I really have hardly written anything here except flight and ride logs (with maybe 4 or 5 exceptions) since about 2010. I’ve never really posted much (maybe anything?) here about work or my infosec/blueteam/DFIR interests. However, today, mostly because I was trying to remember when the Tour de Donut ride was that I got the t-shirt I’m wearing today, I did a very quick run back through the history of this blog. When it started it was over on Blogger, I moved it to my own server when Blogger went through some changes that made it more of a pain to use. It has been running on a VPS for quite a few years now. But, while looking through all those old posts, I realized that I actually started this (and the church blog) in January of 2008, which means this blog is now 15 years old. I don’t know if I will ever get back to writing much here. I am so frustrated with politics these days that I feel like I should just to get it off my chest, but I can’t bring myself to go to the effort of actually writing it up. These days, when I see what has become of the Republican party that I belonged to for more than 25 years, it makes me sick. Tonight will be the President Biden’s State of the Union address, which, honestly, I probably won’t watch, and which will be followed by some vacuous meanderings from Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Kevin McCarthy has sold his soul to become Speaker of the House and will soon manufacture a debt ceiling crisis without having any sort of plan for how to deal with the debt he suddenly claims is the most important issue of our time. I know that the Democrats aren’t saints, but at least they are willing to talk about real issues that effect real people, and have some sort of a governing philosophy. The Republican party simple exists to blow stuff up. And, that make me very sad. So, I’ll probably go quiet again for months or years after this post, but I am still here. I am still thinking about these things. These days, I mostly just like or retweet posts on twitter that are in line with my political/religious/spiritual leanings, but as I said, I just can bring myself to expend the energy to put them in my own words.
I haven’t posted a Year in Riding or a Year in Flying for several years because I have done very little to none of that for several years. I’ve kept my FAA 3rd class (well, Special Issuance) medical current, but haven’t actually operated the controls of an airplane since 2016. I hope to rectify that this year, but I thought the same last year. I didn’t even get 100 miles in on my bike last year because of another herniated disk. I was doing well and thought that 2022 would be a better year, right up until the Friday before Easter. That day, I was mowing the lawn and got the zero turn mower stuck in the mud (not all that unusual an occurrence, especially in the spring). I stood up to step off the mower and pull it out of the mud and had excruciating pain in my lower back and running down my left leg. I suffered through the weekend and on Mon went to my chiropractor since he had gotten me through a similar incident back in about 2014 or so by using the traction machine. This time, though, when the “decompression” finished I was in so much pain I could barely get off the table and could not sit down. I immediately went across the street to the OrthoNeuro Urgent Care (which closed a few months later). To make a long story short, I was using a cane to get around for the next 2 months. I got 2 steroid injections in my back. One in May, the second in June, which helped tremendously. I was able to ditch the cane in late-June or early-July and the pain finally completely disappeared in mid-to-late Nov.
I also never posted here about finally becoming a SANS Certified Instructor which occurred during the pandemic (Sep 2021). The last half of 2022, I finally was able to teach in-person classes again and got to travel on SANS’ dime as I taught in Austin, TX; Sydney, Australia; Prague, Czechia; Tokyo, Japan; and Paris, France in the last 5 months of the year. In fact, I had 9 trips of 7+ days in the second half of 2022 including the 2 annual visits to the parental units in Durham, NC in July and Dec. After the latter, I finally fell victim to Covid despite having a total of 4 shots for it (the second booster, the bivalent one in Sep shortly before the beginning of the international travel). I’ll be traveling again (including internationally) to teach in 2023, but not at the same pace as those last 5 months of last year.
I’m pretty sure that no one but me actually has read anything there that I didn’t put a link to on Facebook or some other social media site, but Happy Birthday to me (well, my blog anyway).
