Opening day [of baseball] in Cincinnati has always been a time of
hope and optimism, a time to look forward to, a time to enjoy
being with family and friends, a time to enjoy looking at the
forsythia and daffodils heralding spring, to walk across the Ohio
River on the Roebling bridge, to take in the annual Findlay
Market Parade, and to hear the umpire (or Marty and Joe on the
radio) say “Play Ball.” I am declaring today my personal
“Opening Day 2020”
In my never ending quest for synthesis, this post combines thoughts on
the OODA loop and falling out of a canoe twice this weekend in rapids
on the Shenandoah river. There is a connection. Maybe.
If you want to see the full trip report, pictures, etc. go here Things
that fall in the river get wet. If you’re interested in how this relates to
the OODA loop or, better, if you have experience/thoughts on applying
the OODA loop to operational cybersecurity settings, read on (and
comment !)
Figure 1: On the river during calm between crisis events
This weekend my son Bryan, friends (former scouts from Philmont days)
Sam and Preston and friend Jack went on an canoe trip down the
Shenandoah river. We were only dumped in the river by two of the two
rapids we encountered. More on that below.
This is written primarily as a personal reflection to my cousin
about us both winding up with tons of family “stuff”.
Secondarily it is intended for a family newsletter. Tertiarily,
for my sons to document snippets of family history, and lastly
(quarternarily ?) it is written as an “open letter”.
I’ve got some extreme social distancing going on this weekend. It
requires gear. Might involve a mountain or two. Loaded up the
pack and put it on. Feels good! There may be rain, but
The windows desktop has (had? I don’t pay attention) icons labeled
“My Computer”. I always thought that was odd, or at least very
often out of context as many (most?) instances of Windows ran on
machines at people’s jobs. They didn’t own the computer. It was
not “My Computer”.
Similarly, Apple has a long history of asserting they know what’s
best for other people and their computers. The last time I had to
go to “The Apple Store” all I wanted was a power cable. I wanted
the part, I wanted to pay, I wanted to get out. But,
characteristically, the “experts” there (what does that say about
their view of their customers) wanted to engage me, to “have a
conversation”, talk to me about warranties and if I qualified, they
wanted to wast my time (more valuable than my money) on their
agenda. Apple software is the same way. Not “My Computer”.
One dark and stormy night I broke my DNS. I decided to move
beyond /etc/resolv.conf and see what demons (daemons?) were
lurking under the hood. “Its complicated.” This is the story of
understanding, debugging and fixing it.
The a few days after that on Fosstodon (open source distributed social
media) I came across the https://100daystooffload.com/ challenge
which, basically encourages you to “just write”. Good timing.
Here it is.
And to get away from it all tonight we played (well, continued) a game
of Civilization: Famine, Strife, Civil War, Flood,
Earthquakes, Volcanoes, but strangely no epidemic (yet).
