Hey everyone! 👋🏻 It's been a hot few minutes since I browsed toots, let alone posted anything. How ya'll been? I see not much had changed here, except for more peoples around. That's great! For me - life is great, cannot complain about my personal bubble (though the world around us seems to be going to shit in many ways), just been busy. When I'm not working, I've been purposefully disconnecting. That includes stay off the few social medias I do have remaining lol. So, let's catch up! 😁 Lots to talk about, so if you're interested, grab a snack and a drink lol. They expanded my character count on my server, and I plan to take advantage of it 🤣 if you're not, then keep scrolling! I take no offense ☺️
I've been enjoying the wilderness more, enjoying people IRL more, reading more (especially since I got my new glasses - using bifocals in my late 40's is wild man 😂 ). Currently working my way through the Memory of Earth series by Orson Scott Card - almost done with book 2 'The Call of Earth' after re-reading book 1. I read book 1 in high school and loved it. Took me a while to remember the joy of reading a novel. I was never much of a novel reader until recently. While I am well read, having spent much of my childhood in libraries (yes, I am older than the Internet), as a teenager and young adult I was more fascinated with learning about (and keeping up with) technology and geopolitical topics (past and present). I read (and still read) a lot of white papers, tech journals, science periodicals, academic papers, etc. around topics like quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and the like (both fiction and non-fiction), while tinkering (build/destroy/fix) with computers, networks + related techs, and learning how the internet functions once that was a thing in the early 1990's. Now, in my middle age, instead of dreaming about these things coming to fruition, I actually work with some of this tech (and keep up with my certs). AI is wild man lol. The fact that Q-day seems to be right around the corner is equally as wild. I am still apprehensive about what marrying those two technologies will look like though - that scares me still. A healthy fear, but a realistic one nonetheless. The nanotechnology we have today is right out of sci-fi stories, but still not quite as cool as I expect it to get. The next few years will be interesting for sure.
Being head of IT Operations and Security for my company has become more exciting (and way busier) now that it's an AI forward company these past few years. My days are much longer now, making my peaceful nights and weekends more valuable to me. I've been building out my own agents to help me do my job more efficiently, I also created an entire compliance program for my company around PCI-DSS in ~4 months using AI as my assistant to wade through ~320 individual controls, create policies, procedures, automations, and introduce functionalities we never had. It would have taken a small army of humans a year or more to do what I did myself over a 20 week period. I'm also doing formal vendor security reviews in 10 minutes, instead of days or weeks. I am conducting in-depth log reviews from dozens of log sources, covering hundreds of thousands of events, in minutes, not days or weeks.
I have even created a new AI SecOps framework for myself - since there isn't a framework in place yet - using AI to help me organize what's in my brain, and actually ship real tools that have real-world impact without having to jump to new vendors or spend a ton of money on new tools. I have my own AI powered security triage app that uses AI to enrich my security telemetry, streamlining daily triage and finding correlations that would normally take me hours or even days to make the connections manually. What this app does, does not exist lol. It's dope.
The young kid in me who was buried in beige cases stripping hardware and soldering circuits that thought scripting was so cool dreamt of days like this. He always wanted to be the guy I am today - walking around with a hardware key around my neck, managing tech for a global company, working wihh artificial intelligence, talking professionally about where quantum technology is taking us - this all seemed like pipe dreams in the 80's and 90's! Yet, WE'RE HERE! so fucking cool bro. So cool.
I'll keep my politics off the table here. That never does anyone any good. I learned a long time ago not to talk about 3 subjects with people you know, especially with people you like or love, as it has destroyed families and can break up life long friendships. Those are politics, money, and religion. And I like most of you fuckers out there lol, so I won't break my rule.
So what's next for me? Well, still gainfully employed in the tech space for now so there's that, but I am looking towards the future aka retirement. Planning starts now! 😁 I have a target of buying the land I want to retire to, and build my off-grid lifestyle on, for next year. Then, slowly but surely building out my homestead in the following years. Been planning this for decades, but now it's getting very real lol. Lots of fun!
So, that's me! What you been up to friends? 😊 Hope you are all doing well! 🫶🏻 Talk soon.
tante
Aral Balkan
The Island of Dr MorBen
BleepingComputer
Viss
AkaSci 🛰️