Up and running (again)

The blog has been down for a couple months – blame it on the juniper; although the Cisco is still acting flakey.  In the mean time, life is about to change drastically for me (again).  This week marks the last week of my graduate level courses.

After friday, I will have conferred upon my personage the Degree of Master – and there will be time in my life for new and different things.  I think I shall require everyone to call me “Master Jediah” from now on.  It’s only fitting for the accomplishment, right? 😉

So in futuristic contemplation, I have no idea what I am going to do with my life yet.  School has consumed every waking free hour for the last 6.5 years. So this weekend, I will be celebrating the new life.  I guess.

I will break the posting silence by stating: and so the next chapter advances, the page turns, the sun cycles on yet another day: opportunities await.  To me, my next directive is to go forth and live – whatever living looks like.

Never a fear of tyranny – from a citizen of America

Has anyone else noticed that with the failure of trying to make the Zimmerman case about race, the liberal media is now running a significantly higher number of stories about gun violence in an attempt to capitalize on fears of the uninformed american people.

Remember when the British tried to disarm us?

It was Noah Webster in a letter to Benjamin Franklin who once said:

“A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power superior to any other power in the state… Before standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any preten[c]e, raised in the United States (Webster, 1787).”

 

References

Webster, N. (1787). An examination into the leading principles of the federal constitution proposed by the late convention held at philadelphia: With answers to the principal objections that have been raised against the system. Prichard & Hall, in Market Street, the second door above Laetitia Court. Retrieved from Google Scholar.

 

No it is not ok to email me my Credit Card Number…

This is a copy of an actual email I had to send today…  I guess there are still a lot of people out there that do not understand the perils of the internet.

[Name removed] –

Good evening.  Thank you for emailing the rental confirmation:  however, I am surprised and disappointed that the image attached to the confirmation email contained the credit card number we used to book the rental property.  By trade, I am an information security technologist – I protect computer systems and data assets from digital theft.

Your email to my wife provided everything necessary for a digital thief to not only commit fraud against my credit card company, in my name, but it also encourages identity theft, as you included personally identifiable information and financial information within the attached image.

Unless very specific precautions are taken, email is an insecure medium and it should be assumed that the contents of email are made publicly available on the internet.

As a secondary example to underline the importance of discouraging the emailing of sensitive information, you accidentally misaddressed the email (sent to *******@******.com rather than ******@*****.com).  While the email was still redirected to a domain I have ownership in, because of my specific configuration, the email could have just as easily, sans my configuration, resulted in a scenario where my credit card was sent to some random person somewhere out on the internet.

As a necessary precaution, I now have to cancel my credit card, get a new card reissued, and go through the long and time consuming process of updating all my billing relationships – a set of tasks I had not planned on spending my evening completing.

I would recommend, in the future, that the practice of emailing sensitive information (such as credit card numbers) be eliminated from HOA procedures.

Thank you.

[Signed]

To my children on father’s day 2013 – be yourselves!

As a parent, I want to encourage my children to think and act ‘out of the box’. When I was young, I was weird, I was among the first to start dying my hair different colors in our small town in Maine, I was among the first to start shaving designs into my head and my eyebrows. I was among the first to start wearing mismatching shoes or socks, wearing my ties around my forehead instead of around my neck… and the list goes on and on.

2013 Fathers day tie from Braeden
My Father’s day tie 2013 – making everyone jealous!

I want to encourage my children to think differently than everyone else, to march to the beat of their own drum… in fact, at least one of my children, not only march to the beat of his own drum, he invents new types of drum-sticks! I want to encourage that!

So to show my support, I wore my tie to Church today. Yes, there were thousands of people that don’t know me. yes, there are hundreds of people that stared awkwardly. Yes, there were even a few people that commented on and appreciated my tie.

These are the years that they will learn to dance and skip and hop to the music in their head, and not someone else’s tune.

It was very ironic today that Randy from Oak Hills church quoted one of his old professors when he said: “Everyone is born unique, but most die a copy”. Today was my day to remind my children to be themselves – no matter what.

I must say that I am lucky that I only had only one child that made me something wearable this year.

Yet, I wore this to church as I have never really been one to worry about what people think of me – just ask my own parents.

🙂

Happy Father’s day to all you Father’s out there.

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Lack of honesty, integrity, or do some people actually have alien children.

I spent the day watching the posts on social media; over and over. Amazing father, amazing kids, amazing this, amazing that. Blah, blah, blah.

Do any of you actually live on this planet? Are any of you actually honest with yourselves and the rest of the people in your glocal society. Or, are there actually some people out there that have alien’s instead of children. Let me tell you – that word child and hell aren’t all that far off.

We wake up to fighting, we hear fighting all day, we go to sleep to fighting. It’s non-stop, it’s incessant, it’s unyielding.

People tell me all the time “It’s because you have such smart children”, so I have to ask myself – does that mean everyone else’s children are so dumb? Maybe they just aren’t being honest. Maybe they put up this fake facade.

You see, not only do I have children of my own; but I grew up in a family of 6 children too. There was constant fighting and bickering. There was a general lack of showing love to one another, and caring and companionship.

We all care deeply for each other,, now that we are all grown up and have moved out from under a single roof… so maybe there is hope..

That said, I’m surprised my parent’s didn’t drown us all. Good thing they didn’t.

Let’s pretend that you could give us 100% safety….

So in the latest ruse, Mr. President wants us to believe that he can give us 100% safety, if only we were to give up our privacy to the government.  Are you falling for it America?

“It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” Obama said. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.” – President Obama.

 http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/09/report-nsa-contract-worker-is-surveillance-source/

 

There are no ends… only beginnings…

As we moved to San Antonio from the North East, crossing paths with a talented musician and dedicated Christian was both a blessing and honor for my family.

Today, #OakHillsChurch said a goodbye to Stephen Fryrear as he and his wife begin a new stage of their lives in Alabama.  A goodbye mixed with tears of sadness and joy.  Sadness for our loss as a Church Family here in San Antonio – even as temporary as it may be, and joy to see that like a seed on the wind, Stephen and his wife will take their joy and talents to some other part of the country to continue to build the #Kingdom.

If you are not familiar with Stephen – I might suggest you check out two of my favorites on iTunes – his song “At the Cross” and “Because of Bethlehem”.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/stephen-fryrear/id302257670

Someone once said that “all good things must come to an end”; what they failed to understand is that there are no ends, only beginnings.  Good luck Stephen, and may God bless!

What about the house alarm?

So tonight while reading Little House in the Big Woods, we were reading the chapter about Pa and the Bear – and Donovan was surprised to find that the book is based on a true story.

I followed up the conversation telling Donovan about my bear story.

Back when we were kids we lived in a trailer that my father had bought, and he had used a chainsaw to cut some doors out of the trailer.  One such door went into a wood shed that dad had built onto the side of the trailer, and then out into the “tool shed”.

Because the trailer was up on cinderblocks, you had to step down into the woodshed before opening the door to go out into the toolshed.  Once in the toolshed, you had to walk through the shed, out into the night, up the hill and around “the path” to get to the outhouse.

One summer evening my mother had went out to go to the bathroom and when she walked down into the woodshed, she heard scratching and growling in the toolshed.  She immediately ran back into the “house” down the hall, and jumped into bed waking my father up telling him there was a bear stuck in the toolshed.

Dad grabbed his gun, went down the hall, down into the woodshed, and opened the door to the toolshed, at which time his pure white german Shepard named “Sam” came bounding into the house.  Apparently Sam had been left outside, and really wanted to get back in.

As I was wrapping up this story, Donovan turned and looked at me in bewilderment, and said: “I don’t get it, didn’t your dad have to disable the house alarm first”.  🙂