Did yet another unintentional act of IT-guy jerkiness: The “did you try turning it off and turning it back on again?”

I swear, it’s not my fault! But sometimes I’ll get a call later in the afternoon with a simple issue like “my USB keyboard doesn’t seem to want to work all of a sudden. What can you tell me about that?” And of course my response is to unplug it and plug it back in, or to turn off the computer and turn it back on again. And I’ll, of course, say exactly that when they ask. Only after they’ve done so and found the issue to be resolved do I realize how rude it sounds to respond with such a simple fix - and they always call me out on it. Happens once or twice a month, and we both laugh about it, but I can’t help feeling just a little bad that I’ll deliver the solution before it occurs to me that it might sound rude.

Oh well. Their computer works and they never sound to be...

For those who have been following Bitcoin for the last year or so, you’ll know of a few key events:

• “Darknet” online marketplace called Silk Road was shut down by the US government, and a large cache of Bitcoins were seized.

• Those Bitcoins, 30,000 of them, were put up for auction last month. That’s about $19.5 million USD worth of Bitcoin.

• There’s been a lot of buzz about who won the auction, because it could have a significant impact on the future of the cryptocurrency.

Well, the winner was announced today: Tim Draper, a venture capitalist, won the auction for the entire amount. He will not disclose the amount he bid, as curious as the internet has been about it, but he did offer a number of forwarding-thinking statements regarding what he plans to do with them.

Today he and some partners held an impromptu press conference to discuss their plans. I took the opportunity to write up...

…is that I don’t have the time or energy left to learn programming.

It’s the one thing that makes me uncomfortable in my professional career is that I am acutely aware of how little I know in the programming sphere. I don’t know any languages enough to say I do. I can write and troubleshoot simple scripts in Python, Ruby, bash, etc. Get me in a situation where I have to code something from scratch to do more than a ping sweep of a network, and I’m scratching my head. It’s a bit like technical debt in that I’ve been putting it off for so long, and now it only gets harder to jump into it.

But where to go if I just want to get some programming background? If I was truly interested in it I would have been on top of it by now, and since I’m not, that’s the difficulty. I guess if a position or a project requires programming experience for me to be a good fit, then maybe I’m not meant for it?

My previous post is roughly an accurate representation of how I’d like to conduct this blog. I will keep posts mostly related to my current projects, and will more than likely be IT-focused.

For those who don’t know, I’m a network analyst from Midland MI. I am CCNA R&S certified, and am currently studying for certifications in the Information Security track. I’m an IT guy.

I have no plans to finish a Bachelor’s degree in Networking/InfoSec, as much as I’d love to. But that won’t stop me from learning and keeping relevant in the field. I enjoy working, but I enjoy progressing even more. Since security is my passion (I break into things, and I make things harder to break into), I’m going full-steam on two industry-recognized credentials that will be both challenging and rewarding.

OSCP & CCNA SEC

First up is the OSCP from Offensive Security. This is, as the name goes, geared toward...

I’ve launched into studying for CCNA Security concurrent with taking the Penetration Testing with Kali Linux course from Offensive-Security.com.

I think I’ve gone insane.