If you didn’t know, my dad passed away earlier this year.

My dad and I didn’t have much of a relationship after I turned 18. There was a lot involved with that. I’m sure that there were things that I did that gave him more gray hair, and I like to think that he’d be proud of where I’m at today. Sometime after 2001, my dad stopped talking to me completely. It took me a few months to realize that he had basically cut me out of his life: he didn’t bother telling me that my Grandma Wilson had passed until a week after the funeral, and he did it by email.

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Well, if you haven’t heard, there’s some drama afoot in the world of AI.

I don’t think I could effectively re-hash what’s going on here, but, from a security engineering point of view, AI/AGI is so new that there’s still a really untapped world of vulnerabilities that is out there to explore. Can you trust your company’s data with a vendor (OpenAI, in this case) who had a 95% staff turnover rate? Do you think that a new team of engineers could promptly resolve and mitigate any vulnerabilities that could spring up in the next few years (because if some Investment firm gobbles it up in its present state, they’re probably going to put the tech on cruise control and let the software stagnate until it loses all velocity and basically becomes another piece of ghost SaaS that is out there)?

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So, there was a bit of a shock last month when I got my usual digitalocean bill – it had jumped to nearly $500. While I’ve got a nice job, I don’t want to spend large sums of money every month that basically do nothing but sit idle; it’s time to kill off my bloghost instance. Moving this blog off to cloudflare is the last step in that journey.

My thoughts on Ghost

If you’re wanting a medium like experience, ghost is probably the best bang for the buck. To be honest, I never got past the fact that it would capitalize damn near every ‘i’ when you used it to start a word, but, that was one of the quirks of the editors that I grew to live with. I’ve had and used ghost for about 4 years…and let’s be honest: most folks just don’t look at my blog every day to keep tabs on me. Hugo works better for my needs and integrates into my very minimialistic server setup

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Reading about what happened at St. Rita’s School for the Deaf in Cincinnati is heartbreaking. My little guy went there until he passed, and he even had the teacher who allegedly threw the child down the hallway.

I volunteered at the school, setting up a technology program from business donations and program donations from Apple and Google, and have funded a scholarship in my little guy’s honor ever since.

I have paused my contributions to St. Rita’s until the Archdiocese completes its investigation and disciplines the teacher.

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I’ve had COVID three times now – 2020, 2021, and 2022. Each one was a little bit different than the last, but, my CTF from this year’s “Hacker Summer Camp” was COVID, and while I did get to spend five days recovering and quarantining without worrying about my job, it took me another two weeks to get my sense of smell back.

I’ve been living with the after effects from this round of COVID more noticeably than my previous run-ins. I’m constantly coughing throughout the days now, will sometimes lose my sense of smell for a few hours at a time, and I have moments where it just kinda sucks to breathe during the day.

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