A Tale of Two Landings

Posted: 24th February 2011 by John in Personal
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I am a pilot.

One day, back in early 2001, I was in the midst of my flight training and gearing up for what I considered to be one of the most exciting flights I had taken yet – the long cross country.

The name is a bit of a misnomer – I was not literally flying across the country, rather I was flying to various places in Wisconsin.  The long cross country is distinguished from a regular cross country in that one of the three legs must be at least 100 nautical miles.

It was a Saturday and I arrived at the flight school early to pull down weather reports and start doing my calculations needed to file an accurate flight plan with the appropriate flight services.  Several of the instructors checked my work,  confirmed that I was reading the weather reports correctly, and signed off on my flight plan. I was excited about this because I did everything correctly on the first try, without any help. Read the rest of this entry »

The power of doing

Posted: 23rd February 2011 by John in Personal
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Any fan of Seth Godin would know and recognize that perhaps one of the most powerful things you can do for improving your career is to identify what needs to be done – that you can do – and do it.  It sounds incredibly simple and obvious, right?   It’s not always.

I think the hangup a lot of people have is that they are waiting for permission to do it.  They want to seek validation from someone higher up that what they think needs to be done is correct.  They seek the safety that having approval from higher authorities gives. Read the rest of this entry »

Change

Posted: 21st February 2011 by John in Personal
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After about two years working for ExactTarget it was time for a change. For quite a while I have been feeling discontent with the more technical aspects of my job – managing certain technologies that, while important, hold no interest to me.  Through much soul searching I realized that while I am a technically backgrounded individual, I have no desire for the implementation of technology to be my primary job function.  Instead what I have found myself wanting is to use my technical ability and understanding as part of my job, but to be able to focus on big picture issues and problems and come up with creative and effective solutions.

After making that realization all that was left was to make it a reality.  A couple of weeks ago I was able to do exactly that as I got myself re-assigned to focus on Application Security.  This role is much less technical hands on and much more “lets look at the big picture of application security”.  I love this role, and love the new work I’m doing.

For those wondering – this isn’t a promotion so much as a lateral move. I still work within the same team as I have for the past two years.  The main difference is that my focus is wholly on AppSec.

Very good things are coming – very good things.

Perspective

Posted: 9th February 2011 by John in Personal
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For a few months now I’ve been struggling with a problem.  I won’t go into details here what the problem entailed, but it was a problem and it was generating a significant amount of stress in my life.  Not good stress that keeps me focused and driven towards some goal, but bad stress which shattered focus and left me struggling to determine a goal, much less find motivation to work towards it.

Yesterday I decided to fix the problem.  In doing so I kicked off a series of events that ended up changing my perspective which – over the next few weeks and months – will make the overarching problem go away.  It’s amazing how a slight shift one direction or another can have such a profound impact.   I immediately felt a weight lift,  the stress melt away, and a spring to my step.

I should have done this sooner.

Fun with IPv6

Posted: 2nd February 2011 by John in General
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Every device connected to every network on the planet has an “IP Address”.   This dotted decimal string of digits represents your unique* location on your network.  An IP address will typically look something like this:  192.168.1.100.

That’s IPv4, anyway, an ageing protocol which is running out of addresses to allocate.

Read the rest of this entry »

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