It's now 2018.  Don't ask me how we made it, but we did.

Regular readers have probably been wondering what's been going on that I haven't posted much.  The short form, and the honest answer, is that I haven't had it in me to really post, aside from some stuff that I copy-and-pasted out of my notes, polished up a bit, and saved.  The holiday season is always a busy time, and my life is no different from anyone else's in that regard.

Lyssa and I flew back to Pennsylvania at more or less the last minute about halfway through …

This is the bluegill that Bill accidentally gigged when reeling his line in last Saturday.

When I was a kid my mom and I used to drive out to North Park Lake in western Pennsylvania and spent the evening (and sometimes most of Saturday) sitting on a bench on the shore with a tackle box, two fishing rods, and a couple of dozen nightcrawlers from the gas station at the bottom of the hill.  We never caught anything really newsworthy - at most a handful of panfish and only once a pair of rainbow trout, but we had some great times out there.  Sometimes a flock of ducks would go swimming in the lake and we'd …

I’ve been sitting on some photographs that have piled on Windbringer’s hard drive up over the past couple of weeks and finally found the time to get them resized and uploaded.

A visit to the Air and Space Museum on my father’s in law’s birthday.

A couple of photographs taken at P. W. Singer’s presentation at HacDC. There are also a couple of shots of fun with night vision goggles later that evening in that set.

As I write this, Bill (my father in law) just came out of surgery to implant a defibrillator to monitor his heart. I'm told that the procedure went smoothly, and he's recovering nicely. He'll be spending about four days in the hospital while they experiment with his medication a little.

After work on Friday night, Lyssa, Laurelinde, and I packed our gear to make the trek northward back to Pittsburgh, by way of Chili's for dinner just of the Beltway (to give the bridge and tunnel crowd a chance to get home and clear the way). We packed as little …

Still not dead. Still not sleeping, either.

Work has been keeping me busy lately, but thankfully not due to a certain beastie that was supposed to go off last week. Conflicker.C appears to have been something of a damp squib, and I for one am grateful. I'm not terribly surprised that it didn't bring about The End of the Net as we Know It. Hyperbole and RPG references aside, packing an out-of-date exploit as a primary vector of infection coupled with samples of the Conflicker.C binary itself winding up in the hands of practically every antivirus researcher on …