Musings

I suppose I ought to explain a little bit more about my previous post.

I sometimes think about Whitney's Houston song, One Moment in Time. It captures something I want, a driving force if you will... the urge to have that one moment in time, one moment "where I'm all that I thought I could be."

I suppose it's pretty much the top tier of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Self-Actualization.

Computers...

Well. Putting this into words is harder than I thought.

When I learn something, I tend to get a feeling for the connections between things, holistically I guess. I don't really like rote memorization, but if I can sense the connections between things I'm pretty good at remembering how it all fits together. I sometimes use terms like 'see' or 'visualize', but it's more visceral than that. Sort of like building a mental map, or following a flow chart I guess.

When I learn something new, it's a bit like building a puzzle. I get a piece, I find it connects to another piece, and the more I immerse myself in the topic the more pieces I get, the more connections are formed, the more the pieces fall into place and the more complete the picture gets. I sometimes get formal training (MDMP, IPB, etc) and sometimes it's stuff I pick up on the job... mostly by jotting down anything unfamiliar and asking about it. Do that often enough, and soon you too can throw out an alphabet of acronyms - ECS, AMG, IPB, EJK, VBIED, etc.

All that is sort of like learning the basic rules of a game (like canasta). Training in the basics and whatnot. It starts off unfamiliar, but the more I immerse myself the more it all starts coming together.

I've always had an interest in national security issues, and cyber security is sort of uncharted territory there. A new dimension that we're just beginning to make sense of. We've got doctrines regarding land warfare, naval warfare, aerial warfare. We kind of know how they work, even though things change as technology changes (i.e. how fast you can maneuver, what sorts of countermeasures work against what, etc.)

But cyber security? We're all still figuring out what's even possible, much less how to counter it.

Right now... well, right now I'm at the very beginning of learning the field. Okay, sure. I've got a master's degree in computer science now. It reminds me of what they say about black belt training - i.e. the black belt just means you're ready to begin learning. It's nice to read articles and realize I can actually follow most of it. I can throw out terms like TCP, UDP, IP, IDS, SSH, FTP etc. and have a fairly good idea of what they mean.

But it's just the beginning. Give me five to ten years of experience and further training (if I can get my future place of employment to pay for some SANS courses that'd be hella awesome), and maybe I can talk knowledgeably about cyber warfare.

So no real regrets about the things I mentioned in my previous post. I know some of that is typical human behavior (i.e. we have a tendency to make stories about our lives and to a certain degree it's easy to be at peace with things when I feel life is going well. I had a phone interview that went well, have an in-person interview scheduled for January, and if things work out then life is good and I have no real complaints.)

And who knows, maybe in five-ten years I'll have a sense of where cyber warfare fits in with the rest of it.