I’ve continued to struggle with what to do with this blog, picturing it as a way to talk as an authority on something. Of course, I’m thinking about this through the lens of the very flashy folks performing huge talks and nurturing a large following. Personally, I’m not confident that I’m an expert on anything in a way that I could contribute to some sort of discourse although that’s probably equal parts lack-of-confidence and still-learning. Reaching that crossroads, I decided it didn’t matter much to allow this to simply languish while I just worked and worked. As of late, I had shifted gears at work. Previously, my entire focus was support. It was a little less on the ticketing end, more focusing on complex issues, training team members on networking and network-related products. As of the beginning of October, I’ve stepped into a bit more of an operations role. Under the banner of “CloudOps Administrator”, I’ve begun really tracking alerting, managing systems across a humongous global fleet. As part of this shift, I’m not really writing to people, sometimes writing some technical documentation. This sparked a bit of something inside of me where I needed to find a way to keep the mental gears turning.

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As I’m sure I’ve made well aware, I’ve been working on a masters degree in cybersecurity with a focus in terrorism. Currently, the class that I’m working on is centered around the focus - “Topics in Intelligence”. This class is built around understanding the law as it pertains to the intelligence community as well as how to begin applying analytical skills to the intelligence that we gather or review. Chiefly, we focus on OSINT, or open source intelligence for the uninitiated. In an effort to continue posting more on here, I wanted to share a bit of a post that I had put together for the class a week ago. Since the situation in China has been changing rapidly, much of this news will be out of date already although it still helps provide a level view of China and Chinese affairs at a time when worries are overflowing and unfettered racism towards the Chinese seems to be reasonable in the main stream and social media. Without further adieu, here’s the post…

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In the last ten days, I’ve been thinking about how to pick this up and simply iterate on the initial posts that I had created, sharing interesting information about a part of the world that we know little about. This is especially interesting since the graduate course that I’m currently working on is titled “Topics in Intelligence”, requiring a weekly “intelligence report” or an aggregate of data about a nation of our choosing. Having equal parts dumb luck and quick response, no one had taken China yet, a country that has continued to impress me with the insanity of its nature but the depth of its history. As a result, I’ve gotten to intertwine some personal curiosity with the education that I’m pursuing. What good luck! Perhaps I can share some of the findings with the blog just to gauge response and feedback. We’ll have to see!

Over the last week, we’ve gotten to see some shocking stuff. Since I’m not needing to share much of my China research in this particular post, I’m going to share a bit of the other stuff that I’m reading…

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Hello, all. I am dialing in from the frontier. We’ve crossed over into a new decade. 2020 is here and with it new luck and good tidings!

I’ve been neglecting this blog. As much as I could say that I’m thinking about picking it back up and being consistent, I’d rather spend less time typing that out and more time typing anything that will help me better convey some thoughts and develop myself personally. It’s hard to put into perfect terms the reason why I’ve been so bad at following up with this although maybe I can try to capture some of that in the coming weeks.

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This is a sample post about images. Check it out!

Isn’t that cool? I think so too!

I know it’s been a bit dead over on this side in spite of repeatedly saying that I was going to begin posting on here a bit more. In order to explain this, I wanted to give a bit of an update on where I’ve been and what’s been tying me up. Selfishly, this will also be in order to finally get a blog post up that hopefully sets a framework for going forward. For the past two or three months, I’ve been largely wrapped up in some graduate studies as part of the cybersecurity program at Wilmington University. While these two classes were the start and were a bit low-level, covering securing networks and operating systems respectively, I learned a bit about how my workflow had to change going into graduate studies. Graduate studies are a lot more work! Trying to tie together an in-depth presentation on different network standards while also preparing research on impactful cyber threats in the world takes a lot out of you. It certainly didn’t help that during this time I was switching careers as well!

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It’s been a bit. I’ve already broken my promise of aiming for a reading list every other although that shouldn’t be the point at which I simply stop. It’s a habit to be built and will take a bit of nursing to get up to full steam.

We’ve run into a ton of interesting stories since the last reading list so I’m going to do my best to bridge the gap without risking irrelevance. At any rate, these will still be small slices of news that I enjoyed the most whether it’s bleeding edge or a few weeks behind.

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With everything that I’ve been working on personally and the presence of a new blog that has yet to have much published, I’ve found myself looking for ideas that help me both write about technology while reading more on the topic to expand my horizons. Since the internet can often times feel like fleeting moments of gold in a deluge of nonsense, I thought it’d be helpful to share a few of the better reads that I find and give a bit of background on each. The goal is to do this weekly or bi-weekly. How that pans out largely depends on other work that I have at the time but I’m excited at the prospect of sharing the fascinating things that I see.

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While I’ve been a bit cautious about starting this and it’s taken quite longer than intended, everything has to start somewhere so I might as well kick it off here. Bringing up a blog was something that’s been on my mind for a bit as a means of collecting thoughts and finding ways to best discuss the projects that I’m working on in my personal time although I wanted to make sure that I put in a little bit of work and was able to do it the right way.

I’ve always personally used WordPress for personal projects and in some cases, it’s the right tool for the job. As fantastic as WordPress is, I’m not sure that it’s necessary to have that much going on behind the scenes to run a simple blog with write-ups of projects. It seemed time to check out a couple different options for static site generation. Originally, I was looking at Pelican as an option although after experimenting with it, I was left wanting a bit more. It has some nice deployment tools rolled in but having to create a virtualenv and move that around to push out the site wasn’t entirely ideal.

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