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What Arline Corthell Left Behind

Erin’s paternal grandmother passed away yesterday. Although she’s gone, she leaves behind memories to treasure and influences to carry on.

Memories

Grammie had a gift for focusing on one person at a time and engaging them in deep conversation. She did most of the talking, of course. She could, as my sister-in-law Amanda put it, talk the ears off of a brick wall.

She had beautiful, penetrating eyes that focused on you and grabbed you like a tractor beam. She had a way of bringing a huge family together at reunions and holiday affairs.

Grammie wore a lot of hats, so many that some of the grandchildren called her Grammie with the Hat. She made me feel like part of the family from the first day I met her 20 years ago. There are a lot of other memories I wasn’t there for. Fortunately, there’s another writer in the family who was. To really understand Grammie’s essence, read this stunning tribute by my cousin Faith.

Influences

You can learn a lot about a person through their children, and Grammie had seven of them, along with way too many grandchildren and great-grandchildren for me to count. The closest example is Erin. She doesn’t let me waste anything, and she’s a stickler for detail. That’s a Grammie influence.

The Corthells are a stubborn lot during conversation. If they feel strongly about something, they won’t back down. That’s a Grammie influence.

Corthells are natural storytellers. Family memories large and small are told in a range of colors that make them impossible to forget. That’s a Grammie influence.

Corthells are fiercely loyal. They argue like every family does, but if you hurt one of their own, God help you. That’s a Grammie influence.

Corthells are rugged, hard workers. My father-in-law ran a driving school — a full-time job in itself — while working brutally long hours for trucking companies. My mother-in-law ran the school with him, teaching half of Haverhill how to drive while raising four girls. Grammie worked for the school, too. I remember her coming to the house after a night teaching driver’s ed or giving lessons, recounting the evening’s events in vivid detail.

The Corthells have been through a lot. Family members have died young. Jobs have come and gone, sometimes unexpectedly. But they have endured, soldiering through the darkness and living to fight another day with heads held high. That’s a Grammie influence.

Being part of the family has been essential to my own personal evolution. It’s been a lesson in being strong, standing up and being tough.

It all goes back to Grammie, a product of the Great Depression and WWII. She built a family that grows in number and spirit to this day, a family built to last no matter what life throws at it.

Thanks for making me part of it.

Grammie

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Together We Fill Gaps

I did some more thinking after writing yesterday’s “Burden of Being Upright” post, and I think I have a better perspective. I was frustrated all day knowing that I need frequent wake-up calls. I want to be so good all the time that I’ll never need them.

Truth is, I’m always going to need it. But what’s important is what a person does when the alarm sounds.

Several years ago, before I was released from the fear that always went with my anxiety, I would have almost weekly discussions with Erin about all the things I was doing wrong. I’d cobble together an action list of all the things I’d do to be better and then I’d do nothing to act on it.

These days, life works differently. I make my action lists and act on them. Sometimes a month passes, sometimes several months. I’m so sure I have my list memorized that I stop looking at it. Eventually, I still slide off track and have no idea I’m doing it. It usually takes the form of little things that add up, like plunging into a bunch of household activities without touching base with Erin first. That means I’ll almost always snarl up a course of action we had agreed to but that I forgot about in my angst to keep the house standing.

When the realization that I’ve slipped slaps me upside the head, I get defensive. There are times when Erin and the kids can be just as difficult to put up with. I sometimes feel like the punching bag for all the angst someone else in the house is feeling, so when my faults are pointed out, I think things like, “I put up with a lot, too. I do more than my fair share of walking on egg shells. Why can’t everyone roll over when I’m the jerk?”

None of this is unique. Every family has this challenge. Most of the time, I think we do as well as we do because we keep talking and we keep loving each other. We close ranks and cheer each other on when it counts most.

As a family, we run fast, sometimes too fast and then we trip and fall. But we always get back up. That’s the part I was forgetting yesterday.

I’ve said before that Erin’s goodness makes me want to be a better man. She’s definitely gotten me a long way on the path. I think I’ve done the same for her, and we’ve both done the same for our kids. Imperfect, but always better than before.

We fill in each other’s gaps. Or at least we try to. It always reminds me of a scene in Rocky. I leave you to watch that scene and ponder what it means in your own family.

talia

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The Burden of Being Upright

A couple facts about the last few months: I made it through the winter more mentally intact than I have in a long time. I also went through a lot of uncertainty over the future of my career, which exhausted me enough to behave in spring as I normally do in winter: scattered, aloof and depressed.

Things have actually turned out well. I got the job I coveted the most after fielding a couple other opportunities. It feels good knowing the opportunities found me when I wasn’t actively looking for a change. And I’d like to think that of late I’ve carried on with good humor.

But this weekend it became apparent to me that I’m having trouble connecting all the dots. It almost exclusively manifests itself at home, where I push around trying to do so many things at once that I create bigger messes than what I started with. I get overwhelmed, which makes me irritable and unable to listen to people as closely as I should.

It leads to me making stupid mistakes with the family finances and screwing up carefully made schedules because I forget certain details.

It pisses me off, because the realization usually smacks me in the face out of nowhere, usually after a period of time where I think I’ve been doing pretty good managing life.

You think you’re fixed. But you never really are. The good and bad come in cycles. I’m fine with that. I just wish I had an early-warning system in my brain that could go off before things go too far.

This isn’t a post about self-loathing. In the big picture, I like who I am. It’s not a post about feeling sorry for myself, either. When I see myself sliding off track, saying so here forces me to right the ship.

Sometime, I admit, I get tired of revisiting that challenge. Trouble is, it’s a challenge that’s always going to be there.

You don’t become a good person and stay that way. It takes constant work.

So off I go, fixing things again.

Chess boards
Art by Bill Fennell
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Yeah, This Is EXACTLY What Depression Is Like

I’ve long been a fan of the blog Hyperbole and a Half, in which the author expresses herself through a combination of words and art. After a long hiatus, she returned this week with a post called “Depression Part 2.”

Having experienced more than my fair share of depression along the way, I can tell you that she nails what it’s like. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen it explained so clearly.

Enough from me. Go to her post and be educated.

Hyperbole and a Half Header

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Curse of the OCD Guitarist

For all it’s power as a tool for staying in the moment, there’s one thing about my guitar playing that’s set off a big OCD trigger.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:4vhTm7eeqJAW4Iq3grUutI]

Is it the need to play constantly, every day? Nope.

Is it the nagging obsession to acquire a Gibson Les Paul? Nah. I have that obsession, but it’s not OCD. It’s the desire of many guitarists, except for those who already own one.

Here’s my problem, as told in three photos:

Crooked Music Man

As you can see, the Music Man guitar on the right is crooked. It makes me crazy.

Crooked Epiphone

I fix it, only to discover that the Epiphone Les Paul Junior on the left is crooked, too. It torments me.

Straightened Epiphone

That’s a little better. But I keep staring and wondering: Is the Music Man crooked again?

There’s only one remedy for this torment: picking up one of them and getting on with my practice.

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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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Leaving CSO, Heading to Akamai

After five excellent years as senior editor and managing editor of CSOonline.com and CSO Magazine, I’m moving on. Starting June 3, I’ll be a senior program manager at Akamai Technologies in Cambridge, Mass. I’m stoked about this new challenge.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:4xaEeuXlXyc3lzYoLYEsAV]

I’m announcing my new adventure here because it’s the best way to reach the most people, since this blog is read by friends, family and many in the information security community.

Let’s address some questions:

Why leave?

The news will surprise some folks because I’ve always done this job with child-like glee. It’s been the best job I’ve had up to this point, and I didn’t start 2013 with plans to go anywhere. But along the way this and other opportunities arose, and the process of talking to people made me realize I needed to take the next step in my career. I’ve gotten too comfortable, which puts me at risk of becoming complacent. Complacency is never acceptable to me.

Will you still be in the security industry? Will you still be writing for a living?

Yes and yes. In fact, this change takes me deeper into the security community. That’s one of the things I wanted: to become less of a journalist and more of an advocate for this industry because I find the work done here so vital to the peace and prosperity of the world.

In the new job, I’ll be blogging, podcasting and creating in-depth reports and multimedia packages about the state of global security through the Akamai prism. It’s huge prism: At last check, the company was handling tens of billions of daily Web interactions for 90 of the top 100 online U.S. retailers, 29 of the top 30 global media and entertainment companies, nine of the top 10 world banks, and all branches of the U.S. military.

I’ll still write about what’s going on in the larger world of infosec (information security, for the uninitiated), and my job will involve a lot of community outreach. But now I’ll have Akamai’s data to compare with what other companies are seeing.

Above all, I’ll be telling the story of Akamai’s security program, which is powerful but not as universally understood as it could be.

When do you start?

I can’t wait to get started, but I will wait June 3. My remaining time at CSO will be for finishing up my current project load and ensuring that the group is in good shape when I leave. I owe them that and more. They’ve been truly fabulous to me, and I’ve made many friends for life. CSO and IDG will always hold a special place in my heart.

Will you still write THE OCD Diaries?

Absolutely. I wouldn’t have taken this or any other job if it required me to stop writing this blog. CSO and IDG supported my personal blogging from the beginning and in all of the discussions about different career opportunities these last few months, no one has asked me to kill this to join them. In fact, the support and enthusiasm have continued.

It goes to show how much progress the business world has made in recognizing and accepting those whose brains tick a little differently from the mainstream.

It makes me more optimistic than ever about the future.

Akamai