When I was at MAD Security, our VP of Professional Services, Cliff Neve had a saying: "It's the dumb stuff." What Cliff usually meant when he said it was that it's the simplest, most obvious concepts that are likely the cause of most of our pain. And nowhere in security…

A friend posted a link to this great story on "The World's Worst Penetration Test Report" this morning. Reading someone else's horror story reminded me of the particularly horrible experience that drove me to write a full-day class on Pen Test Reporting and Analysis that I gave at CanSecWest and…

Every startup (like every marriage) starts with optimism. We get together with like-minded people and we start going in a direction. If all goes well, we build something amazing together that actually has legs. I've been incredibly lucky to have had that experience over the past 4 years - I…

A couple of weekends ago I transitioned this site over to Ghost just to see what all the fuss is about. And I rather like it. But I realized that my writing has been largely missing the last couple of years - mostly, because I've been writing in multiple other…

A friend of mine mentioned that she was having trouble getting in the habit of going to the gym every morning, so I promised an explanation of how I have created so many beneficial habits in my life in the past year.   I thought that the email that I sent…

One of the fundamental tenets of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) is the idea of "matching and mirroring" - the idea that we create rapport between individuals by mirroring aspects of their physiology in ourselves and, because they see someone who looks like them, they're more likely to enter in to a…

A few months ago, my friend Drawk Kwast released his first ebook on the Kindle store.   And he's been having some great success (mostly because the book is awesome).  Shortly after, I got my first Kindle and was fascinated by all of the low-cost and interesting self-published books on there…

I wrote recently on Maturity and the way I've been trying to view my life lately. The place that I've found this thinking most interesting is in conceiving of my businesses (esp. THA).  It's easiest to try to solve most of our business problems in the frame of "what's best…

I was having a conversation with a friend the other night about maturity and social connection. We tossed around the question of what it is to be "mature". According to Wikipedia, maturity is "how a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate and adaptive manner.... Maturity also…