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6:00am – 11:30pm, six days a week (Chinese).

4:00am wake-up, five days a week (new teacher).

8 hours / day minimum, every day (new to tech).

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Those are the habits I use to keep and, to a degree, still keep. I’m still very much in the 8 hours/day, 7 days a week minimum, as I’m still learning.

I’m not really sure what it is….but I fear I may have a touch of madness within me. A strange sort of masochism to always dive through the rabbit holes of how things work and trying to do things well.

I HATE feeling stupid. There’s no worse feeling.

Huntress and their CTF competition is driving me crazy!!

You take these certification exams and feel like you know a few things, and then you find you that when it comes to getting your hands dirty with no hints or guidance, it gets HARD.

Still ongoing….I’ll definitely get more points…but still…

It takes me back to being a new teacher….

As a teacher, you KNOW someone is going to ask you difficult questions. You KNOW you are still learning and may not know the answer. You DON’T KNOW whether or not these questions and answers will hurt or harm your credibility, but you KNOW that if you don’t at least swallow your pride, mentally prepare for the inevitable infuriating feeling of being stuck and just put in the work, you’ll never get better. You’re the one the kids are going to for answers. You’d better know your stuff!

Such a feeling is the daily grind of transitioning into this new field. Python, Wireshark, PowerShell, CyberChef, Splunk, Crowdstrike, OpenVAS, Burp Suite, the Cloud…there’s always something new to learn….

But there’s always something new to learn! It’s horrible…yet, it’s somehow exciting! It’s the feeling and reason behind why I moved to China. It’s why I abandoned my history major to teach English and sociology. It’s why I learned to speak Chinese. It’s why I went from university to university to high school and ultimately back to the USA to explore IT and blue team cybersecurity.

It’s HARD, and I don’t. like. it. ….but somehow, I do.

The steganography, poking through HTML and PHP code, decoding ciphers, using hexadecimal, base64, and all kinds of other realms of knowledge I used to think were niche, esoteric realms of knowledge that nobody ever actually used – it’s certainly been a wild ride! There’s a few more days left to figure out some more!

I haven’t been able to spend enough time on it because of certification courses, but I will try to do a little every day! 1-2 flags a day for practice.

Although this has been a maddening process, it’s been good for me! I’ll ask for help and guidance near the end, but I’m curious to see how far I get on my own.

Ultimately, I am where I am, and I believe I have a very unique perspective and set of skills that will ultimately come together into something weird and wonderful…I don’t know what the end product will be, but I’m weirdly optimistic.

We’ll see!