Episteme

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…

There was a post the other day on the purplepatch forum about whether or not anybody does a daily functional strength routine.   I started to answer the question there for my teammates, but figured it made just as much sense to make it a public post because this is something…

I was lucky enough to get to attend YCombinator's Startup School today.    I figured it might help some people who weren't there to see my notes from the day - it really was a fantastic education for anybody who has ever considered starting their own startup. These are pulled from…

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…

Thursday, June 30, 2011 - We finished up the meeting with the client and decided to do a short debrief at Starbucks. While everyone else just grabbed a table, I walked to the counter and ordered two apple fritters and my usual iced tea. I ignored the strange looks from…

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…