New Year. New Me.
I’m in a weird head space rn.
As some who follow me and my LinkedIn know things in the real world have been getting a little hard.
As time goes on my brain lags behind. Is it tiredness? Is it burnout?
I’m getting older, I kinda figured by now I would have my ‘forever job’ and that be the end of it but life, as it does, always finds a way.
At the close of 2024 I decided I would make some changes in my lifestyle, not new years resolutions as they are prone to failure. I needed to build a baseline structure I could work from and go up from there. Important points to follow for me are health (age is catching up), education, family, money.
Health
The health thing I have tried, and failed, many times before but I realize the mortality of my time on this earth and I know I need to ‘maximize’ the time I have here to do the things I want to do and be here for my family… I am rapidly approaching the age my father was when he passed and I know what that did to me as a child and how it effected my growing up as such I can’t let that happen.
So I began at the start of the year (which was bloody complex but I’ll explain that some other time), logging my food intake looking to wards a calorie controlled diet. A simple system, eat under a certain amount and lose weight, eat over and maintain current weight or eat excess and gain weight.
So far I have been under on one of the six days of this year so far, that isn’t to say ‘I’m a fat fuck’ It is more to show I am actually taking the time to logically log and remember my foods, I have to learn to log and maintain that log for a little while before it actually kicks into action.
Whats that system? It takes 90 days to build a habit. 30 days of trial, 30 days of confusion and 30 days of sticking to it and it becomes a habit… something like that.
So were still waiting a while for it to become glue in my head.
Education
One of the ‘baseline’ items I wanted to address this year is my learning, I have no structure or guide..
I’m just here with the pirate compass like:
So to tackle it head on I decided to read books.
Books are awesome for education and I actually read my first ‘adult’ book last year (adult meaning proper book not something spicy about sea monsters and damsels in distress and hardly any clothing). I read the book Red Team Development and Operations: A practical guide by Joe Vest and James Tubberville. I found it highly educational from a ‘Management of Red Team Operations’ standpoint and it actually superseded I book I was working on I called ‘Standard Operating Procedures’
I learned a lot and found I can actually read on a Kindle (My Mrs Paperwhite for any interested).
Though nothing beats a proper paper book, the tactile and analogue feel of a book.
As such I picked up another book last year and hadn’t read it yet, it is nothing to do with cybersecurity and it isn’t a book on fantasy either, it’s actually geared towards health and wellbeing as such I decided I would read that book this year.
On the 1st of January I cracked it open and stopped 3 chapters in on page 60 (Insane for me because I have difficulties reading).
Since then I have knocked out a chapter a day, I healthy amount of reading in my opinion.
In fact there are only a few chapters left in this book so looks like I might be begging to buy another book soon (send suggestions on twitter or Bluesky if you have them) I do have a couple books lined up in my Amazon cart and this includes the £50 CCNA revision guides, hardback obviously, I think the total cart is like £110 so one day I’ll grab them all or chip away one by one….
I’ve also been looking HARD at my security stuff, yes I have an eJPT and that is wonderful but it’s not really doing anything for me… perhaps I am marketing myself incorrectly?
Either way I have kinda hit ‘pause’ on security for the moment, I still dabble but nowhere near as hard as I used to and I am actually taking a step back and looking at the broader picture once more.
I enjoyed DevOps and Programming stuff so I have been looking into cloud (shout out to Microsoft for making a shed load of content and fundamentals free to learn) and also networking, I keep thinking about that CCNA again too, something I would have gotten during the start of the pandemic had I pursued the Networking side as opposed to Security.
Family
Family is a major baseline, family keeps my head square and cheers for me when I need support as such the health and money tie into this, I need to be strong for them and I need to bring in ‘phat stacks’ of money to help sort everything out and see what happens with the house we live in.
There’s a lot to this side I am leaving out as I don’t like to open up about my personal stuff on the internet so keeping this section short.
Money
It sure would be nice to pickup a remote working job this year.
In a little while I will have actual dedicated space to work from, the ability to grow and learn as well as getting paid 💰💰💰 that one is kinda important I want to make sure I am earning a decent wage for what I am doing.
As I said above security is kinda taking the back seat for a hot moment, I picked up a new fasciation (cloud) and want to have a jump into that for a month or so to really get acclimated. I’ve also been rediscovering networking which is what got me falling into security anyway (hilarious if after all this time I actually did pick up my CCNA and a few other bits and got a full time Network/Systems Admin Role).
But anyway, that’s enough from me for now.
I didn’t want to put up a blog post per-se but I did want to vent out my head problems into something and oddly enough a few hundred words yeeted out onto the internet and I am feeling much better.
Anyway, back to learning Azure.
Be safe my fruity darlings.
Peace
🤙
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