8r4d Consulting Ltd.

Blog

  • security drill

    Running a website, any website, essentially means you need to become a bit a security hawk.

    Granted, I installed this website on a domain name that I registered over two decades ago and from which I have run various sites, subdomains, and web apps. If it isn’t in at least a dozen dark web databases I have utterly failed at self-promotion in those twenty years. But the downside of that success is that yeah, hours after I relaunched this site, there were hundreds of little knocks on the back door as various bots and hackers tried to see how tight the locks were set.

    Hackers are an inevitability.

    And I’ve been mitigating this by:

    • adding various plugins that track sus behaviour and block sus actors from hammering against the wall and brute forcing their way through my defences
    • hiding my login page
    • disabling the default features in wordpress that automagically publish my login username as the writing credit in my posts and feeds
    • setting stupidly strong passwords that mathematically should take longer to brute force crack than the age of the universe

    It’s daunting. It’s daunting for everyone, even folks who are seasoned at this, knowing that just behind a fragile digital firewall is some bad actor with a bot farm and nothing better to do that try and break into your digital backyard.

    And it’s neither fun nor seemingly fair, but it is normal enough that its not worth panicking about.

  • spring cleaning

    My house is twenty years old next month, and with any time one lives somewhere for two decades there comes the inevitable accumulation of clutter in the basement. 

    As with many people, we have that room downstairs where reside archeological grade relics from our days passed. Boxes sit where they were packed a dozen years ago and never since opened. There is a corner devoted to baby and toddler kit that we just couldn’t bear to discard or sell. And of course we saved all those scraps of surplus carpet and boxes of extra laminate flooring and spare ceiling tiles, all from when we renovated and… you never know what you might need later.

    The internet as a common public platform for business has been around for longer than twenty years and like my house, some folks have been occupying their digital real estate for decades.

    Likewise, I suspect there are a lot of business websites out there with more digital clutter in their metaphorical server basements than most would care to admit. Most of this might be packed tightly away in boxes and spare rooms which will never see the light of day, but unlike my basement it may only take an unscrupulous visitor mere minutes to pack themselves up a copy of all that clutter and disappear into the dark corners of the web.

    And I don’t need to tell you that your old business information may be much more valuable on the black market than my box of old charging cables and power adapters. We probably all could spend the weekend doing some spring cleaning.

  • corporate

    corporate

    I kick off a lot of big projects, from novels to video games to hare-brained website plots, but so much of that is stuff that lacks the weight of officialness. In many ways, they are little more than public sandboxes that, if substantial interest was generated, could be elevated but for the most part are just me making things to play and practice and learn.

    Yesterday I made something much more official.

    Yesterday I incorporated.

    There are a lot of reasons, but it really turned out to be a bit of chicken and egg problem. I want to get some contract work, I’m actively bidding on contract work, I hope I can get some contract work, but I can’t get contract work until I have a company, tax number, business license, etc. On the other hand, I don’t need to be a corporation until I get work and there is a bunch of expense and work in making one.

    I spent a couple days mulling this problem and came to the obvious conclusion that the risks of missing an opportunity because I dragged my feet were much greater than the risks of investing time and money ahead of the problem itself.

    Thus, as of yesterday, I am the sole director and lone employee of the newly formed 8r4d Consulting Ltd., an official (and soon to be fully licensed) corporate business in the province of Albert providing digital, web, and business services.

    Very official. Literally.

    And whatever happens next in terms of my work it will almost certainly be tangled up in this new legal entity, probably for the rest of my career.  Stay tuned.

  • dusty memory

    Arguably, I have spent many years taking my experience for granted.

    As I set out into the world of contracting this year, I have found myself in the interesting postion of suddenly and very quickly needing to do a lot of professional self-reflection and inventory work. Specificially, I’ve needed to spend a couple weeks digging through my decades of experience and compiling a professional portfolio for submissions.

    Logistically this has been tough because as an employee of any organization one does not routinely stop to do the two things one needs to do in order to compile a well-designed and robust portfolio. One does not routinely stop in the middle of work, lift oneself up to the metaphorical fifty-thousand foot view, and evaluate ones role in that moment. Also, and ethically, one does not take screenshots of work in progress and save them as a kind of professional photo album of one’s adventures through a business process.

    In other words, not only did I need to think creatively about demonstrating examples of the same without access to years worth of files and screenshots, I also had to sit down and open my mental memory banks up to those days spent doing in-the-weeds collaboration and organizing user research sessions and aggregating workshop data, and then put it all into a kind of logical and reflective inventory of all those years of experience I had previously taken for granted.

    And now that I’ve done it, I think I’d decided my next important step on this contracting journey: I need to go back into those memory banks and take better care of those experiences. Curate. Hone. Highlight. And cherish. Letting that stuff gather dust was possibly not my smartest move.

  • multitaskable

    multitaskable

    I think a lot of us out there would like to think that we are superb multitaskers. I like to think that of myself. Or maybe you don’t. But we are out there and I know a lot of people who would fit that description: I can do everything, anything, as much as I want.

    Now…

    I have been doing this thing I’ve been calling a “career shift” —well, I mean, it stopped being a career break over a year ago when I started picking up odd jobs and part time work and going back to school. None of that is a so-called break anymore. It’s just a different kind of work, after all. My end goal is something different from where I was, but I am moving towards it with a careful, deliberate effort. So I’m calling it a shift. And in taking this approach I have been doing a lot—no, really, a lot—of multitasking. Or trying to, at least.

    I’ve been working jobs, volunteering, parenting, re-educating myself, writing, job hunting, trying to keep fit, coding, playing video games, reading more, socializing with friends, squeezing in a bit of travel—aaaaand, well… that’s the thing isn’t it? 

    As much as I’ve been doing all this stuff, I think I’ve become saturated. 

    Maxed out. Capacity reached.

    I am officially at the point where doing anything new seems to push something else out the back—and off the list.

    I started blogging more and my coding efforts suffered. 

    I upped the number of shifts I did each week at my part time job and suddenly I realize that I’m not making art.

    I’ve been reading more books, but almost simultaneously my progress on my novel ground to a halt.

    It’s not something I’m formally tracking, of course, but just trends I’ve noticed. Start one thing new, something old vanishes from my life.

    And yet I don’t view this as a weakness. My ability to multitask, something that I’ve long viewed without context or care or introspection is something that I’ve also long thought was nigh limitless. But actually it isn’t. And that’s okay.

    Understanding that the mind has limits, time is strict, that multitasking ones life and projects is finite, and that getting the most from ones efforts is a work of good and strategic choices—this is a kind of self-awareness that, for me at least, has been hard to come by. Knowing that taking on something new will take away something existing, or alternatively, giving up something existing will leave space for something new: this is a variable to help me understand my  ultimate potential to create, learn, and contribute. 

    And it sounds all-to-obvious to write that, but I think if more people could consciously articulate that variable about themselves they would not only make better decisions about their lives and careers, they’d probably find a kind of comfort in knowing that limits are nothing to fear and the very idea of multitasking should be evaluated with a unique and personal lens.

  • professional anecdotal

    professional anecdotal

    I have been observing the subtle art of the professional anecdote.

    As someone pointed out to me recently, LinkedIn and other similar networks, along with individual websites like this very site, a professional-ish blog, are rife with people wearing masks.

    Professional masks, of course. People post on sites and blogs like LinkedIn and their own portfolio websites and almost unanimously do so wearing a kind of digital mask. That is to say, much of what you read here, there and other similar places is almost certainly, to a degree, appropriately, necessarily, and interestingly performative.

    Not in a bad way. Rather, it is performative in a work way.

    We are all trying to be professionals, and build up a facet of our identities online that normally we would reserve for the office.

    And this leads to the fine art of the professional anecdote. How does one tell a work appropriate story that is simultaneously a little humorous, a little insightful, and all around something that might be the kind of story one would feel perfectly comfortable telling at a meeting or a conference or to a client? 

    A few minute before I sat down to write this a former colleague of mine, can I call him a colleague? Someone with whom I did business in the past to whom I am now connected on LinkedIn, wrote a little story about how on the way to catch a cross-country flight to attend a business meeting recently he encountered a faulty gas pump while refueling his rental car, soaked his only pair of shoes in gasoline, and consequently had to think on his feet (groan) while navigating airport security, a crowded flight, and an important business meeting. A little humourous. Insightfully relatable. And assuming it was told with a tact, perfectly the kind of story that one could tell at the start of a meeting with just about anyone. Professionally anecdotal.

    And it is an art form that while often derided a bit pejoratively, just as I did to a degree when I noted that this is a kind of performative mask wearing, it is also a part of professional decorum that is vital to anyone in business these days.

    I note this second take because on LinkedIn lately I have seen some people, clearly the kinds of folks who have crafted long and careful perceptions online to their colleagues, suddenly shift into deep and divisive political opinion, telling stories that tick all the boxes as above, but then also make people a little uncomfortable regarding the state of the world these days, from almost every perspective one might imagine.

    So I wonder: is this a blip, and will the fine art of professional performance online shift back to the apolitical “a funny thing happened to me on the way to work” anecdotes? Or are we entering a refreshened era of tinting those masks to match our political colours to better understand with whom we are doing business?

  • strategic simplicity

    strategic simplicity

    I write all of these things I post into an offline word processor first.  Then I do some light editing, copy and paste into the blogging software, and then ultimately push publish.

    Maybe you read that and thought so what? 

    Big deal? Obvious.

    We all have these simple little habits that keep us organized. They are each of them personal strategies to creep us towards whatever definition of success we’ve chosen. And each of these strategies are fundamental building blocks of who we are how we can get stuff done.

    I was observing a coworker yesterday inputing some data into a spreadsheet. She made a mistake and quickly realized that she had entered the data into the wrong cell. For me, I would have highlighted the cell, Ctrl-Xed it and then highlighted the right cell and Ctrl-Ved it, and been off to the next item. She used the mouse, located the undo button on the menu, clicked it to erase what she had written, then highlighted the correct cell and retyped the data.  Same result, but my method would have been literally five times faster.

    Never assume the little things are obvious or so what? moments. We might spend hours writing and talking about our big strategies for getting stuff done, but often I think I could teach a course on all the little things I’ve learned about getting things done and each individual step I take to accomplish it all.

  • social games

    social games

    I spent nearly a decade feeding the massive social media networks like Facebook and Instagram with my creative output.

    What did it get me?

    I could tell you that I learned some skills in social media engagement, but that would be a bit of an exaggeration because an invisible algorithm did most of the work.

    I could tell you that it gave me an excuse to write and create, but that would be something of a cop out because one shouldn’t need such excuses to practice one’s craft.

    I could tell you that it gave me an audience, but honestly I could have currated an email list of my friends and family and had nearly as many eyes to see what I made.

    What it really did was create value for someone else.

    What the social media networks never admit is that the house is only one guaranteed to win, and it’s always their house. Sure, some folks hit a jackpot and walk out richer and wiser, but most of us spend our creative chips and they vanish into the coffers of the app or network.

    I can’t tell you that you shouldn’t play the social media game, but I can suggest that there are far fewer winners there than there are the rest of us. And I can tell you that I have lately been, and will continue to be, putting more effort into building my own (much smaller and less social) networks with my creative energies.

  • two hundred and fifty

    two hundred and fifty

    There are many ways to approach a problem, but by far my steady go-to approach has long been incrementalism.

    A little over a year ago I started writing a novel.

    This is actually a complex and confusing anecdote about sitting down to write a trilogy of novels, nearly finishing the first one, deciding that it was actually not a trilogy but just one great big story, then reopening what I thought was a climactic conclusion of my book to instead trudge into the effort of writing another entire novel-worth of story to finish the plot in a meaningful and interesting way.

    The first half took me two months. The second half is approaching a year worth of effort.

    Of course, in that time life has got in the way. I’ve been working, parenting, going back to school, and coding a video game—but I digress.

    The point is that I have been incrementally working towards finishing the novel. I have been writing it two hundred and fifty words at a time. Little steps. Inching closer to completion. Trudging ever forward.

    Is this the ideal approach?

    Heck, I don’t know. I’d like to tell you that I have stumbled onto some great secret of success, but the reality is that slow and steady progress is such an old piece of advice that it literally has it’s own spirit animal in the tortoise.

    Each day I sit down and write (at least) 250 words, one word at a time, one keyboard stroke at a go, all to add onto my novel. Each day I incrementally move slighty closer to the end. Each day I am 250 words closer to being done.

    My point is that some problems and projects are just big and there is no quick and easy fix.

    My fix, neither quick nor easy, is to write two hundred and fifty words each day. Like a tortoise in a foot race.

  • only reading

    only reading

    Used to be that when I bought a new piece of technology I wanted to push it to the limits to see what it could do. But earlier this week I bought myself a new e-reader and I’m approaching it with a completely different tactic: I’m using it solely as an e-reader.

    Let me elaborate. 

    A decade ago when I bought myself a similiar piece of technology, my first instinct would have been to dig into it and see how I could use it beyond reading books. I may not have gone as far as hacking the firmware, say, but I certainly would have connected it up to a computer within the first day, dug into the file system, tried loading other media types, experimented with connecting things to the bluetooth, attempted to use it as a game device of some kind, certainly dabbled in using it to write if that was any way possible. Played. Pushed. Nudged. Forced the single-function device to bend to my will.

    Today? I bought one of those new colour Kobo readers to replace my Kindle and continue moving away from my Amazon dependency. And I’m using it as a book. I’m going to read books on it. I’ve hooked it up to the accounts it suggested, linked it with my public libary card, and I downloaded a half dozen books. That’s it—and I have been reading.

    Only reading.

    And while I would like to emphasize that this does not necessarily signal a shift away from my inquisitive and exploratory nature, it may indicate that I’ve quenched that need to “multi-purpose” everything in my life.

    A decade ago I found joy in making simple things do complex things.

    Today I find joy in using simple things closer to and merely in the way they were intended. And I’m good with that.