowly build it into a wheeler as I get time/money. Anyone want to buy the Neon for parts or a project?

Criss and I got a chance to canoe a couple weeks ago. We took a weekend trip and went down the Tippecanoe River at Tippecanoe State Park. It was a decent trip. We paid the local livery service to drop us at the boat launch and then drive Ruggy back to their place, and it didn't cost us much. The park was nice and quiet (and big) and the trip down the river was smooth. We went at a good time, and we're looking at going back soon.

We've also decided that we don't do that sort of thing often enough, so we're making plans. Next summer we're doing Yellowstone to celebrate our 10 year anniversary. We're also looking at a small hike up into the Smokies for a night or two at a rustic cabin. Who knows where else we might go.

This sort of thing requires that we be in shape. We've fallen of the wagon a bit in the last month or so, but we have done a fairly good job of not eating out, (especially fast food,) Not drinking pop, and in general trying to make healthy food choices. Oddly, it's helped us save money. We've also started exercising mostly, on the Wii. It's easy to scoff at, but I've lost weight and gained a bit of strength, and I feel better in the morning.

I'm certain there are other things I could go on about, but I've probably bored most of you to tears anyway, so I'll leave off here. the whole point was to get my brain running again and get ramped up for writing anyway. I will try to post more often as things come to mind, but who knows when that will be.

IT Security Education

I taught IPSec to my freshman platform class today. I love teaching this particular section of the book, because I usually expand it beyond the borders of what the chapter covers into a broader discussion of security. This time, as well as the last I assigned the McCumber cube paper (annex?) as a read and respond to lead up to it. It helps the discussion if the students have at least seen the source material. I opened today’s discussion by asking what the students thought of the paper. I had one student tell me that in researching his response, he talked to the industry professionals that he knows and they had never heard of McCumber or his ideas. Further, when asked, the same professionals could not articulate how they would plan for security of a system.  The student wanted to know why this was case, given that I said McCumber provided the model for good security practices. 

Though I never really gave much thought to the issue, the problem is endemic in the IT field. Certainly I see it in my daily dealings with my “service provider”.  The solution however is glaringly clear, and came to me right away: Most likely they had never been taught it. In fact digging deeper, I would suggest that the way the IT security is taught is inherently flawed. 

While I admit I have not done exhaustive research, my experience tells me that Security is generally given second billing or ignored in classes not directly dealing with the topic. It’s certainly true that the Platform technologies class I teach would be this way, were I to go directly from the book. (It basically says using IPSec will help you be more secure).  When security is taught, more often than not, we teach the tools (the technology facet of the cube) and ignore policy and education. Even then, we don’t necessarily teach appropriate use of the tools, leaving IT professionals ill-equipped to deal with the realities of securing systems.

This holds true in every niche in the industry, from coders to database admins to network engineers, creating potentially dangerous knowledge deficiencies which increase risk exponentially. While specially trained IT security personnel can sometimes help to mitigate some of the danger, real world example after example shows that it’s usually not enough. 

The solution is simple, though it will take a shift in the collective pedagogy of the field, and will move with the speed of academia. We need to teach security and security principles as core competencies across the IT discipline. Curricula should include the fundamentals of security as an integral part of technology rather than an overlay. At a minimum, all IT students, regardless of focus should have a dedicated security class early on in their academic careers. Education is one facet of the McCumber Cube. It should be applied to Information Technology professionals as much as any end-user, in fact more so. Early and often. 

Clausewitz Roundtable post: Fin

My final thoughts on Clausewitz. Not very articulate, but read them here.

Clausewitz Roundtable post 8

Read it here, it's good, I think

Clausewitz Roundtable post 7

Please read it here. Especially all you MBAs.

Clausewitz Roundtable post 6

Book six. Read it here.

Clausewitz Roundtable post 5

Read it here.

Clausewitz Roundtable post 4

Read it here

Clausewitz Roundtable post 3

At Chicagoboyz.net.

Clausewitz Roundtable post 2

Second one, not as exciting as the first. Read it here.

Clausewitz Roundtable post

I submitted my first post for the Clausewitz Roundtable at Chicagoboyz.net. You can read it here.