Author: Carl Page 41 of 151

Journey of the Intern Therapist

On December 12, 2017

I have a friend who is a therapist-in-training in the Bay Area who just started writing. I’m loving her posts. She’s working to be a therapist and is going to start working with a middle school population which brings back memories for all of us. Her latest post resonates deeply with me. She’s going to be working with middle schoolers.

Crap…” I thought, “not middle school… anything but middle school.” I immediately flashed back to my own middle-school experience. I entered 7th grade with a terrible hair-cut, glasses, braces, and skinny like an awkward string bean. My hand-me-down, decade-old clothes made me stand out from my wealthier peers who always had fresh, new clothes and great hair. I remember getting bullied on the bus mercilessly by 8th graders day in and day out. I remember holding back my tears on the bus, trying to look reassured while older girls would tease me and older boys would harass me. Suddenly, things I had necessarily forgotten were staring at me in the face. I didn’t want to work with adolescents… especially middle-schoolers.

Middle school brings back vivid memories for me too. Some good but many fearful and anxious. She closes with an honest bit of writing that I feel could have been written by anyone I know, myself included.

So how do I “adult” from here? Honestly? I have no idea. I’m guessing at it every day. I’m working on a website, I’m writing a blog, I’m networking, I’m taking risks at disappointing people with my career choices, I’m taking some time for my family and accepting financial hardship as a present, unavoidable (but hopefully temporary) reality. I’m trying to take criticism and uninformed advice in stride but hey – I’m not made of metal. I’m making poor choices and good choices, not having any idea which is which at any real-time moment. I’m open to advice, feedback, and opportunity. As a wonderful professor of mine once said, “the ego must be strong enough to allow itself to be defeated.” This is the making of the intern therapist… I think.

So… how do I adult from here?

I don’t know any more than she does, but I encourage you to follow along with her journey to figure it all out…

Follow along at Journey of the Intern Therapist

Fires

By Carl

On November 30, 2017

In Observations

Running around fires makes you feel good because you’re solving problems and you’re busy. But you’re not solving problems. You’re dealing with the unsolved problems that caught fire and need your immediately attention.

If you were solving problems, you wouldn’t be fighting fires, you’d be watering down dry wood and putting matches away. Look for potential fires. Stop them before they start.

Defriended

By Carl

On November 28, 2017

In Introspection

I have been off Facebook for a few months now. I have thought about it for a long time. I am friends with a lot of people on the site. There are a few people who I 1) care enough about to follow their lives and 2) can only connect with them through Facebook.

Some people have blogs. Others I can keep up with on Twitter or Instagram. For the rest, I do miss keeping up with them and their hijinks with their kids.

And I haven’t found a good solution for them.

I want to reopen my Facebook account so connect with those few people. If I do, I am going to go through my list and unfriend most of the people there. (Unfriend is such a harsh word. And they use it purposely.) We are not Facebook Friends™.

My biggest problem with Facebook is the endless striving for more! More people, more connections, MORE FRIENDS!

When I deactivated my account, its first solution was to suggest that I connect with more people. As if that was the problem… Not enough friends.

If I reactivate my account, I am going to pair the list down to those few people. I know Facebook will continue to show me friends of friends and people they think I might like. And people who commented on a post they made one time.

I don’t care about their family members.
I don’t care about their friends.
I don’t care about their co-workers.
I don’t care about…

I care about the people I care about enough to friend. The End.

And that’s the problem with Facebook. There’s no money in it for them for me to keep my social network small. And that’s where we disagree.

Facebook is not important enough for me to fight that fight. It’s not worth my time to keep fighting Facebook’s interests.

Most importantly, I haven’t missed it. I haven’t opened the browser or downloaded the Android app since I deleted it back in October. It’s not a part of life I find missing.

Do I want to reopen that door?

Doors

By Carl

On November 26, 2017

In Introspection

My anger was a cage and the cage had no door.
– Strangeness by Alex Armstrong

This should be how I describe my teen years. I was an angry guy with a lot of emotions and thankfully I found poetry and industrial music as a way to process them.

I often think about how close I could have come to really ruining my life with the fuel of rage. I am a big guy and I was then. At 6’5″ and north of 260 pounds in high school, I could have channeled my anger into something far darker than Trent Reznor, black lights and filling notebooks with words.

One day I found myself out of the cage, unsure sure of how I’d got there. Only one explanation accounts for all the facts. I had invented a door, and the key that fit in its lock, and let myself out.

That door had a name. It happens to be the same name as my wife. The key took longer to forge, but it was a fire my wife started and the perspective she provided allowed me to work the forge and smith a key that fit the lock of my anger.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for my wife, Annie. I am thankful for the perspective she brought me then and the love, support, affection and humor she continues to bring me now.

I do not know where I would be without her, but I’m sure glad she’s here.

NIST updating password recommendations

By Carl

On August 10, 2017

In Links and Quotes

The Man Who Wrote Those Password Rules Has a New Tip: N3v$r M1^d!

(Full story is behind the Wall Street Journal’s pay wall.)

You’ve used P@ssw0rds like this for years. It’s what NIST recommended for the Federal Government in 2003 and major corporations and universities picked up the guidance and set their password requirements to match.

Mr. Burr, who once programmed Army mainframe computers during the Vietnam War, had wanted to base his advice on real-world password data. But back in 2003, there just wasn’t much to find, and he said he was under pressure to publish guidance quickly.

He looked for some real-world data to see what people were doing.

He asked the computer administrators at NIST if they would let him have a look at the actual passwords on their network. They refused to share them, he said, citing privacy concerns.

Given there wasn’t much research into the field of password security and no real-world password stockpiles to pull from, he did the best he could.

With no empirical data on computer-password security to be found, Mr. Burr leaned heavily on a white paper written in the mid-1980s—long before consumers bought DVDs and cat food online.

Now there is better password data available. Have I been Pwned currently lists 3,999,249,352 accounts from 228 websites. My own data has been breached over a dozen times including by our own government

The truth about passwords is we’re bad at passwords. I am terrible at passwords. That’s why I’ve used 1Password to keep my passwords secure. I don’t know most of my passwords because they are nonsense and very long. I know a single master password.

Given this new data, NIST is updating its recommendations which will slowly be adopted by the government and companies as it did originally.

Long, easy-to-remember phrases now get the nod over crazy characters, and users should be forced to change passwords only if there is a sign they may have been stolen, says NIST, the federal agency that helps set industrial standards in the U.S.

Academics who have studied passwords say using a series of four words can be harder for hackers to crack than a shorter hodgepodge of strange characters—since having a large number of letters makes things harder than a smaller number of letters, characters and numbers.

This XKCD comic explains the math behind cracking these types of passwords. I look forward to leaving the P@ssw0rd days behind and welcome the correct horse battery staple.

Password requirement comic from XKCD.