I am working to be better at sharing information I find useful. Sharing on social media is great, but that takes away from easy posts for my blog. But how can I do this without spending wasted time doing the copy-paste shuffle?

The answer was rather simple: I created a shortcut which appends an entry to temp post in Markdown format, including a small blurb about the post. I can grab the contents on the temp post from my iCloud Drive and paste it directly into my blog. This beauty of this approach is the shortcut runs on my phone, tablet, and laptop all thru Safari’s share sheet which is basically the same process I follow for saving things to my reading list.

There is still room to improve this. I could automatically create a new day’s post and populate the front matter. I could look at automatically publishing this somehow, or at least script the process. But this is a great time-saving start.

Today was roadtrip day – so I got to catch up on a lot of podcasts.

What Leaders Need to Know Before Trying a 4-Day Work Week – 4-day work weeks don’t lead to less work, but can lead to less work/life balance. I tend to like my Fridays for catch-up and projects.
Resisting the Pressure to Overwork – Overwork is not required for success. Combat it with focusing on prioritizing, setting boundries, and reinforcing your values. Then work to be effective and efficient on goals focused on your high-level objectives.
Making Sense with Sam Harris: #282 — Do You Really Have a Self? – Self is the illusion. Flow states are evidence of this.
Money 2.0: The Rich and the Rest of Us – Hidden Brain – Differences between the wealthy and the rest of us, and how inequality effects or lives in many ways.
The Law of Connection (Part 1) – John Maxwell Leadership Podcast – Relationships are key to your success.
S4 E13. Broken News – Media Lab – Discussion about how our media has failed and how it could get better.
Unicode Locale Data Markup Language (LDML) Part 4: Dates – I used this to figure out the right date formats to use in my daily reading post shortcut…and to test it’s output. 😎
The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk: 473: Ed Mylett – Building Confidence, Asking The Right Questions, & Maxing Out Your Life (The Power Of One More) – Ryan always puts out a good podcast, and today was no exception. I’ll be getting Ed’s book(s)! Here’s the highlights I captured: Don’t tie your identity to what you do for work – tie it to who you are. Success is tied to self-confidence and humility. Be interested in people. Your inner circle is important – surround yourself with people who run at a higher level than you in the areas you need to grow. Link confidence to intention, not accomplishment. Leaders are always making people feel something, such as motivation. Success is knowing your strengths and using them to serve others – leaders find other’s strength and get them to believe in themselves while working towards the objectives. Be talent scout – help people believe in their greatness! Most people just want someone to love them and believe in them. The great successes operate out of visualization & imagination by seeing how the world can be and working toward that, while most everyone else is operating out history and memory. Pick your mission – what you do, what you stand for, and what you stand against – and be confident in it. Your standards are more important than goals: high performers have high standard and good habits, allowing them to bring it even on their off days.
Nick Lane on Powering Biology – Sean Carroll – I had to listen to this one over again. I feel even stronger this reinforces my beliefs that God and science are mutual, not mutually exclusive. But this requires you to assume that the seven days it took God to create the earth are an analogy given to man so that he could understand it. His days were billions of years in a universe he created. His crafting of Adam and Eve took place over eons, starting from primordial chemical reaction and ending in life we know today. He created the atoms with a natural desire to react and form more complex chemicals. These chemicals then reacted with each other to form even more complex structures such as amino acids and peptides. These eventually formed into the machinery of RNA and created simple life. Simple life interacted and grew more complex until it eventually created DNA and mitochondria to support complex, specialized cellular structures needed for multi-cellular organisms. This would mean the universe is actually primed to create life, not chaos. How could the beauty of that not be His grand design?

The Technium: 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known – Habits for life
The jobless Americans chasing the dream of ‘passive income’ – Not all that glitters is passive income gold. Most people successful in this arena are monetizing things they enjoy.
Cool Things People Do With Their Blogs – Great list of cool things you can do with your blog. I personally like the ‘now’ page and plan to craft one up myself.
Uses – Ru – Idea for a ‘uses’ page that I captured from the above list.
Watch Keeper of the Ashes: The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders Streaming Online – 📺 Hulu true crime docu-series on the still unsolved Girl Scout Murders.
The Most Useful Mac Keyboard Shortcuts to Know – Basic Mac keyboard shortcuts for boot, Finder, and global. I’ve been on a quest to compile a good list of my frequently used app shortcuts.
Joe Speiser ⚡️ on Twitter: “I’m 43. When I was young, I chased things that didn’t matter. You can learn from my mistakes. If you’re 20-something, read this:” / Twitter –
Twitter thread on what not to focus on in your 20’s.
35 Impactful Questions Managers Should Ask Themselves Regularly – Great list of reflections for a leader to ponder on a routine basis.
Send meeting availability in Outlook mobile – Save time scheduling meetings – Share your availability in Outlook.
Jack Rhysider on Twitter: “If you’re in IT, I highly encourage you to write a blog. Here are 17 reasons why you should be blogging. 🧵👇” / Twitter – Reasons to blog of your in IT.
How to Ask for a Promotion – Great deep-dive by Jordan Harbinger on how to properly ask for a promotion at any level.
On rebooting: the unreasonable effectiveness of turning computers off and on again – Why “turn it off, then turn back on again” is usually the best solution to your problems. 🤷‍♂️
Are Your Passwords in the Green? – How long it takes to crack passwords based on length/complexity. Yet more ammunition to have long passphrases, stop expiration, and use MFA.
Toxic Superiority in IT: How it Hurts Us All – Good post about toxic attitudes common in IT vets, how they bring others down, and what you can do to help prevent it.
Sean Carroll’s Mindscape: Nick Lane on Powering Biology – Sean and Nick Lane explain Nick’s theories behind how life’s essential processes might be based in self occurring chemical reactions. These reaction are the basis for everything that follows from amino acids to RNA to fully functional DNA. What struck me with these theories is how yet another process in the universe favors life over chaos. If this is true, then God is really built into everything.
How To Say No – Email templates for how to say no to various things.
Biden leans toward $10,000 in student loan relief, advocates push back – Instead of forgiving just $10,000, why not leave the 0% interest in effect in perpetuity? This is the first time I’ve made real progress in my student loans since completing my masters degree.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything with this blog. My goal is to get back to posting at least once a month. My commitment level has increased after spending a few hours getting Jekyll up-to-date and fixing the GitLab CI pipeline for publishing. The project also required me to rebuild my personal laptop from scratch after the Monterey 12.4 update botched my Filevault. Life has changed a bit – focusing more on developing my leadership talents than my technical abilities. Here’s to the first of hopefully many more posts.

I’ve spent the last few months coming to terms with the fact I have anxiety. My wife had brought it up a few times, but things really came to a head as the pandemic pandemonium hit the Upstate. I was running at 200% and could never turn off. I had panic attacks on a daily basis and felt a deep disappointment in myself for being unable to live up to the unfair standards I set for myself. I finally made the choice to seek help from my doctor after a long talk with my wife where she finally told me how very different I had been for the past two to three years.

Treatment meant starting on anxiety medicine. I battled an internal stigma which had prevented this choice for a long time, but it has been the single best change I’ve made for myself in years. I went from a 12 to a 7 on a scale of 1-10 almost overnight. That change was all I needed to have hope things would get better. I was able to start piecing together how I could manage my anxiety while keeping an active career and family life amid this crisis. I’m now near what I would call my old self again, but with a much better understanding of managing myself.

One of my triggers is having too many open loops. I’ve learned to accept that there will always be more work than I have time for. But that doesn’t mean I need the clutter of those partially done tasks floating around everywhere. I’m doing my best to keep my immediate physical and virtual workspaces as uncluttered as possible using my version of the GTD method. I’ve got inboxes for my email, OneNote, and Feedly which I try to fully process at least once per day. I’ve been great at sticking to this.

I have not been as good about dealing with the pipes that accumulate in my Action Required email folders and task lists. I could be forgiven for missing some things considering the number of projects I’m involved in, but I feel horrible when my family or staff reminds me for the 5th time that I haven’t acted on something they need from me. My latest change has been to follow the “Delegate, Defer, Do” mantra. I force myself to think thru these questions:

Am I the only person that can do this task?
Am I the right person to do this task?
Can this task wait until later?
Does it need to be done at all?
Easier said than done in the heat of the moment.

I’m also forcing myself to trust my team more. They are all smart, capable folks and if they need help will ask for it. The positives far outnumber the negatives. I have more open time to do things that only I can/should do. I spend more time facilitating or training others, thus permanently removing load from my shoulders. And my staff seems to feel more empowered to take ownership in what we do.

It’s been a long time since I was able to clean up anything but my inbox. But I’m making progress daily and the piles slowly get smaller. And, most importantly, I can walk away from it at the end of the day.

I’ve finally closed out an open task to refresh my blog! The last year has seen a lot of changes both personally and professionally, most of which have left me with very little time for much besides work. Things had finally started to settle when COVID-19 hit the area. Finally I have gotten to a point where my routine allows me to focus on more than just completing the next task.

Early 2019 left me dealing with the aftermath of my mother’s mental health crisis. She’s dealt with schizophrenia most of my life. The last 20ish years have been fairly uneventful for her aside from my brother’s passing in 2006. Unfortunately, her husband’s terminal cancer and eventual passing created a situation which resulted in her hospitalization. After she was released, we attempted to have her live with us in SC unsuccessfully. I would like to say she is back to herself, but anyone who has dealt with schizophrenia can tell you they are never really the same afterwards. My family is still dealing with the ripples created by this event and likely will for a long time yet.

Mid 2019 presented us with a very different challenge. The VP over my role was abruptly let go, and I volunteered to fill in as ‘acting VP’ until the role could be filled. I absolutely loved the opportunity to explore strategy, understand why our credit union operates the way it does, and get to know our leadership team. But filling two roles is challenging, and frankly I was not ready to jump headlong into being a VP.

Things at work have finally settled out in my new role as the Director over our IT Department. I get to lead a great team of guys, help them develop, and leverage my experience to build our team to best serve our credit union.

I pulled the plug on my email server this morning…and I should have done it months ago. I decided to abandon my self-hosting plans after just under a year. Why? As I mentioned in my original post, hosting web and email servers can be an exercise in masochism. It is also not an endeavor for those with a lack of spare time. A great deal has changed in my personal and professional life over the last year, and dealing with all of the extra technical work did not appeal to me. Read more

This edition of “Grey Hat Hacking” builds upon the previous four editions by providing updated and expanded information on several key aspects of ethical hacking.
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Endpoint security tools can be a real pain when trying to get accurate vulnerability scans. Some tools go so far as to kill off a generic Nessus scan. Each has it’s own bypass mechanism.
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After several weeks of nothing happening malware-related at work, my phone pinged and alerted me to someone caught red-handed clicking on something they shouldn’t have. Read more