Cleaned out the last of my desk today. There are reasons I’m moving, but it’s still always sort of bittersweet when you shred the last drawer of notes and diagrams.

I did find this list of advice I gave to my team a long time ago (ok, not that long - I only got into this last job at the very end of 2024). Maybe they’re useful to you, too.

• Read all the things
• Make connections
• Accept gut level hypotheses -but-
• Disprove your own ideas - aggressively
• Share the ideas you cannot disprove
• Warn leaders early; use appropriate caveats
• Timestamps will save you; send emails
• Log actions taken after hours
• Be wary of empty logs left by people or systems
• Confirm the problems you think are someone else's responsibility to solve truly belong to those other people, and that they know about them, too

Last day with my current employer is Friday the 13th.

New employer hasn’t finalized a start date yet.

Probably not my smartest move (giving notice before I had the next start) but I need the break. Really looking forward to having some time to sleep, do yard work, clean, all the adulting tasks I never complete on the weekend and am too tired to attempt in the evenings.

Very grateful to have a wonderful spouse who understands that I need some time not spent on generating income. That said, if you’d have a short term project that could use some threat intel support? I’m very open to the idea of remote side gigs while I line up for the next push.

If you’d want to talk cyber, space, nonkinetics, or how different domains interact with each other in modern conflict, let’s chat.

This is free trader Beowulf, calling anyone

Mayday, mayday

We are under attack

Main drive is gone, turret number one not responding

Mayday

Losing cabin pressure fast

Calling anyone, please help

This is free trader Beowulf

Mayday

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/

Really want to read this a few times and think very hard about zero-trust network initiatives.

not gonna lie - the Working Family Party's #WeAintBuyingIt boycott of Target and Amazon will make christmas shopping harder, but its worthwhile. Convenience comes at a cost, and I should be willing to get off my butt if it, you know, fights idiocy in corporate America.

I was glad to see WFP is now active in Virginia. I've liked them for a while, but didn't know they were local.

Well now.

The last 24 hours worth of headlines here in the US have been a pleasant surprise.

In this house we celebrate today by ordering pizza and giving the wrong address.

No we don’t, that would be horrible and rude to the delivery driver. Donate to indigenous peoples’ legal defense funds, the folk in Gaza facing their own colonizers, and by being kind to workers everywhere. And don’t just do that cuz is a holiday in the US, do that cuz it’s the right thing to do.

May still order pizza for dinner, though. Pizza sounds good.

Most days it feels like the value I bring to a team is that I read a lot, I connect concepts and events, and I’ve been doing it long enough to remember the last time we (or someone else) tried XYZ.

I don’t know that orgs want that anymore, to be honest.

Really want to run a laundromat. Clean clothes help everyone; I’m tired of arguing with people that something is important for the weeks before the event resolves and then watching them write AARs asserting that no one could have know this was a problem. If I was a better communicator, maybe they would have listened? I don’t know.

But laundromats! No one likes dirty laundry; everyone benefits when we all are clean.