About two years ago I decided to change up my career. I was on an active break from Software Engineering, which (depending on the job market and finances) I highly recommend. By chance I saw a press release for a women in Cybersecurity contest and it reminded me of how much fun I had working on Cybersecurity research over a decade ago. I realized it could give me a path into something new and interesting.

I entered the Cybersecurity contest and won SANS courses and vouchers for the GFACT and GCIH certifications. The National Cyber Scholarship Foundation also held a similar contest where I ranked 1st in California, and I won a course and voucher for the GIAC GSEC certification which I quickly completed along with the others. My SANS trifecta was complete!

One of the SANS organizers suggested I look into City College of San Francisco because they have an incredibly strong Cybersecurity program. I enrolled in classes, entered competitions, and my CCSF team won 2nd in a regional CPTC contest. I also co-founded a Women in Cybersecurity chapter to help promote women in technology careers and to support training events at the school. My time there renewed my interest in mathematics, and I had an enjoyable experience taking Discrete Math, Linear Algebra, and Statistics classes while preparing for grad school.

City College of San Francisco is a great resource, and I think of it as the gift that keeps on giving. I joined an Astronomy Service-Learning group that organizes planetarium shows and was able to get research time on the Nickel telescope at Lick Observatory. I was also accepted into Lick’s Astral Workshop and will be staying at the observatory in mid-July.

One of the more memorable experiences these past two years was becoming a teaching assistant at City College and helping with Intro and Advanced Python courses. This led to working with students in other capacities, like teaching college workshops, exam proctoring, tutoring, and I’m giving serious thought to more academic work in the future.

My bucket list is currently filling up and it’s exciting to be involved with so many new projects. I’m currently working on video game related AI, open-source security research, and studying advanced mathematics and computer science. I’m looking forward to what the rest of summer brings.

Here are some movies, books, games, and other things I discovered or found again in 2022. Most were published earlier than this, however, since I spent this past year enjoying them I’m putting them here.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. My favorite show of 2022! I was just getting used to the idea of Zachary Quinto as the new Spock and then Ethan Peck absolutely rocked it along with his role in the earlier seasons of Star Trek Discovery. Anson Mount, Jess Bush, and Bruce Horak were so much fun in this as well and I hope Horak returns in future seasons. I also love the audio descriptions and how their narration fit perfectly into each episode.

Citadels. I’ve started playing this game again after a decade-long break. This year I think I’ve been in the right mindset for it.

Star Wars: Thrawn by Timothy Zahn. I stumbled onto this book after somehow missing the original Thrawn trilogy and most Star Wars media featuring Thrawn as a main or side character. Thrawn’s political ineptness first drew me into this story because it gives him the appearance being naive despite his well-known history as a villain in the Star Wars universe. When played against Eli Vanto, who actually is naive, the mix is a troubling and haunting relationship.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. One of the greatest books of our time.

Carbon Based Lifeforms. Their entire discography has become the background music I use for pretty much anything computer related these days. I find their albums to be quite relaxing and not at all sedating.

Dune (2021) – Wow! This movie is what Dune should have been from the first book all the way through the various attempts at movies over the years. Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson were perfect as Paul Atreides and the Lady Jessica.

Call Me By Your Name – Another brilliant movie with Timothée Chalamet.

Habanero hot peppers. A fruit that sort of tastes like chocolate.

Visual Studio Code. The NVDA accessibility and plugins in VSC are a vastly improved experience compared to the full version of the Visual Studio IDE. I’m planning to continue with VSC for the near and hopefully long-term future.

Here are some of my favorite games, books, movies and shows I discovered in the 2010’s, presented in no particular order.

Books:

• The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
• Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross
• The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
• The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• The Magicians by Lev Grossman
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
• Changes by Jim Butcher
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Video Games:

• This War of Mine
• Neo Scavenger
• Avernum 6
• Super Hexagon
• Long Live the Queen
• Magical Diary
• Thirty Flights of Loving
• Stardew Valley

Movies:

• Moonlight
• Edge of Tomorrow
• Rogue One: A Starwars Story

TV Shows:

• The Magicians
• Game of Thrones
• Daredevil

I had a fantastic time speaking at DjangoCon today in San Diego.  Here are the slides from my talk!

DjangoCon 2018 – Elasticsearch Accelerating the Django Admin – Kate Kligman (PDF)

I view the new year as a life checkpoint. How am I doing? Am I doing what I set out to do? Am I happy? I also look at basic goals, accomplishments, and insights from the previous year.

In prior years my focus was external and career oriented. Gaining certifications, speaking at events, and contributing to open source projects I felt strongly about. This past year my focus was internal and oriented towards having a better life.

Accessibility. I spent a significant amount of time this year learning everything there is to know about accessibility. This turned out to be the tip of a very large iceberg, but I feel I succeeded in studying accessibility on OS X, Windows, and the overall web.

Getting Legit Organized. Organization has been an overarching theme in my life, usually when I’m experiencing failure, but this year I decided to make it a focus. I studied organizational systems, learned how to identify and eliminate the clutter in my life, and successfully organized most of my paperwork electronically. I also experimented with a lot of technology and systems to get to this point, and I feel I can maintain it going forward.

Read more books. This has become an on-and-off goal in past years, but this year I decided books were something to make time for. I discovered Marie Kondo, whose books were the foundation of my reorganization this year, and I also discovered Tim Ferris, whose attitude and ideas I found useful when approaching challenges.

Diet and Nutrition. Though I’ve always been very skinny, nutrition has been former weak spot for me. Being skinny doesn’t always correlate to good health, so this year I decided to take cooking classes and focus on switching to healthier foods. I spent most of December cooking, and while there is still much work to be done I feel I’m overall healthier for having spent roughly half the year changing my personal habits on this.

More time with friends. I played a record number of board games and went to a record number of parties and outings.

Enhance personal technology. This was an expensive one. If I felt a device or app could improve my life by as much as 5%, I tried it. My major wins this year include joining rise.us, an app that pairs users with nutritionists who review their daily meals. I also got a Fujitsu ScanSnap IX500, a duplex scanner which can scan and ocr about 20 pages a minute. My favorite feature is the scanner’s ability to detect when pages have doubled up and wait for user correction. Many scanners were returned before I discovered the ScanSnap with this prized feature.

Time management. I’ve developed a working Evernote system I use consistently. I also use the Pomodoro technique for the less exciting tasks in my life. Google calendar took a backseat this year, and is now only used for appointment and meeting reminders.

My favorite childhood video game was the Atari 2600 title Swordquest: Fireworld. The game takes place in a series of caverns that lead to rooms with mini-games. Every once in awhile, when I beat a mini-game, letters would flash on the screen. I was sure they had meaning, but without access to the game’s instruction manual or a resource like the Internet, I had no idea what. I was also five years old.

Almost 20 years later I was surprised to find out the game had been part of an elaborate contest held by Atari during their golden years. Those who discovered the meaning of the puzzles and completed them alongside a comic in the instruction manual would compete for lavish prizes even by today’s standards. I was disappointed to learn the contest ended about a year before I discovered the game.

I just finished the Ready Player One audiobook, written by Ernest Cline and read by Wil Wheaton. It’s the story of a video game contest with embedded puzzles seeped in 1980’s escapism. I enjoyed the book because it provided a platform to revere so much of the entertainment I liked as a child and rediscovered as an adult. It’s also a good story with a lot of threads that add to the world without being obviously used for foreshadowing.

Ready Player One takes place in an immersive VR future, but it draws on so much of Atari’s past and the excitement and competition an epic contest can bring. I think it’s absolutely realistic in that regard.

Discovering there will be a Ready Player One movie out in 2018 feels like the cherry on top of the cake’s icing considering how good the audiobook narration by Wil Wheaton is. I’m also looking forward to listening to the author’s next book, Armada.

My first encounter with No Man’s Sky happened when literally everyone I knew with a computer told me they couldn’t wait to play it on the Oculus Rift. I love retro games with simple graphics, for example I’m a huge fan of the original Elite series of games. So I decided to wait and see what would become of No Man’s Sky.

It’s now the eve of the PlayStation 4 launch and I’m excited to see a sandbox exploration game receive this much attention.

My first area of interest is teamwork. Soloing sounds amazing, but space seems lonely. I used to solo Minecraft, and though it was soothing I ultimately found it to be more fun to play with friends. I’m also curious to see how the shared universe experience pans out, particularly with planetary discovery and resources.

Finally, this game was promoted with what I think of as a “magic box” principle. Basically there’s this place to go, the center of the universe or “the box”, and you don’t know what’s in it, but it must be enticing considering all of the work it will take to open it. It reminds me a lot of Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube?, which used a similar principle: get to the center of a cube, and something will happen. When the ending to No Man’s Sky was leaked prior to it’s launch it publicly broke this mechanism. This makes me wonder if the developer will change the ending along with their recent re-generation of the game’s universe.

Unfortunately I won’t be playing this game myself because I’m staying away from video games at the moment. But I’m looking forward to hearing what others think of it.

I’ve been using Evernote for the past few months and it’s been crucial to getting and keeping my life organized.  Here’s my system:

1. Folder structure: Cabinet, Inbox, To-Do, Trash.  All incoming notes hit the Inbox first for processing.
2. Note processing: The two main types of notes in my life are either Recurring or Projects, so I label each note’s title with Recurring: or Project: to identify them. If a note is a project I add a success criteria, if a note is recurring I star it for fast retrieval later and eventual scheduling into Google Calendar. A third type of note is Reference. I don’t touch the title of reference notes, but do I use Evernote’s tagging system to label them with something descriptive (eg minecraft) and immediately put them into the Cabinet.
3. At least once a week I review all of the notes in my Inbox and if appropriate add them to To-Do (in progress), to the Cabinet if the project is finished, or schedule them into Google Calendar and/or set an Evernote reminder if the note is recurring. If the contents of a note are not substantial or worth retaining then I delete it when it’s no longer needed.
4. I also use Evernote’s chrome plugin to snapshot and tag reference material. This is substantially better than using a browser based bookmark system because the Evernote plugin stores the full text of the web page I’m capturing into a note.

Using this system has helped me identify and organize collective groups of tasks that turned out to be projects. It also gives me a handle on scheduling and reducing my workload with recurring tasks.

My Evernote system is the byproduct of following advice from Michael Hyatt on his Evernote system. The weekly review was inspired by Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.