Time to return to Wing Chun chop foooey

"Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived.
I see all this potential, and I see it squandered.
God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
We're the middle children of history, man.
No purpose or place.
We have no Great War.
No Great Depression.
Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives.
We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars.
But we won't.
And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

Wonderful... the science of happiness

I inherited my love of radio from my Dad.



I find myself switching on ABC Radio National everyday before any other station. On Saturday the 17th May 2008 I stumbled upon this gem. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2008/2243006.htm

"The pursuit of happiness is a global obsession. But can science investigate its slippery, subjective nature? What are the metrics—self report, brain activity, or the good deeds we do? Five world leaders in the field join Natasha Mitchell in conversation—neuroscientist Richard Davidson, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace, psychologist Daniel Gilbert and philosopher David Chalmers."

Considering I missed the end of the segment, the concept of podcasting reinforces itself in the spreading of enlightenment via information and ideas. A segue perhaps to this:

"To create a social business which reduces all suffering by facilitating the access to and dissemination of enlightened information and ideas."

Note: It's coming.

Secur_it_y?

http://xkcd.com/424/

Something else is missing... need a pointer

Was thinking today... since school and university have come and gone(from my perspective), and family are in a different hemisphere; why is it so difficult to find or stumble across a mentor in this industry or even in this life? Is it just when you are younger that you feel like there are people around and above you who know what's going on, or have a plan? Once one becomes more self aware do we see everyone stumbling along together? One wonders what structure or guidance we as a society will need or will cling to to ensure cohesion, or what will emerge in the place of organised religions in the West?

Where are the few who espouse 'enlightened self-interest' and 'non-zero sum games' for the world? Why is it not immediately obvious in our leaders and politicians? What is broken and how can we fix it? ( I tend to start these days with http://www.ted.com/ or the http://www.worldchanging.com/book/ )

Unfortunately Information Technology is extremely lacking in individuals who can offer wisdom and guidance, presumably being such a young discipline/art itself?

Life is difficult to figure out in this generation of mass media with a constant bombardment of encoded information which mainly focuses on mass materialism and consumption. Is it any reason that graffiti and street art has tried to fill the gap left by the press, advertising and the media at large.

Everything has sped up. Most people are disembodied from themselves and society. What could you prescribe? Diet, exercise, preventative mental health, meditation, different types of education, emotional intelligence...etc?

If you would like to be a mentor please send a S.A.E. to PO BOX 564 :)

I probably need my own personal technical version of one of these guys: J Krishnamurti, Anthony DeMello, Eckhart Tolle, Matthieu Ricard... or maybe an aggregate avatar of all of them that follows you online or is a 3d hologram buddy in real life ;)


Note: The image above is of the 3d holographic shark who assists the kid in one of Discovery's 2057 programs. An episode that happens to focus on a city wide virus that gets in to everything including digital signage. Not on my shift I tells ya!

How much is enough?

Is IT Security/Technology Risk Management a discipline or an art, is it subjective or objective? ( Is information technology deterministic or just overly complex? )

Are IT systems and frameworks closed systems? What comparable frameworks or systems (through which value transits) must defend against sentient attackers who attempt to subvert, control or disable services?

Can organisations quantify the value of information in motion or at rest within their managed footprint? Can they independently verify/audit the flows and data objects present? Somehow the bad guys have a better appreciation for CPU, disk and BW and SERVICE than we have!

Does it come down to simple economics? How to incentivise and penalise?

Surely 'Critical Infrastructure' should be held to extremely high standards by an independent body of technical auditors?

Does it really come back to accountability? Do we/they/us/them need to get burned badly (which the miscreants don't want either!) before we are enlightened...

Can the little guys afford the head count of the big boys? (big boys who actually sometimes have *less* of a clue about their systems than the little guys in the first place!). Is it possible that sink-holing traffic centrally in the cloud will give us the visibility/control we have hoped for? Thin offices perhaps staffed with 'thin' people :)

For me it comes back to a simple paradigm. You can't manage what you can't measure. We need to return to atomic units via reductionist thought. This is what I hope shall come with cloud and utility computing. Can you or the cloud provider "afford" NON-integral CPU, DISK, FLOWS, BW, KILOWATTS... runaway code.. such that it now becomes a billing issue? Once IT shops in enterprises start properly implementing "charge-back" rather than a flat rate service we may see some changes.... this coupled with a metric/cost applicable to shared infrastructure such as network fabrics, DNS, NTP, control planes etc...

How can we secure a service when we can't even charge for a service?

Billing 2.0, Utility 2.0, Employment 2.0

"Toffler-esque", wondering about IT churn?

An interesting look at employee churn, and very apt in the IT arena, methinks:

"Employees – especially the most talented ones – are not “dating around” and moving from place to place in search of the Perfect Company at which they can grow old and retire at. They’ve already aced the first four rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy and are in search of self-actualization: the instinctual need of humans to make the most of their abilities and to strive to be the best they can."

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx

Thanks Wade. All we have to worry about now is the predictions of Malthus.