I know it’s standard practice to cut off access to prevent malfeasance. But, I really was going to be okay spending no more than a month winding down, committing last changes, finishing last migrations, putting my team and company in a good spot, and walking off proud.

Damned fucking shame…

Oh, shit… what happened?!

So I got hit with a layoff notice on Friday, just due to contract financials. I have a couple months left with the company to wind things down and do handoffs, etc, but I'm officially looking for something new.

Cybersecurity, director-ish level. If anyone has some connections, let me know!

🫂

…I’m going through and deleting things and trying not to panic.

Of stuff I committed to GH, it’s safe. Of uncommitted changes, I have to accept that the context is already lost. Of stuff I created for one-off tests, the job is fulfilled.

Anything else, they’ve cut off my ability to share.

Going through a doing another cleanup of my work laptop.

Getting a little sad, because—despite how much the place abused me—I did a lot of really cool things, which I’ll miss being able to even marginally influence or even share.

And, legally, I can’t keep any of it with me anymore…

Group watch, as in the whole darned thing? I can’t imagine…

Mola Ram! Prepare to meet Kali… in Hell!

My eyes weren’t looking at the bedspread… 😁

I ask myself: “Self, will you get at least $5 worth of enjoyment out of Black Dynamite?” Maybe, maybe I will…

“Let the Fur Fly”?
“Pawsome Con”?

Nice! Great job! 👏

Someday, modern science will reveal why, unbidden, Melle Mel’s “White Lines” is this week’s earworm…

Man, who’s making series like these anymore? Tek War? Babylon 5? Max Headroom? SeaQuest DSV?

That sci-fi-oriented, sometimes-serious, sometimes-quirky, with a colorful cast of recurring characters.

And, by god, I need computer
animation straight out of a video game FMV cutscene.

…I kept up with it as best I could at the time. But, it originally broadcast at a time when I did a TV moratorium—I quit for a full month—and suddenly I missed an entire left turn of the series and suddenly I couldn’t keep up.

My hope this time is to figure out what I missed. 😁

Ended up picking up the Babylon 5 complete series for a steal and started in on the pilot. It’s definitely a thing of its time, but it gives me hella nostalgia feelings.

I thought it was a cool series at the time, in the same vaunted period that gave us Wing Commander 3 and Privateer 2…

Hell, I properly learned about VLANs in the course of study. Inspired me to set them in my home network. Made me rethink some of the subnetting of and routing between the VPCs at my previous employer—though I can effect no change there, I can do better next time.

In this case, I’m really doing it to set up for Sec+ and close some gaps in my knowledge (with motivation).

I will probably always want to do some SWE work, but my skills have lately pivoted to system architecture.

Figured I should probably have a more solid foundation beyond applications.

Fun fact: I hold this cert already. Turns out I took the exam back in 2001. Guess how much has changed since then? Just about everything, in some way or another, from Ethernet cabling standards, to wireless, to cell networks, to switching equipment, to WAN technologies, and then some. 😁

It was my hope that the process of studying for and taking the cert—as with many certs I’ve done—would help fill in some of those gaps.

And, indeed, it has: I’ve filled in fair number of gaps. But, I’m not going to be a network engineer. And I’m not sure I need to know these fine, fine points.

I know that one of my weak points is “networking”.

I’ve known enough to be dangerous for a while. And, I had to teach myself a lot more about it in AWS-land than I ever needed before.

But, there are still so many gaps—so much of my AWS Pro. Architect exam dealt with the subject…

I struggle with whether taking this cert is worth it to my future job prospects. I highly doubt it. *But*…

As I’ve moved up the ladder into more of a systems architect/staff+ role—and particularly in light of how AI is ripping SW engineering apart—I’m feeling like I need to be more well-rounded…

I slightly kid on the last one. But the questions and scenarios are much more complex and cover things not even *mentioned* in my prep materials.

Did you know that 2.4GHz wireless channels are 5MHz in width? I didn’t, until I took the latter provider’s practice exams.

Is it on the test? I dunno. 🤷🏻‍♂️

The former is also like: “The link light for a given switch port is not lit. What should the technician check?”

While the latter offers: “An attempt to channel bond on a MU-MIMO WAP is failing. Which flags need to be set on the packet sent to the wireless controller to fix this?”

The unevenness of the questions between two different providers of Network+ practice exams is hilarious.

One is like: “Which is the port number for HTTP?”

The other is like: “POE is defined by which IEEE standard?”

I hope they work well for you. 🫂

A screenshot from some ambiguous Fallout game, on which is overlaid the text “[Everyone disliked that.]”

Ultimately, it needs to be, like, the entire bottom floor of the Marriott. But, logistics say that isn’t happening… 😁

Very true. As I added, I appreciated the come-as-you-are environment. A good number of kinks, including a few of mine, were there.

Hence, why not being able to go last year sucked, and why missing this year would just be more suck. It’ll be what it’ll be, I guess. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I’m just floored.

Granted, it was *busy* a f…

But, I appreciated the come-as-you-are environment. Saw some old friends. Met some new people.

Hope their virtual queue mechanism works this year and I get to go. Else, I’ll just fuck off to Trader Vic’s.