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You’re a Good Man, Trey Ford

As most of my friends in the information security community know, one of our own — Trey Ford — got left out in the cold last week when Black Hat’s powers that be decided they no longer needed a general manager to handle their annual summer conference. He’s following the proven path of seeking new job leads on the social networks.

But he’s doing something else that makes him worthy of mention here.

Mood music:

Most people would single-mindedly push forward on their own job hunt, and that’s not a criticism. When you have bills to pay and mouths to feed, you have to do what’s necessary to get re-employed as quickly as possible.

But knowing that a lot of other people in the industry are looking for new jobs, Trey is offering to use his vast network to help them as he tries to help himself. In a message on Facebook, he said:

There are a number of folks looking for work, and I have fresh perspective on opportunities out there. Drop me an email and I will do what I can to help assist you in your hunt.

During times of global trauma, I like to refer people to a post I wrote two years ago about words of wisdom from Mister Rogers’s mother. She’d say that in tough times, the helpers always arrive.

While it’s certainly true during huge tragedies like the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School last year and the Boston Marathon bombings this year, it also applies to the seemingly smaller events, like someone losing a job and needing help to find a new one. In such cases, the hardship involves individuals rather than big segments of the population, but if you’re the individual who has lost income, it’s a pretty grave deal.

It warms the heart to know that there are people out there hell-bent on helping those individuals.

That someone like Trey would offer help when he needs to find work himself is damn inspiring.

Thanks for being you and Merry Christmas, friend.

Trey Ford

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“A Christmas Story” Made It OK to Be Weird

Sunday, I settled in with Erin and the kids for our annual viewing of A Christmas Story. Like everyone else, I have my 10-15 favorite lines:

“It was… soap poisoning!”

“Notafinga!”

“You used up all the glue … on purpose!”

But those lines, as much as I enjoy them, are not why I consider this movie so special. The main reason is that the movie made it OK to have strange thoughts.

Mood video:

http://youtu.be/Ktzt096mlxs

When I was a kid, I always thought something was wrong with me because I’d dream up all these crazy thoughts and scenarios. If I got punished, I’d dream up all manner of revenge scenarios. If I wanted a certain toy, I’d dream up hundreds of scenarios of me playing with said toy.

All kids do that. For that matter, adults do it to. But it took seeing A Christmas Story for me to get that. Before that, I thought I was just a bizarre kid doomed to a future of sinister thinking that would make me an alien among more “normal” people.

It also taught me that mine wasn’t the only family that failed to fit all the Brady Bunch parameters.

I’m not a special case. The movie was an eye-opener for a lot of people.

The reason those scenes cause us to laugh so vigorously is because there’s a release — or, more to the point, a relief. Relief in knowing we’re not alone in our weird families and weirder thinking.

That’s what I call a Christmas gift.

Ralphie

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The OCD Diaries, Four Years Later

This weekend marks four years since I woke up in a funk and started this blog on a whim, figuring I’d at least feel better if I spilled my guts. It did the trick. But in the years since that day, it has become something far bigger than I could have imagined at the time.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/zQzNBTukO0w

I didn’t expect so many people to connect with the writing. I figured it would be no big deal to people, because we all have our stories — filled with happiness, sadness, love, heartbreak and other forms of adversity. I would just be one in a chorus of online voices sharing my emotions and experiences.

But people did connect, especially work colleagues and others in my profession. I thought my soul venting might raise eyebrows at work, but I got nothing but support. The reaction from the information security crowd was particularly stunning to me. People who intimidated me with their outward toughness started sharing back. They became more than just people I did business with. The friendships I’ve gained through the sharing is a huge gift this blog has given me.

The reaction from family and friends was shock, because I had succeeded in carrying on with a stoic, easy-going exterior. I couldn’t believe people saw me as easygoing. Apparently I could have found success as an actor.

The sharing has allowed me to repair some relationships that were broken. In other cases, it made matters worse. But there was no turning back.

My wife was often bewildered by what I wrote, because I was sharing past experiences I hadn’t shared with her up to that point. That led to us doing a lot of work on our relationship, and that’s the absolute greatest gift this blog has given me. As part of that, the blog has become one of the things we do together as a couple: I do the writing, Erin does the editing and bullshit detecting. When something I write doesn’t ring true, she pushes me in the proper direction.

Admittedly, I’ve expanded the subject matter a lot in the last year and a half. I didn’t originally plan to opine about current events here, but I realized a couple things after a while:

  • If I were to write about nothing but my own flaws, I’d risk being defined by them and nothing else.
  • This blog should be about more than just my own personal growth. Part of one’s growth comes from their dealings with the people and events taking place around them. By that measurement, current events became fair game.

In finding the path through adversity, there are many lessons to be had by exploring how we all talk to each other.

I’ve also focused more on the lighter side of life, because few things get us through the fog like humor. That has made this experiment a lot more fun for me. I hope it has worked for all of you, too.

Here’s to many more years of staring adversity in the face and making it blink — becoming better on our own and together.

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Honor the Mental Sacrifice Veterans Have Made

With another Veterans Day upon us, I want to thank our servicemen and -women for a very specific sacrifice they’ve made.

Mental sacrifice is always implied when we thank our veterans for the larger sacrifice of life and limb to protect our freedom. That’s as it should be. Still, as someone who has never seen combat but has struggled with mental illness, I’m especially grateful to troops past and present for carrying the mental burden.

Mood music:

I have many friends who have served in the military and have seen combat. They’ve been shot at, lost limbs and lost buddies they served with. They suffer with depression, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

I wish they could have been spared all that. But I hope they can get some satisfaction and even happiness in knowing that they raised the profile of mental illness as a scourge to be confronted more than perhaps anyone else could have.

Soldiers are known for their courage, and when that courage extends to confronting mental maladies left by war, they are breaking stigmas that have held us all back.

Amid the last decade’s War on Terrorism, we saw an alarming rise in suicide among those who came home and couldn’t reconcile their former lives with where they had been and what they had seen. We saw a lot of troops struggling with depression as they came to terms with the loss of arms and legs. Many of them shared their struggles publicly and, in the process, showed us all how to move beyond adversity toward something better.

One example that sticks with me is that of U.S. Marine Clay Hunt. He survived Iraq and Afghanistan but ultimately fell to depression, taking his life in 2011 at the young age of 28.

Before he lost his battle with depression, though, he managed to help countless people suffering with the same disease. As James Dao wrote in a New York Time‘s blog post, “News of Mr. Hunt’s death has ricocheted through the veterans’ world as a grim reminder of the emotional and psychological strains of war — and of the government’s inability to stem military and veteran suicides, which have climbed steadily in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.”

Despite the ravages of PTSD, Hunt threw himself into volunteer work. Dao wrote that he built bikes for Ride 2 Recovery, a rehabilitation program for injured veterans. He journeyed to Haiti and Chile with Team Rubicon to help organize events for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) and appeared in a public service announcement encouraging veterans to seek help for mental health problems.

Despite how his life ended, I hope his friends and family know how much he did to fight the mental illness stigma.

I want to thank him and all the other veterans who have taken arms against the enemy of the mind. Peace be with you all.

atwar-clay-hunt-articleInline
Clay Hunt participating in a 2010 Florida ride with the Ride 2 Recovery veterans organization. Hunt, who was active in various public service groups, took his own life in March 2011. Photo by the Associated Press

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Wherein I Get Another Year Older

On this, my 43rd birthday, I can’t help but remember what Indiana Jones said in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Grousing about a body beat to hell from a life of adventure, he noted that it’s not the age but the mileage.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/lWkZqE3oaDs

I have to admit, my mileage shows. My beard is getting grayer. My knees aren’t as durable as they used to be. I’ve got sleep apnea and bad vision. But then all these things existed on my 42nd birthday. And my 40th and 38th. Which means I’m not at all bothered by it.

I’ve always had trouble understanding people who get depressed about their birthdays. What’s not to love about not being dead; of making it another year?

I’m always mindful of the fact that I had severe illness as a kid. That I haven’t yet developed colon cancer after all the damage Crohn’s Disease did to me in my youth is pretty amazing. I’ve seen a sibling and some good friends die young, and the fact that I’m so many years older than they were at their deaths makes me realize how lucky I am.

And hell, I’m still a kid in many respects. I love new toys, especially technological gadgetry and musical instruments. In the past year, I’ve collected guitars, amps and effects pedals with the same enthusiasm I had as a boy collecting Star Wars action figures and ships. I still play my music at maximum volume. I still love a good party, even if I no longer drink.

I’ve also found that being in my 40s is much better than being in my 20s and 30s. A lot of those years were full of suckage: jobs that chained me to desks for 80 hours a week, a body much heavier than it is now, OCD, and fear, anxiety, and depression that kept me in hiding much of the time.

At 43, I have a career that I love. I have the best wife on Earth and two boys that teach me something new every day. I have many, many friends who have helped me along in more ways than they’ll ever know.

This aging thing ain’t half bad.

Another year of graying whiskers, sore knees and hectic business travel? Bring it on.

Smoker 100th Year

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Godspeed, Neil Roiter

Yesterday I learned that a former colleague, Neil Roiter, passed away on Sunday from an inoperable brain tumor. We worked together at TechTarget for several years, and I’m a richer man for it.

Neil was a journalist’s journalist, a stickler for details and truth. As a tech reporter, he didn’t just quote security vendors about what their products did and why they were worth the customer’s money; he made them prove it. He’d put the technology to the test, finding experts who could take things apart to see what made them tick.

But that’s not what my affection for Neil was about. It was the quick-witted family man I was proud to call a friend.

I remember him leaving work minutes after arriving to drive the hour back home to help his family. I laughed my ass off one day as he gave his daughter, Tess,  a talking to on the phone. The young lady replied to all his questions by Instant Messenger even though they were on the phone together. The more she did it, the louder Neil’s voice got and the more I chuckled from my desk, next to his.

Whatever they were arguing about, Neil didn’t give up on her. He stayed on the phone and talked her through her problem long past the point where many parents would have slammed the phone down in frustration.

The love he had for his kids was on display every day. He’d spend an hour on the phone with Andrew talking baseball, and he would always beam with pride every time he talked about those kids. The same could be said about his love for his wife Gwen, also a journalist. In every conversation, you easily understood how much he cherished her.

As a co-worker, Neil was a lot of fun. I remember walking the streets of Provincetown, MA, with him during a SearchSecurity group outing. The team took a shuttle boat to the small town on the tip of Cape Cod and spent an afternoon poking around shops and enjoying lunch at The Lobster Pot. Neil and I decided to have a few Irish coffees and proceeded to walk off the buzz, popping in and out of book shops and candy stores.

On the shuttle back to Boston, we talked about pretty much everything.

We liked to have a battle of wits in the office. I’d like to say I won every time, but our officemates will probably tell you otherwise. Either way, we had a lot of laughs.

After I left TechTarget, Neil and I stayed in touch, hanging out during various security conferences. I’m grateful for that.

Rest easy, Neil. We’re all going to miss you here, but you left us with plenty of sunny memories to keep us going until we meet again.

Neil’s obituary and funeral-memorial information can be found on Hathaway Family Funeral Homes’s website.

NR_8-2011

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Hearts Bigger Than Boston or Any Bomb

Whenever we experience the kind of evil we saw in Boston yesterday, pictures emerge to restore some hope in the human race: EMTs, police, firefighters and many bystanders leaping to action, giving victims medical care and getting survivors to safety.

As a lifelong Bay Stater who tends to be prideful of my Boston roots, those scenes warmed my heart. But I don’t want to be selfish. What we saw wasn’t merely a Boston thing. It was something you’ll see anywhere in the world when bad things happen.

We sure as hell saw it in NYC on and after 9/11. We saw it after the horrific earthquake in Haiti. We saw it after the London bombings in 2005.

Though evil is everywhere, so is goodness. Evil can never be strong enough to beat the good at the core of most people. No matter who we are &dmash; a businessperson preoccupied with the next sale, the driver stuck in traffic and losing their temper, the addict enslaved by the addiction, anyone — we have the ability to cast aside our demons and leap to action when someone is in danger.

That’s why evil will never win. It can kill a lot of people and damage a lot of property. It can make us do a lot of stupid things in life. It can break our hearts.

But it can’t destroy our hearts.

Helpers in Boston

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I Forgot to Trust God, Now I’m Paying for It

I got out of bed this morning after another rotten sleep and it hit me: I’ve been having trouble sleeping through the night and controlling daytime anxiety because I’m in one of my classic control freak-outs, in which I get depressed because I am anxious about everything and want to control it all.

In other words, I’ve been stewing over things beyond my control and forgetting to put my trust in God.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:7v0mtl6oInUtHOmTk2b0gC]

Big, positive changes are potentially afoot in my life. That’s usually the way it is for me: When something big is in the wings, especially something good, I lose all patience and my mind gets stuck in the future instead of the present, where it belongs. The result is anxiety, which screws with my mood, my energy level and my ability to get a proper night’s sleep. The nose and head congestion certainly never helps, but I find my eyes snapping open at 2:30 a.m. lately, thoughts of what may or may not be shredding my brain like a cheese grater.

Then I get angry with myself, because I have the coping tools to keep myself in the present. I also believe every minute of every day that when I trust God to let things unfold, everything works out fine.

But in the crush of a control freak-out, everything I know is suppressed.

It’s good that I’m spilling my guts on this now, because it means I might be coming to my senses. I can’t promise I’ll proceed in a care-free, sunny fashion, but at least I might get a good night’s sleep.

I’ll let you know how it goes from here.
Now Panic and Freak Out

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A Tribute to Nana Ruth

I’ve been thinking a lot about Erin’s grandmother, Ruth Robinson, since she passed away Friday morning. I have lots of memories, all cherished.

Whenever I think of family, there’s always a lot of dysfunction to go with the joy. It’s like that in every family, and the dysfunction can be good, the stuff that goes into the humorous aspects of family lore. But when I think of Nana Ruth, I always see that smile. That smile could put the most uptight, cantankerous people at ease and fill them with warmth.

I know this because when I first started dating Erin 19 years ago, I was an uptight kid with a chip on his shoulder. Being the negative type, I always thought of my own family gatherings as battles to be survived. It didn’t occur to me at that point that you could or should enjoy time with family. I always chose to run. I don’t blame my family for that. It’s just how I was back then.

My perception started to change when I met Erin’s family. I didn’t feel like I had to be on my best behavior or watch what I said. I felt comfortable in my own skin. Nana Ruth really personified that environment. Hanging out with her was like soaking up the warmth of a roaring fireplace. She and Erin would talk for hours whenever we visited. Erin inherited a lot from her Nana: a love of knitting, endless worrying about other people, that smile.

Nana was big into family history. She’d spend hours telling us about the Sawyers and the extended Robinsons. At Robinson family gatherings we’d laugh and laugh.  All the girls of the family had traits Nana passed down to them. There’s my mother-in-law Sharon’s serene nature, Cousin Martha’s sense of humor and everyone’s faith in God.

Of course, she rubbed off on the Robinson boys, too. I think of Uncle David and Cousin Andy — two guys who are always generous with their time and talents. Uncle David once got rid of a dent and paint blemish on my car for free. Andy designed the art you see atop this blog, and didn’t seem to care if I ever paid him. I did — two years after he did the first design.

It all goes back to Nana Ruth. Her kindness rubbed off on everyone, including our kids.

Sean and Duncan are still young, but Sean remembers Nana Ruth getting down on the ground to play with him and his trains. She did so for a whole week once, keeping Sean occupied so Erin could continue working while I recovered from a back injury. She played with Sean on the living floor for hours as I lay on the couch a few feet away, passed out on pain meds.

We have to say goodbye to her this week, but all that warmth, kindness, laughter and beauty will be with us forever. I’d like to think she’s helped make me a better person, though that’s for others to judge.

At the very least, her influence — just like that of the grandaughter I married — makes me want to be a better man. I’ll keep trying, and I know she’ll be watching.

Nana Ruth

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Thank You, All

Things I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving and every day:

[spotify:track:5MjS49btXnlMRqPC9Fg2Aj]

  • My wife, who seems to grow more beautiful by the day, and our children, who keep us young.
  • My work, because cybersecurity never gets boring, the people in the industry are great friends I learn from daily and my office colleagues rock.
  • My Aunt Robin (I’m glad we’re back in contact) and my extended family.
  • My parents for sticking by me when I was a kid, even though I gave them plenty to worry about.
  • An army of friends that seems to grow by the day. That includes all the new friends I’ve made because of this blog, old friends who have always been nearby and friends I thought were gone forever but somehow came back into my life.
  • Sean Marley for showing me how to live way back when no one else could get through to me.
  • My recovery from OCD and addiction. My recovery is challenged every day. Some days it bends. Some days it burns. But it hasn’t been broken.
  • The city of Haverhill, for accepting me for who I am.
  • The city of Revere, for always welcoming me back.
  • The people who forgive.
  • The gift of writing, which gets me through every day.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Giving Thanks