As I write this, it's roughly a week before my 40th birthday.  I'm sitting in a hospital waiting room tapping away on Windbringer while Lyssa undergoes surgery to remove a cataract from her left (and only working) eye.*  When this post goes live on the day of my actual 40th birthday, more things will undoubtedly have happened.  I don't know how much time I'm going to have in the next few days, so I guess I'd best take advantage of the spare time I have due to how busy I've been lately.

A lot's happened in this past year that …

In the last couple of years, a meme that's come to be known as security nihilism has appeared in the security community.  In a nutshell, because there is no such thing as perfect security, there is no security at all, so why bother?  Talking about layered security controls that reinforce each other is pointless because they always skip right to the end, which is the circumvention of the nth countermeasure and final defeat.  In the crypto community, cries of "Quantum computer!" are the equivalent of invoking Godwin's Law, leading to the end of all discourse, nevermind trying to separate …

Well, the holiday season is upon us once again. Not that you could fail to notice unless you've been living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and your only link to the outside world is a 300bps modem connection over shortwave radio. As it's wont to be down here, the weather in the DC metroplex is a little erratic, swerving drunkenly from shirtsleeves comfortable to bone-chillingly cold to damp and rainy almost on a daily basis. Lyssa and I took a few days off last week to drive back to Pennsylvania and visit our respective families for Thanksgiving and …

As the title of this post so subtly implies, today is Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

I don't actually have a whole lot to write about right now. Lyssa and I left the DC metroplex last evening and arrived at her parents' place around 2300 EST5EDT. We got a couple of hours of sleep, enough to recuperate after the drive home. Surprisingly, the drive didn't agree very well with her injured foot. I think it had to do with the lack of elevation for her foot combined with the low temperatures (it's finally starting to get cold around here). Also, the …

Frankly, I've just been too tired. Not so much physically tired, though that has been creeping up on me over the past day or two, but a sort or weariness that has settled into my bones and is slowly but surely slowing me down. I've been doing a lot of running around lately and that hasn't been helping - we've got family coming into town for Easter this weekend, so Lyssa and I have been running around getting some last minute stuff to make dinner on Sunday, like a new cutting board (our old one broke a couple of weeks back …