An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

As stated in my recent posts, I've made another career switch. This time, I'm dipping my metaphorical toes into the increasingly mission-critical area of most businesses: that of cyber security. The new look that I've applied to this blog, that of a darkened forest, is an analogy that I find apt. In broad strokes, most people are aware of its existence, yet few have explored it to find the diversity of the elements which comprise it.  Being such a neophyte myself I count myself as especially fortunate, to be in a team where there are already experts I could call upon, where we have the potential to leverage powerful, industry-leading tooling, and in an environment where every employee is called upon to actively protect not only our own data and assets, but those we are entrusted with by our clients.  In fact, it was immediately apparent that one has no choice but to take this role seriously if only because my employer's clientele consists mostly of organizations t...

I'd recently admitted to some friends that, ironically (and funnily enough) the topic of time management has been on my mind. The irony being that this post comes more than halfway through October, with the greatest gap in time that had transpired since the blog was launched in May. Here is a quote from the TV series "Bones", which has a protagonist whose behaviour I can relate to quite well. She's being interviewed by a bubbly morning chat show hostess in the following exchange: Courtesy of IMDB : Stacy Goodyear : I'm Stacie Goodyear and joining me on Wake Up, D.C. is Dr. Temperance Brennan. She is the author of the best-selling mystery novel "Bred in the Bone" and she's also - now tell me if I get this wrong - an anthropologist who works with the F.B.I. to solve crimes? Dr. Temperance 'Bones' Brennan : Yes, that's correct. I use the bones of people who have been murdered, or burned, or blown up, or eaten by animals or insects, or ...

... iff (if and only if) you appreciate my blog! Here I'd like document various thoughts concerning my journey in Twitter, which I joined in 2009. At first, I wasn't convinced that I would enjoy using it. Already feeling overwhelmed by the Information Age, I also noticed a lot of highly public yet personal (read: inappropriate or irrelevant for mass consumption) tweets as well as quite a lot of rude behaviour (ad hominem attacks). At the time of joining I had no Smartphone, and even now I have a severely minimalist data plan, so I don't tweet "on the go". Since I walk to work, checking the twitter stream on my commute is also fairly hazardous (although having said that, when I had a painful bus commute I relied on audio casts and preferred musical recordings stored in my iPod due to the ease with which I succumb to motion sickness.) As of today, mostly due to the aforementioned circumstances, I still only have a handful of tweets. More depressingly, I...

Several of my fondest childhood memories stem from working in libraries. There, it was often my duty to take a crisp newspaper and clamp it to a wooden holder for broadsheets. My preferred paper was The Globe and Mail from quite early on; one of the alumni from my high school is a prominent columnist  there. The advent of the internet in the early to mid-90s happened to coincide with a period that I didn't subscribe to broadsheets and lived without TV (otherwise known as my time at university). To procrastinate from studies, I often read through some of the newsgroups, and played around with a personal set of HTML pages. Interestingly I was still working in the libraries during this period, but had moved to cataloguing new arrivals of periodicals, and didn't touch newspapers except for the occasional copy of the university papers ( The Tech  and  Tech Talk - I was saddened to learn the latter went out of print in 2009) or  Bay Windows , made freely available to t...

I feel fortunate that I can't identify first-hand with Tina, the long-suffering tech writer in Dilbert. My desire to provide user and administrator manuals for software applications stem back to even before I entered the professional workforce. The motivations, however, didn't stem from any false hopes that there would be any significant audience for said work. As an undergraduate I eventually ended up majoring in a combination of Technical Communication and what they call Brain & Cognitive Science, which involved neuroscience, psychology and linguistics. I also worked at the university libraries, where I spent one summer cataloguing musical recordings by the various ensembles over several decades (mainly on vinyl). It was the following year, that their adoption of a system from OCLC (I believe it was Connexion, but I could be mistaken) led to an opportunity to create an administrators' concise guide. When later I arrived at a documentation role, I found that str...