- Blog
- Profile
- Homepage
-
Question the process
I’m sure my coworkers get tired of me. For someone who works in a bureaucracy, I often question the process. I want to balance efficiency and consistency and accuracy. There are tradeoffs, and navigating them through hashing out (debate and data) the way they function and dysfunction is why I like my work. Why things…
-
Facebook phishing pages
Last spring, I resurrected my https://www.inoreader.com/ account to get RSS feed subscriptions for news sources. My email accounts are so over run that I’m not likely to track what’s happening local through them. So, I made a change. Today, looking through, I noticed an article about a suspicious death and police soliciting for more information.…
-
Authentication all the time everywhere all at once
Since it is cybersecurity awareness month, I’m thinking more about how secure things are not. Big companies I expect capable of well resourcing their teams get breached. They are giant whales, so the Ahab threat actors really want to take them. The awareness stuff is all the same stuff with a twist: Be careful. Over…
-
IT squirrels
While discussing an update with a colleague via Microsoft Teams about an Excel file he doesn’t have access to—an email referencing a tangentially related conversation in a channel he doesn’t have access to arrived—it struck me how fragmented our digital communication has become. Information is dispersed across emails, chats, and channels, making it increasingly difficult…
-
ALL YOUR VOTE ARE BELONG TO US
The New York City mayoral election is shaping up to make Ranked-Choice voting shine. They held the primary yesterday and the super progressive candidate won. The model where there’s a primary and there’s no winner with 50% triggering a run-off typically sees far fewer people show up for that run-off. I think that makes a…
-
Meming to keep from crying
At work, I post perhaps too many memes. I like them because a picture “says a thousand words.” And, sometimes, the picture works better in my haste to express raw emotion. Most of the time, these come from intense frustration, so the humor of a meme interjected into the seriousness helps me feel better. The…
-
Ping management
A scene I love from The Hunt for Red October was the communication through sonat pings. Later, when I worked in IT, the use of SNMP pings became a core part of my troubleshooting an issue. I thought of this scene every time. These days, another form is most of my work with humans. These…
-
Metaphors are everywhere in IT
People aspiring to work in information technology may think they just need to learn to read and write software, learn databases, networking, operating systems, and similar. They may overlook how important literary tools are to the above. Metaphors are everywhere in IT. It’s a crucial part of the language and context around the things we…
-
I need an Applied History certificate
Back in the wake of Obergfell v Hodges, I talked with some friends about a news story of a court person refusing to sign off on gay marriages after the Supreme Court allowed them. My friends were confused. They wanted to know: How can they refuse the authority of the Supreme Court?!?! I had a…