A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I worked as a SQL developer for a ecommerce company in the 90’s. The commercial internet was relatively new and shiny, hacker culture was in full swing, and even slightly irritating gothy kids could get work in the dot com boom and go to parties straight out of the Matrix with pretty horrible rave music. It was there that I made my first real life connections in the Chicago hacker scene and went from a rather insular computer life to the exciting new uses for the internet.

A colleague approached my friends and I with a novel concept – we were going to start journaling on a private website, writing out our youthful angst and the various horrible things we did to Linux and Windows 9x. Of course, the term ‘blog’ had not been coined yet, and even ‘weblogs’ were pretty unknown. So, we wrote, and wrote. Insomuch I’m a bit glad this was long before the existence of web archiving and I’m a bit glad I can’t read my complaints about school and family. I remember one harrowing birthday where I wrote what seemed to me to be the most profound thing I had ever written, and lost power mid post. (This was also before the existence of drafts or autosave!)

I can’t recall when it all stopped. The dot com bust ruined the glamour of the internet that had no limits – the one that ran in dark rooms blasting Orbital on servers maintained by long haired Linux geeks from 2600.

Many years later, I occasionally considered returning to blogging. I wrote some articles, short stories, and regular infosec articles for my employers. But, I’d never considered until this point that I have anything worthwhile to blog to the community. The internet is full of blogs now. Billions of stories about everything from human rights to breakfast. An archive of an entire society and our human knowledge, (good, bad, and everywhere in between).

But the fact is, my lovely friends have pestered me about posting some stories, articles, and guides in longer form, so I’ve decided to start this blog to share mostly infosec related research and tools I’ve developed over the years. You can still find my regular security basics blogs at Motorola Solutions Fresh Ideas in Public Safety. I’ll use this as a platform to share more in depth resources as they come along.

Thank you for visiting and for your requests!