Happy New Year! Thank you for bringing in the new decade with me.

Ten years ago, we thought, just maybe, this Y2K thing would cause widespread computer system breakdowns.

I was with an IT consulting firm and was working on New Year’s Eve. (What!? It was a Friday. Cut me some slack.) I had my young son with me at the office. We had hooked up analog call forwarding to send incoming calls to the vice president’s house, and we had armed him with a stack of paper workorders and an analog fax machine. The idea being, should pandemonium ensue, people would call firms such as ours. The VP would get a signed agreement and send in the techs. I was on-call for second level support.

Before I left, I shut down the network and PBX and disconnected power. You never can be too safe, right? After all, who knew how bad it would get. (Actually, we were doing much of this in a tongue-in-cheek fashion.)

My son and I drove home early. We picked up my wife, then very pregnant, and went to see a movie. It might have been Pokemon. It might have been Wild Wild West. None of us can quite remember and agree which movie it was now. Anyways, we were in the Krafft 8 movie theater standing in line when the first call came in.

I answered my trusty Nextel, fearing the worst. It was not even close to midnight but you never know. What had happened?

On the line was Thailand. My good friend had called to wish me a happy new year. Life was still going, he assured me, with no disruptions in Tokyo or Bangkok. We had a good laugh and chat.

My family enjoyed the movie. Then we dropped my son off at his grandmother’s. They had their party, and my wife and I had ours. The night passed quietly. Then the weekend passed quietly. Then my daughter was born and I forgot all about Y2K.

And before I knew it, it was 2010. Somewhere along the way, we hooked back up the firm’s computer and telephony equipment. Other bugs came and went. But Y2K, for me, was the dog that did not bark.

Since the work of a technologist is primarily mental, I am always on the look-out for ways to boost mental capacity. One way is thru food. Below is my recipe for a "brain train" smoothie. The drink provides a number of nutrients recognized for improving memory and cognition.

The smoothie weighs in around 500 calories. It equates to two servings of fruit and a half serving of vegetables. Consuming two smoothies daily fulfills the FDA recommended allotment of fruit and veggies.

Feedback is welcome, drop me an email. The drink is very much a work in progress.

Ingredients

1/2 cup or about 12 frozen dark sweet cherries (1/3 frozen package)
2/3 cup frozen blueberries (1/4 frozen package)
1/2 cup frozen chopped spinach (1/2 frozen package)
2 cup low-fat yogurt (1/2 large container)
2 heaping teaspoons Soy protein powder
1 heaping teaspoon cinnamon
1 shot espresso coffee, chilled

Directions

1. Make a shot of espresso and chill it.
2. Use the food processor to thoroughly chop the cherries, blueberries, spinach, soy protein, and cinnamon.
3. Use the food processor to mix in the yogurt.
4. Use the food processor to whip in the espresso.

Additional information

Complete nutritional information is available in an Excel spreadsheet.
http://www.jwgoerlich.us/papers/jwg-brain-train-smoothie.xlsx

Blueberries

"University of Redding have shown that eating blueberries may ‘increase powers of concentration by as much as 20 per cent over the day.’"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6168870/Blueberry-is-food-for-thought.html

Caffeine and coffee for boosting focus, energy, and possibly growing neurons.

Smith, A. (2202), Effects of caffeine on human behavior, Food And Chemical Toxicology
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12204388

Korkotian, E., and Segal, M. (1999), Release of calcium from stores alters the morphology of dendritic spines in cultured hippocampal neurons, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10518577

Caffeine clue to better memory
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/472473.stm

Cinnamon extends the effects of the smoothie by leveling out the blood sugar.

Spoonful of cinnamon helps blood sugar stay down
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSCOL07026020070620 
Hlebowicz, J. (2007), American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

Choline

The smoothie provides choline from yogurt, spinach, and soy protein. "A new research study done at MIT suggests that a combination of choline, omega-3 fatty acids with the uridine improved memory and learning in gerbils, and may have benefits for Alzheimer patients."
http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/abstract/22/11/3938
http://www.cholinebaby.com/cbblog/2008/07/choline-omega-3-and-uridine-bo.html
http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/Data/Choline/Choline.html

Spinach

The smoothie provides ample folate from spinach. "Observational studies show that low folate and elevated homocysteine concentrations are associated with poor cognitive performance in the general population."
http://www.uiowa.edu/~centrage/News/Newsletters/Newsletters%202006/Newsletter%20April%2006/Alzheimers,%20Cognitive%20Decline,%20Nutrition%204.7.06.pdf

Excerpted from Alzheimer's Disease, Cognitive Decline and Nutrition Newsletter
 

Here is an interesting article that dovetails 1930s radio legislation with the Obama administration's Cyberspace Policy Review:

"Seventy-five years ago today, on May 29th, 1934, Egyptian private radio stations fell silent, as the government shut them down in favor of a state monopoly on broadcast communication. Egyptian radio 'hackers' (as we would style them today) had, over the course of about fifteen years, developed a burgeoning network of unofficial radio stations. They offered listeners an unfiltered, continuous mix of news, gossip, and live entertainment from low-powered transmitters located in private houses and businesses throughout Cairo."

Read more of How a Resilient Society Defends Cyberspace.

Global Knowledge released an article on Ten Dying IT Skills. The top-tem include:

1. ATM
2. Novell NetWare
3. Visual J++
4. WAP/WML
5. ColdFusion
6. RAD/Extreme Programming (this I doubt)
7. Siebel
8. SNA
9. HTML
10. Cobol

Please pardon me while I get a little nostalgic.

I once buttered my bread by being fairly proficient at five of the above. I began in May of 1995 as a Systems Administrator for Novell Netware. I still do some Netware today, though only because I am engaged in a migration from GroupWise on Netware to Exchange on Windows. Being able to do both Netware and Windows engineering got my foot in many doors, and took me into many odd projects.

For example, around the turn of the century, I was involved in laying a multi-site ATM network. We used AT&T as the provider for the point-to-point links. I then back-ended the ATM onto an enterprise network switch that was capable of 100 Mbps. It was rather exciting, and I remember spending lots of time pouring over technical manuals to learn the ins-and-outs of ATM.

Another time I did a web user interface project with HTML and ColdFusion. I had been hacking web pages together with Notepad since getting a dial-up Internet connection. Using ColdFusion was first time that I reached any sort of professional developer status. It was quite fun, though I quickly passed on to Visual Studio and .Net development.

I cannot recall if it was before or after the HTML / ColdFusion project, but around that same time I wrote a BlackBerry application. It was a proof-of-concept for a financial firm. Basically, it pulled back the top ten customers based on assets from an accounting system, and indexed them with the CRM system. The sales people then could see the name and number of their top accounts. The delivery mechanism? WAP/WML. I did most of the work with Notepad and a BlackBerry emulator.

Now a favorite phrase of mine is that those who live by the sword die by the arrow. In technology, you have to be constantly training to keep relevant. My goal is 20% of my time be spent on acquiring new skills. Though I know this intellectually, articles like Global Knowledge are still a good reminder. Everything that I knew ten years ago is virtually irrelevant. Everything that I know today will shortly become a dying skill.

With that, I am back to hitting the books.

I just read "Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies" in The New Yorker. The hacker poetry made me smile and then made me think. Blogs are to ballads like tweets are to haiku. I have been wondering what best to post on Twitter. Perhaps I'll start posting daily 'hacker haiku' that summarize InfoSec themes and ideas.

Here is my first stab at a hacker haiku. This is in regards to cloud service providers and the need to build controls and a perimeter-less security model.

Clouds form on the horizon

Redefine security
Perimeter-less

Within time, within budget, that is my credo. I do not like my projects to run late. Yet in IT, some things often do run late. So it was today that I emailed a colleague to say that the computer I was updating was running about fifteen minutes longer than I expected. He pinged me back to say that patience was a virtue. To which I responded with my old family saw: patience is for those who cannot have it RIGHT NOW.

The timing was great, incidentally, as the update finished at the same time as my email. So I could have it right now. Good deal.

But that got me thinking about patience. I am not what one would consider a patient person. Patience brings to my mind a content bearing of a delay.

Yet so many saying revolve around patience. Take the Chinese proverb: “patience is power. With time and patience the mulberry becomes silk.”

I wouldn’t call that patience. It isn’t like you are waiting for the mulberry to become silk. No, not at all. You are actively engaged in the process. You are steadfast and firm, consistently working toward the goal. You are persistent.

Patience is waiting. Persistence is building. Now persistence, persistence is a virtue.

As a company that trades on the open market, we have many rules and regulations to follow in regards to employee trading. Part of this is a yearly training session on trading compliance and the systems we provide. I sat thru this a few weeks back. It was the normal session about not accepting cash or large gifts, and not trading stocks that the company is currently researching or holding, et cetera.

At the end of the presentation, the head of the compliance team stood up. She thanked her staff for the presentation and thanked all of us for coming. Then she pulled out a newspaper. She described the company in the news and how similar it was to ours in size, focus, and culture. She then read from the paper. This company had a compliance lapse. The SEC fined the company millions of dollars, and fined the person who executed the trade over a hundred thousand. The room fell dead silent.

I thought this was a particularly effective technique to reinforce the idea that the rules we follow really do matter.

These crack me up. Who says us Germans don't know how to have fun?

German Sports
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzt9CGSEn8o&feature=related

German Dancing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa13vrk_SnI&feature=related

German Women
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehN0hbwr1nQ&feature=related

German Engineerinng
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuGu5NfHseg

And, of course, VW's "tuned by German engineers" videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WFZWY3qFQw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv157ZIInUk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I0WfnhVs2s