Category: Thoughts
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My Top 5: Movies
Something on the lighter side for a change. After a week of heavy topics, I thought it was worth looking at something more fun: my top five favorite movies of all time. Before you judge, keep in mind that these aren’t necessarily the best movies, and they don’t mean that I can’t enjoy completely unrelated films. What…
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COVID-19 and Threat Modeling
Stop trying to eliminate or ignore risk; take necessary risks smartly. 2020 has been a wild ride so far! An entire continent caught on fire, every two weeks we dodge another world war, the market crashed, and of course… a global pandemic. It’s easy to choose between one of two options: Shut down completely and disinfect…
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Observations: Dare to Lead
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” – President Franklin D. Roosevelt Lessons Learned is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.…
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Teleworking is Hard
Whoever thought working from home was easy never listened to that stay-at-home parent. How do we prevent teleworking burnout? Let’s face it: teleworking sounds amazing. Roll out of bed late, leisurely enjoy your breakfast and coffee, get in some exercise, and get to work. Finish up early and still have plenty of time to catch…
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The Eisenhower Box
“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” – President Dwight D. Eisenhower President Dwight D. Eisenhower was an incredibly productive man. Over the course of his life, in addition to serving two terms as the 34th President of our country, he also served as General of the Army (the rare five-star general)…
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Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose
Why Daniel Pink is on to something with his 2011 book, Drive. In 2011, Daniel Pink published a great book titled, Drive, which discusses the numerous ways that people are driven in life, their profession, and their passions. His fundamental thesis was that there are three primary elements that contribute to our personal and professional satisfaction: the…
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My Top 5: Leadership Books
Here is a list of the top five books that have made me a better leader. While I have read a lot of books that I can claim have reshaped my problem-solving and leadership approaches, these are the top five that I like to recommend to my teammates. Some of these I have been reading…
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The Starfish, the Spider, and Security
Internet security lessons we can learn from both spiders and starfish. I was recently gifted an interesting book, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom by a fellow Airman who (I think) hoped to encourage and empower more independent action among others against the grain…
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Finding a Good Password is Just a Roll of the Dice
Even though your security isn’t a game doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. Never have secure account passwords been more important, yet never have they been harder for humans to remember. Think of all of the times you have had to make a password that had a certain number of special characters, numbers, upper case,…
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Ashley Madison Breach: Another Study in Security and Mitigation
Cheating never pays… and neither do bad security practices. So you’ve probably heard a little bit about Ashley Madison and the massive data breach, but may have been wondering a few things. Namely, who is Ashley, why do I care that her data is all over the internet, and why does this matter to me?…
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Security 101
Protect yourself on the internet… and off. I often discuss computer security issues amongst friends, family, and coworkers and a consistent thing that comes up is: “How do I best secure myself?” Here are a few key points I always bring up: Let’s start this discussion with the two broad categories of attackers and how they effect…
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What Dropbox Taught us About Password Security
There is no such thing as a single perfect password. In October of 2014, it was revealed that malicious hackers may have obtained a dump of approximately 7 million username/password combinations. According to this statement from Dropbox, their site itself wasn’t hacked, most of the passwords were out-of-date, and affected users have been directly notified. Regardless, it’s worth revisiting…