Change Management

 

This year has been full of change, more than usual it feels like. It seems like it's happening to everyone, not just me. Heard so many stories from friends and family that make this year seem more overwhelming than most. There was no shortage of bad news during the first half of this year and it's not over yet.  It feels like we have been chasing an imaginary goal to bring things back to a normal state. 

The real problem with this plan is that change truly is inevitable and normal is always changing.  While we try to make the world around us more comfortable to what we have been used to, the world continues to evolve in ways we never imagined.  Just because everything is changing we shouldn't worry too much because our core beliefs still hold true and if a change truly works better it will stick around for a while and if it doesn't it will change.  

This weekend marked the autumnal equinox and you can see signs of changing seasons everywhere. Tree leaves are changing color and falling.  Weather is getting cold quicker at night and school is back in session. Personally I am going through lots of change this next week so it seemed fitting to make this post, got a new job with lots of new and exciting challenges, seems like it will be good, but it's much harder going from 4 months off to back to work. Will have to hit the ground running, but that's the way I like it.  

One thing I've learned over the years is embracing change generally leads to the best success and personal satisfaction. Resistance is futile when change is inevitable. New schedules will mess up routine but optimizations can be introduced to make a change more tolerable. Now for the tricky part, practice adapting to change whenever possible to become a more resilient human.  Take a lesson from the change management playbooks used in critical infrastructure, every change is reviewed regularly to help communicate intentions, plan for possible impacts, and stay prepared for back out and recovery plans if a change fails.

Cheers to change! For the better, worse or otherwise it will continue to happen!

Banjolele and Bass week

 

Decided to pick up the banjolele I had purchased a few years ago.  I was initially excited for the possibility of a tiny banjo like musical instrument one drunken night and purchased it on Amazon. When it arrived I spent about a week learning to play it and then ended up with a random injury on the pinky finger of my plucking hand.  It was a just a scratch in my opinion, but over a few weeks became very infected and uncomfortable. It sort of became a saga of it's own leading a journey of recovery that lasted months.  But enough about fingers, this is a post about banjolele's for those interested.

So after what seems like an eternity of lacking inspiration, I picked up the little fella this week and decided to learn a few tunes.  There's lots of great content online to teach you songs and proper methods to practice and I also have an eBook to dust off (Clawhammer Ukulele: Tabs and Techniques By Aaron Keim). It's a great book on the clawhammer technique which gives the banjolele the unique banjo twang. Some enjoy it more than others, although it's much different than playing bass. Still fun to play and unique in it's own way.  The finger picking style used for banjo maximizes the notes you can play in a strum sort of like playing triplets with a bass.  

I don't plan on becoming an expert at it, but knowing how to strum a few tunes made my week extra nice. Until next week, keep on doing your things, and just be happy!

Adversary Emulation

 

Did some playing with Caldera the other day...

More details to come as I learn more but for now let's just say you don't need rocket appliances to run this tool at home. Any old laptop within the past 10 years'ish will generally do. I'm sure there are some exceptions. I also managed to get the recently released OT plugins uploaded for bacnet, DNP3, and modbus with hopes of testing soon. So far I've only deployed a couple agents on sacrificial Linux hosts in the home lab.  I felt like I barely scratched the surface of capabilities of this tool, but it was very painless to setup, and includes impeccable documentation and training support.  Kudos to the folks at Mitre for releasing another great tool.

Until next time, keep on tinkering!