zrb05292

I was laid off about 4 years ago. My boss Skyped me (really!) and said there was no easy way to put it but they were moving the business in a different direction and I, along with my team, were being laid off. I laughed at him, said ok, and hung up. Then I stomped around angrily for half an hour. Then I hopped on LinkedIn and started applying for every open position that looked appealing. In 12 days I was made an offer and started the following week.

I have to work almost all the time. My day typically begins at 3am and ends around 7pm. The reason for this is that my own projects and goals are often contingent on the successful completion of projects by other teams, and organizationally we tend to hire C workers at best. So I spend a lot of time pushing other people and other teams. It doesn’t make me popular but it does make me effective.

Having a sudden reason to push shadow software patches to nearly every device and server in the world...I wonder who would benefit from that...

I enjoy programming. I do not work on huge, complex systems though. Not directly, anyway. I mainly work to automate things and on integrations. But just yesterday for instance I wrote a small script that downloaded and organized several hundred files for our analysts and they were so happy. I guess I just like helping people even if it’s in small, seemingly trivial ways. And the little programs and scripts I write are my way of doing that.

You are probably aware but in case not I’ve read in the past where researchers used special video games as a therapy for PTSD. Something about how the brain isn’t able to tell the difference between real danger and virtual danger so it’s a sort of safe immersive therapy (I’m explaining very poorly). http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2011.0003