Spawn0 standing atop the monkey bars.

She play joke

Headless

Ant's view of a shuttle cock

Asbestos anyone?

Snaggle tooth

Yellow slide

Color with me mama

Jayhawk Ruby

Sliding Rubes

Rubes

Progress report

Life is flying by. It's already February. In a few short days my oldest daughter will be nine years old. Where have the last nine years gone? In nine more short years, she'll be finishing high school, preparing for college or whatever it is kids will be doing at that point in time.

Over the last month, I've been making steady progress on my house. Late last year I divided the half of the downstairs in half (quartered it). Taped off the quarter with large sheets of plastic in an attempt to keep the dust quarantined. It's better than nothing, but not perfect.

I've been spending my weekends scraping, skimming, sanding, skimming, sanding and priming the ceiling. It's nearly finished and in the parts that are finished, it is the smoothest ceiling in the entire house.

I've also pulled up the resilient tiles. I had been chipping these out with a hammer and a chisel until I was informed that they likely contained asbestos. I did a little research and it seemed reasonable to me that the tiles did contain asbestos so I decided to take a different approach.

Using a torch, I was able to heat the tiles and peel them up in one piece. I'm soaking them with amended water bagging them up in thick plastic bags and boxing them up and sealing all edges of the boxes with tape. I wear a respirator and leave a HEPA filter running constantly. Resilient tiles present little risk of releasing asbestos into the air and in many states their removal is unregulated.

So there's progress on the home front, but there's still much work to be done.

On other fronts, progress is also being made. We're cooking more meals at home, which has been better for our health and our finances.

And in other areas there has been little progress and even some setbacks. My SANS Mentor session was rescheduled due to a lack of interest. Training budgets are being cut all over, including where I work. I'm going to stage a more concerted effort to market the course this time, but given the current economic environment, it's going to be a tough sell.

I continue to edit the SANS Forensics Blog, and recently helped the CEO of SANS out by proofreading and offering feedback on a book he wrote about Ecclesiastes, which is one of my favorite books of the Bible.

I haven't lifted a finger to create a passive income stream. I don't even have an idea for that one yet. And I've done nothing about writing a GIAC Gold paper and very little work on the presentation front, though I have been collecting some materials and ideas.

With one month down, I've much ground to cover in the next 11 months.

Friday, I'm heading to Washington D.C. for the first time in my life. I'll be attending Shmoocon on my own dime and I'm really looking forward to the trip.

Micro-blogging

Yes, I'm on Twitter (@davehull). I'm way late writing about this, but I don't care. I've been using it since around May of '08. It's a micro-blogging service allowing users to spew messages 140 characters at a time.

Twitter has been a net gain in my life. I tapped into the info sec user community right away. It's awesome being able to eavesdrop on conversations between people I want to emulate and once in a while having something to contribute to the threads that illicit responses.

What I was thinking about today though is the 140 character limit. Twitter is like television. It's bursty. Some smart person somewhere figured out that humans are drawn to action. Look at nearly everything on t.v. The camera angles change every second or less.

I read recently that some evolutionary bioligists who study behavior and the mind believe we are drawn to this frequent change because it causes a heightened state of awareness. During our evolutionary history, those who quickly discerned a harmless leaf falling from a tree from a predator moving through the canopy were the ones selected, naturally, and had more offspring thus passing on those traits.

A sudden movement puts us on alert, gives us a charge and pulls us in. The success of micro-blogging services like Twitter should come as no surprise then, its tweets are like little bursts of movement in the natural world or the changing camera angles of the t.v.

Home improvement

Status update:

I've been busting my hump on my house project for the last four weeks. We're currently living in 3/4s of our house as has been our habit for the last eight years or so. We buy a place, immediately start remodeling making some quadrant of the house unlivable. Our projects start at a good pace. Life happens. Procrastination and laziness eventually give way and the work resumes, the cycle repeats.

Over the last few weeks the carpet and padding have been taken out of the affected quarter. The resilient tile underneath has been removed. Some vinyl sheet goods have been taken up, the glue left behind has to be painted over with a special solvent. Covering the solvent with tin foil and letting it soak for at least 20 minutes reduces the level of effort for scraping up the glue.

Opposite the floor is the ceiling, the other target of my efforts. The ceiling originally had a texture that appears to have involved the sponging on of a thin sheetrock mud mix. It's really not too bad to look at. We have it in our upstairs and aren't going to change it. Unfortunately some time during the history of this particular money-pit, some genius applied popcorn texture.

Popcorn ceiling is devil spawn.

After a couple days worth of effort, the popcorn is nearly gone. A dash of liquid soap (dish or laundry) added to a spray bottle full of water, they call this "amended water." Obviously the water keeps the dust level down and I believe the soap may bind the dust particles together more so that even when the water evaporates, the dust is lessened.

With luck, next week will find me priming the ceiling and moving on to the other quarter of the house where the process will be repeated. Yay!

Beginning my 40th year

Tonight my wife and I went out for dinner in celebration of my 39th birthday. It was delicious and the food was good too. I am truly blessed to have such a wonderful loving wife and beautiful family.

So tomorrow begins my 40th year. What will it hold for me and what will I bring to the table?

While walking to the grocery store tonight I was again struck by the feeling that I'm lucky to be living in this place at this time. I was after cat food and honey and against better judgment, I wore headphones and listened to David Shenk's The Immortal Game: A History of Chess. As a technologist who loves Chess, I enjoyed this book thoroughly and keep putting it back on my play list.

To be alive at a time when I can listen to a book or some life improving audio while walking in the dark to a place where I can buy essentials and have a very large variety of non-essentials to choose from is truly amazing. I have it pretty good.

Despite how great life really is, I have been struggling to find happiness in my work for several years. I have what most people would consider a good job. I sit in front of a keyboard most of the day and some days the work is interesting. I even work from home two days a week. Prior to my current job, I was a director of technology at a public university. I wasn't paid well, but the benefits made up for it.

I left that job because it wasn't satisfying and I was being offered more money. I left the job before that because the new job was a move up into management and because I felt I was spinning my wheels in different directions. Money was not a factor in that job change, in fact, I took a pay cut moving into management.

I have tried to remember the last time I was doing something professionally that I really enjoyed. I honestly have a difficult time remembering ever having a job that I loved, something I looked forward to getting back to the next day. I think when I first started out in my career I liked it more. I recall staying at the office for hours after my shift so I could continue coding. I like to develop software, but have been working on the periphery of the development arena for the last several years so I'm rusty. I don't think a company would be interested in hiring me as a developer since it may take me some time to get back up to speed.

Development would give me a creative outlet again, but would it really satisfy me? And could I find a position in software development that would pay me as well as my current position?

Is it ridiculous that I think I should find happiness in my career? Don't most people come to loathe their jobs? Isn't there a reason they call it work?

For the last three days, I have been on vacation. My first vacation days in six months. I needed it worse than I thought. Since moving into corporate America, I've been putting in more hours and the commute is now a 45 minute drive (one way) as opposed to a 20 minute walk or five minute bike ride. I don't get paid for my time commuting, but I try to make the most of it. I'm fortunate to work across the street from a large public library and I'm a regular borrower of audio books which I listen to in the car.

I don't know, but I'm still not sure what I want to be when I grow up. For now, I want to get back into using this site as an outlet for something that I know I used to love to do. I'm going to try and write more frequently if for no other reason than therapy.