Posts on Ian's (not so) technical blog

Status of My World

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 01:05:09 -0500

Well, folks, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I know I’ve gone from the guy who would post multiple times a day back in my prime, to the guy who posts once a year or so, but, hey, that’s how life goes sometimes.

I’m still the COO at the Makerspace. It’s still challenging as fuck, but, it’s really…beneficial for my mental health.

Work is work: both exhilerating and exhausting. New products are always being released, and while I’m generally known around work as the ‘security dad,’ I still have to put the foot down every now and again to get folks to take me seriously. Admittedly, there’s nothing like an $800k bill to remind folks that I called this out as a risk 45 days ago for them to finally listen to me.

Year end reflection, Cookie Recipes

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:58:19 -0600

2025: A Year of Settling In, Stepping Up, and Slowing Down

If 2024 was the warm-up lap, 2025 was the year everything finally came into alignment. Not in a dramatic, fireworks-in-the-sky sort of way, but in the steady, grown-up sense that the pieces I’ve been moving around for years finally decided to cooperate.

Stepping Into a New Role

The biggest milestone this year was taking on the role of COO of the Dallas Makerspace. I’ve been part of the community long enough to know its quirks, its strengths, and its potential, and stepping into a position where I can help steer its growth feels both natural and energizing.

The Minio Pivot: Container images and CVEs

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 11:02:41 -0500

In case you misssed it, there’s been some intense community discussion around Minio (the popular S3-Compatible object storage server). It’s a perfect storm of a critical vulnerability, a sudden business model change, and a high-stakes standoff that puts Docker’s hub in a really shitty position.

What Happened?

The whole mess kicked off when a critical privilege escalation vulnerability, CVE-2024-40626, was disclosed. A patch for this nasty bug hit Minio’s source code around October 15th, but users quickly noticed the official minio/minio Docker image wasn’t being updated. This led to a GitHub issue being filed around October 18th, politely asking what was up. The answer was a bombshell: Minio had already made a business decision around October 10th to become a source-only distribution. They were abandoning their pre-compiled binaries (including the Docker image) and had even pulled their online documentation. As you’d expect, the community discussion exploded, both on GitHub and in a massive Hacker News thread around October 21st. To make a bad situation worse, when Docker’s own ’trusted images’ team tried to contact Minio, they were met with complete radio silence.

CPB Helped Make Me

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 01:13:06 -0500

I really want to think that I’m the type of child who benefitted the most with PBS:

Grew up in a small village under-served by traditional media.
Attended public schools in the 87th poorest county in Ohio with books that were sometimes 30 years old (I had books in High School that my mom used.)
Grew a love of math and Science from shows on PBS like Square One, which Mathnet helped me fall in love with Dragnet, NOVA, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego which taught me about geography.

Thinking about this more doesn’t make me want to put something on a pedestal…but it does make me feel like I’m not special, and that PBS did it’s job. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting – CPB – was dismantled today, unceremoniously. I hope and pray that one day, we can give kids a chance like I got to succeed.

Volitics -- My New Favorite Word

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 06:50:06 -0500

Personal note:

While I love volunteering and helping others, I choose to spend my time at organizations that I want to spend time at. I understand that there will always be politics in the things that are out there any time where you have a group of diverse minds with different goals, but, I always hope that the goals of the non-profit can come first: helping others learn, sharing our love of teaching with others, and helping other non-profits by providing resources and support so that they can perform their missions in the community.

Deployments

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 16:09:18 -0500

As most of you know, I’m a linux nerd. I do use some macOS and windows for my work life, but 99.9% of what I do is based off of Linux. With that said, while there are somewhat out of the box solutions for installing windows, there’s not really a piece of software that’s open source that’s out there that does everything that I want. Fog Project fits some pieces of the puzzle, netboot.xyz is really strong when it comes to Linux Management, but, doesn’t really give me any dashboard nor any way to really manage it outside of a docker container, which doesn’t really fit my workflow, and while there are OS specific solutions that are out there for Debian and RHEL, I’m looking for something that can automate a lot of the normal workflow specific things for me:

Book Review: The Volunteer

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 14:32:07 -0500

Front Cover of the Book

Quick Information at a glance:

ISBN: 9781668033012
Author: Gianna Toboni
Pages: 320
While I did copy this review on my Librarything profile, please consider this the official review.

The Book, My thoughts, and is it a good read.

“The Volunteer” is a sobering book about the capital punishment machine in America, the attempts to whitewash it in the form of lethal injections, the fight between departments of corrections and the anti-capital groups trying to get restrictions on how the drugs can be used in correctional settings, and the story of Scott Dozier – a former death row inmate in Nevada who tried to force the state to execute him – as told by Gianna Tobini, a Vice reporter.

Adding Slashpages to my sites

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 20:33:19 -0500

I spent some time today working on getting my blog updated, including adding the list of Slashpages to my blogs that I manage.

New pages include:

/about – a page all about me…
/ai – a page on my website that describes how I use, or don’t use, AI.
/cannon – an encapsulation, in list form, of those things that have most shaped me. A sort of annotated bibliography of influences.
/colophon – a page that describes how the site is made, with what tools, supporting what technologies
/death – a page with instructions for family and friends in case of my demise
/defaults – a list of the apps I use for various tasks, usually based on the list from Hemispheric Views 097
/ideas – things I want to make, or concepts am considering
/interests – what I’m passionate about and what excites me.
/junk – host an indie-web yardsale
/nope – a list of things I don’t like or don’t want to do
/shoebox – A bit of website where for the odds-and-ends.
/someday – things I someday would like to achieve, accomplish, explore, experience, create, learn, understand
/verify – a page on my website to list and prove my online identities
/where – a place to let others know about my current location
/why – an opportunity to say what I care about, what direction you’re heading, and how I hope to exist in the world. A minifesto on the purpose of my site, or my work
/yep – a list of things I agree with or will do

A lot of content for one evening…

My System for Moving

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:00:18 -0500

I’ve moved around a lot in these last eight or so years. Cincinnati to Dallas to Austin to Dallas to Cincinnati to Dallas to Chicago to Tampa to Dallas to Boulder back to Chicago back to Dallas. I have three main categories of things:

Stuff that I use everyday and is important to my day-to-day work and relaxation.
Stuff that I use weekly and is too expensive to replace.
Stuff that I occasionally use but don’t want to replace.

For items in the first category, they are items that fit into my media bag, my laptop bag, or my electronics duffle. These are things that I usually take everywhere with me.

Quiet Evenings With the Radio

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 01:18:49 -0500

It’s not every night where I can sit and work on random projects until 1 in the morning, and it’s not every night where I can spend time talking strategy with my friends about how I’m trying to solve some home automation thing.

Tonight’s project was getting one of my older radios back up and working again. It had been relegated to a random storage bin, and I’ve finally been able to get it out of the bin, work on things, and bring it back to life. It’s not in the best shape, location, or tune, but, these are things that I can solve with time.

I need to get better at writing blog posts.

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 04:48:16 +0000

So, we’re in 2025. I’ve been taking a bit of a social media hiatus, but, I’m still around. I’ve been doing a lot of work at my local makerspace, mainly learning things that are outside of my wheelhouse – ceramics, jewelry making, and printmaking. A lot of folks have been asking for advice on how to deal with things at the makerspace and while I’ve been helping and providing guidance the best that I can, I don’t really want to make the makerspace my ‘second job,’ nor do I want to work on things before I work on things…so, we’ll see how this goes.

Field Level Security (in rails) "Done Right"

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:45:24 -0600

I’m a huge proponent of believing that security shouldn’t be something that’s baked in after the fact – it’s something that should be all or nothing from day one. I realize that this is probably a wild and opinionated point of view, but, let me try to explain:

When your application starts out, user account security is usually one of the things that you think of last unless you’re utilizing a framework that has some type of tenant segregation in from day one. While security is usually brought into the product at some point after the core functionality of the MVP is introduced, this is the point in the development lifecycle that can really make or break your application: make the right choice: a library that is well maintained, well documented, and well-tested, and hope that it not only has the support of the community, but, pray that it doesn’t commercialize itself later down the road breaking your core functionality…or, roll your own. Rolling your own means ensuring that you’ve got a well-built set of definitions and goals for your authorization stack and that you’ve thought of everything your application needs from day one. Realizing that it’s a step in futility, most good engineers will try to add some things to your application to allow it to ‘future-proof’ the application, basically locking himself to be the ‘forever authz guy’ or worse, detrimental to your engineering team when that engineer leaves and all of that domain knowledge of the library or gem leaves after everyone on his team has left. (Oddly specific because I’ve lived through it. Twice). How do you solve for that? In my mind, that’s getting as close to the data as you can, and building forward from there. That’s where Soter comes in. Soter’s opinionated, secure by default, and easy to implement. Soter works on the belief that all data should be graded from the moment where it’s defined in the Model – if the model hasn’t been graded, then the data is unavailable to display to the user. Grading the data is mandatory, but, granting access is optional. You could have fields that could only be available to the application, prohibited by rules in being returned as a JSON or other object, keeping those fields secure by default.

Tabs, Windows, and Buffers in Vim

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 16:04:01 -0600

I move back and forth between neovim and vscode frequently, depending on the day of the week, which way the wind is blowing, and a litany of other things including how I feel like my system is behaving, even if that is something that is completely subjective. I found myself struggling to really grasp the keystrokes required to manage my split panes, so, this post is 50% education for you, and 50% a reminder for me.

Wednesdays With Aspen

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 01:53:49 -0500

You can totally tell when I’m depressed if you’re watching closely.

Yeah. Maybe I should move more when I'm depressed....

Yes. For those who are wondering, I did hit 10k steps today.

Aspen decided that we needed to go for a long walk today. Halfway through the walk – after she had tried to chase after a fox, a skunk, and a goose – she decided that she had enough walking, and loafed on the ground.

Employee Surveillance Fosters Mistrust

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 17:26:29 -0500

A new study titled “Employees as Risks” - released today by the Vienna-based non-profit crackedlabs - explores software from Microsoft and formerly from Forcepoint – specifically SIEM (security information and event management) and UEBA (user and entity behavior analytics) applications. This study, part of an ongoing series of reports on the Surveillance and Digital Control at Work, examine the way in which expansive information gathering in the workplace turns employees into suspects. As the report points out, employee surveillance fosters mistrust, may be disproportionate, and comes with potential problems like false positives and inaccuracies.

Snowflake Security and SAML

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 22:43:34 -0500

There’s been a bit of stories about Snowflake recently; both from users who are recovering from the fact that Snowflake had no velocity limits on their wide open user data buckets, companies who are upset about their lack of meaningful MFA Controls, and then Snowflake reporting that they are now going to force MFA controls on all user accounts.

If I’m an administrator at a larger organization, and I’m adding applications to my organization’s SaaS footprint, the baseline is that SSO is a hard requirement. If your team doesn’t have the cash to spend for SSO on their product, then you better build and maintain your own solution, because you have a better chance of winning the lottery than me approving that purchase or allowing our internal or customer data outside of the network: I likely have a SAML implementation – be it EntraID, Okta, OneLogin, or something else – and I’m already enforcing MFA and trusted devices for all of our federation.

Week Two Update

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 02:05:22 -0600

Well, kids, it’s been two weeks since I received the news that I no longer have a job. I’ve taken it fairly well so far.

In the last two weeks, I’ve:

Applied for: 547 positions
Recruiter Calls: 8
Hiring Manager Interviews: 4
Team Interviews: 3 (Scheduled and have happened)

At this point in time, I’m fairly confident that I’ll have a new role before my severance is up.

I’m kind of kicking myself for not taking the Riot offer: they gave six months of severance!

My Resume Generator

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 01:54:47 -0600

So, After being laid off from my job at Greenhouse last week, I’ve decided to automate my resume and searching tools. After taking a day or two off to kind of figure out what I really wanted my next steps to be, taking a few days off because of a really nasty stomach bug, and taking a few days to enjoy the winter weather with my puppy, I started to look at my gameplan for figuring out what my next steps are. I will say, that I’ve had some really amazing friends out of all of this:

Linear, Carta, and Breakglass

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 16:21:53 -0600

There was some drama over the weekend on X, where the CEO of Linear posted on her timeline that someone from Carta’s Liquidity division is reaching out to angel investors directly about selling linear shares to their buyers. What makes this even more egregious was the response from Henry Ward, Carta’s CEO – who made it seem like this was a lone employee doing something shady and using their break glass to access customer data. It comes out in the thread that Carta has done this before, has promised to stop, but, it keeps on happening.

Cincinnati We Barely Knew Each Other

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 21:26:41 -0500

I spent the week in my Cincinnati Office. It’s perfect when I want to do things like reverse engineering or work on building random electronic projects that I might have going on in my life. In this particular case, I just wanted to spend some time working on my larger screens and get some of my random work projects cleaned up.

When I travel, I generally use my iPad as a second monitor, but, I’ve noticed in the aggressive RF environments (like hotels), my ipad has a tendency to lose its mind, freezing the display, and then I have to wait for everything to time out before I have to disconnect everything and reconnect it again. In my office, I have dual 34" curved monitors which give me…a LOT of screen space.

2023 Happy Thanksgiving

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 01:42:04 -0600

What am I thankful for?

I’m thankful for my wonderful and ever-so-derpy puppy, Aspen.

Thankful for my amazing partner who is so incredibly tolerant of me and my antics.

Thankful for my friends.

Thankful for my talented coworkers.

I hope that you have an amazing Thanksgiving if you choose to celebrate it. You deserve it.

Seasonal Depression 2023 Edition

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 01:12:46 -0600

If you didn’t know, my dad passed away earlier this year.

My dad and I didn’t have much of a relationship after I turned 18. There was a lot involved with that. I’m sure that there were things that I did that gave him more gray hair, and I like to think that he’d be proud of where I’m at today. Sometime after 2001, my dad stopped talking to me completely. It took me a few months to realize that he had basically cut me out of his life: he didn’t bother telling me that my Grandma Wilson had passed until a week after the funeral, and he did it by email.

OpenAI and AImageddon

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:23:04 -0600

Well, if you haven’t heard, there’s some drama afoot in the world of AI.

I don’t think I could effectively re-hash what’s going on here, but, from a security engineering point of view, AI/AGI is so new that there’s still a really untapped world of vulnerabilities that is out there to explore. Can you trust your company’s data with a vendor (OpenAI, in this case) who had a 95% staff turnover rate? Do you think that a new team of engineers could promptly resolve and mitigate any vulnerabilities that could spring up in the next few years (because if some Investment firm gobbles it up in its present state, they’re probably going to put the tech on cruise control and let the software stagnate until it loses all velocity and basically becomes another piece of ghost SaaS that is out there)?

New Blog, who dis?

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:12:28 -0600

So, there was a bit of a shock last month when I got my usual digitalocean bill – it had jumped to nearly $500. While I’ve got a nice job, I don’t want to spend large sums of money every month that basically do nothing but sit idle; it’s time to kill off my bloghost instance. Moving this blog off to cloudflare is the last step in that journey.

My thoughts on Ghost

If you’re wanting a medium like experience, ghost is probably the best bang for the buck. To be honest, I never got past the fact that it would capitalize damn near every ‘i’ when you used it to start a word, but, that was one of the quirks of the editors that I grew to live with. I’ve had and used ghost for about 4 years…and let’s be honest: most folks just don’t look at my blog every day to keep tabs on me. Hugo works better for my needs and integrates into my very minimialistic server setup

My thoughts on the St. Rita's incident...

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 20:22:41 +0000

Reading about what happened at St. Rita’s School for the Deaf in Cincinnati is heartbreaking. My little guy went there until he passed, and he even had the teacher who allegedly threw the child down the hallway.

I volunteered at the school, setting up a technology program from business donations and program donations from Apple and Google, and have funded a scholarship in my little guy’s honor ever since.

I have paused my contributions to St. Rita’s until the Archdiocese completes its investigation and disciplines the teacher.

Long COVID sucks

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 04:48:16 +0000

I’ve had COVID three times now – 2020, 2021, and 2022. Each one was a little bit different than the last, but, my CTF from this year’s “Hacker Summer Camp” was COVID, and while I did get to spend five days recovering and quarantining without worrying about my job, it took me another two weeks to get my sense of smell back.

I’ve been living with the after effects from this round of COVID more noticeably than my previous run-ins. I’m constantly coughing throughout the days now, will sometimes lose my sense of smell for a few hours at a time, and I have moments where it just kinda sucks to breathe during the day.

Red Teaming with tools from hak5

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 23:26:20 +0000

First of all, all of the tools that I’ve purchased from hak5 are items that I’ve purchased with my own money for use in my roles as an information security engineer.

Generally speaking, my day-to-day is a mixture of threat detection, incident response, and providing guidelines and guidance to keep our infrastructure secure. I did some red teaming in my previous roles, but, it wasn’t anything formal: running things like wp-scan automatically against our wordpress instances to make sure that the developers hasn’t inadvertently kept in a plugin that should have been updated due to a security issues.

OpenStreetMap, Nominatim, and OSRM

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 05:18:30 +0000

I’ve been on a fairly big GIS kick recently. Part of it is me feeling like there’s a lack of market tools for things like studying things like resource deserts, but, the other half is me wondering, “How many oil change places are within a 15 minute drive,” looking for things like resource saturation within a specific industry and possible geopolitical research (for example: OpenStreetMap + Census Data + Political data could be a tool to allow campaigns to better target their advertising dollars to allow for a more focused spend).

Looking for the past

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 06:51:59 +0000

I spent a little bit of time tonight looking for one of my lost friends – only to discover that she passed away last year, ended up in a pauper’s grave, and her mom is still posting “where Is my daughter” posts on Facebook.

She wasn’t the type of person who would constantly text me, but, every few weeks, she’d ask how I was, and we’d spend an hour or so talking: mainly because we always wanted to catch up. I changed my long-term number in the winter of 2020 to my new number, and she probably didn’t see my text in the litany of spam texts that she normally had on her phone.

Breaking into work, one door at a time...

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 22:05:14 +0000

So, let me preface this with:

I’m generally responsible for the Information Security at where I work. There are others on my team, but, I’m very fortunate that I have bosses that (generally) support what I do and give me wide latitude to do what’s needed to get things done.

I stopped by Denver a few weeks ago to spend some time with some coworkers that I’ve wanted to meet. As part of the process, he mentions to me, “We’ll have to meet on the 5th floor; I don’t have my keycard to get Into my office (on a different floor) and I don’t want to bug the community staff to let me in”

Simple as fuck bread recipe

Mon, 30 May 2022 04:27:43 +0000

I’ve started to go down this weird ‘cooking’ story arc. Why? Because cooking bread requires following recipes to the letter for making ingredients work, but, you can usually be a little liberal with the processes, as long as you’re generally following a sane methodology. I recently bought a Kitchenaid Stone Bowl for my stand mixer and wanted to try actually baking some bread with it.

The good news?

The bread turned out ok.

The Life and times of John McCance

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 21:13:56 +0000

As I’ve gleefully told a lot of folks, the first really meaningful job I ever had was at a Radio Station. We had a few different radio stations there – one was more Mainstream/Contemporary Hit Radio (CHR), one Country, one was more Adult Contemporary, and one was more Standards oriented. I worked a lot of ball games and babysat equipment, for lack of a better term, and eventually, I’d pick up the Sunday morning “Hangover” shift full of religious programming on the AM Simulcast of the FM Standards station.

Upgrading the Firmware on your AR-705S

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 21:12:58 +0000

Are you getting a failed Verification when upgrading the firmware on your AR-705S?

After reading one too many tutorials on the web, I finally figured out what I needed to do:

1.) Download the following files:

You’ll need to go to your admin Interface for the router, and then upload your file to the router. First, do the 3.105, keeping your settings. Once your router reboots, you can then do the 3.203 upgrade. Once that’s completed, you’re golden.

Finding a good soldering iron

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 06:39:45 +0000

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I like to tinker. A lot.

My general workbench has a nice Hakko FX888D soldering pencil with a Hakko FR301 gun that is used for when I need to desolder something. I do like the pencil, but, as my need are changing (Yes, my PiDP-11 has something to do with this), I’m looking for a soldering pencil that I can use that meets my needs a bit better. I purchased a TS-100 last year, but, it’s basically stayed in my toolbag for the most part of a year.

DEFCON and the Delta Variant

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 18:08:49 +0000

We’re a week out from DEFCON 29.

Clark County, Nevada just decided to re-implement the 100% mask mandate.

All of the DEFCON talks are pre-recorded.

While DEFCON was “Vaccinated-Only” this year (and required proof of vaccination), I made the decision a few months ago to forgo the trip to Vegas and do my Blackhat/DEFCON week completely remote. I’m glad that I did.

Welcome back to the mask club, kids.

The biggest question that I want to know is:

My PiDP-11 Experience

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 20:34:06 +0000

I’ve been wanting to get my hands on one of the PiDP-11’s that Oscar Vermeulen has created. The PDP-11 was my second computer, thanks to the Broadcast Engineer at the radio station that I worked at when I was 16/17/18, John McCance (John probably deserves his own post, but, that’s good enough for today!)

My PiDP arrived at my office today, so, expect some pictures as I start to build it and once I get it working!

Weather Resources for Nerds

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 23:59:04 +0000

It’s thunderstorm and hurricane season, so, in the spirit of finding your eternally amazing storm to chase this year, let me share with you some of the neatest tools for tracking your favorite storms.

I use RadarScope for the Radar products on my iPhone/iPad. I kind of prefer using my iPad during storm chasing – just because I can get many different products on a single screen. My preference is to have both the reflectivity as well as the velocity, on the same tilt, usually zoomed out a little bit so that I can get a good situational awareness of what’s going on.
Usually, in a safari tab – either on my iPad or on my iPhone, I have the IEMBot Monitor set for audio alerting on the area in which I’m at.
Depending on where I’m chasing (Country always, City, not so much), I’ll bring my DJI Mini so that I can take pictures of the storm from some altitude.
Usually, I’ll either have my iPhone 12 or my DSLR handy for storm pictures.
For movies in my vehicle, I have a DJI Pocket 2 or a GoPro (probably a GoPro 3 or 4 – haven’t had the need to ever really replace it in the last 10 years.
For Communication, I have my Kenwood TM-D710GA for my main mobile transceiver, and a Kenwood TH-D74A for portable use when I’m calling in reports to local amateur nets, and my NX-5000 Mobile/Portable for calling in reports to my local EMA.
I think this year’s plan is to finally bite the bullet and get some warning gear in my Truck. My biggest fear when storm chasing is getting hit when I’m outside of my vehicle taking pictures. I’ve got a high visibility vest that I wear when I’m out of my vehicle, and generally follow guidelines of being in front of my vehicle, with the wheels turned to the guardrail (so, if my vehicle is is hit, it goes into the guardrail and not me). I’d like to get some front, side, and rear warning lighting, get my radios professionally installed (so that my middle armrest can return to its state of handling napkins and other odd items).

If you storm chase, and have other items or suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

Actions have Consequences, Jonathan Pentland...

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 18:33:41 +0000

I have the utmost respect for the Armed Forces. I’ve worked on many a government contract that involved the military, and while I’ve never had a bad experience, I’ve had plenty of experiences with white supremacists in the armed forces – both personally and professionally.

Unfortunately for Mr. Pentland, the entire Army is in the middle of a “stand-down” – a suspension of normal business to ensure that every single soldier, leader, and civilian employee gets into a mandatory, in-person training session to make sure that everybody knows the Army leadership’s position on this super-important topic: extremists and white supremacists.

US Bank; or, why I should have moved banks a LONG time ago.

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 11:23:02 +0000

I’ve had Personal Checking and Business accounts with US Bank over the last ten years:

Personal Checking
Personal Savings
Personal Credit
Business Checking x 2
Business Line of Credit x 3

In July of 2020, US Bank decided that they no longer wanted my business for my business account. This corresponds almost directly with me starting to do around 10-20K/week in export sales with vendors in China and selling those goods on Amazon and on my personal website (Amazon’s API makes it super-easy for omni-channel fulfillment using FBA). No warning, no explanation (but they did say that it wasn’t for AML…so, I guess that’s something?), just…the b& hammer.

COVID Sucks

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 22:52:50 +0000

That is all.

Ok. Maybe a bit more.

I wasn’t really feeling hot on Thursday, but, after the persistence of a few folks, I went and got a COVID-19 test on Friday.

Welp. Of course it was positive. Because, why not, right?

This new variant really fucking sucks. I’ve been on supplemental oxygen since Sunday…and while It’s made my sleep better, I’m still having pulse oximeter readings in the low 90’s/high 80’s…and just lethargic as fuck these days.

My thoughts on Tony Hsieh

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 23:49:57 +0000

If you haven’t heard, Tony Hsieh tragically passed away from a house fire this holiday. I met Tony in 2011 at the Zappos Holiday party where one of my former coworkers from Eucalyptus invited me to the Holiday Party as his +1. Tony was one of the most inspiring, kind, impactful, and humble leaders that I’ve ever met. I’ll never forget the bus ride out to the ranch (it was a western themed party), and there were so many people who just spoke so highly about Tony, the opportunities in Vegas after Zappos, and the biggest take away that I remember was that the people mattered. Tony genuinely cared.

iStatMenus, or, lessons in leaving autoupdate turned off

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 20:32:20 +0000

I’ve been a fond user of iStatMenus for a long time – I’ve been using them on my macbooks for at least 3 years; I generally keep autoupdate turned on for my applications on my mac – just do it automatically, I’ll deal with the config changes later. I do this because I’d rather deal with the consequences of a broken config later…

…until someone does something stupid like this:

Let's keep your boxes updated!

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 21:52:39 +0000

I have a few different P25 capturing stations across the country. My main one is in Cincinnati, however, I also have stations capturing and parsing data in Miami and Austin.

These machines were running on a Ubuntu 18.10 (cosmic) build. No big deal – cosmic is out of date, and I’d like to keep everything up-to-date…so, let’s just upgrade?

Nah. Ubuntu’s got something else on it’s mind:

Hum. Looks like I’m rebuilding this ISO again.

My only political post this year

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 22:19:54 +0000

“It’s obvious that none of you have ever ran a business. Trump understands what it’s like to be a business owner.” – one of my friends, talking about how he’s voting for Trump in 2016.

I just voted absentee this year for Ohio. Suffice to say, it was basically up-and-down the ballot Democrat.

I don’t care who you vote for. Just fucking vote.

In light of the recent events...

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 03:42:12 +0000

The America I believe in, and have known for most of my life, is founded on the essential principal that all men and women were born free and equal, and should be treated with respect and dignity. The constitution gives us the right to peacefully assemble and the freedom of speech: items embedded in our constitution. I understand that this is probably white privilege at its best: some 40 year old white guy making 6 figures a year talking about peace and equality.

TaskWarrior, TimeWarrior, and stup

Mon, 18 May 2020 16:32:12 +0000

I am a huge fan of CLI’s and ncurses based formats. It just reminds me of the days of computing yore where men were men and wrote their own damn device drivers.

Now that I’ve got that bit of gatekeeping out of the way, I use taskwarrior, timewarrior, and stup to keep my tasks, my time, and my sanity in check. If I do something on my taskwarrior list, it starts the timer in timewarrior, and adds it to my stup list for the day. It allows me to produce nice reports, and allows me to async sync with my coworkers at the end of the day via slack (and a well-crafted http plugin).

Rest in peace, Starbuck. You will be missed.

Sat, 16 May 2020 06:53:03 +0000

I’m really struggling right now – between the countless nights we spent at the hive, to the time where we almost got arrested in Kenwood, to the stag campsite at Burning Man, you were someone who always lived his own way.

Propane powered drums that shoot fireballs when actuated? Yup, you were the crazy motherfucker who used sprinkler valves to do it (Safety Third, of course, was the hive’s true model back then). I’d make dinner at the hive and then we’d spend a few hours working on your smart light sticks. Hell, I remember the reel of addressable LED’s you and Bells took to Burning Man in ‘11 so that your bikes wouldn’t be darkwads.

The world of music/IEM's

Tue, 12 May 2020 05:35:25 +0000

The pair of UE 5’s that I’ve had for about 13 years died, and honestly, I didn’t really feel like sending them back to get repaired. Honestly, I wasn’t a huge fan of Ultimate Ears after Jerry Harvey left, so, I went back to do my research.

What I ordered...

Ever since the Beatles, musicians have had “stage monitors” (sometimes affectionally called “wedges,” due to their shape), that allow them to listen to the feed of the music the way that they want it. For example, maybe the vocalists need more mix of the lead vocalist or maybe the bass needs the drum and maybe the guitar, but not the vocals.

Building an AMI for OSSIM

Wed, 06 May 2020 03:37:34 +0000

Wanting to find a good SIEM that is relatively inexpensive, I started looking at the various options that are out there, and ended up falling in love with OSSIM.

…then, I discovered that AT&T bought the company up.

…and basically eliminated their EC2 offerings.

Not to be completely disappointed, I downloaded the Alienvault OSSIM ISO and started looking at it. It’s a relatively simple debian stretch iso that has had some customizations to it. The usual location of the preeseed file came out with a few zero size files – a dead end – so, I wanted to poke around some more.

PPP: Funded!

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 23:53:22 +0000

Well, it’s about 2 weeks too late, but, I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Update to Florida's Unemployment Fiasco

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 15:41:55 +0000

I woke up to a text message this morning from my friend in Florida telling me that his status has been changed from “Pending” to “Eligible.”

He filed on 3/21. He was approved on 4/27. Thirty-Seven (37) days.

I had him write letters to his Florida State Representatives … and while he hasn’t received any word back from them, writing those letters every day was cathartic for him.

Let’s see if he gets the full $825 vs the $225 that he gets (federal vs state+federal).

Stress, Uncertainty, Pandemics, and Me

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 21:26:03 +0000

Broken, but together

Let’s be honest – 2020 is a year that nobody really expected would happen. What appears to be a global biological crisis is not the future that we expected, hoped, nor prepared for. My 40th birthday was going to be a hell of a time – Black Hat, DEFCON, a week of catching up on work, and then Burning Man.

I had my Plane Tickets, Hotel rooms, and an RV Rental already ready to go. I was making my pixelblasters and solar panels for Burning Man. I was going to celebrate my “Over the hill” birthday in style.

The Payroll Protection Program

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 08:29:27 +0000

As many of you know, I have a small business (in fact, I have two of them, but, that’s another topic for another day). The minute the PPP was announced, I went to my friendly bank, US Bank, and applied for the PPP.

The process itself took about 90 minutes – a lot of it was questions dealing with the application, but, the other half of it was fighting against its website. My status went from there to “Approved,” then to “Pending,” then they ran out of funding.

Florida's Unemployment Debacle

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 15:40:42 +0000

Since the COVID-19 Pandemic started in early March, there have been about 1.8 million unemployment claims processed (source). Transversely, only about 116,830 claimants have been paid. This means that only about 6.65% of those who have applied for unemployment in Florida have gotten anything.

Further, up until the 20th of April, Florida was not one of the states that you could receive retroactive payments – meaning, you start to receive assistance from the date that they accept the claim, not the date that you were unemployed. (Florida has since changed this to allow the payments to be retroactive).

It's been a while

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 04:46:22 +0000

So, yes, I know. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve posted something in here.

In the last few months, I’ve managed to find myself a new job, stay relatively safe from COVID-19 (after a weird couple of days), and managed to find myself in a fair amount of stress.

We are in a bit of a “Groundhog day” situation. As a reminder, you can get burned out when you work from home.

"I just can't afford to keep you anymore."

Sun, 13 Oct 2019 16:38:17 +0000

…and like that, a 5 year contractor position is gone.

Oh well. I’m job hunting again right now, so, this should be fun.

Michelin Stars in DC

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 21:34:32 +0000

So, it’s my goal to go to as many Michelin starred restaurants as I possibly can. The new list for Washington DC is out, so, I have updated my list of places that I want to go to:

The Inn at Little Washington: Been there, loved it. Was hungry on the ride home, so, I ended up at Kabob Palace near DCA with my driver before I got back to the hotel.

My thoughts on the NYT Child Sex Abuse Article

Sun, 29 Sep 2019 17:58:23 +0000

If you haven’t read it, I highly encourage you to do so:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html?

The things that I want to really point out:

NCMEC is horribly underfunded, and has issues keeping (and retaining) technical talent.
Startups like Thorn (Which is Ashton Kutcher’s anti-child sex trafficking startup) try to help solve the problem by providing solutions to NCMEC, but, Thorn itself seems to be in a bit of a disarray with hiring and retaining technical talent. (I interviewed for a position at Thorn, and during the interview process, it was mentioned to me that the position that I was applying for had been open for six months! After two rounds, they rejected me with no feedback…which really kinda sucked from my point of view, but, it was the most depersonalized hiring process that I had ever been through).
NCMEC is taking a LOT of funding from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, who are also reporting things to NCMEC. NCMEC has no real transparency mandates and actively blocked the NYT from getting reasonable statistics.

I’ve seen this from a few different angles:

Job Hunt: Update

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 04:55:01 +0000

So, apparently one of my jobs failed to tell me that it was a cleared position.

Here’s my issue…I haven’t held a security clearance in almost 10 years, and I honestly have zero intention of going through that process again.

Scratch one job off of my list.

Also, the Engineering Manager job that I really wanted said no…with zero feedback as to why they rejected me after two really good interviews.

Job Hunt: September 2019

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 19:12:08 +0000

Since my contract at my current company is coming up in the end of September, I started looking for a new gig this month. A few things were really important to me:

Finding a job that had some upward mobility.
Finding a job that had decent benefits
Finding a job that didn’t really require me to go to an office every day.
Finding a job that seemed appropriate for me (no Microsoft, yes Linux, yes Open Source, etc).

Before this, I did a few things to make my job search a little bit easier:

Cypress for e2e testing

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 17:02:05 +0000

As many of you know, I don’t make it a secret that I’m not an amazing front-end guy. However, since I have a mantra of “test all the things” that I’m working on, when I have to do front end work, it’s my goal to test everything.

I start by using sitespeed.io for testing the page load and performance times of my application. This is critical in ensuring that the code that I’m writing is performant, and doesn’t introduce any critical latency bugs to the application. I can integrate sitespeed.io into my gitlab workflows – which is super critical, as I can reject any builds that are not performant, and a video and screen shot of the home page (and any associated pages that I’m testing) are part of the artifacts created: this enables me to provide “page level diffs” showing the content on the page that has been changed. The one thing that Sitespeed cannot do, however, is testing functionality. You’re limited to grabbing pages via URL, and can’t pass data into forms for posting.

Gitlab and Digital Ocean Kubernetes

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 03:59:01 +0000

If you haven’t used Gitlab’s Auto Devops product yet, and you’re in the DevOps or CI/CD space, you’re really missing out on the convenience that the Review App can bring. In order to get started, you’ll need a few things:

A Digital Ocean Account.
A little bit of working Knowledge about Digital Ocean’s Dashboard.
Be a Site Admin for GitLab
Some UNIX chops.

I’m going to assume that you have a GitLab instance up and running already. Setting this up is probably a bit outside of this article, but, I highly recommend the Omnibus installer for your sanity (and mine, honestly). Fortunately, you won’t need SSH access to your Gitlab instance, but you will need to be able to open a shell and do UNIX like things. I haven’t tested this on Windows, so, you’re on your own there.