transitions

getting back into the swing of blogging is weird. microblogging is so tempting; just dump brief thoughts and don't care about longevity, about audience, about context.

time was I would publish essay-length things here to get well-structured thoughts into the world. now, I'm not sure how much I believe that anyone will listen.

I'm in the middle of a multi-tiered life upheaval as we try to move the family to Vancouver Island. we have a lovely place to move to lined up, but so much needs to change at once.

I'm taking the opportunity to consider changing careers as well, although I don't know what's going to stick. teaching adult ed math courses at a university? infosec work? I've been learning a lot of pentesting skills this year and picking up a couple of related certs, but I'm still not sure if that will become a full-time gig or something I do on the side or just Another Weird Diversion.

weird to think that I could Wayback this website and find poetry I wrote nearly thirty years ago. getting older is strange.

I still have a cohost archive I need to convert to a format I can put up here, and maaaaaybe my old tweets. it's tough; what, on Olde Twitter, was written to endure? what was I proud of? what was just shitposts or venting? what, if anything, had people linked to there that's now broken and lost?

so I put something here, because at least it's mine, on my hardware. not rented space, not content for someone else's sludge farm, not SEO. not going to be bought by yet another techbro nazi so they can de-woke it into their psychotic idea of "truth".

oh, so I've had canarytoken emailing me every day or two when something hits my Obvious Canarytoken link on the site, out of curiosity as to how often AI content scrapers are hitting my web server. so, once every couple days is the answer, I guess. this site is staying lofi enough not to be a big bandwidth hit anyway, but it does make it tempting to install an LLM tarpit of some kind.

today I had to tell students not to trust Google's AI summary of search results. again. it's not going to stick; I'm fighting UI design that's leveraging Google's existing public trust. we spent so long telling students to use Google (or Bing or whatever) to access this amazing shared intellectual resource, only to now have to tell them that the gateway is poisoned, there's a Man in the Middle and they're pushing you Fact-Flavoured Processed Text-Food Product instead of, you know. Human knowledge.

I'm capable of happiness in real life, honest, but wow I'd like to enjoy technology again. maybe that's why I'm leaning towards infosec, and pentesting / red teaming in particular. at least then when things are trash I get to enjoy the challenge of defeating it; maybe even help make something better.