Just as I had begun to post more frequently, a month's hiatus occurred.
Some thoughts:
One of the difficult parts of this consulting jobs is that each person is their own brand. Additionally, everyone has very different schedules. Unlike colleagues at a non-consulting job, whom you see every day, interact with frequently, and who may do the same work as you, here the ones closest to what you do are scattered around the country. At work I sit in a small, windowless lab, perpetually cold to ensure the safety of the server rack next door, surrounded (when they're here) by IT Auditors, who work long hours in Excel, examining standards and compliance. It's a world away from my background, and, regardless of how much personal time I invest in it, my day-to-day work. I stress that maybe other people won't care for me to reach out and talk to them, off-the-cuff, about anything. Everyone is always so busy, every interaction is preceded by a quick Outlook calendar check, and I never know how much they care to chat.
It's very much a job of solitude. Fortunately, I have a mentor with whom I talk twice monthly, and a couple of people I've worked with before. Performing a challenging penetration testing assessment is a good bonding experience. In this job I know one has to seek out speaking opportunities, but that's just your brand. What if you just want to shoot the s**t about work?
In other news:
Interesting experience yesterday of donating platelets/plasma. They decided to go for a bit more platelets than usual, draining me of 1.07 L of liquid. That was unusual. The machine always adjusts too high to the veins and draws and drains much too quickly.
I took the plunge at last and bought a personal laptop to function as a work computer. Not a netbook or Chromebook, purposeful though those may be. It's something I'd felt the lack of even in college, six years ago, when I hauled a desktop and monitor to school in a carry-on bag just to work on it in a lab, hiding from assistants locking it up for the night, trying to finish a project the night before it was due.
The choice was a Thinkpad T460p - which I'll upgrade to having 32 GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. I've never used a computer with an SSD so it should be fast. Plan to install Ubuntu to dual-boot it and the Windows 10 OS that comes pre-installed, with the intention of keeping the Windows part for pentesting and Ubuntu for regular use. i5 processor, but that shouldn't be an issue. Total cost, about $1400.
A project I've started working on is writing a Python script for the Pimoroni display0tron 3000 that will monitor a tor relay's traffic (rx for now) and display it on the Display0Tron's LEDs. A next step would be to pair the color display to the LED counter to have 36 levels of traffic so I can visually identify traffic rates (other than by simply staring at the flickering lights on the switch). Probably will use the 'psutil' library, but will have to do some subtraction to get a current number. There are shell commands to display this data, like vnstat, and some information is logged somewhere in /opt, but I'd rather not splice shell commands and python together for now. Also vnstat lags by about 10 seconds compared to starting at the traffic using the 'arm' tool on the tor relay itself.
Some thoughts:
One of the difficult parts of this consulting jobs is that each person is their own brand. Additionally, everyone has very different schedules. Unlike colleagues at a non-consulting job, whom you see every day, interact with frequently, and who may do the same work as you, here the ones closest to what you do are scattered around the country. At work I sit in a small, windowless lab, perpetually cold to ensure the safety of the server rack next door, surrounded (when they're here) by IT Auditors, who work long hours in Excel, examining standards and compliance. It's a world away from my background, and, regardless of how much personal time I invest in it, my day-to-day work. I stress that maybe other people won't care for me to reach out and talk to them, off-the-cuff, about anything. Everyone is always so busy, every interaction is preceded by a quick Outlook calendar check, and I never know how much they care to chat.
It's very much a job of solitude. Fortunately, I have a mentor with whom I talk twice monthly, and a couple of people I've worked with before. Performing a challenging penetration testing assessment is a good bonding experience. In this job I know one has to seek out speaking opportunities, but that's just your brand. What if you just want to shoot the s**t about work?
In other news:
Interesting experience yesterday of donating platelets/plasma. They decided to go for a bit more platelets than usual, draining me of 1.07 L of liquid. That was unusual. The machine always adjusts too high to the veins and draws and drains much too quickly.
I took the plunge at last and bought a personal laptop to function as a work computer. Not a netbook or Chromebook, purposeful though those may be. It's something I'd felt the lack of even in college, six years ago, when I hauled a desktop and monitor to school in a carry-on bag just to work on it in a lab, hiding from assistants locking it up for the night, trying to finish a project the night before it was due.
The choice was a Thinkpad T460p - which I'll upgrade to having 32 GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. I've never used a computer with an SSD so it should be fast. Plan to install Ubuntu to dual-boot it and the Windows 10 OS that comes pre-installed, with the intention of keeping the Windows part for pentesting and Ubuntu for regular use. i5 processor, but that shouldn't be an issue. Total cost, about $1400.
A project I've started working on is writing a Python script for the Pimoroni display0tron 3000 that will monitor a tor relay's traffic (rx for now) and display it on the Display0Tron's LEDs. A next step would be to pair the color display to the LED counter to have 36 levels of traffic so I can visually identify traffic rates (other than by simply staring at the flickering lights on the switch). Probably will use the 'psutil' library, but will have to do some subtraction to get a current number. There are shell commands to display this data, like vnstat, and some information is logged somewhere in /opt, but I'd rather not splice shell commands and python together for now. Also vnstat lags by about 10 seconds compared to starting at the traffic using the 'arm' tool on the tor relay itself.
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